**NNT 13:40 -- Land of Rain -- Border of Ruined Asugamuzi**
**Pit Pat pit pat**
The rain never stops bleeding.
"It rained red the day Asugamuzi screamed its last breath."
---
Damn, what was left of Asugamuzi? Calling it a village would be spitting on graves. This was a festering wound carved into the earth's flesh, weeping pus and memories. The ground itself had turned black, not from fire but from something worse—Hanzo's mycotoxin had eaten through everything living until even the worms rotted from the inside out.
I can still smell them. The children.
Their bloated corpses bobbed in the shattered canals like broken dolls, eyes milky white and staring at nothing. The water ran thick as blood, copper-sweet and crawling with maggots that had grown fat on human meat. Trees stood like gallows, their bark peeled away to show the sick yellow bone underneath. When the wind blew, they creaked like dying men.
The crows were the worst part. Fat as cats, they'd grown lazy from the feast. They sat on rooftops, picking at eyeballs with the patience of surgeons. One looked at me as I passed, a child's finger hanging from its beak like a worm.
*Caw.*
Even the fucking air was wrong here. Each breath tasted like copper pennies and rotting flowers. My lungs burned with every inhale, and I could feel something wet and warm trickling down my throat. The same poison that had melted these people from the inside was working on me too.
But we kept walking. Through the playground where swing sets held tiny skeletons still clutching rusted chains. Through the market where vendors had died at their stalls, hands forever reaching for coins that would never come.
Behind me, someone was crying. Soft, hitching sobs that made my teeth ache.
*This is what victory looks like,* I thought. *This is what we're fighting for.*
---
**NNT 14:25 -- Land of Rain -- Asugamuzi Memorial Site**
They came like shadows bleeding into the gray dawn. Akatsuki cloaks heavy with rain and sorrow, moving through the corpse-field in single file. No banners, no war songs—just the wet slap of boots on rotting flesh.
Konan knelt beside what used to be a mother and child, their bodies fused together by the poison until you couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. Her paper flowers looked obscene against all that death, white petals already browning at the edges.
"They're still warm," she whispered, and I wanted to puke.
Yahiko stood before our pathetic little army—maybe thirty survivors if you counted the ones too broken to hold a kunai. His pink eyes had gone dead as winter stones. When he spoke, each word fell like a shovel of dirt on a coffin.
"Look around you." His voice barely rose above the rain. "This is what peace looks like in their world."
A woman behind me made a choking sound. I turned and saw her staring at a child's severed hand, still wearing a friendship bracelet someone had woven from grass.
"Hanzo poisoned his own land rather than let us live free." Yahiko's fist clenched, knuckles white. "The Five Great Nations—they don't want to end war. They feed on it. Every dead child is coin in their pocket. Every poisoned village is another weapon in their arsenal."
*He's right,* the voice in my head whispered. *They all deserve to die.*
"But we're not them." Yahiko's eyes found mine across the crowd, and for a moment I saw something that might have been hope. Or madness. "We'll build something different. Not hidden in caves or forgotten valleys, but here. In the open. A city where children don't learn to kill before they learn to walk."
Someone laughed—harsh and bitter. "You want to build on top of corpses?"
"Where else?" Yahiko spread his arms wide, encompassing the slaughter around us. "This is all they left us."
As we scattered the ashes, I couldn't shake the feeling that we were scattering ourselves too. Piece by piece, soul by soul, until nothing would be left but the hunger for revenge.
*Good,* something dark inside me purred. *Let them all burn.*
---
**NNT 18:15 -- Land of Rain -- Amegakure, Foundation Day**
The rain had turned to sleet by the time we reached what would become Amegakure. Ice mixed with blood, each drop like a tiny knife against exposed skin. But the real knives came from the people.
An old hag with skin like leather hurled a stone at Konan's head. "Murderers! Baby-killers! You wear the same mark as those bastards who took my boys!"
The rock caught Konan in the temple, sending her stumbling. Blood ran down her face, mixing with the rain until she looked like she was crying tears of rust. But she didn't retaliate. Just stood there and bled.
"GET OUT!" Another voice, raw with grief. "NO MORE NINJA! NO MORE DEATH!"
Windows slammed shut as we passed. Doors barred with whatever people could find—chairs, tables, the bodies of their own dead. One merchant had carved words into his shop front with something sharp and desperate:
**NO JUTSU HERE. NO PEACE HERE. ONLY GHOSTS.**
I wanted to hurt them. Every thrown stone, every curse, every look of pure hatred made something dark and hungry writhe in my gut. My fingers twitched toward the kunai on my belt.
*They're ungrateful,* the voice whispered. *After everything we've sacrificed, they spit in our faces.*
But then I saw her—a little girl, maybe six years old, hiding behind her mother's skirts. Half her face was melted from the toxin, the skin hanging in ribbons that wept yellow pus. She looked at me with her one good eye, and in it I saw not hatred but pure, animal terror.
She was afraid. Of me. Of what I represented.
And suddenly I understood why the stones hurt so much. It wasn't the pain—it was the truth. We were shinobi. We were death walking on two legs, and no amount of good intentions could wash that blood off our hands.
---
**NNT 19:30 -- Land of Rain -- First Night in Amegakure**
The foundations rose like bones from a shallow grave. Rusted metal and salvaged wood, held together with prayer and spite. Our "city" looked like what it was—a refugee camp built on corpses and delusions.
But people came anyway. Not many, and not the kind you'd want as neighbors. Deserters with dead eyes and twitching hands. Prostitutes too old or too damaged for the brothels. Children whose parents had sold them for a handful of rice.
The desperate. The broken. The forgotten.
*Our people.*
Konan moved among them like a ghost, her paper wings folded tight against her back. She didn't speak much anymore—the stones had knocked something loose in her head, and now she just smiled that empty smile and handed out origami flowers to anyone who'd take them.
Yahiko stood on the half-built wall, rain streaming down his face like tears. Below him, our "citizens" huddled around trash fires, burning anything that would catch. Books, clothes, memories—it all went into the flames.
"Look at them," Nagato whispered beside me, his voice thick with something that might have been pity. "Is this what we saved them for?"
I watched a man beating his wife with a piece of rebar while their children screamed. Watched a woman shooting up some kind of poison between her toes because her arms had collapsed. Watched kids playing games with severed fingers they'd found in the rubble.
"This is what we have to work with," I said. "The world's refuse. The people nobody else wanted."
"Can we make something beautiful from garbage?"
I looked at Yahiko, still standing in the rain like some fucked-up messiah, and felt that dark thing in my chest purr with anticipation.
"No," I said. "But we can make something terrible."
And in the growing dark, as the rain turned to ice and our people huddled around their fires of burning dreams, I thought I heard the sound of something vast and hungry stirring in the depths below.
*Soon,* it whispered. *Soon.*
---
**NNT — DUSK — The Desert Monastery of Dying Echoes, Land of Wind**
Fuck me, but the visions were getting stronger.
Raghoul collapsed against the monastery's shattered gates, his chest heaving like a bellows. A month since the incident—since he'd lost control. Two weeks of walking through sand that cut like glass and dreams that tasted of blood.
The red sun pulsed behind his eyes, bigger than before. Angry. Hungry.
His hands shook as he pushed open the monastery doors. The hinges screamed like dying animals, and bats exploded from the rafters in a black cloud of leather and shit. But he barely noticed. The power was singing in his veins now, electric and wrong, making his bones ache with need.
The old Abbot had known something. All those years of cryptic bullshit about stars and transcendence—there had to be a reason. Had to be something more than the ramblings of a senile old monk who smelled like incense and disappointment.
He stumbled through corridors thick with dust and spider webs, past rooms where novices had once slept and dreamed of enlightenment. Now only silence lived here, and the slow tick of settling stone.
His flames flickered to life without conscious thought, painting the walls in hellish red. In their light, he could see what the years had done to this place. Meditation halls filled with bones—not human, but something else. Something with too many joints and teeth like broken glass.
*What the fuck happened here?*
He found the Abbot's quarters behind a door marked with symbols that hurt to look at. Inside, everything was exactly as it had been the day the old man died—scrolls scattered across a low table, tea cups still sitting where he'd left them, growing new kinds of mold.
And there, half-buried under a pile of religious texts, was the plaque.
Raghoul's breath caught as he pulled it free. The wood was older than anything he'd ever seen, black with age and carved with constellations that seemed to move in the flickering firelight. At the center was a hole—not carved, but burned. As if something had reached through reality itself and left its mark.
"The path to transcendence is in the stars," he whispered, remembering the Abbot's words. "And in the stars lies the map of the universe."
He traced the burning hole with one finger, and the world exploded into red light.
Visions crashed through his skull like broken glass. Cities burning. Oceans boiling. A great wheel of fire spinning in the void, and at its center—
*Himself.*
Not as he was, but as he could become. Wreathed in flames that could melt steel and boil blood. Standing over the corpses of gods while reality itself burned around him.
He laughed, and the sound echoed through the empty monastery like the cry of some great and terrible bird.
"I understand now, old man. You weren't teaching me about enlightenment." He clutched the plaque to his chest, feeling the heat of that impossible hole burn through his robes. "You were teaching me about power."
---
**NNT — 2 WEEKS LATER — The Road to the Land of Weeds, Borderlands**
The stars were different here.
Raghoul walked through knee-deep grass that crackled with each step, dead as old bones. Above him, constellations wheeled in patterns that made his eyes water, and at the center of it all burned a red star that wasn't there when he looked directly at it.
*Following the map,* he told himself. *Following the path.*
But the truth was simpler and more terrible: he was being led. Each night, the red star pulled him north, toward something that waited in the dark spaces between countries. Something that had been calling to him since the day he was born.
His feet left smoking prints in the dead grass. The power was growing stronger, harder to control. Yesterday he'd sneezed and set a tree on fire. This morning he'd woken up to find his bedroll burned to ash around him.
He passed through villages where people crossed themselves and slammed their doors at the sight of him. Word traveled fast in the borderlands—stories of a demon walking north, leaving footprints of flame in his wake.
Good. Let them fear him. Let them all burn.
By the time he reached the boundary stones that marked the edge of the Land of Hot Waters, even the air around him was beginning to shimmer with heat.
---
**NNT — LATE DUSK — Border of the Land of Hot Waters, Outskirts of Tajramal**
The mist here tasted like sulfur and old blood.
Raghoul stood at the edge of a vast necropolis, tombstones stretching to the horizon like broken teeth. Some were so old their inscriptions had worn away to meaningless scratches. Others bore symbols that made his vision blur and his skull throb with phantom pain.
This was it. The place the star map had been leading him toward.
At the center of the graveyard rose a hill crowned with a single structure—not a tomb, but something older. Predate the hidden villages, predating maybe even the Sage of Six Paths himself. The very air around it seemed to bend and twist, as if reality itself was uncomfortable with its presence.
O-myōji seals covered every surface, warnings in a dead language that his bones somehow understood:
**HERE LIES THAT WHICH SHOULD NOT WAKE.**
**HERE SLEEPS THE FIRE THAT BURNS STARS.**
**TURN BACK, CHILD OF FLESH. THIS PATH LEADS ONLY TO ENDING.**
Raghoul laughed, and small fires bloomed in the dead grass around his feet.
"Too late for warnings, don't you think?"
The entrance was a crack in the hillside, barely wide enough for a man to squeeze through. As he approached, the temperature dropped twenty degrees in as many steps. His breath misted in the suddenly frigid air, and somewhere in the distance he could hear something like wind chimes made of bone.
He pressed his palm against the cold stone, and the seals flared with sickly green light. For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the entrance began to bleed.
Not blood—something thicker, darker, with the consistency of tar and the smell of burning hair. It oozed from cracks in the rock, pooling at his feet in puddles that reflected no light.
He squeezed through the crack, leaving skin on the jagged edges, and plunged into darkness absolute.
---
**NNT — INSIDE THE O-MYŌJI CRYPT — TIME UNKNOWN**
His flames died the moment he crossed the threshold.
Not guttered—died. As if something in the air itself was hungry for light. He tried to reignite them, pushing power through his chakra coils until his head pounded, but nothing. Just cold and dark and the sound of his own breathing, too loud in the crushing silence.
He felt his way forward by touch, fingers trailing along walls that seemed to pulse with their own sluggish heartbeat. The stone was covered in something slick and warm—not quite liquid, not quite solid. When he pulled his hand away, strands of it stretched between his fingers like spider silk.
The corridor stretched forever, or maybe minutes passed like hours in this place where time moved sideways. He passed alcoves filled with things that rustled when he got too close, chambers where whispers in dead languages echoed from invisible mouths.
And then, finally, the corridor opened into a vast chamber.
He could feel the space around him—cathedral-huge, with a ceiling that disappeared into blackness. But it was what occupied the center that made his breath catch.
A sarcophagus. Bigger than any he'd ever seen, carved from a single block of stone so black it seemed to absorb the very concept of light. Chains wrapped around it—not iron, but something that looked like crystallized screaming. And from those chains, a sound like breaking glass mixed with weeping children.
From inside the sarcophagus.
His hands moved without conscious will, reaching for the chains. The moment his fingers touched them, they shattered like ice, falling to the floor in shards that sang with released agony.
The lid of the sarcophagus began to move.
Grinding. Scraping. The sound of stone against stone, but underneath it something else—breathing. Slow and deep and wrong, like the inhalation of something vast and patient and utterly inhuman.
The lid slid aside.
Darkness poured out like liquid night, washing over him in waves that made his sanity flinch. But through it, in the deepest part of the impossible black, He saw something.