This feeling wasn't unfamiliar to Gojo Yoru.
Before sudden death strikes, the body often sends warnings. If you stay up too late, you may find yourself unable to sleep at all. Instead, you only grow more and more alert, your mouth and throat turn dry, and your body temperature starts creeping upward.
What's worse is the heart.
It pounds so fast it feels wrong, and that crushing mix of palpitations and tightness in your chest gives birth to a terrifying thought—that once you fall asleep, you might never wake up again.
Gojo Yoru had felt this many times in his previous life. Back then, when he was younger, he never took it seriously.
Now that sensation had returned, and a wave of fear surged through him.
Without the slightest hesitation, he got out of bed and drank water. He didn't dare gulp it down in one go, only taking small careful sips.
Once the dryness in his mouth eased a little, Gojo Yoru carried the bottle back to his room, lay down again, and tried to empty his mind, hoping his heartbeat would settle on its own.
It didn't.
No matter what he did, his heart refused to slow down.
In the stillness of the night, the sound inside his room was like a drum being beaten over and over.
He lifted his shirt and looked down. His chest was pounding so violently it almost seemed as if the heart inside were about to burst free of his body.
The agitation, the fluctuating body heat, the dry mouth—everything kept him from sleeping. He could only keep boiling water, keep drinking, keep enduring.
He even took several cold showers.
It didn't help at all.
This state continued until noon the next day.
Aside from a brief half-hour nap the day before, Gojo Yoru had now gone a full thirty hours without sleep.
And yet, he didn't feel bad at all.
In his previous life, after being awake that long, even if his mind remained strangely excited, he would still feel the tension in his brain, the sting in his eyes, the bloodshot heaviness that warned collapse was coming.
But this time, none of that happened.
After forcing himself to calm down, he realized he still had an absurd amount of energy. It was as if his body had become some kind of perpetual-motion machine.
Clearly, the source of it all was his heart—that organ pumping like it had gone mad.
This abnormal condition lasted for a full seven days.
For seven entire days, Gojo Yoru could not sleep. Nearly two hundred hours passed without him closing his eyes.
During those seven days, he didn't eat a single thing. He only drank water.
It wasn't that he didn't want to eat. He simply couldn't.
And yet, despite going seven days without food, his body showed no obvious signs of weakness. He remained energetic, almost disturbingly so.
Little by little, his feelings changed.
The fear he felt at the start gradually gave way to excitement.
If this had truly been sudden death, then after seven sleepless days he should have already been lying in bed waiting to die. The fact that he was still alive meant this was not sudden death at all, but some unknown transformation taking place inside his body.
Maybe… maybe his cheat was finally about to appear.
Was it some hidden bloodline limit of the Gojo family, awakening in his generation?
Or was it a special ability brought over from his previous life—perhaps even the very reason he had crossed through time in the first place?
That death-like state finally began to subside at noon on August 28th, Konoha Year 30.
"Finally… it's over…"
The moment his heartbeat returned to normal, the faint fever vanished, and the dryness in his throat faded, Gojo Yoru let out a sigh of relief.
But before he could finish checking his body for changes, his vision went black.
He collapsed onto the bed and plunged into a deep sleep.
He had no idea how long he slept.
The only thing that dragged him back to consciousness was the violent twist of hunger in his stomach.
"So tired…"
Gojo Yoru opened his eyes, but for a long while he had no desire to move.
It had been a very, very long time since he had felt the exhaustion that came from truly being sleep-deprived.
If not for the familiar ceiling and the room around him, he might have believed the last six years had only been some long, absurd dream.
Turning onto his side, he pulled open the drawer of his bedside table and took out a box containing two rows of six pills.
These were soldier pills—the Naruto world's compressed biscuit packs and energy-restoring medicine all rolled into one.
One pill wasn't enough.
Gojo Yoru swallowed three in a row before his body finally regained a little strength.
He got out of bed and stood before the full-length mirror. After taking off his clothes and confirming that his outward appearance hadn't changed in any obvious way, he immediately sat down cross-legged and began refining chakra, trying to see whether anything inside him had changed instead.
Thump.
A sound like a drumbeat echoed in his ears, in his head, in the deepest part of his soul.
For a brief instant, the image of a heart flashed through his mind.
Then it vanished.
Gojo Yoru's eyes snapped open, astonishment written all over his face.
If he hadn't seen wrong just now, then the heart inside that fleeting image had looked… black.
"Was that my heart?" he thought.
To confirm it, Gojo Yoru closed his eyes again and resumed refining chakra.
But that image never appeared a second time.
What did happen was even stranger.
At the moment when physical energy and spiritual energy were supposed to merge, a third energy suddenly surged out from his cells and forcibly joined the process.
Then, inside his abdomen, a strand of black chakra formed from the fusion of all three.
"Black chakra… could this be my cheat?"
Gojo Yoru opened his eyes and immediately formed hand seals, trying to mobilize that thread of black chakra.
It flowed through his meridians into his right palm just like ordinary chakra.
At first glance, there seemed to be no difference between the two.
But perhaps the quantity was too small, or perhaps his control over it wasn't precise enough, because the black chakra failed to manifest outside his body at all.
Only a few seconds later, that strand of chakra disappeared back into him.
In such a short interval, Gojo Yoru couldn't detect anything special about it.
So he simply closed his eyes once more and continued refining chakra.
Again, that special energy rose from within his cells. Again, it merged with physical and spiritual energy, producing strands of black chakra.
When he could no longer draw out any more physical or mental energy from his cells, that special energy suddenly rushed straight into his chakra core and fused with the blue spiral there.
It was like dripping black ink into white paper.
Bit by bit, part of his chakra shifted from blue to black.
By the time the special energy in his cells had been completely exhausted, nearly one-third of his total chakra had turned black.
"Let me see what you really do."
Gojo Yoru stood up.
His hands moved through seals, and with a mix of anticipation and unease, he guided the black chakra through his body.
He had begun refining chakra at the age of three. By now, he had already mastered the Three Body Techniques taught at the Ninja Academy, and during this vacation he had even started practicing the basic C-rank Five Elements Release techniques.
The elemental techniques couldn't be tested casually at home.
So what he chose to try first was the Three Body Techniques.
The result was… absolutely nothing.
He couldn't produce a Clone Technique.
His body showed no change under Transformation.
Nothing happened at all.
That surprised Gojo Yoru even more than if the black chakra had exploded in his face.
If the technique failed to activate, it meant this black chakra was fundamentally different from ordinary chakra. The fact that he couldn't immediately identify its effect only made it more mysterious.
And mystery meant power.
Swallowing another soldier pill, Gojo Yoru opened the glass door to the balcony and looked out at the sky, which was just beginning to brighten.
He formed hand seals, ready to turn into a blur and leap out using the Body Flicker Technique.
Then he paused.
He remembered that when he had previously guided the black chakra, he had successfully sent it into his palms.
So this time, he sent it into his feet instead.
Then he used the Konoha Body Flicker Technique—the D-rank movement technique taught at the Ninja Academy.
Just like with the Three Body Techniques, he didn't vanish in a blur.
But the moment the technique activated, Gojo Yoru felt something strange.
It was as if he had stepped into empty air.
He looked down.
His pupils shrank violently.
Both of his feet had sunk into the balcony floor as though he had stepped into a swamp, his calves half-submerged in solid wood and stone.
And yet he felt no pressure. No squeezing. No resistance.
His body didn't continue sinking, either.
It was as though his legs hadn't broken through the floor at all, but had simply merged with it.
Slowly, Gojo Yoru lifted one leg and pulled his right foot back out.
He stared at the balcony.
The floor remained completely intact, without the slightest dent or crack.
At that moment, he could no longer hold his expression together.
He lowered his head and covered his face with both hands. His shoulders trembled, and a strange sound escaped him—something between a sob and a laugh he was desperately trying to suppress.
A long time passed before Gojo Yoru finally lowered his hands again.
He raised his head and looked out over Konoha, drenched in the pale morning light.
The village he had lived in for six years suddenly seemed different, as if he were seeing it for the first time.
Beautiful. Quiet. Glowing like a painting.
A huge smile spread across his face, impossible to hide.
Then he opened his arms wide toward that village and laughed.
"What a beautiful village!"
"What a… wonderful world!"