Farewell to This Era

Rumble—!

The dome of the Naka River Shrine collapsed completely.

Tons of rock, wrapped in earth and tree roots, crashed to the ground like a meteor shower.

Dust instantly swallowed the entire underground chamber.

There were no screams.

No panicked attempts to flee.

Not even a single plea for mercy.

Several thousand Uchiha sat cross-legged where they were.

The boulders fell.

The sound of bones snapping rang out with startling clarity through the dust.

Blood spattered, staining the glowing patterns of the jutsu array on the ground.

An old man's spine was crushed. His body folded limply in two, but his hands never stopped forming Hand Seals.

A mother was pinned below the waist by a falling beam. She paid no heed to her mangled legs. Instead, she instinctively shielded the child in her arms, using her back to bear the rubble that came down after.

Even after another rock crushed her head, her hands remained locked around the baby's swaddling.

Obito stood at the edge of the hole, his lone eye narrowing slightly beneath his mask.

The wind tugged at his black cloak patterned with red clouds, making it snap and flutter.

It was too quiet.

This wasn't a massacre at all.

It was more like a silent play.

"These madmen..."

Obito looked down at the ruins.

The dust slowly cleared.

The once orderly formation had become a heap of rubble. Limbs lay scattered among the dirt.

Blood pooled on the ground, reflecting the shattered moon overhead.

Several thousand people.

In just a few short seconds, they had all become corpses.

Not one person had fought back.

They were like puppets following a program set long ago, calmly accepting the arrival of their destruction.

This wasn't normal.

It completely defied the human instinct to survive, not to mention the Uchiha Clan's proud and combative nature.

"Did you get them all?"

Danzo emerged from the shadows, leaning on his cane.

Dozens of Root shinobi followed behind him.

These emotionless killing machines swiftly leaped down into the ruins. With practiced ease, they drove the Ninja Blades in their hands into the hearts of every corpse, delivering the final blows.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

The sound of blades piercing flesh rose and fell.

Still, there were no screams.

Because these people had already "died" before the rocks came down.

The pain lasted only an instant.

It was like being bitten by a mosquito, followed by an endless lightness.

Xuan Shi opened his eyes.

He saw himself.

His body, dressed in a Police Force uniform, lay facedown in the center of the array. A jagged rock had pierced his chest, and blood covered the ground.

But he couldn't feel any pain.

He looked down at his hands.

They were translucent, glowing with a faint blue light.

No body, no weight.

So this was the soul.

"Did we... succeed?"

A bewildered voice came from beside him.

Xuan Shi turned his head.

Fugaku floated in midair, looking down at his own body, its shoulder crushed on one side. His expression was complicated, as though caught between relief and sorrow.

"We did."

Xuan Shi gestured around them.

Fugaku raised his head, his eyes widening.

It was magnificent.

That was the only way to describe it.

Above the ruins, countless blue lights rose from the corpses.

One, ten, a hundred, a thousand.

They were the souls of several thousand Uchiha.

They had left behind their heavy, doomed-to-rot flesh and become pure energy.

No more blood. No more pain.

The old had discarded their canes, and the disabled had their legs again.

The soul of the baby its mother had shielded rose into the air, still sleeping in her arms and glowing faintly blue.

"So this... is what death feels like?"

Yashiro's soul floated over. He looked down at the Root shinobi stabbing his corpse, a trace of mockery on his face.

"Go ahead. Hit it harder."

Yashiro drifted in front of the Root shinobi and shouted in his face.

The shinobi showed no reaction. He simply pulled out his blade and stabbed again.

"Idiot."

Yashiro cursed, then turned and flew toward the sky.

All the blue lights were rising.

They were like a grand meteor shower in reverse.

They gathered into a broad river of light, winding its way into the depths of the night sky.

There.

The system's power had torn open a vast rift in space and time.

Within it lay endless darkness and chaos: the currents of time, and the passage leading to the past.

Xuan Shi guided his soul to the front of the procession.

He was their navigator.

He would lead these several thousand lost souls home.

Just then,

the river of light suddenly slowed.

One red light stopped in midair.

It was Itachi.

Even as a soul, his chakra remained a distinct red, carrying a stench of blood and sorrow that couldn't be washed away.

He didn't follow the main group upward.

Instead, he hovered in midair, his gaze piercing the layers of buildings toward another part of Konoha.

That was the dormitory area of the Ninja Academy.

At this hour, Sasuke should have been sleeping there—or perhaps the tremor had woken him, and he was trembling under his blankets.

Itachi looked in that direction.

His soul trembled violently, its light flickering, growing terribly unstable.

He wouldn't go.

Or rather, he couldn't bear to leave.

In this world, Sasuke had been left behind.

Without his parents, his brother, or his clan.

Tomorrow morning, when Sasuke woke and saw the bodies scattered across the ground, saw his empty home—

how was that seven-year-old child supposed to survive?

Under Danzo's watch, facing the cold stares of the villagers, he would have to bear the curse of being the last survivor of a massacred clan and live all alone.

That pain was crueler than being slowly cut to pieces.

"Don't look anymore."

Xuan Shi floated over to Itachi.

He didn't try to pull him away. He simply hovered quietly at his side.

"The cause and effect of this world has already formed a closed loop."

Xuan Shi's voice sounded directly in Itachi's mind.

"We can't take him with us."

"He's the Sasuke of this era. His fate is fixed here."

Itachi didn't turn around.

His gaze remained locked on that direction, as though he could see through the walls and look once more at his sleeping little brother.

"Leaving him all alone here... Is this the price we have to pay?"

Despair filled Itachi's voice.

"Yes."

Xuan Shi's answer was blunt.

"It's cruel, but fair."

"We're abandoning everything in this world, including the Sasuke here, in exchange for the chance to start over on another timeline."

Xuan Shi raised a hand and pointed at the enormous rift in space and time above them.

"In that 'past'..."

"Sasuke hasn't started at the Ninja Academy yet."

"You haven't joined the Anbu yet."

"Shisui hasn't jumped into the river yet."

"As long as we go back—as long as we win—"

"In that world, Sasuke will have loving parents, a brother to practice throwing Shuriken with, and the entire Uchiha Clan at his back."

"The one you're saving is that Sasuke."

Itachi's body trembled.

Slowly, he looked away.

The pain, as though his soul were being torn apart, dimmed the red light around him.

Goodbye.

Sasuke of this world.

Your big brother was a coward.

Your big brother ran away.

He left all the darkness and pain for you to bear alone.

I'm sorry.

I really... am sorry.

Itachi closed his eyes.

A crystalline drop of spiritual energy slid from the corner of his eye and vanished into the night wind.

When he opened his eyes again, the longing was gone.

All that remained was resolve.

For the sake of a perfect ending in another world, he had to sever his ties to this one.

"Let's go."

Itachi spoke softly.

He turned away and didn't look back.

The red light surged forward, accelerating into the blue river of light and flying toward the pitch-black rift.

Xuan Shi watched him go and sighed.

This, too, was a kind of growth.

Even if that growth came at the price of a bloodied wound.

"Let's go, too."

Xuan Shi waved his hand.

The river of light quickened.

Thousands of lights, like bees rushing back to their hive, plunged into the rift one after another.

On the ground.

Danzo stood before a corpse.

It was the corpse of Yashiro Uchiha.

Though the body had been somewhat crushed out of shape by rocks, the Three-Tomoe Sharingan remained perfectly intact in its eye sockets.

"Hmph. Stubborn old fool."

Danzo snorted and bent down.

He held Yashiro's eyelid open with two fingers, his movements practiced, and reached to pluck out the eyeball.

It was his spoils of war.

And the greatest prize he'd won that night.

However.

The moment his fingers touched the eyeball,

Danzo froze.

The texture was wrong.

It lacked the spring of chakra-rich tissue, and there was no trace of that distinctive ocular power.

This eye... was dead.

Like a glass marble, or the eye of a dead fish.

Dull and cloudy.

"What's going on?"

Danzo furrowed his brow and forcefully plucked out the eyeball.

He held it up to the moonlight and examined it closely.

No chakra.

Not a trace.

This wasn't simply the result of chakra dissipating after its owner died.

It was as if... the essence of the eye, along with something inside the body, had been drained away in an instant.

All that remained was an empty husk.

"Lord Danzo!"

A Root shinobi nearby, who was retrieving Sharingan, shouted in alarm. "Something's wrong! These eyes... they're all useless!"

"What?"

Danzo's expression changed. Leaning on his cane, he hurried over.

The shinobi held several freshly extracted Sharingan in his hands.

Every single one of them was the same.

They were all dull and lifeless, their Tomoe blurred, as if they'd weathered for thousands of years.

"What about the ocular power?"

Danzo snatched the eyes from him, his voice trembling. "Thousands of Sharingan! How could they all have turned into worthless junk?!"

Even after their owners died, the ocular power in the Uchiha Clan's Sharingan remained for a long time. That was why he'd gone to such lengths to wipe out the clan.

But now,

the eyes were empty.

As if someone had stolen the souls inside them.

Above,

Obito was still standing at the edge of the hole.

He hadn't gone down to join the frenzy of eye harvesting.

His single eye was fixed on the pile of corpses below, and the sense that something was wrong grew stronger by the moment.

The corpses were real.

The blood was real.

But something still felt off.

As the false Madara Uchiha, a master of Space-Time Ninjutsu and soul techniques, he could sense souls far better than ordinary people.

Thousands had died here.

There should have been resentment, death energy, and the chakra fluctuations of souls fading away.

But now,

this place was terrifyingly clean.

There were no souls.

Not a single one.

These bodies were like fruit rinds tossed aside after all the flesh had been eaten.

"That light just now..."

Obito abruptly raised his head and looked up at the night sky.

That blinding white light hadn't been an explosion.

It had been a mass of chakra at an extremely high density.

And that fluctuation...

Obito's pupil suddenly contracted.

A space-time fluctuation!

It had been faint, but he'd sensed it.

That aura of tearing through dimensions was strikingly similar to the one he created with Kamui, only countless times more powerful.

"Could it be..."

Obito's heart skipped a beat.

An utterly absurd thought surfaced in his mind.

Had these people... not died?

Or had they abandoned their bodies and escaped together by some method he couldn't understand?

But how was that possible?

There was no such jutsu in the Shinobi World.

Just as Obito was struggling to make sense of it,

in the night sky,

the last stretch of the river of light, invisible to mortal eyes, slipped into the space-time rift.

The rift began to close slowly.

In the final second before it sealed shut,

a voice—

a voice full of mockery, scorn, and icy menace—seemed to cross the dimensional barrier and ring directly in the depths of Obito's mind.

It was Xuan Shi's voice.

"Uchiha Obito."

"And Shimura Danzo."

"Enjoy your 'victory.'"

"I'll leave this pile of rotten meat to you."

Obito shuddered and spun around, staring into empty space.

No one was there.

Nothing at all.

Only the voice lingered, growing more distant and indistinct.

"We'll be waiting for you in the past."

Hum.

The air quivered faintly.

The invisible rift disappeared completely.

The moonlight was still cold.

The night wind still howled.

The corpses still lay motionless across the ground.

But Obito felt a chill shoot from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.

Waiting for us in the past?

What did that mean?

Where had those lunatics gone?

"Search! Search everything!"

Danzo suddenly roared below, hurling the useless eyeball to the ground and crushing it underfoot.

"Even if you have to dissect the bodies, find out what happened!"

"My Sharingan! My power!"

Danzo raged across the ruins like a gambler who'd lost everything.

Obito watched in silence.

He said nothing.

But for the first time, the single eye exposed on his face held an emotion known as fear.

An unpredictable variable.

A tremendous variable, one beyond his control, had come into being.

[System Notification: Soul transition complete.]

[Current coordinates: Within the space-time turbulence...]

[Estimated arrival time: Unknown.]

[Target node: Konoha, Year 38.]

[The journey... begins.]