Sometime around 1100 AD, a group of samurai fled from their village in Japan after being raided and losing their homes. They traveled through mountains, forests, and villages for weeks until they finally found a secluded valley to claim as theirs. Wildlife was abundant, and the group of samurai had access to food and water. It seemed like a utopia until they found out this wasn’t any normal place.
About a year after arriving, one of the samurai, Miyamoto Musashi, was hunting and spotted a deer. He followed it into an area he had never been in, expecting the deer to be backed into a corner so he could kill it. As soon as Miyamoto got into the area, something came flying out of the air and the deer squealed in pain and ran away. He immediately looked around, confused at what had just happened. What he thought was a wall of stone in the back of the clearing seemed to move. I must be hallucinating, thought Miyamoto, rocks don’t move on their own. But then he remembered what had happened to the deer. That couldn’t have been a coincidence.
Miyamoto slowly tiptoed across the ground and hid behind a tree when he was getting close to the back wall of the clearing. He peered around the trunk and saw something he never thought he would see in his life: the rock was moving. And it was looking right at him. He saw a rock flying at him in his peripheral vision, and fled the area.
Miyamoto ran to the palace his group had been building, and told the leader, Sanada Yukimura, about what he had found. Sanada was amazed and explained to Miyamoto that this was a legendary beast known as the Ancient Golem Guardian. According to myth, it was hostile at first but only as self-defense. It could be tamed and befriended if you acted calm and did not run away.
So, the two samurai decided to be peaceful with it. It could be a good protector of their land, and they could work in harmony together. They prepared food and weapons just in case something went wrong, and traveled to the Golem Guardian’s clearing. When they got there, the Golem Guardian immediately recognized Miyamoto from before and was not happy. He let out a long roar and a rock nearly missed his shoulder. But the two samurai stay put. Sanada set out some food as a peace offering. The Golem Guardian did not eat human food, but he still recognized that the humans did not want to fight.
Both parties were still hesitant for a few days, but they started working together. The Golem Guardian gathered deer, birds, and plants for the samurai group to eat, and in exchange, the samurai worked on a new section of their palace specifically for the Golem Guardian.
For the next nine hundred years, the Golem Guardian and the samurai group lived in peace with one another, catering to each other’s needs. They did not face any problems in their secluded valley, until one day when someone spotted what looked like a group of warriors running towards the palace. He alerted the Golem Guardian, who got ready to attack. However, by the time the Golem Guardian had taken down the warriors, thirty of the samurai died. Unfortunately, this problem persisted.
To stop these attacks as quickly as possible, the samurai and the Golem Guardian established a system to protect themselves. Samurai would stand in groups with each other and take down enemies when they rushed in. If the warriors were skilled enough to get past enough samurai, that’s when the Golem Guardian came in. He tried, usually successfully, to throw boulders down at the warrior groups and kill them. The ancestors of the legendary Sanada Yukimura and Miyamoto Musashi also had a special role: they were equipped with special, hard-to-make weapons and armor forged by ancestors so that they could pose a real threat to the warriors.
If by any chance, a warrior group killed the whole palace, the samurai still didn’t want their legacy to be gone. So they hid their ancestral armor and weapons in a secret room to make it very hard to find. But that hasn’t happened yet, and let’s hope it never does.