The silence of the bamboo forest was heavy, gratingly pressing against your eardrums until you wanted to scream just to prove you still existed.
I kept my eyes on the back of Red Wise's tattered robe, forcing my feet to move one in front of the other. My heart was doing a nervous tap-dance against my ribs, but my face was a mask of bored indifference.
I'd gloated to Orochimaru earlier. I'd practically puffed out my chest and wagged my dick in his face. And yeah, I deserved that victory lap. The Snake Sannin had tried and failed where I succeeded. I signed my name in blood and walked away still breathing, still young, still handsome.
Signing the contract with the Meigetsu Hermitage wasn't just dipping a brush in ink. It was an execution. It'd been years, but I remembered vividly the moment the ink touched the scroll. The sensation of being drained, not of chakra, but of time.
It started at my fingertips, a cold, brittle numbness that spread up my arms. In seconds, my skin had gone slack, then papery thin. I'd watched the veins on the back of my hands bulge and darken, the tendons standing out like cables beneath tissue that looked like wax paper. My joints stiffened, grinding like rusted hinges. My lungs shrank, each breath shallower than the last, like trying to suck air through a straw. My vision blurred, colors fading to grey.
I was dying. In real time. Year by year, breath by breath, as I carved my name into the scroll.
The worst part wasn't the pain. Pain I could handle. It was the weakness. The helplessness. Feeling my body give up on me. My cheeks hollowed out. My teeth felt loose in my gums.
For a reincarnated soul, for someone who knew the cold reality of death, or at least went through it, it should have been manageable. But feeling your life force being sucked out through a straw? Feeling your virility, your power, your very self turn to dust while you were still conscious? It was a violation. It was worse than any stab wound, worse than any poison. It was unique, horrific torture.
But I'd passed. Because I'd given up. From the start, I had.
Death was death. Whether you die on a blade or die old and broken in a bed, the end result is the same. The method was just details. And in the shinobi world, you learned real quick that it didn't matter. Only when.
Or so I wanted to believe…..
It wasn't an exaggeration to say it was one of the worst experiences of my life. Both lives.
And yet... I would take that rapid aging over this green hell any day of the week.
I followed the two red pandas down the dirt trail. I didn't show my displeasure. I couldn't afford to antagonize Red Wise. Not yet. One day, when I was a Sage myself, when I had the power to back up my mouth, I'd show these fuzzy bastards what respect looked like. But until then, I had to play nice.
Still, I kept a relative distance between us. Close enough not to get lost. Far enough that they wouldn't mistake it for fear.
I wasn't scared. I was cautious.
But the thought of getting lost in here again...
I bit the inside of my cheek.
I kept my eyes forward, locked on Shifu's stupid, swaying tail. I didn't look around. Not directly. My peripheral vision caught the green stalks, the way they swayed without wind, the way the shadows between them moved in ways that didn't match the light. But I didn't look at them.
The forest looked normal. That was the trick. It looked safe.
It wasn't.
Accepting the lifespan drain was the test for the Meigetsu Hermitage contract. Finding your way out of this bamboo maze was the test for the Momiji Sanctuary. Unofficially, that was. The pandas, smug pricks that they were, still added missions on top of it—fetch quests, errands, philosophical riddles. But the real test was this forest.
The bastards refused to call it a test because it wasn't fair. It wasn't designed to be passable. It was designed to break you.
Orochimaru had said that the goal of a test wasn't to be impossible; it would defeat the point.
This place didn't care about any of that. It was a trap. Pure and simple.
Once you entered, the odds of exiting were below zero.
And…. it doesn't kill you. That's the sadistic part.
It's a space-time distortion. A pocket dimension that fucks with reality in all the wrong ways.
I remembered the hunger that gnawed at my belly but never killed me. I remembered the thirst that cracked my lips but never granted me the sweet release of dehydration. You didn't age in here. You just... existed. Wandering the same identical paths, the same mist, with nothing but your own deteriorating mind for company.
You don't age. Time passes—oh, you feel it pass—but your body doesn't change. You stay exactly as you were when you entered. Trapped in a loop of sensory hell, seeing the same shadows, hearing the same wind whistle through the hollow stalks.
I'd spent what felt like — no, I'd spent centuries inside. I'd trained until my knuckles bled. I'd meditated until I forgot what my own voice sounded like. I had gone mad. I had rebuilt my sanity. Then I'd gone mad again. I'd lost my mind more times than I could count. I had screamed until my voice was gone, hallucinated entire lives.
It was luck, but when I finally stumbled out, not a week had passed in the real world.
Not even a week.
All that time, all that suffering, all that training…. Meaningless. The forest didn't let you keep it. The time wasn't real. It felt real. It was real to me. But the world didn't care. How cruel it was.
It felt like a joke.
But not a genjutsu. Yet, even then, knowing it was fake, knowing it was just temporal fuckery designed to mess with your head, I still woke up in nights after in a cold sweat, convinced I was still inside. Convinced I'd never really left.
My thoughts scattered like leaves as a small shrine came into view at the end of the trail.
It was a strange thing. Makeshift, cobbled together from mismatched wood and stone, but well-maintained. The roof was thatched with dried reeds, and paper talismans hung from the eaves, fluttering in a breeze that shouldn't exist. A wall of stones sat beside it.
I remembered this shrine. That was the luck I had stumbled into. That was the shrine of hope, I prayed to for the first time after centuries of hell. The well, however…. that was new.
"Here we are," Red Wise said, his voice light and cheerful. He turned to face us, his little paws clasped together. "I must gather some Crimson Vein leaves. I shall make the best tea."
Before I could protest, he vanished. No puff of smoke. No sound. Just gone.
I stood there, mouth slightly open. "Great. Just….." I clicked my tongue.
This was bad. Without Red Wise, I had no guide out. Shifu would ditch me the second he got the chance. That only left—
"You are finally here…."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. It slithered through the air directly against the back of my neck. My skin prickled.
I turned slowly toward the well.
And froze. A violent shiver ripped down my spine, making every hair on my body stand at attention.
At the top of the stone lip, barely visible, was the crown of a head. Like the most accursed movie. Black hair, damp and stringy, hung in clumps. And just above the edge, two pale, unblinking eyes stared.
Shifu immediately dropped into a bow. "Lady. You asked to see us. We have come."
I didn't hear him. My right hand had already moved to my pouch, fingers curling around a kunai. My left arm twitched toward the firehand tag I still had on my forearm from the Orochimaru prep.
"Come closer…." the voice whispered, drifting on a wind that didn't exist. My spine turned to ice. "Don't be shy."
I squeezed the kunai so hard my knuckles popped.
I should have said something. Something witty. Something to break the tension. But I had nothing. The last few hours had drained me dry.
I wanted to firebomb the entire clearing and sprint until I hit the ocean.
Besides, what the fuck was with the well? What kind of horror movie—
I didn't finish the thought.
The thing in the well blurred.
It lunged.
I fumbled. Actually fucking fumbled. My brain screamed to move, but my legs did something else, and I took a single, stupid step backward.
But instinct kicked in a heartbeat later. By the time the creature reached me, I already had the kunai out, swinging in a brutal arc toward its skull.
Fast. The thing was fast. A clawed, furred hand shot out and grabbed my wrist mid-swing. It was strong too. The momentum carried it forward, slamming into me like a battering ram. My back hit the dirt hard enough to knock the wind out of my lungs.
I swung my free fist at its face, putting every ounce of spite I had into the punch.
It caught that, too. My eyes widened. Fuck, my chakra's still sluggish.
Clawed fingers locked around my wrist and pinned it above my head.
"Fuck!" I snarled, thrashing beneath the weight.
The thing hovering inches from my nose was a biological error.
It has a face, if you squint and have a concussion. Like me right now.
It had fur, russet and cream, like a fox, and a muzzle that jutted forward with too-sharp teeth visible even when its mouth was closed. But the proportions were off. The eyes were too large, too round, too human. The nose was flat and wide like an animal's, but the cheekbones beneath the fur were high and delicate. The mouth curved in a way that suggested lips beneath the fur. And the long, straight hair, black as ink, fell around its skull like seaweed.
A grotesque fusion of beast and human that sat squarely in the uncanny valley and made my skin crawl.
It made a sound. A rasping, choking noise that might have been a laugh if laughs could make grown men weep and children piss themselves.
"My, my….. your heart is beating so fast," it — she —said, her voice soft and distinctly feminine. She tilted her head, the movement too fluid, too graceful. Her lips pulled back in a smile that revealed too many teeth. "Thump, thump, thump…. it's practically trying to escape your ribs, darling."
I tried to get control of my breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Calm the fuck down, Eishin. This thing wasn't scary. I wasn't scared. I was just caught off guard.
She tilted her head to the side—a jerky, avian movement that cracked a vertebrae in her neck audibly. Her human eyes widened, shimmering with a manic delight. The thing released a high-pitched, gurgling sound of excitement, like a kettle whistling mixed with a giggle.
"Is it because you missed me?" she gurgled, a low whine vibrating in her chest that I could feel pressing against my own. "Is your little heart doing flips? All excited? All cute and fluttery for me? For me?"
"Get. Off. Me," I snarled through gritted teeth.
I stopped struggling. My muscles went slack, my breathing evened out. She was playing. I knew she was playing. Even if being pinned to the ground by a furry nightmare pissed me off so badly I wanted to bite through my own tongue, I knew she wasn't actually trying to hurt me.
Or at least, I hoped she wasn't.
She raised a brow. Of course, she had eyebrows. Human eyebrows on her furred face, because why the hell not?
"Oh, baby," she purred, leaning closer. "Are you scared?"
Then she brought up her third arm.
Unlike the two powerful, fur-covered limbs pinning my wrists, this one was different. A woman's arm, slender and smooth, with perfectly manicured nails. It looked like it had been grafted onto her side, an afterthought stitched into the nightmare.
She ran the back of her hand down my cheek, her touch feather-light.
I jerked my head to the side, my jaw clenching. The fact that it was a woman's hand didn't make it any less unpleasant. If anything, it made it worse. The wrongness of it, the contrast between soft skin and the muzzle inches from my face, made my stomach twist.
She hummed thoughtfully, her head tilting the other way. "No sarcastic comeback? No witty one-liner? Like you used to do?" She let out a snort that sounded eerily like a pouting young woman. "Hmph. That'll teach you. After all the not nice things you said to me last time. That's not how you talk to a lady, you know."
She paused, trailing her fingers along my jawline, her claws—no, her nails—scratching lightly against my skin.
"Especially," she whispered, her grin widening, "one who remembers which horror movie creeps you out the most."
Her eyes gleamed with mischief, her voice bright and sickeningly cheerful.
"But that's expected, I suppose." She leaned in until her nose nearly touched mine, her breath warm and smelling faintly of cinnamon. "I'm your soulmate, after all."
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