Underground Chamber

Takuma had returned.

After a three-day mission, he had brought back only a change of clothes and a bottle of liniment for bruises and sprains. He said nothing, and Shuo Ye did not ask.

An Uchiha Clan jonin did not need to report the details of his missions to his seven-year-old son. That was an unspoken rule within the clan.

But Shuo Ye noticed something.

The next morning, before dawn, he was awakened by an extremely faint sound.

It was not the wind. Not a cat. It was footsteps.

He closed his eyes and spread his chakra sensing to its smallest range—covering only the area near the entryway, so as not to alert his father.

Takuma was suppressing his chakra.

For a jonin, suppressing chakra was basic practice. But suppressing his chakra and leaving the house at four in the morning was noteworthy in itself.

Shuo Ye turned over on the tatami, pulled the blanket up to his chin, and kept his eyes open in the dark.

He did not move.

He waited for about twenty minutes. Takuma's chakra signature moved from the entryway to beyond the courtyard wall, then gradually faded away in a particular direction—the direction of the Naka River.

Shuo Ye sat up.

Naka Shrine.

He followed his father, keeping roughly two hundred meters away.

A seven-year-old body had equally obvious advantages and disadvantages when it came to tailing someone. The advantage was that a seven-year-old child simply should not exist on the streets of the Hidden Leaf Village at four in the morning—no one would notice him. The disadvantage was that his stamina was insufficient; if Takuma picked up the pace, he would lose him.

But Takuma did not speed up.

He walked steadily, his strides even, following the small path along the outskirts of the clan grounds all the way south. Shuo Ye had walked this route many times—from the Uchiha Clan grounds to the Naka River, then ten minutes along the riverbank to the torii of Naka Shrine.

But today, Takuma was not taking the usual route.

Shuo Ye crouched behind a tree and watched his father's back disappear beyond the torii of Naka Shrine.

He waited three minutes.

Then he followed.

Naka Shrine at four in the morning was completely different from how it looked during the day.

By day, the shrine was a landmark of the Uchiha Clan grounds. Clan children came here to play, and occasionally clan members came to pray for blessings. But at four in the morning, there were no wind chimes, no footsteps—only the heavy silence that belonged to ancient buildings.

Takuma was not in the courtyard.

Shuo Ye expanded his chakra sensing slightly—enough to cover the entire shrine.

Takuma's chakra signature was underground.

It was faint. Not because Takuma was suppressing his chakra, but because something underground was blocking chakra detection. Shuo Ye's senses struck a barrier, like reaching into water and touching a smooth stone—he knew something was beneath it, but could not make out its shape.

He stood before the main hall's doors and hesitated for three seconds.

Then he went around the back of the main hall.

There was something here he had never noticed before—a stone slab. It lay flat against the ground, blending seamlessly into the surrounding stone path. Unless someone specifically looked for it, they would never notice it existed.

At one corner of the slab was a recess. The shape of that recess—

Shuo Ye crouched and touched it.

A hexagon.

Of course he knew what it was.

The Uchiha Clan's stone tablet. The Sage of Six Paths' stone tablet. Writing that only the Sharingan could decipher—and the higher the level of one's eyes, the more of its contents one could read.

Of course he knew what was written on it.

"Those who wield the two powers of Yin and Yang..."

Those words were crystal clear in his mind. In his previous life, he had read word-for-word analyses of the tablet's contents on Naruto wikis. He knew what each stage of the Sharingan could read, knew what Madara became after reading all of it, knew Kaguya—

No.

There was no point thinking about that now.

He was now a seven-year-old Uchiha Clan child without the Sharingan. He did not even have one tomoe. In his chakra system, the conditions for awakening the Sharingan had not yet been triggered.

So he could not see the words on the tablet.

But he had already "seen" them in his previous life.

Shuo Ye took a deep breath.

He pressed both hands against the stone slab and shoved.

The slab did not move.

He pushed again, this time adding chakra to his palms. Chakra seeped from his palms into the surface of the slab—

The slab moved.

At an incredibly slow pace, it slid about thirty centimeters to the side. Beneath it was a pitch-black entrance, with stone steps leading downward.

Air rushed out of the opening.

Cold air. It carried an ancient scent, a mixture of stone and earth.

Shuo Ye hesitated.

He looked down. The stone steps stretched into darkness, and he could not see the end. His chakra sensing was repelled again at the entrance—there was an even stronger isolation barrier below.

He knew he should not go down.

This was a forbidden place of the Uchiha Clan. The tablet was something only the clan head, elders, and certain designated people had the authority to access. A seven-year-old child appearing here was a capital offense in itself—if anyone discovered him.

But he still stepped onto the first stone stair.

Beyond it was a very short corridor.

There were traces of torches on the stone walls, but they had been extinguished for a long time. Shuo Ye gathered a tiny ball of light at his fingertip with chakra—his own little trick, not any ninjutsu. He simply compressed a minuscule amount of chakra at his fingertip and released it, producing a faint glow.

The light illuminated the end of the corridor.

A stone tablet.

Black stone. About as tall as a person and half as wide. Its surface was covered in writing—but to Shuo Ye's naked eyes, the characters were nothing more than a blur of uneven grooves.

He knew they were not ordinary patterns.

They were words left behind by the Sage of Six Paths. Only the Sharingan could decipher them.

Shuo Ye stood before the tablet and reached out to touch its surface.

Cold.

The patterns on the stone rose and fell beneath his fingertips, yet he could not read a single word.

The "knowledge" in his mind—the detailed descriptions of the tablet's contents he had read on wikis and countless Naruto forums in his previous life—was separated from the cold black stone before him by a wall he could not cross.

Knowledge was one thing.

Seeing it with his own eyes was another.

He stood before the tablet for a long time.

Only the tiny orb of light at his fingertip glowed in the corridor, illuminating his hand and the stone before him. His shadow stretched long behind him, cast upon the stone wall like the silhouette of a tiny, lonely person.

"..."

He said nothing.

Naturally, the tablet said nothing either.

But Shuo Ye felt as though the stone was watching him.

It was not an illusion. The tablet had no eyes, no face, no organ capable of "watching." Yet that sensation—the sensation of being watched—was unmistakable.

Or perhaps it was not the tablet watching him.

It was all those who had read this tablet before him. Madara. Izuna. Kagami. Takeru. Fugaku. Shisui—had Shisui read it? He did not know.

Their gazes had passed through time and space, lingering within this stone.

And now, a seven-year-old Uchiha boy who knew nothing, yet knew everything, stood before it.

He could not read a thing.

But he knew it all.

That feeling—the feeling of "knowing the answer but not being able to see the question"—filled his chest with a heavy, indescribable emotion.

It was not fear. Nor was it reverence.

It was a deep, indescribable—

Loneliness.

He returned to the surface.

He pushed the stone slab back into its original position. He checked it three times, making sure he had left no trace.

Then he walked home along the bank of the Naka River.

Dawn had not yet broken.

But he had already seen what he wanted to see.

Not the words on the tablet—he had not been able to read anything.

What he had seen was the tablet itself.

The object mentioned time and again in every Naruto fanfiction, the tool countless transmigrated protagonists used to "cheat"—it was real now. Cold. Black. Carved with patterns he could not recognize a single word of.

It was there.

Quietly, eternally, bearing the weight of a thousand years of time, it was there.

When Shuo Ye returned home, Takuma was already back.

He lay on the tatami, pretending to sleep.

Takuma's chakra signature in the next room was steady. He was probably meditating—one of a jonin's daily routines.

Shuo Ye closed his eyes, his mind filled with that black stone tablet.

V004.

He gave this foreshadowing a number in his mind.

The foreshadowing from Chapter Four. The stone tablet.

He knew when and in what way this stone would appear in his life again.

But not now.

Right now, he was only a seven-year-old child who was supposed to go to the ninja academy after dawn.

He turned over and pulled the blanket up to his shoulders.

Outside the window, the sky was beginning to pale.