Farewell to This Era

Rumble—!

The dome of Naka River Shrine completely collapsed.

Rocks weighing several tons, wrapped in dirt and tree roots, smashed toward the ground like a meteor shower.

Dust swallowed the entire underground chamber in an instant.

There were no screams.

No panicked flight.

Not even a single plea for mercy.

Thousands of Uchiha Clan members sat cross-legged where they were.

Boulders fell.

The sound of bones shattering rang especially crisp through the smoke and dust.

Blood sprayed, dyeing the glowing jutsu patterns on the ground red.

An old man's spine was smashed apart, his body folding limply in two, but his hands still did not loosen from their seal.

A mother had her lower body pinned beneath a falling beam. She ignored her mangled legs and instinctively shielded the child in her arms beneath her, using her back to bear the rubble that followed.

Until another stone flattened her head, her hands remained clamped tightly around the child's swaddling clothes.

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

The wind stirred his black cloak with red clouds, making it snap and flutter.

Too quiet.

This was not a massacre at all.

It was more like a pantomime.

"These lunatics..."

Obito looked down at the ruins below.

The dust gradually dispersed.

The originally orderly square formation had turned into a pile of rubble. Severed limbs and broken arms were mixed in with the dirt.

Blood pooled into puddles, reflecting the shattered moon overhead.

Thousands of people.

In those few short seconds, all of them had become corpses.

Not a single person fought back.

They were like puppets whose programs had been set long ago, calmly accepting the arrival of destruction.

This was not normal.

This completely defied the human instinct to survive, and even more so the Uchiha Clan's proud, warlike nature.

"Are they all dead?"

Danzo leaned on his cane and walked out from the shadows.

Dozens of Root ninja followed behind him.

These emotionless killing machines quickly jumped down into the ruins, the ninja swords in their hands expertly stabbing into the heart of every corpse, delivering the final blow.

Pfft. Pfft. Pfft.

The sounds of sharp blades entering flesh rose one after another.

Still, there were no screams.

Because these people had already "died" before the stones fell.

The pain lasted only an instant.

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

Xuan Shi opened his eyes.

He saw himself.

That body in a Police Force uniform was sprawled at the center of the formation. A sharp rock had pierced through his chest, and blood had spread all over the ground.

But he felt no pain.

He looked down at his own hands.

They were translucent, glowing with a faint, dim blue light.

No substance, no weight.

This was a soul.

"Did we... succeed?"

A blank voice came from beside him.

Xuan Shi turned his head.

Fugaku was floating in midair, looking down at his physical body, whose shoulder had been smashed halfway to pieces. His expression was somewhat complicated, as if relieved, and yet also sorrowful.

"We succeeded."

Xuan Shi pointed around them.

Fugaku raised his head, and his pupils abruptly widened.

Spectacular.

It could only be described as spectacular.

Above these ruins, countless blue motes of light were rising from the corpses.

One, ten, a hundred, a thousand.

They were the souls of thousands of Uchiha Clan members.

They had broken free of those heavy shells of flesh, doomed to rot, and transformed into pure bodies of energy.

No more blood, no more pain.

The elderly cast aside their canes, and the disabled regrew their legs.

The soul of the infant who had been protected beneath its mother also floated up, still asleep in its mother's arms, giving off a faint blue glow.

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

Yashiro's soul drifted over. He looked at the Root ninja below who was delivering a finishing blow to his corpse, and a trace of mockery appeared on his face.

"Go on. Cut harder."

Yashiro floated in front of that Root ninja and roared into his face.

The ninja showed no reaction at all, still mechanically drawing his blade and stabbing it in.

"Idiot."

Yashiro cursed, then turned and flew toward the sky.

All the blue motes of light were rising.

Like a grand meteor shower in reverse.

They gathered together, forming a broad river of light that wound its way into the depths of the night sky.

There.

The system's power had torn open a massive rift in space-time.

Inside the rift was endless darkness and chaos—the turbulent flow of time, and also the tunnel leading to the past.

Xuan Shi controlled his soul and flew to the very front of the group.

He was the navigator.

He had to lead these thousands of lost dead souls home.

Just then.

The flow of the river of light suddenly stagnated for a moment.

A red mote of light stopped in midair.

That was Itachi.

Even after becoming a soul, his chakra was still a unique red, carrying an indelible stench of blood and sorrow.

He did not fly upward with the main group.

Instead, he hovered in midair, his gaze piercing through layers upon layers of buildings and turning toward another direction in the Hidden Leaf Village.

That was the dormitory area of the Ninja Academy.

At this point in time, Sasuke should have been sleeping soundly there, or else awakened by the tremors just now and hiding under his blanket, trembling.

Itachi looked in that direction.

His soul body was trembling violently, its light flickering bright and dark, appearing extremely unstable.

He would not leave.

Or rather, he could not bear to leave.

In this world, Sasuke had been left behind.

No parents, no brother, no clan.

Tomorrow morning, when Sasuke woke up and saw the corpses covering the ground, saw this empty home...

How was that child, who was only seven years old, supposed to survive?

He would have to live all alone under Danzo's surveillance, under the cold eyes of the villagers, bearing the curse of being the "orphan of a massacred clan."

That kind of pain was crueler than death by a thousand cuts.

"Stop looking."

Xuan Shi floated to Itachi's side.

He did not pull Itachi away, merely hovering quietly beside him.

"The karma of this world has already formed a closed loop."

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

"We can't take him with us."

"He is the Sasuke of this era. His thread of fate is already fixed here."

Itachi did not turn back.

His gaze remained locked firmly in that direction, as if he wanted to bore through that wall with his eyes and look one more time at that sleeping younger brother.

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

Itachi's voice was filled with despair.

"Yes."

Xuan Shi answered very simply.

"It's cruel, but fair."

"We abandoned everything in this world, including the Sasuke here, in exchange for a chance to start over in another timeline."

Xuan Shi stretched out his hand and pointed at the huge space-time rift above their heads.

"In that 'past.'"

"Sasuke hasn't entered 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."

"The Sasuke of that world will have parents who love him, a brother who practices shuriken with him, and the entire Uchiha at his back."

"The one you have to save is that Sasuke."

Itachi's body trembled.

He slowly withdrew his gaze.

That agony, as if his soul were being torn apart, dimmed the red light around him somewhat.

Goodbye.

Sasuke of this world.

Your brother is a coward.

Your brother ran away.

And left all the darkness and pain to you alone.

I'm sorry.

I'm truly... sorry.

Itachi closed his eyes.

A crystalline drop of soul power slid from the corner of his eye and dissipated into the night wind.

When he opened his eyes again, that trace of attachment had disappeared.

Only resolve remained.

For the perfect ending of another world, he had to sever his bonds with this one.

"Let's go."

Itachi spoke in a low voice.

He turned around and did not look back again.

The red mote of light abruptly accelerated, plunging into the blue river of light and flying toward that pitch-black rift.

Xuan Shi looked at his back and sighed.

This, too, was a kind of growth.

Even if this growth was bought with bloody wounds.

"We're leaving too."

Xuan Shi waved his hand.

The river of light sped up.

Thousands of motes of light, like a swarm of bees returning to their nest, rushed one after another into the rift.

On the ground.

Danzo stood before a corpse.

It was the body of Yashiro Uchiha.

Although it had been somewhat deformed by falling rocks, those three-tomoe Sharingan remained embedded in their sockets, completely intact.

"Hmph, you stubborn old fool."

Danzo let out a cold snort and bent down.

He extended two fingers, skillfully pried open Yashiro's eyelids, and prepared to gouge out the eyeball.

This was his trophy.

It was also his greatest harvest of the night.

However.

The moment his fingers touched the eyeball.

Danzo's movements froze.

The texture was wrong.

There was none of that elasticity filled with chakra activity, nor that unique fluctuation of ocular power.

This eyeball... was dead.

It felt like a glass marble, or the eye of a dead fish.

It was dull, lusterless, and murky.

"What is going on?"

Danzo furrowed his brows tightly and pried the eyeball out with force.

He held the eyeball up to the moonlight to examine it closely.

No chakra.

Not even a trace.

This wasn't just the dissipation of chakra caused by death.

It was as if... the essence within this eyeball, and perhaps even something within this entire body, had been instantly drained away.

All that remained was an empty husk.

"Lord Danzo!"

Not far away, a Root ninja who was busy recovering Sharingan shouted in panic, "Something is wrong! These eyes... they are all ruined!"

"What?"

Danzo's expression shifted, and he hurried over, leaning on his cane.

The ninja held several Sharingan that had just been extracted.

Without exception.

They were all gray and lusterless, the patterns of the tomoe blurred and indistinct, as if they had weathered for thousands of years.

"What about the ocular power?"

Danzo snatched the eyes, his voice trembling, "Thousands of Sharingan! How could they all have become worthless scraps?!"

The Sharingan of the Uchiha Clan retained their ocular power for a long time even after the host died. This was precisely why he had gone to such great lengths to exterminate the clan.

But now.

These eyes were completely hollow.

It was as if the souls within them had been stolen by someone.

High above.

Obito still stood at the edge of the breach.

He did not go down to join the frenzy of eye-gouging.

His single eye stared fixedly at the pile of corpses below, the sense of dissonance in his heart growing stronger.

The bodies were real.

The blood was real.

But he just felt that something was wrong.

As a pseudo-Madara Uchiha who was proficient in space-time ninjutsu and soul arts, his perception of souls far exceeded that of ordinary people.

Thousands of people had died here.

Logically, this place should have been filled with resentment, death energy, and the chakra fluctuations of dissipating souls.

But now.

This place was terrifyingly clean.

No souls.

Not a single one.

These corpses were like fruit peels stripped of their flesh, discarded here at will.

"That light from just now..."

Obito suddenly raised his head, looking up at the night sky.

The blinding white light from earlier was not the light of an explosion.

It was a high-density aggregate of chakra.

And... that fluctuation...

Obito's pupils contracted sharply.

Space-time fluctuation!

Although it was faint, he had caught it.

That aura of tearing through dimensions was extremely similar to when he used Kamui, but the scale was countless times larger.

"Could it be..."

Obito's heart skipped a beat.

An absurd thought emerged in his mind.

These people... didn't die?

Or rather, had they abandoned their physical bodies and collectively escaped in some way he could not comprehend?

But how could that be possible?

What kind of jutsu existed in the ninja world like that?

Just as Obito was filled with suspicion and uncertainty.

In the night sky.

The last tail of that river of light, invisible to the naked eye, slipped into a space-time rift.

The rift began to close slowly.

In the final second before it sealed shut.

A voice.

A voice filled with mockery, sarcasm, and endless chill, seemed to cross the barrier of dimensions and resounded directly in the depths of Obito's mind.

It was the voice of Xuan Shi.

"Obito Uchiha."

"And Danzo Shimura."

"Enjoy your 'victory' to the fullest."

"This pile of rotting meat is my gift to you."

Obito shuddered, turning abruptly to look into the void.

No one.

There was nothing there.

Only that voice continued to echo, growing more distant and ethereal.

"We will... wait for you in the past."

Hum.

The air vibrated slightly.

The invisible rift vanished completely.

The moonlight remained cold.

The night wind continued to howl.

The corpses covering the ground still lay there silently.

But Obito felt a chill shoot from the soles of his feet straight to his scalp.

Wait for us... in the past?

What did that mean?

Where on earth had these lunatics gone?

"Investigate! Investigate it for me!"

Danzo below suddenly erupted in a roar, slamming the ruined eyeball in his hand onto the ground and crushing it to pieces.

"Even if you have to slice the corpses into pieces! Find out the reason!"

"My Sharingan! My power!"

Danzo roared at the ruins like a gambler who had lost everything.

Obito watched this scene coldly.

He did not speak.

But in that single exposed eye, for the first time, a trace of an emotion called "fear" appeared.

A variable.

A massive variable, one beyond his control, had been born.

[System prompt: Soul transition complete.]
[Current coordinates: In the space-time turbulence...]
[Estimated time of arrival: Unknown.]
[Target node: Konoha Year 38.]
[The journey... begins.]