History shifted on a hinge so small no one in the Mist would ever see it.
Under the soft blur of his Psychology Veil, Uchiha Sogetsu watched his work settle into place. The emotional field he'd pre-wired into the area — subtle anchors, stacked suggestions, primed associations — slid neatly into the raw wound of the Third Mizukage's death.
It wasn't complicated.
You didn't need some grand, complex genjutsu when a village had just lost its Kage. You just nudged.
A few whispered cues, a gentle press on the word revenge inside already bleeding minds, and their thoughts bent with almost no resistance — plans tilting, priorities shifting, everything rolling along the track he'd laid down long before they even arrived.
When the last of that emotional inertia caught, Sogetsu dusted off his palms and got to his feet.
He glanced back at the scarred lake, lips curling.
"You stay put for now," he said softly. "I'll have big plans for you next time."
Isobu, the Three-Tails, slept once more at the bottom — shackled again, this time with a fresh layer of Hypnotist chains. He'd left it not because he couldn't finish the job, but because a live catastrophe was more useful than a dead one.
Then Sogetsu blurred and vanished into the rain.
Behind him, the Mist support unit — minds burning with grief and the revenge he'd poured into them — began the dirty work of the defeated: cleaning the battlefield, retrieving the dead, erasing traces.
The Land of Waves.
A small country pinched between greater powers, with no ninja village of its own.
Inside a modest inn, the man who had just killed a Kage sat at a low table, brush in hand, writing his mission report.
The report was short, precise, and curated.
He summarized his actions in Kirigakure:
The annihilation of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist.
Using intel from Yakushi Nono to locate and disrupt Isobu's seal.
Unleashing the tailed beast as a distraction and anchor.
Exploiting that chaos to infiltrate the battlefield and assassinate the Third Mizukage.
On paper, it was very simple: kill the Mizukage, using Isobu as cover.
Nothing about sequences. Nothing about dragons. Nothing about reality-twisting eyes.
And, of course, it was phrased the way Kirigakure itself had already chosen to see it:
A sneak attack. An assassination.
If the victim's own village officially ruled it a backstab by a Konoha jōnin, it would be rude not to cooperate with the narrative.
Sogetsu let the final stroke of ink dry, scanned the text once, then dusted it and rolled it up. A compact ANBU seal flared briefly on the paper, locking it.
He held the scroll out to the woman kneeling opposite him.
"Give this to the Hokage," he said. "He'll know what to do with you after that."
Yakushi Nono blinked, taken aback.
"And you? You're not coming back with me?"
"Not yet."
Sogetsu leaned back against the futon, elbow propped, cheek resting lightly on his knuckles, smile easy.
"I've got one more thing to take care of here. Once that's done, I'll return."
Nono accepted the scroll carefully, fingers tightening around it. She looked at the boy in front of her — black hair, calm eyes behind black frames, posture relaxed as if he hadn't just changed the course of a hidden village — and her expression grew complicated.
"I still can't believe you actually did it," she said quietly. "You didn't just assassinate the Mizukage. You wiped out the Seven Swordsmen. After this… Kirigakure should calm down for a long time, right?"
Sogetsu's smile crooked, something unreadable flickering under his lashes.
"Calm?" he echoed. "Heh. Maybe."
If not for him, the Mist might have swallowed the insult, choked on its grief, and chosen to endure.
Losing a Kage and the Seven Swordsmen, then still insisting on a war with Konoha — that would have been the kind of "bravery" that got villages erased.
But people were funny.
You scratched them in the right place and they stopped being cautious animals and became something else: a howling engine of revenge on legs, dragging everyone they loved along behind them.
Right now, Kirigakure was exactly that: a war-chariot made of anger, rolling downhill.
Anyone who tried to stand in front of it — even their own — would just get ground into the mud.
"Go on back, Miko-san," Sogetsu said, lifting a hand in a lazy little wave. "You've been out in the field long enough. I imagine you miss your kids."
At that, Nono's composure cracked. Emotion surged up too fast to hide; her eyes shone, the corners reddening. She rocked back a step, then another, and folded herself down into a full bow — forehead nearly touching the tatami.
"Lord Sogetsu," she said, voice low and steady despite the tremor in it, "I can't begin to repay what you've done for me. If you ever have need of me, I will give you everything I have."
"I'll remember that."
He nodded once, then flicked his fingers toward the door.
"Go. I'd like to rest a bit."
Nono backed out of the room on her knees before she dared to rise, sliding the door shut behind her with careful hands.
When the latch clicked and silence returned, Sogetsu let out a long breath and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
"Good. Finally alone."
He lowered his hand, and in his eyes there was, for the first time in days, open anticipation.
"Time to prepare for promotion."
He'd delayed this as long as he safely could.
Now he could finally advance to Sequence 5.
His heart ticked a little faster. He smoothed it down, breathing slow, letting his Rank VI Hypnotist training settle his own mind for once.
He'd already laid traps around the room — alarms, misdirection seals, psychological tripwires tied into the inn's blind spots. No one would stumble in by accident.
He "soothed" his psyche several more times, running checks on his emotional state and his mental defenses, then scanned every inch of the room with Spirit Vision. Only when the last possibility of interruption was gone did he move on.
Carefully, as if handling venom, Sogetsu reached into the system-space only he could access and drew out the promotion materials one by one.
A complete brain from an adult Mind-Dragon.
And five hundred milliliters of its blood.
The brainstem still pulsed faintly, as if annoyed at being removed. The convoluted folds of brain tissue twitched and shifted, opening and closing slits that looked disturbingly like half-lidded eyes. Tiny grey glyphs crawled along the surface — not written on it, but somehow within the flesh, hooked into both meat and the thin edge of reality.
Just looking at it made the mind want to sink, to drift, to let go.
"Anesthesia," Sogetsu murmured to himself. The Hypnotist cadence fell over his own thoughts, clearing them like someone had opened a window.
His gaze sharpened. Hands steady, he began to work.
He'd rehearsed this a hundred times in his head. The gestures came as easily as breathing.
Before long, the ingredients were no longer brain and blood and strange anatomical fragments, but a potion.
In a clear crystal vial, a viscous fluid clung to glass. Grey-white motes of light swam in it like faint stars in a little bottled cosmos.
They drew the eye.
They wanted to be looked at.
"Potion is ready," he said. "Next is the ritual."
Advancing to Sequence 5 — Dreamwalker — had two possible routes.
The first: go hunt down a human-headed bird spirit from the Spirit World, form a contract with it, and swallow the potion while in a state of intense joy or rage, holding one of its tailfeathers.
Given that he had no reliable map to the Spirit World — or proof it even intersected this shinobi reality in a usable way — that option was… not ideal.
So he'd chosen the second method, the "simpler" one.
Remain lucid inside your own dream.
"Good thing I prepared you ahead of time," Sogetsu said under his breath.
From another storage scroll he drew out an old brass candlestick, its surface scratched by years and layered with thin, twisting sigils. He set it beside him with almost ceremonial care, then fed a waiting spirit-construct into its base.
Hermes's brass candlestick.
A Miracle of the Dream Path — one that could weave dreams as real as waking life. In his earlier tests it had also proved capable of holding his awareness, of letting him stay awake while the rest of him slept.
If it could knit dreams, it could anchor lucidity inside them. That was a Sequence 3 Dreamweaver's hallmark, and this relic reeked of that tier.
FWUMP.
A cold, grey-blue flame leapt up along the wick.
The brass threw back the light in dull, molten waves. The strange fire painted Sogetsu's face in shifting colors. He picked up the crystal vial, studying the miniaturized starfield within.
Then, without giving himself any more time to think, he tipped his head back and drank it all.
Gulp. Gulp. Gulp.
The thick potion slid down his throat like honey made of smoke and iron. He didn't have time to register a taste before the world tilted.
The room blurred.
His thoughts slid sideways, as if someone had knocked the table his mind was sitting on. For a moment he felt himself falling through layers of color, softness, memory—
—then the brass candle-flame flared.
The blue-grey fire shot up, stretching to the ceiling, and its reflections rippled across the walls and floor in waves. Light became water, became sky, became something that made no sense at all.
Sogetsu's head jerked once.
And just like that, he was clear again.
He opened his eyes on a street that shouldn't exist anymore.
Streetlights. Car horns. Neon and concrete and the buzz of a thousand lives stumbling past each other.
Cars surged in streams of chrome and light. Steel and glass towers stabbed at a cloudy sky. The crush of people flowed around him, shoulders bumping, faces turned away, each trapped in their own private orbit.
They brushed right past him without ever really seeing him.
He stood in the middle of the sidewalk, hands slack at his sides, expression blank and distant as he watched a world that used to be his.
To him, it was all past.
No matter how vivid the smell of exhaust, the warmth of a bakery's open door, the flicker of ad-screens — this was a home he could never walk back into.
He closed his eyes.
His sense of self rose, light as breath.
The city peeled away beneath him, its details melting into a single, shining bubble, then into something smaller still. His awareness tilted upward, out of the dream's skin.
He slipped free like a diver breaking the surface, and looked down.
Below him, the "bubble" hung in a vast, dark expanse, bobbing gently. It was one among countless others — floating islands of dream and story, bobbing on an endless sea.
The sea itself shimmered, black and deep and full of faint, glimmering lines. Thoughts. Instincts. Fears. Hopes.
Waves rolled, and each wave carried images: fragments of lives, beast and human and stranger things, all half-felt and half-formed. The surf of it brushed at the edges of his mind, and for once he didn't try to analyze it; he only saw.
"This is…"
From the Dreamwalker's vantage, the words came to him clean and precise.
"…the sea of the collective unconscious."
The place where the underside of every mind met and mingled — all living things' shadow-thoughts pooling together into one boundless, churning ocean of soul.
The heart of the path he was stepping onto.
◇ BONUS & SUPPORT ◇
◇ 1 bonus chapter for every 10 reviews — drop a comment!
◇ 1 bonus chapter for every 100 Power Stones.
◇ Read 60 chapters ahead on P@treon → patreon.com/StrawHatStudios