Shin returned to consciousness without knowing exactly when.
There was no awakening. No clear instant when sleep ended. It was more like slowly realizing that the pain was still there — and that this meant he was alive.
The cold came first.
Not the kind that bites at the skin, but the one that settles inside, making the muscles feel heavy, as if the body had forgotten how to move. Shin tried to turn and felt something hard beneath his arm. A body. His mother's.
He opened his eyes.
The light of dawn filtered through what remained of the house. Parts of the roof had collapsed during the night, and now the sky appeared in irregular fragments — gray, stained with smoke. The smell was still strong, soaked into everything.
It took Shin a while to remember.
When he did, it didn't come as a sequence of events. It came as a single crushing weight against his chest.
His father.His mother.His siblings.The village.
He tried to sit up and failed. His body didn't respond. His arms trembled. His head spun. His stomach twisted, and he vomited beside his own knee, without strength or shame.
He cried again.
But the crying was different now. Weaker. More exhausted. As if something inside him had already been drained.
That was when the pain changed.
It didn't lessen.
It shifted.
A strange pressure formed behind his eyes, deep and invasive, as if something were being forced into his skull. Shin brought a hand to his forehead, letting out a low groan. The world seemed to fold in on itself, images overlapping.
He saw the destroyed village.
And at the same time, he saw something that did not belong there.
A rain-soaked asphalt street. Tall buildings. Artificial lights reflected in puddles. The distant sound of cars. A small, messy room with books scattered across the floor. A young man sitting on the edge of a bed, staring into nothing.
Shin sucked in a sharp breath.
"No…" he murmured, without knowing who he was speaking to.
The images didn't come like dreams. They were too vivid. Heavy with unfamiliar sensations. A different body. Taller. Heavier. Emotions that did not belong to a nine-year-old child.
Frustration.Exhaustion.A quieter, older kind of emptiness.
He felt two pains at once: the recent loss — raw, unbearable — and another, older one, stretched across years, shaped by bad choices, broken expectations, dreams that had never taken form.
The two collided.
For a moment, Shin thought his head would split in half.
There was no voice explaining who was who. No conversation. No arrival. It wasn't as if someone was "entering" him. It was as if two currents had been forced into the same narrow space, compelled to merge.
Memories overlapped.
The first time holding a small bow made by his father.The first failing grade on a school test in another world.The smell of simple food in the village home.The sound of rain hitting a glass window, years later, in a place without forests.
Childish fear.Adult fear.Anger.Guilt.An intense desire to disappear.
And another, just as intense, to survive.
Shin screamed.
Not loudly. Not like the night before. It was a hoarse, almost animal sound, torn from his throat as he curled on the floor, hands clutching his head as if he could stop it from continuing.
The pain lasted — too long to be an instant. Too short to be measured.
When it passed, it left something behind.
The world made sense again — crooked, broken, but recognizable.
Shin was breathing fast, drenched in sweat, his eyes burning. His body was still small. Weak. Hungry. But there was something different in the way he perceived things now.
He looked at his hands.
Small.
But not unfamiliar.
He looked around.
The destruction was still there. The smell, the bodies, the dead village. Nothing had changed outside of him.
Inside… it was something else.
Thoughts came with more clarity. Not better — just more organized. He could observe his own despair as if standing one step away from it. It still hurt — far too much — but now there was something beyond the pain.
Awareness.
Shin slowly pushed himself up, leaning against the wall. Dizziness washed over him, but he didn't fall. He looked once more at his parents, at their unmoving faces.
The child inside him wanted to stay there. Wanted to lie back down. To wait for it to end. To wait for someone to wake up.
Another part — quieter, harder — understood something simple and cruel.
No one was coming.
He left the house.
In the daylight, the village lay completely destroyed. The bodies were impossible to ignore. Shin walked among them with hesitant steps, his stomach tight, his throat dry.
He saw strange symbols marked on some of the burned walls. A dirty cloth bearing a fallen-leaf symbol lay near one of the corpses.
He recognized it.
Not with immediate rage.
With cold certainty.
"It was Konoha…" he murmured.
The child inside him felt hatred.
The older part felt something different.
Bitter understanding.
Konoha was guilty. Yes. The hands that killed, burned, and destroyed belonged to those men. But the world was not made of simple villains. Orders existed. Wars existed. People died because they were weak. Because they were in the way.
And he had been weak.
The village had been weak.
That truth offered no comfort.
It offered direction.
Shin clenched his fists. His small body trembled, but his eyes were dry now. There was no heroic vow. No grand oath.
Only a silent decision, born from the fusion of two broken lives.
He would not die there.
He would not be crushed again.
If the world worked like this…
Then he would learn to function within it.
Even if he had to become something the child he was hours ago would never recognize.
Shin turned his back on what remained of the village
and began to walk.
Without knowing where.
But knowing, at last, that he had to keep going.