A Truly Wonderful World

This feeling was not unfamiliar to Gojo Yoru.

Before sudden death, the body gives warnings.

When overtired from staying up, sometimes you can't sleep at all—instead, you grow more restless, with a dry mouth, parched throat, and rising body temperature.

Worse still, your heartbeat races, and that suffocating tightness in your chest breeds a fear that if you fall asleep, you might never wake up again.

Gojo Yoru had experienced this many times in his past life, but he was young then and never took it seriously.

Now, as the sensation returned, Gojo Yoru couldn't help but feel a surge of terror.

Without a moment's hesitation, he got up to drink water, but he didn't gulp it down—he took small, careful sips.

Once the dryness in his throat eased a little, Gojo Yoru carried the kettle back to his room, lay down on the bed again, and tried to empty his mind to calm his heartbeat.

But no matter what he did, his heart rate didn't slow in the slightest.

In the silence of the night, Gojo Yoru's room sounded like someone was beating a drum.

He lifted his shirt, and his chest was pounding so hard it seemed the heart inside wanted to burst out of his body.

His restless energy, along with the intermittent spikes in temperature and thirst, made sleep impossible. He could only keep boiling water and drinking it.

Gojo Yoru even took several cold showers, but nothing helped.

This condition persisted without fading, all the way until noon the next day.

Not counting the half-hour nap the day before, Gojo Yoru had now gone a full thirty hours without sleep.

Yet he felt no discomfort at all.

In his past life, after being awake this long, even if his mind was wired, he would have felt the strain in his nerves, his eyes bloodshot and swollen.

But in this life, Gojo Yoru didn't experience any of that.

In fact, when he calmed down, he realized his energy was boundless, like a perpetual motion machine.

Clearly, it was the effect of his heart—that blood-pumping organ—beating violently.

This state lasted for seven full days.

Gojo Yoru was also sleepless for seven days, nearly two hundred hours without closing his eyes.

Even during those seven days, he ate nothing at all, only drinking large amounts of water.

It wasn't that he didn't want to eat—he simply couldn't.

Strangely, after seven days without food, his body showed no change at all. He was still bursting with energy.

Gojo Yoru's mood gradually shifted from initial fear to excitement.

If this were sudden death, after seven days without sleep, he would have been lying flat on a board long ago.

But he wasn't dead, which meant it wasn't sudden death—it was his body undergoing some unknown transformation.

Maybe... his golden finger was about to arrive!

Was it an unknown Kekkei Genkai of the Gojo Family, awakening in his generation?

Or was it a special ability that had crossed over with him from his past life, perhaps even the main cause of his transmigration?

The sudden-death-like sensation continued until noon on August 28, Year 30 of Konoha, before it slowly faded.

"Finally, it's ov—"

Just as his heartbeat returned to a normal rhythm, and the low-grade fever and dry mouth vanished, Gojo Yoru hadn't even finished his sigh of relief or checked his body for changes, when his vision went black. He collapsed onto the bed and fell into a deep, snoring sleep.

He didn't know how long he slept, until the churning hunger of stomach acid dragged him out of his deep slumber.

"So tired..."

Opening his eyes, Gojo Yoru had no desire to get up.

It had been a long time since he'd felt the exhaustion of not sleeping enough.

If it weren't for the ceiling and his surroundings reminding him, he might have thought the past six years were just a long dream.

Turning to the side, he pulled open the drawer of his bedside table and took out a box. Inside were two rows of six pills each—Ration Pills, the compressed biscuits and mana-recovery items of the Naruto World.

One wasn't enough. Gojo Yoru ate three Ration Pills before his hollowed-out body regained some strength.

Getting out of bed, he stood before a full-length mirror, stripped off his clothes, and turned to examine his reflection. Seeing no outward changes, he immediately sat cross-legged and began refining Chakra to check if anything had changed inside.

Boom—

Like the sound of a drum, it exploded in Gojo Yoru's ears, in his mind, in the depths of his soul.

In that instant, his gaze seemed to turn inward, arriving at the chamber where the human heart resides.

Inside that "room" was a black heart, thumping and beating.

The image flashed and vanished.

Gojo Yoru's eyes snapped open, his face full of shock.

If he saw it right, that heart... was it black?

"Could that be my heart?!" Gojo Yoru thought to himself.

To confirm his hypothesis, Gojo Yoru closed his eyes again and refined chakra.

But the internal vision from before never reappeared.

Instead, just as Physical Energy and Mental Energy were about to merge, a special energy suddenly surged from within his cells, forcefully joining the fusion of the two energies.

Then, a strand of black chakra, formed from the fusion of three energies, appeared in Gojo Yoru's abdomen.

"Black chakra... could this be my golden finger?"

Gojo Yoru opened his eyes again and formed hand seals, attempting to mobilize that strand of black chakra.

The black chakra seemed no different from ordinary chakra; guided by the hand seals, it flowed through his meridians and gathered in Gojo Yoru's right palm.

Perhaps due to insufficient quantity, or maybe because Gojo Yoru's chakra control hadn't reached the standard yet, that strand of black chakra failed to manifest outside his body.

And within just a few seconds, that strand of black chakra vanished inside Gojo Yoru's body.

With such little time, Gojo Yoru simply couldn't find anything special about the black chakra.

So, Gojo Yoru closed his eyes again and continued refining chakra.

The special energy surged forth once more, mixing with Physical Energy and Mental Energy to form strands of black chakra.

When Gojo Yoru could no longer extract Physical Energy or Mental Energy from his cells, that special energy went straight for the main nest, merging into the blue vortex.

It was like painting ink onto white paper—part of the chakra gradually shifted from blue to black.

By the time Gojo Yoru could no longer extract the special energy from his cells, a third of the chakra inside him had turned black.

"Let me see just what effect you have!"

Gojo Yoru stood up, both expectant and nervous, forming hand seals to mobilize the black chakra within him and beginning to perform a technique.

Ever since he first refined chakra at age three, Gojo Yoru had already grasped the Three Body Techniques that the Ninja Academy would teach, and this vacation he had started training in C-rank Five Element Ninjutsu.

He naturally couldn't practice Five Element Ninjutsu at home, so Gojo Yoru intended to use the black chakra to perform the Three Body Techniques.

The result was... absolutely nothing happened!

No phantom clone could be created, and his body's form didn't change at all...

Upon this discovery, instead of being alarmed, Gojo Yoru was delighted.

Being unable to perform techniques meant this black chakra was different from ordinary chakra. The fact that nothing seemed off only proved that its "special effect" was buried deep.

And mystery meant... power!

Gojo Yoru swallowed another Ration Pill, then opened the glass door to the balcony, gazing at the dimly lit sky outside. He formed hand seals, ready to transform into a blur and leap out.

Suddenly, Gojo Yoru paused slightly, recalling how he had successfully moved the black chakra to his palm earlier. He then mobilized the black chakra to gather in his feet, preparing to perform the Konoha Body Flicker Technique—a D-rank technique also taught at the Ninja Academy.

Just like with the Three Body Techniques, Gojo Yoru didn't turn into a blur and vanish, but a sensation of stepping on empty air came from beneath his feet.

Looking down, Gojo Yoru's pupils sharply contracted.

He saw his feet, as if sinking into a swamp, with his calves submerged into the balcony floor.

Yet there was no feeling of pressure or being wrapped around his feet, nor did his body continue to sink. It was as if his feet weren't sinking into the balcony but had merged with it.

Gojo Yoru slowly lifted his leg, pulling his right foot out of the balcony.

Staring at the balcony floor, which showed no trace of indentation, Gojo Yoru could no longer control his expression. He couldn't help but lower his head, cover his face with his hands, and let out muffled sounds from his shoulders trembling—whether sobs or suppressed laughter, it was hard to tell.

After a long while, Gojo Yoru finally lowered his hands and looked up at Konoha, bathed in the glow of the morning sun, beautiful like a painted scroll. It was as if he was seeing this place he had lived in for six years for the first time. A grin still stretched across his face, but he couldn't help spreading his arms and sighing with a smile: "What a beautiful village... what a wonderful world!"