“Time is what we want most but what we use worst.”
Consider the value of a second.
To the giant tortoise, who live for hundreds of years, a second is but a blink of an eye. Their lifespan filled with hundreds of billions of seconds, each one could be grazed over.
The tortoise seems never in a hurry and learns patience, because he allows himself to take time.
But to the mayfly, whose life expectancy is but a mere day, every second counts.
The value of a second is amplified.
What would the mayfly give but for a mere hour longer to feel the breeze, take time and pause? A mere hour to the tortoise is but a breath, wasted in a flood of time that they swim in.
You are a tortoise, Kaine.
You exist in a sea of time, endless. Each night, blending into those before. Each second, meaningless to your existence.
Time has no bounds on you.
And you give it no value.
Centuries pass, the Odawara destroy the Tiger’s Nest Monastery. The battle rages, peace is formed and memories are lost.
And to you, it exists as a mere puzzle. Piecing together the passages of time to determine the answers you seek.
You place the pieces down in your puzzleboard, forming the passage of time that you seek.
To your mind, it is all linked and you can spend eternity identifying why.
You’ve built your puzzle up over time to form a picture of what you see as the common factor in all these things.
The disappearances.
Tenchu. Aesop. Leif Helveig.
You’ve toiled away, wasting time chasing demons that don’t exist. Forming answers to questions nobody asked you.
And what you’ve created is merely a picture of a suspect.
Me.
And you’ve dragged Lucy along for the ride, feeding her snippets of your jigsaw to sate her bloodlust.
Like seconds of time to a tortoise, you have methodically positioned yourself to take advantage of every situation you find yourself in. To investigate and leave no stone unturned.
But we do not live in a world of tortoises, Kaine.
To you, we are but mayflies.
I was born into this puzzle long after the fall of the Odawara.
I seek answers to the very same questions, not because it is a matter of killing time for me, but because those people were my friends.
I valued their life.
Yet you have your head so set in the moments of the past that you miss the very real present that you find yourself in.
“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift… That is why they call it the present.”
I exist in that present. Mindful in the moment of now.
I stand before you, with no more time left to waste.
No more time to hear your theories, time wasted with your nose in places where it need not belong.
Your time is up, tortoise.
If your investigation does not close at Ring of Dreams, I will close it for you.