The concept of rotation was simple, you grab a ball and you spin it around.
But some people got smarter with it, added physics and mathematics into the equation making it so the ball doesn't just spin aimlessly but spins with a predetermined format.
This was what my brother Gyro told me in this life. My name is Julius Zeppeli and I am the youngest of the Zeppeli family. A family of doctors and executioners.
"It truly is a shame..."
And I am dying once more.
[The Golden Ratio]
When I first woke up in this world I wasn't familiar with it, but after my eyesight started to perfectly form when I was an infant and my hearing was a bit clearer I understood where I was.
I was in the world of Jojo Part 7: Steel Ball Run, and I was born into the Zeppeli family. Not knowing Italian was troublesome at first, like trying to read a book with every other page torn out. But children learn fast, and I learned faster than most because I already knew what sounds to listen for, what patterns to follow. By the time I was three I was speaking it well enough that nobody questioned anything.
Gyro was eleven when I was born.
I remember the first time he held me, this lanky kid with that ridiculous grin already forming on his face even at that age, looking down at me like I was the most interesting thing he'd ever seen. He poked my cheek. I grabbed his finger. He laughed so loud our mother scolded him from the next room.
That was my first real memory in this life. Not the cold shock of being born, not the blurry shapes of the ceiling above a cradle. Just Gyro's stupid laugh and his finger in my fist.
Growing up in the Zeppeli household was a strange thing when you already knew how the story was supposed to go. Our father was a serious man, not cruel but carved from a particular kind of stone that doesn't warm easily. He loved us in the way men of his generation and profession loved things, through expectation, through investment, through the particular pride of watching something he built perform well. Gyro was the heir and bore the full weight of that. I watched my brother get molded year by year into exactly what our father needed him to be, the perfect Zeppeli, steady handed and sharp minded and willing to pick up a man's sins and carry them to the executioner's block without flinching.
I was luckier. Or unluckier, depending on how you look at it.
As the youngest I had room to breathe. I still learned medicine. I still learned the spin. But nobody was watching my every rotation with the intensity they watched Gyro's, which meant I had space to fail, and more importantly, space to experiment.
The spin came to me differently than it came to Gyro.
My brother was a natural in the truest sense of the word. When he threw a steel ball it sang. There was something almost musical about the way he worked, instinctive and fluid, like the physics were simply agreeing with him out of courtesy. Our father praised him constantly for it in his restrained, measured way, which for him was practically shouting from the rooftops.
When I threw a steel ball it was more like an argument.
I could feel what I wanted the rotation to do. I could see the geometry of it in my head, the spiraling path, the precise angle, the way energy should transfer from the spin into whatever it touched. But translating that vision into my hands took time. It took hundreds of failed attempts and bruised fingers and one memorable incident where I sent a steel ball through a window and it bounced off three walls before coming back and clipping me in the ear.
Gyro found that one very funny.
Our father did not.
"You lack the mindset for the spin," he told me eventually, in that calm tone that was worse than shouting. "You think too much. The spin requires instinct, not just calculation."
He wasn't entirely wrong. But he also wasn't entirely right, and I knew something he didn't.
Because what I was reaching for wasn't ordinary spin. I was reaching for something I'd read about in the manga, something that even Gyro only unlocks under extreme duress in the final stretch of the race. The Golden Ratio. The spin that doesn't just rotate but spirals in perfect proportion, 1 to 1.618 repeating into infinity, the mathematical fingerprint that shows up in nautilus shells and flower petals and the structure of galaxies.
The spin that can interact with the Saint's Corpse.
I was thirteen when I first achieved it. Just for a moment, just a flicker, the steel ball leaving my hand at an angle that felt less like throwing and more like releasing something that already knew where it was going. It hit a wooden post in the yard and the grain of the wood spiraled outward from the impact point in a perfect logarithmic curve.
I stood there for a long time staring at it.
Then I went inside and said nothing to anyone.
[The Golden Ratio]
The years between thirteen and sixteen were preparation.
I read everything I could about the Saint's Corpse which was everything about jesus without making it obvious that I knew it existed. I framed it as theological curiosity, as medical interest in relics and their historical documentation, as a young man finding his faith. Our father approved. It gave me access to texts and contacts I wouldn't have had otherwise.
I mapped out where each part was located based on what I remembered from the story. Most of them I couldn't touch, they were too deep into the race route, too tangled up in events I couldn't intercept without derailing things in ways I couldn't predict. Johnny needed his legs. Gyro needed to find his own path to the Golden Rotation or he'd never reach what he was capable of and that requird the eyes. The race had to happen mostly as it happened.
But one part could be removed early without breaking anything essential.
The ears.
They were accessible before the race began. And without the ears, Valentine's Love Train would be incomplete. It wouldn't matter how many other parts he collected. The corpse needed to be whole to grant its full power, and I intended to make sure it never would be.
Convincing our father to let me go to America required a story that was true enough to be believable. Nikola Tesla was real, his work on electrical applications in medicine was genuinely interesting, and the idea of a Zeppeli son bringing back knowledge that could advance their practice was exactly the kind of thing our father found compelling. It took two conversations and a written proposal I spent a week drafting.
He agreed. He even looked proud.
I felt guilty about that for the entire voyage across the Atlantic.
[The Golden Ratio]
America was loud in a way Italy wasn't.
New York especially. The smell of it hit you first, coal smoke and garbage and salt water and something underneath all of it that was almost alive. The streets were crowded with people from everywhere, languages overlapping into a kind of constant noise that after a few days stopped being chaos and started being texture.
I spent two weeks in New York actually meeting with Tesla's people, taking notes, asking genuine questions, because if I came home without anything to show for it the story fell apart. Tesla himself I only saw once from a distance at a public demonstration. He was taller than I expected and moved like someone who was always slightly ahead of whatever room he was standing in.
Then I went south and west and started looking.
Sugar Mountain was harder to find than I anticipated. The manga makes it seem like a place you stumble across but in practice locating a girl who lives inside a tree in rural America with nothing but vague geographic context from a story I read in my previous life was closer to a months-long exercise in frustration. I followed rumors. I talked to locals in my broken English which got less broken over the weeks. I hunted, because that was how you found her, you came to her territory with genuine intent to take something living from it.
I killed a rabbit.
I felt bad about the rabbit.
But it worked.
Sugar Mountain emerged from her tree like something out of a fairy tale, which I suppose she was, and the exchange happened the way it was supposed to. The ears of the Saint's Corpse, wrapped in cloth, sitting in my hands with a weight that had nothing to do with their physical mass. They hummed faintly. Or maybe I imagined that. I've never been sure.
The pastor was a mistake I made with open eyes.
I knew trading them to him was creating a paper trail. I knew buying them back the next day was suspicious. But I was sixteen years old and I was tired and I thought I was being clever by routing the exchange through someone who would treat it as a sacred object rather than a weapon.
What I didn't account for was how fast word travels in certain circles.
By the morning after I bought the ears back I had a shadow. By afternoon there were three. By the time I made it to the edge of town there were enough of them that I understood this wasn't a robbery.
These were Valentine's people. Or people who reported to Valentine's people. Men who had been watching for any movement of the Corpse parts for months or years, patient and professional, waiting for exactly this.
I ran.
I was never going to outrun them.
[The Golden Ratio]
The alley they cornered me in smelled like coal and standing water.
There were four of them. One had a rifle. The other three had revolvers. They were spread in a loose arc and they knew what they were doing, no clean angle, no gap I could spin my way through without eating a bullet from at least one direction.
The ears were in my coat pocket.
I looked at them. I looked at the men. I thought about Gyro, about that stupid grin, about him poking my cheek when I was three days old. I thought about Johnny Joestar riding across this country on a horse he shouldn't have been able to ride with legs he'd regained through something miraculous. I thought about all of it ending with Valentine standing at the finish line holding a completed Saint's Corpse and rewriting the fate of a nation.
The man with the rifle said something in English. I caught enough of it to understand he wanted me to hand over what I was carrying.
I reached into my pocket.
They tensed.
I pulled out both steel balls.
The first shot hit me in the shoulder and spun me half around. The second caught me in the side. I kept my feet. The Golden Ratio wasn't easy to call up when your hands were shaking and your vision was going gray at the edges but I'd spent three years learning to reach for it under pressure and I found it now, that perfect spiral singing through my fingers, the steel ball leaving my hand.
It hit the ears.
Not to destroy them. Not at first. Just to begin the process, the rotation biting into the structure of the relic the same way it bit into living tissue, unwinding it, reordering it at a level below what the eye could see.
More shots. I stopped counting after 10.
I was on my knees by the time the ball came back to my hand and I sent it again, and this time I pushed everything I had left into the rotation, felt the Golden Ratio lock in with a clarity that almost made me laugh because of course it was clearest now, of course it was easiest when I was dying, that seemed about right.
I saw a green figure come from my steel balls, it was just a moment but I saw it touch the corpse part with it's index finger briefly.
The ears came apart.
Not violently. They didn't explode or burn. They simply came apart. The structure unwound into something that wasn't tissue anymore, wasn't relic, wasn't anything that could be gathered and used. Fine as dust. Gone before it hit the ground.
The man with the rifle looked at his empty hands where the target had been. His expression was the most satisfying thing I'd seen in either of my lives.
I sat down against the alley wall because my legs had made their decision without consulting me.
[The Golden Ratio]
It's a strange thing, dying for the second time.
The first time there's shock. The raw animal refusal of it, the body's outrage at being switched off. This time I recognized the feeling for what it was and that recognition made it both easier and harder. Easier because I wasn't afraid. Harder because I knew exactly what I was losing.
I was sixteen.
I hadn't gotten to see Gyro win anything yet. I hadn't gotten to watch Johnny figure out what he was. I hadn't gotten to do half the things I'd planned, the contingencies, the careful nudges, all the small ways I was going to try to make sure my brother came home.
I accomplished one thing.
One stupid, painful, bloody thing in a coal-smelling alley in America.
Was it enough?
I didn't know. That was the honest answer. Valentine was resourceful. The race hadn't started yet. There were other ways his power could develop, other paths the story could take without the ears. Maybe I'd changed nothing. Maybe I'd changed everything. Maybe Gyro would ride across this country and come home and live a long life and never know his little brother had bled out in an alley in New Jersey trying to tip the scales.
I hoped so.
I hoped he never knew. I hoped he just came home.
I gritted my teeth against the cold spreading up from my fingers and I thought about him. Playing in the yard, his ridiculous laugh, the way he'd looked out for me when I was small even when he had every reason to be too busy, too weighted down by what was being built on his shoulders. My siblings. My parents. The smell of our house in the morning. Things I hadn't thought to memorize because I thought I'd have more time.
You always think you'll have more time.
'I hope you live a long life, brother.'
The alley went quiet.
The alley went dark.
"Your heart was in the right place, Julius Zeppeli."