The Tiger Who Refused To Die

🍁 Prologue 🍁

The world had changed.

Cars hissed across wet pavement outside his window,
a low mechanical growl so different from the horses he once commanded.
Electric lights flickered like fireflies trapped in glass.
Somewhere downstairs, a radio hummed a tune he could not name.

Yet none of those sounds could drown out it.

That music.

The one he carried in the marrow of his bones.

A gentle plucking of strings—
delicate, mournful, strangely familiar.
A melody born of a koto he had never held,
played by hands he could not picture,
yet somehow... knew.

It was always the same.
He would sit alone at night, poring over documents and blueprints—
weapons far deadlier than anything he forged in his lifetime—
while the world outside marched toward war after war.

And every night, just before exhaustion claimed him,
that sound rose in the silence of his memory:

A soft trembling note...
like winter sighing across mountains.
A yearning.
A longing so profound he sometimes stopped breathing just to hear it clearer.

"Lord Takeda, the next design proposes a lighter frame—"

A voice shattered the trance.

Shingen blinked, and the melody slipped away like mist.
He raised his head.

He was not in Kai.
Not in his war tent surrounded by maps and torches.
He was sitting at a polished steel table under the fluorescent glow of an American factory office,
with engineers and generals discussing rifles, artillery, and the next war they expected him to survive.

Blueprints were unfurled.
Calibers were debated.
Men looked to him for orders.

But his gaze drifted elsewhere.

Past the papers.
Past the noise.
Past the century he never asked for.

There—mounted on the wall behind them—
his old katana rested in a glass frame, its steel still untouched by time.

A ghost of the life he lost.
A reminder of the man he used to be.

He stared at it as the men spoke around him—
their voices fading into a distant hum—
and for a moment he swore he heard it again:

That song.

Played by someone whose face he did not know...
yet whose music had once lulled him to sleep when nights bled into dawn,
when strategy drained the strength from his bones,
and only that gentle, aching melody could steady his thoughts.

A song full of longing.
A song he had never forgotten.

A song he felt was waiting for him—
somewhere across centuries he could no longer return to.

He exhaled slowly.

"Proceed," he murmured to the men without looking away from the katana.

But in his heart, the music continued.
Calling.
Pulling.
Echoing through time...

as if someone from a world long dead
was still trying to reach him.