By the time I return to my quarters, the storm feels louder than ever.
Rain hammers the window like it's trying to claw its way inside, thunder rolling so deep it rattles the desk lamp. The room smells faintly of damp stone and ink, of the cloak draped over the chair like a shadow that doesn't belong to me.
I sink onto the bed, wet boots leaving marks across the floor, and just… sit. My muscles ache, my hair is plastered to my forehead, and my stomach still twists from the flight. But it isn't the rain or the height that has me staring at the ceiling like a man in a cell.
It's the eyes.
The eyes of the people below, ducking under umbrellas too small to matter. The way they froze when Konan appeared, the way they bowed their heads, trembling, silent. Not reverence. Not love. Fear wrapped in obedience.
I rub my face with both hands, muttering under my breath. "Peace. Yeah. Sure. If you can call that peace."
The mask lies on the desk, pale and empty, staring at me. It feels heavier than the cloak somehow. I wore it once and already I hate how right it felt. Faceless. Cloaked. Part of the silhouette that made the crowd part like the rain.
I lean back on the bed, cloak bunched beneath me, and let the thoughts spiral.
What have I gotten myself into?
On paper — no pun intended — this isn't bad. A room. A cloak. Food that doesn't taste like gutter water. Recognition, even if they keep calling me "reserve." A purpose, even if it's one they hammered into me.
But the leash is real. The tower's walls aren't walls. They're chains. Konan's voice in my head, Pain's shadow in every corner, Preta's dead eyes watching like a guard dog made of silence. And beyond the hall door — Nagato. The broken god. The "something important" Konan spoke of with that softness I still don't know how to process.
I turn my head toward the window, forehead pressing against the glass. Ame sprawls below in the rain, a city choking on itself. It looks alive from up here, all lights and movement, but I know better. It's not living. It's surviving.
And me? I'm not outside it anymore. I'm inside the machine that keeps it this way.
I close my eyes, fists clenching around the cloak. "Guess this is what belonging feels like," I whisper to the storm. "Comfort with chains attached."
The thunder doesn't answer. The storm just keeps beating, endless, as if to remind me this isn't going to stop. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Not until someone rips the sky open.
I sigh, sit up, and stare at the mask again. If this is my life now, I'll need to make it mine somehow. Training. Reading. Anything to keep from rotting into silence.
Because if I don't… the leash might not just choke me. It might turn me into another one of them.
The storm sings me to sleep.
Not gently — not like a lullaby. It's more like being buried under a drumbeat that never stops, rain hammering the glass, thunder shaking the frame of the bed. But exhaustion outweighs dread. My eyes shut, and the world of Ame drowns me.
Dreams blur. Faces I don't recognize and faces I do, twisted by fear, by bowing heads, by Rinnegan eyes that never blink. Konan's wings unfurl against a sky split in half. Pain's voice echoes like judgment. And somewhere behind a door I can't open, a voice whispers my name.
I jolt awake.
For a second I can't breathe. My hand's already reaching for the kunai by the bed before I realize I'm not under attack — just in the same cold room, the storm still clawing at the tower.
The mask stares at me from the desk. The cloak hangs heavy from the chair. Silent reminders.
I sit up, rub the grit from my eyes. My body aches, not just from yesterday's flight but from something deeper — a restlessness that the bed can't fix.
I mutter into the empty air, "I can't just sit here."
The thought sticks. If I'm stuck in this tower, I'm not going to rot in silence. If I'm on a leash, I'm going to sharpen my teeth.
I drag on the cloak, fasten the ties, and pull my boots tight. The room feels smaller once I'm dressed. Too small for the weight I'm carrying.
I glance once at the hall — at the door at the end I'm not supposed to touch — then look away fast. Not yet.
"Training it is," I say, mostly to convince myself.
The storm growls outside as if to agree, and I step out, following the hum of the tower toward whatever they'll throw at me next.
--
The room they let us use for training smells like old smoke and wet stone. Torches gutter in iron brackets; the floor is scarred with marks that could be from fists, kunai, or the landing feet of something much heavier. It's functional. It's honest. It doesn't pretend to be anything softer.
I come in with my cloak still damp and my jaw still tasting of the city. I want to move — not for glory, not for shows, but because sitting inside the quiet lets my head fill with dangerous plans. Movement clears the static.
A shout of breath and I'm already doing the basics: channel, focus, small pulses of chakra through the palms to feel the flow. Little things first — control. A circle on the floor, a finger tracing seals I don't belong to but can mimic. The muscle memory from another life aches and protests but cooperates when I ask it nicely.
Something cold brushes the corner of my consciousness the way thunder warns of lightning. The air shifts, and when I turn there's Preta, standing where I didn't expect him to be — like the room bent around his arrival. He's as still as carved bone, hollow-faced, the stupidly wide mouth stitched into a permanent line. The eyes — Nagato's eyes — look through the world like glass.
"You are to practice with this path," he says. The voice has no anger, only the flatness of fact. "It absorbs. Learn respect."
I swallow. "Right. The absorb-y guy." Not joking — the way Preta is built, they named him for function and left the rest blank.
He doesn't smile. He steps to the center of the room and raises one hand, palm open. When he does, the air around the palm hums, not with warmth but with a vacuum-sickness — like the sky after a storm, the sound just gone.
Preta's path is a lesson in how dangerous nothing can be. It takes what you throw at it as if it were a cup and you were the river. Throw a pebble and the pebble disappears into water. But throw a torrent, and the thing that swallows you will change the riverbed.
"Begin," he says.
I do the cautious stuff first: a spark of fire that should be nothing more than a match. Hand seals I can do with my eyes half closed. I breathe, shape the chakra, push — and the tiny flame blooms, pretty and useless, then rushes toward the Preta-path like a moth toward light. I expect sound, resistance, crackle.
Instead the flame grazes the air in front of Preta and is gone — as if the world hiccuped and took the light with it. The smoke curls, but it's not smoke from the flame; it's the ghost of it.
My chest tightens with an odd thrill. "Okay." I say it aloud to fill the quiet. "That's… actually cooler than I thought."
Preta inclines his head, unreadable. "Again."
So I push harder. A small gust jutsu — one I learned to keep my feet when rained on in alleys, a pocket of wind to bite into the push. Hand signs, breath, a coil of chakra along the spine and out the palms.
I release it. The wind tears out, a small gust that throws dust along the floor. It hits Preta and — like the flame — is swallowed. Only this time the swallowing is almost audible: a soft sucking sound, like air being taken from a room. My lungs ache like someone sat on my chest.
The training is mean. The path does not return anything. It only takes. The jutsu is gone as if it never existed — but I feel the absence in my limbs, an emptying that is strange and cold. For a second I feel as if I've been picked clean from the inside.
I step back. "So it's a black hole," I joke, and the humor dies in my throat. The metaphor fits too well.
Preta watches me, expressionless. "It absorbs. It stores. It does not forget. You will learn precision. And you will learn to stop."
"Stop what?" I ask.
Preta's answer is simpler than I want: "You."
The next round I try something heavier — a small spatial cut I've been tinkering with, an imitation of a teleport-lash that steals air like a blade. The seals feel right, the chakra tastes right, my fingers move like a conjurer. I can feel the edge of something dangerous under my skin — a flicker of that Shinra-temper that shows up like a bruise when I push too hard.
I send the cut out. It slices the air, a real thing, beautiful and cruel. It arks toward Preta.
This time the path does not simply swallow. The edge hits the void and for one breath it pushes back.
I feel it in my bones: a counter-pull, a tug in the gut. My balance staggers. For a second the world tilts and I lose my footing, my cut clinging to existence like a wounded animal. My own chakra recoils. Pain flares along my forearm — not from impact but from backlash, the universe complaining that I asked it to do something it was not ready for.
I stagger and curse. The sensation is small but hot and very real: jutsu-pain reflected back. Preta's eyes do not change. He waits while I straighten my breathing.
"When you attempted that," he says finally, "you nearly bled yourself. The path does not give. It only takes. Your nature is… unique. That means you must not be careless."
Unique. The word lands heavier than any push he could have given. My mind stutters a memory — flashes from last chapter, Deva naming Shinra-Tensei, the way the world had cracked around me. My heart thunders.
I breathe slow. I let the sting go. The room smells like wet earth and burned ozone. I close my eyes and let the lesson sink in.
"Again," Preta says.
So I do. Slower. Softer. I test the edges of my own temper carefully — small slashes of chakra, controlled bursts of element that I can retrieve as soon as I send them. I work the timing like plucking a single hair from a thread without tearing the whole line. I learn to start a thing and take it back before it grows teeth.
At first, the path swallows with the same indifferent appetite. Then, a sliver of difference: I send a small blue spark — the tiniest imitation of fire — and instead of it vanishing like a swallowed lie, a hint of it is held at the path's edge. For half a second I watch a memory of my jutsu hang there, like a photograph in the air. It shimmers, then collapses inward.
I grin despite the aching in my ribs. It's not mastery. Not even close. But something small has changed: I can coax a reaction, feel where the path takes and where it leaves. That sliver of control tastes like victory.
Preta inclines his head, the merest fraction, as if approval were not a thing he could grant easily. "Better." His voice is low; the words carry an odd weight. "Do not mistake improvement for safety."
I wipe sweat from my forehead with the heel of my hand. "Yeah. Got it." My hands are raw, trembling with adrenaline and the aftertaste of close calls. "No more trying to be dramatic, promise."
Preta says nothing, but his eyes move to the small scar on my palm — a souvenir from the classroom with the summons, the busted scroll — and back to me. The path's presence hums like a sleeping animal underfoot.
I gather my things. The room is quieter now, the torches sighing low, rain like a curtain against the stone beyond. My body aches in a way that means work was done. Not just theater. Something useful.
As I slap my gloves back on and fasten my cloak, the thought lands clear as cold water: being useful here will mean learning how to be watched and not fall apart. It will mean tempering strength into something that can be held close without exploding.
Outside, the tower's bells toll some hour I don't care to name. Preta turns, already backing away into shadow.
"You will be given more," he says. "Prepare."
And then he's gone — leaving me with the silence of a room that remembers what it swallowed and the small, bruised satisfaction of having been the one to return the next morning to try again.
After training with Preta, my body feels like wet rope — heavy, frayed, pulled too tight. My arms still tingle from the backlash of chakra, my head throbs with the memory of nothingness swallowing everything I threw.
I need air.
Back in my quarters, I toss the cloak across the chair and flop into the desk instead of the bed. The lamp buzzes faintly, its glow soft against the gray stormlight leaking through the window. I open one of the lower drawers, searching for anything to distract me — kunai, notes, anything.
That's when I find it.
A book, tucked away at the very back. Old, warped from water damage. The leather binding is cracked, the pages curled and soft like they've been read too many times. I thumb it open, and the first line almost makes me laugh.
The Tale of the Gutsy Ninja.
I blink. Of course. Of all the books to stumble across in this cursed tower, it had to be this one.
I know it. Not word for word, but enough. Jiraiya's story — the man who wandered, who wrote his ideals into fiction. Hokage hopeful, sage of Mount Myōboku, the one who would fight Pain and die for it.
I read anyway. The prose is simple, almost clumsy. But there's something warm in it, something earnest that doesn't belong in a place like this. A stubbornness that says: the world can be better, even if it laughs in your face.
I don't notice the door open.
"Where did you find that?"
Konan's voice cuts through the storm like a blade.
My head jerks up. She's standing just inside the room, wings folded, eyes fixed on the book in my hands.
"Uh—" My brain stutters. I hold it up lamely. "Found it. Drawer. Wasn't snooping, promise. Just… you know. Reading material."
She crosses the room without sound, stopping at the edge of the desk. Her gaze doesn't leave the cover. For the first time since I've known her, the sharpness in her eyes softens.
"That book," she says quietly, almost to herself, "was written by a great man."
Her voice is different. Not the calm enforcer. Not the angel of Ame. There's weight in it, but also memory.
I open my mouth to ask — Jiraiya? Did you know him? — but something in her face stops me cold. It's the look of someone holding a fragile glass shard, afraid it might shatter if touched.
So instead, I nod slowly. "Yeah. I can tell."
Her eyes flick to mine, studying me for a beat too long. Then she turns, cloak whispering as she moves toward the door.
The storm growls outside, but her voice lingers, softer than I've ever heard it:"Do not lose that one. It has more truth in it than most shinobi will ever admit."
And then she's gone, leaving me staring down at the warped pages, my fingers tracing the kanji like they might burn themselves into my skin.
I whisper into the empty room, "A great man, huh? Guess I've got homework."
The storm answers for her, rattling the glass until the words blur on the page.
Days blur.
At first, I think I'll go crazy. The storm never stops, the tower never changes. But slowly, the monotony hardens into something else — a rhythm, a pulse, the steady beat of survival.
Morning comes with gray light through the window and the smell of damp stone. I eat whatever Konan leaves — rice, dried fish, tea that tastes like bitterness in liquid form. Then I train.
Preta is always waiting. His stare never changes, his patience never cracks. He absorbs everything I throw, forces me to refine, to focus, to hold back before I break myself. My muscles ache, my chakra burns, but I start to learn the edges of my own recklessness.
"Precision," his flat voice echoes in my head even when he's gone. "You must not be careless."
Afternoons I read.
The Tale of the Gutsy Ninja sits on my desk now, always within reach. Its pages are warped, its words clumsy, but they burn brighter than anything else in this place. I catch myself smiling at parts, even laughing once or twice. Not because the writing is perfect, but because it's honest. Because it feels like Jiraiya himself is whispering stubborn hope into a world drowning in rain.
Sometimes Konan sees me with it. She never says much — just a glance, a pause at the doorway. Once, her fingers brushed the cover as she passed, almost like she wanted to touch the memory hidden in the pages. That silence says more than any lecture could.
Evenings are quiet. I sit by the window, watching Ame's lights blur under sheets of rain. I trace the red clouds on my cloak. I run through seals in my head until I can do them blind. I listen to the storm and pretend it's applause instead of punishment.
And little by little, I realize something dangerous: I don't hate it.
I should. I should resent every second of this leash, this cage dressed as a tower. But there's food on the table. A bed under me. Training that sharpens instead of starves. Even recognition, in its twisted, backhanded way.
Maybe it's not peace. Maybe it's not freedom. But compared to the streets, compared to running… this doesn't seem too bad.
And that thought terrifies me more than the storm ever could.
Because if I can get comfortable here — in the heart of Akatsuki, in the shadow of Pain — then maybe the leash is already working. Maybe it's not just holding me. Maybe it's remaking me.
I close the book one night and catch my reflection in the glass: masked, cloaked, faceless. My heart kicks, but I don't look away.
"This is life now," I whisper to the storm. "So I'll make it mine."
And the storm just keeps beating, endless, like it agrees.
A month slips by, and I don't hate it.
That thought alone should scare me. But it doesn't. Not as much as it should.
The days blur into a rhythm I can't deny feels better than my old life. Training with Preta until my body aches, reading until my eyes blur, sitting by the window while the rain drums steady on the glass. Even the food — bland rice, bitter tea, dried fish — feels like luxury compared to gutters and scraps.
It's routine. Predictable. Safe.
I've stopped flinching at the thunder. Stopped wondering when the storm will end. It never does, and that's the point. It's as eternal as the leash they've put around my neck.
The mask Konan gave me sits on the desk, pale and empty. I've only worn it on trips into the city — when she pulls me along and I'm meant to be faceless, a shadow at her side. In here, I leave it untouched. It's too heavy. Too final.
I'm not against this life. Strange, but it's true.
For the first time, I appreciate things I used to ignore. The weight of a cloak. The warmth of tea. The quiet of a book written by a man I never met, whose words still cut through the storm like sunlight.
Maybe this isn't freedom. But compared to what I had before? It feels like something close.
And then, one day, I notice it.
Konan isn't around as much. Her presence, steady and constant, has thinned. I don't hear the whisper of paper in the halls, don't see her silhouette moving between rooms.
The Paths, too. They appear less often. Deva's shadow doesn't loom over me the way it used to. Even Preta's training sessions are shorter, less frequent. The tower feels emptier, like the leash has slackened.
And that's when the thought slithers in.
Maybe I could see him.
The idea hits hard enough to make me freeze. Nagato. The god behind the door. The "something important" Konan spoke of with that rare softness in her eyes.
I should shove the thought away. Laugh it off. Call it what it is — suicidal. But instead, I catch myself staring down the hall, at that door I've never touched.
If Konan's gone more often, if the Paths are thinning out, then maybe… maybe I have a window.
The storm rattles the glass. My pulse beats with it.
I glance at the mask on the desk, staring at its empty face. I mutter, "Guess curiosity really does kill the cat."
But the thought won't leave.
And by the time I lie down that night, staring at the ceiling while the storm hammers overhead, I know the truth:
I'm going to try.
The tower is a different kind of quiet at night — not empty, exactly, but bated, like a lung holding a breath it refuses to let out. I move through it the way you move through a sleeping house: slow, soft, as if the floor itself might wake and report me.
I check the usual places first. Konan's rooms — nothing but folded paper and the faint scent of rain. The Paths' chambers — still, dark, with the faint hum of chakra like old wiring. No paper flutter. No soft footsteps. No wings. My chest does a stupid little flip. Opportunity tastes like metal in my mouth.
I keep my cloak wrapped around me, the hood low. I don't take the mask; that porcelain face felt like a promise I'm not ready to make. I'm faceless enough without it. My boots whisper on stone. I press my back to the wall and peer down stairs, corners, archways. Everything answers with shadow.
The hall seems to stretch the farther I go, torches guttering like breath. I pass doors I've passed a hundred times, each one a small fortress of wood and iron. My palms are damp against the fabric of my cloak. My heart hammers like someone knocking from the inside.
I tell myself the logic of it. Konan's absence isn't proof. The Paths being elsewhere isn't commitment. This is stupid. Dumb. Suicide on a dare. But I have lived long enough in other lives to know when a question has chewed into you until it won't stop. I need someone to talk to. To know the face — the exact human behind the machine. To corrupt whatever they think I am with the truth I carry.
The door waits at the end of the hall like an accusation.
It is heavier up close. The iron bands are cold enough to burn when I brush my fingertips along them. The wood smells older than the rest of the tower, dense and oiled with history. Someone — someone with sense — carved nothing into it, no sigils, no warnings. Just plain, terrifying purpose.
I look left. I look right. I listen. The storm outside storms as always, but it's a distant thing now. Inside, the tower breathes slow. No paper rustles. No footsteps. Not even the distant murmur of Deva pacing.
My throat is thick. I can feel the skin of my palms prickle the way it does before a fever. Every part of me is loud. My hands sweat so much they slick on the handle when I curl my fingers around it.
For a beat I picture the worst — Nagato eyes opening, Rinnegan like moons, a voice that could fold a mountain. I remember the battles I read about in some other life: villages folding into dust, entire armies crushed. I remember Jiraiya's letters, the parts about grief and stubborn hope, and the way heroes die for things that break the world. I remember being a coward once and how that tasted.
And still — need is thicker than fear. Maybe I'm foolish. Maybe I'm brave. Maybe I'm both and that's the point. I tell myself the truth like a prayer: I need to speak to him. To see if under that corpse-and-chakra contraption there's a man who remembers anything of hope. To ask one stupid question: Why?
My thumb turns the cold metal.
The lock gives with a sound small and obscene, like a cough. The door opens inward a fraction, and there is a smell that knocks the breath from my lungs: oil and iron, old blood, incense threaded with machine-smoke. It's the scent of things kept alive by wires and willpower — a smell that says someone has been kept between breaths for a long time.
Light leaks from within: not torchlight, not the warm glow of normal lamps, but a thin, clinical wash from tubes and panels, some of them pulsing with the rhythm of a heart. Shadows flatten at the edges into shapes that do not want to be seen: poles, wires, a bed that looks more like an altar than a cot.
I push the door wider. My shoes scuff on stone I haven't seen before, and the room opens up in front of me like the throat of a sleeping beast.
There he is — or rather, there are the shapes that make the man: a cluster of machinery, a husk of a body slumped in an impossible frame. Tubes snake from his chest into pipes that vanish into the floor. Thin veils of chakra shimmer at the joints where human fails machine and machine demands human keep going. He is smaller than I thought he would be and yet somehow larger — the way a wound can take up more of a person than the person did.
Nagato Uzumaki is not godlike in this light. He is, plainly, pitiful. Eyes closed, chest rising and falling with the sound of pumps and breathers. Flesh is pale, too thin, pulled tight over the angles of a man who has been kept alive by more than will. But there is the Rinnegan — rings like cold moons turned upwards under blind lids. Even closed, they press a weight into the room that steadies my knees.
A voice, not from him but from the corner where someone keeps watch, murmurs, and I startle. The silhouette of another Path — sleeping perhaps, or merely still — folds into shadow. There is movement at the periphery: a small chart, a hand adjusting a dial. Life, mechanical and human, tending to something that looks half myth and half body.
I stand rooted, cloak dragging wet stone, the door yawning behind me like a gate I can no longer close without stepping through. I had built the idea up and in the end it is almost banal: a man, exhausted, sewn into apparatus, breathing in time with electric pumps. The monstrous thing is the mismatch — the scale of what they suit him for: the power coiled like a beast beneath skin and wire.
My mouth is dry. I expected thunder. I expected angels of paper and pain. I expected a god to levitate and pronounce verdicts. Instead the silence is small and intimate, the kind that makes you feel obscene for intruding.
And then I hear it, so faint it could be my own heartbeat or a machine deciding whether to convince itself the body it keeps is still worthy of being called human: a breath. A single, ragged inhale.
The choice presses in on me. Back away now and pretend I never came. Or step forward and speak the question that's been burning holes through my skull. My fingers unclench around the cloak. My legs forget how to move.
"—Nagato," I whisper, the name a thing I have said only in my head until now. It sounds wrong and perfect at once.
Something shifts within the room — a faint stir, a click from some unseen relay. The Rinnegan-eyes under the closed lids twitch, as if at the sound of their own name, as if something buried in muscle remembers the call of its own past.
I have crossed the line.
The door sighs shut behind me on a sound that might as well have been final.