Kyoto, 1582.
Damien stood in a shadowed corridor within Nijo Castle. He'd assumed the face of a trader from the West, but the daimyo had noticed something wrong—his dialect was too clean, too modern. He had hours before suspicion hardened into execution.
His goal wasn't survival. It was a whisper.
He found the boy—a sickly child in a silk kimono—alone in the moonlit garden. The boy would one day become Hideyoshi's scribe, whose journal would go on to influence an entire movement of pacifist philosophers in the 1800s. A single sentence would change the world. Damien needed that sentence to change differently.
He knelt beside the child and told him a story about a future where war was calculated by algorithms. He gave him a phrase: "Truth is a function of pattern, not passion."
The boy nodded slowly, entranced.
History tilted.