The world was still.
Not peaceful. Not silent. Just... paused.
It was not night, yet there were no stars. It was not day, yet the world was cast in silver. The very concept of time seemed suspended, like a breath held across the fabric of reality.
Then—
He opened his eyes.
And the world remembered to spin.
---
A child lay beneath a sakura tree that had never bloomed in the forests outside Konoha. Its blossoms hovered, caught in the air like thoughts unfinished. The wind, which should have carried their scent, did not stir. Gravity itself seemed reluctant to assert authority over this place.
At the base of the tree sat a boy no older than five, clothed in simple, unfamiliar fabric—black and gray, stitched not with thread but intention. His hands rested calmly on his knees. His back straight. His gaze... still.
He didn't breathe. He didn't need to. Not yet.
Around him, the Root Origin began to stir.
It wasn't chakra. It wasn't nature energy. It wasn't divine, cursed, or spiritual. It was something older, something that had no cause and defied all consequence. A self-originating paradox, swirling in absolute silence—a vortex without center, containing all contradiction, and none.
And in the eye of that impossibility sat Soromon.
---
He had no memory of his human life.
He did not remember cities or machines or the weight of a name whispered on Earth.
But fragments echoed behind his thoughts:
> a sky with stars too far away,
a voice that once said, "Keep going, even if it makes no sense,"
a sense of having asked for one last chance—without even knowing from whom.
But all that no longer mattered.
Because the universe had answered.
---
It had not sent him to be a savior.
It had not granted him a system.
It had become him.
He was the answer to a question no one had asked. The axis around which contradictions spun freely.
As he sat beneath the tree—his eyes open but expression void—the land around him twitched.
Not in resistance. But in curiosity.
The leylines beneath the soil bent in his direction. Not out of obedience, but inquisition. He was not chakra-compatible, and yet the land did not reject him. It tasted him—like water meeting stone—and then... shifted.
Subtly.
Permanently.
---
Three days later, a patrol found him.
A Senju shinobi named Kuraji, middle-ranked, diligent, skeptical by nature. He was trained to expect bandits, to kill quietly if needed.
He wasn't trained for what he saw.
A boy, uninjured, unspeaking, seated in absolute stillness beneath a tree that didn't exist on any map. No birth record. No aura. No chakra flow.
He didn't breathe in the normal way. His pulse was low, but stable. His eyes were open, but he wasn't looking at anything. Or perhaps—he was looking at everything.
Kuraji didn't know why he brought the boy back.
Only that he should.
---
The Senju compound responded to the event with professional distance.
"He must be from a hidden settlement."
"Perhaps a failed experiment from the old Uchiha labs."
"Could be a spy child. Wipe his memory."
"We should hand him to ANBU."
Tobirama Senju did none of those things.
He stood before the boy, arms crossed, impassive as always. The boy looked at him—gaze calm, timeless.
"You smell of regret and calculation," the child said.
Tobirama's eyes narrowed.
"And what do you smell of?"
The boy thought for a moment.
Then:
"Dust that has never settled. And decisions that haven't happened yet."
---
They named him Soromon Kenja, a name drawn from old dialect scrolls Tobirama once studied—a "sage without anchor."
No one taught him to speak. He already knew how.
No one taught him to read. He read everything in the first three weeks.
He wasn't trained in chakra control, yet he moved as though he knew how chakra would behave before it decided to behave that way.
He wasn't loud. He wasn't proud. He didn't assert. He observed.
Tobirama had meant to observe him. But soon realized that Soromon was observing the world back, with the patience of a creature not bound by urgency.
---
By his sixth birthday, it was clear that something around him was changing.
Plants near where he meditated grew faster. Chakra pools settled more evenly around training grounds he walked through. Injuries healed slightly quicker in rooms where he slept, even if only briefly.
The other children admired him—yet never challenged him.
Not out of fear. Out of… disorientation.
It was as though standing too close to Soromon shifted your sense of gravity—your sense of self. People forgot what they'd been angry about. Or why they'd trained the way they did. Some even began to alter their jutsu, unconsciously, following patterns Soromon had never voiced aloud.
And the world let him do it.
Not because it was enchanted or compelled. But because it recognized him as something inevitable.
---
The Root Origin was not a gift.
It was not a power.
It was a condition.
It made him both less and more than human.
It stripped away divine authority, bloodline limits, conceptual ceilings.
It made all things possible—not at once, not easily—but eventually.
With enough thought. Enough contradiction. Enough paradox.
And so, as Soromon quietly studied the world he now lived in, he did not seek power. He did not crave status.
He sought… possibility.
He watched as humans trained their chakra.
He observed the Five Nations through silence.
He noted the scars left by gods and monsters alike.
And slowly, as the years passed, he began to plant his own ideas—carefully, roundabout, like whispers to the wind.
Ideas that would outgrow him.
Ideas that would alter the world.
Ideas that could never be traced back to him.
Because the root does not bloom.
The root spreads. Quietly.
Until the ground itself becomes something else.