The air in Raiden Gorge tasted like old stone and something older still.
Kozan stood at the mouth of the chasm, the wind dragging his coat against his legs, the cliff face yawning open like a scar carved by a titan. Mist pooled low, sliding between broken pillars and jagged boulders. Two Iwa shinobi stood behind him Raiken's closest comrades, the only ones willing (or foolish enough) to descend with the Mist's silent specter.
They didn't speak to him.
They hadn't spoken since dawn.
Kozan didn't mind. Silence was a language he understood better than most.
He adjusted the straps on his gloves, letting a thin strand of chakra dance along his fingertips. The gorge was quiet, unnaturally so. Even the wind seemed to pause before entering. He stepped forward.
The first crunch of gravel under his heel echoed like a drumbeat through the hollow canyon.
"Is… is it safe?" one of the Iwa shinobi whispered.
Kozan didn't look back."Safety isn't the point."
That shut them up.
They followed anyway.
The descent was steep, zig-zagging along cracked stone paths and narrow outcroppings. At times the ledge narrowed to a body's width. Kozan moved like the terrain belonged to him, the mist coiling around his ankles as if guiding him downward. The others stumbled and hesitated.
Halfway down, the taller Iwa shinobi, Genda, mustered the courage to speak.
"You… you've been here before?"
Kozan didn't answer at first. His eyes traced the cliff face a series of faint indentations, almost glyphs, half-buried under centuries of dust. Marks he remembered touching as a child.
Marks he wasn't supposed to remember at all.
"Yes," he finally said. "Once."
"When?"
"I don't know."
The man said nothing after that.
Memory was a broken thing for Kozan. Sharp fragments, uninvited. Whispers. Flashes of cold hands on his face. A woman crying. A man saying, He doesn't feel fear good. A dim corridor lit by lanterns. A seal burning onto his wrist while he didn't scream. Couldn't scream.
Someone humming.
He pushed the memory away.
Below, the ground leveled into a wide plateau littered with abandoned equipment and broken stone pillars. Some were shattered from the inside outward.
The mist thickened.
"We're close," Kozan said.
"Close to what?" asked the other Iwa shinobi, Naro, clutching his kunai.
Kozan didn't answer.
Mei's footsteps were soundless.
She watched from above, hidden where the gorge's shadows bent and folded around her presence. Kozan hadn't seen her. Or maybe he had and simply let her follow. With Kozan, it was sometimes impossible to know.
She wasn't here because she doubted him.
She was here because she feared what he'd find.
Fear wasn't something she liked admitting, even to herself.
But Kozan… Kozan was not normal, and she could feel it more every month. He melted into violence like it was a memory. He listened to silence like it whispered back. And sometimes, when he stood very still, Mei felt like she was watching someone who hadn't fully decided if he was human.
She watched as he reached the plateau and paused.
He was remembering something. She could tell by the way his posture tightened, the way his fingers flexed as if bracing for an old wound.
Mei stepped deeper into the shadows and continued following.
Kozan moved toward the center of the plateau, where a huge stone disc rose from the ground like the mouth of something buried. The metal rings carved into it were unfamiliar to the Iwa shinobi—but not to him.
He had seen them before.
Not here.
But somewhere else.
In a room that smelled like iron and seawater. In a place where voices had murmured that he was "promising." A place where they'd told him he had a gift. A place where he had learned to stay quiet, because quiet children survived.
Kozan placed his hand on the stone disc.
It was warm.
Something thudded beneath it slow and rhythmic.
A heartbeat.
Naro stumbled back, panic tightening his voice. "There's something alive down there"
"No," Kozan said softly. "Not alive."
"Then what is it?!"
He didn't answer. His palm slid along the grooves. Chakra pulsed in response, not resisting him but welcoming him. The stone rotated. Dust shook loose.
A seal snapped.
The disc shifted open with a low groan.
A tunnel breathed out air that smelled like old papers, metal, and something faintly sweet like the antiseptic scent of the room he'd been raised in for his earliest years.
The memory hit him so hard his vision blurred.
"He adapts fast.""His chakra affinity is anomalous.""He's quiet good. Quiet ones learn obedience.""If he breaks, we'll make another."
A hand pressed to his forehead.
A cold voice:"You're not a child, Kozan. You're a result."
His fist tightened unconsciously.
He stepped forward.
Mei tensed as she watched him disappear into the tunnel.
Kozan rarely showed emotion. Even less so fear. But something in him had changed the moment he touched the stone something sharp, flickering, almost vulnerable. She had never seen that in him before.
She moved to follow, but the gorge trembled.
A low rumble, deep as the grinding of the earth.
An old defensive mechanism awakening after years of sleep.
The two Iwa shinobi jumped back as several stone pillars cracked open, releasing humanoid shapes of mud and chakra golems with empty sockets where eyes should have been.
Genda yelled, "What the hell?!"
Mei charged past them, lava sparking at her fingertips.
Kozan didn't turn back.
He kept walking, deeper into the tunnel.
Deeper into the memories.
The tunnel descended in a spiral, walls covered in writing not in any language Kozan recognized, yet somehow he understood.
The words weren't spoken.
They were felt.
Instructions. Observations. Notes.
Experiments.
The deeper he went, the more the air shifted, growing warmer, thicker, humming with chakra that tasted like the ocean under pressure. His footsteps echoed, as if the place were greeting him.
Or calling him home.
Kozan stopped at the first sealed door.
A handprint indent was carved into it small, the size of a child's.
The memory came back with brutal clarity.
A room. Cold. Bright lights. The smell of ink and chemicals.His hand small, shaking pressed into the indent.A voice whispering:"Good boy. Open the door."
Kozan exhaled hard.
He placed his hand into the print.
The door opened without resistance.
Inside was a chamber filled with broken glass tubes, rusted metal restraints, and crystal fragments that pulsed faintly with stored chakra. Shelves lined the walls, filled with scrolls and ledgers that had decayed with time.
But at the center was something intact.
A tank.
Cracked. Empty.
A faint outline of where a child had once floated.
Where he had floated.
He stepped forward, touching the glass.
His fingers trembled. Just barely.
Another memory crashed through him:
"He survived another one.""How many did we lose before stabilizing the formula?""Nine.""And this is number ten.""The quiet one?""Yes. He never cries."
Kozan swallowed, jaw tightening until something hurt.
"I wasn't born here," he whispered. "I was made here."
Behind him, the tunnel shook.
A blade of stone slammed into the ground inches from his feet.
Kozan turned slowly.
A stone golem stood in the doorway, half-alive with chakra, its form warping and cracking with each movement. More shadows moved behind it.
Outside, Mei and the Iwa pair were fighting waves of them.
But this one wasn't attacking.
It bowed.
Sluggish. Stiff. But unmistakable.
Kozan stared.
"Why do you know me?" he asked quietly.
The golem lifted its head, mouth cracking open. Dust spilled out. And then, through a grating noise that barely resembled speech, came a fragmented whisper:
"Pro…to…type…"
Kozan felt his pulse stop.
The golem pointed deeper into the tunnel.
Toward whatever waited there.
Toward the truth.
The golem collapsed to dust at his feet.
Kozan stepped forward.
Outside, Mei blasted apart another golem, panting, her hair damp with sweat and steam. The Iwa shinobi struggled to keep up. The gorge kept shaking, dust raining down from above.
"Kozan!" she shouted into the tunnel.
He didn't answer.
Of course he didn't.
Mei clenched her fists."Damn it… you don't get to face this alone."
She ran into the darkness after him.
Kozan reached the second chamber.
This one was larger, circular, lined with massive pipes and stone conduits that pumped chakra like veins. In the center was a dais with a broken console and a stone tablet covered in more of the strange writing.
He approached it.
The script changed here.
No longer instructions.
Not observations.
A message.
He felt the meaning unravel in his mind:
"Prototype Complete.Release Only Upon Final Activation."
Activation?
He looked down.
A faint symbol glowed at his wrist, the one he had always assumed was a birthmark a swirling mark resembling a mist curl wrapped around a hollow circle.
The symbol on the tablet was the same.
Kozan took a slow breath.
"I am not… human."
Saying it aloud made the walls feel closer.
Footsteps echoed behind him.
Mei.
He didn't turn.
She stopped a few paces away, chest rising with her breath, eyes taking in the room, the tank, the tablet… and the look on Kozan's face.
"Kozan," she said softly. "What did you find?"
He answered without emotion, because emotion would break something inside him.
"My beginning."
She stepped closer. "And?"
"And the reason I should not exist."
Mei's eyes softened.
"Kozan… whatever they made you for, whatever they wanted you to become… you defied it. You chose your own path."
He swallowed.
"I don't remember choosing."
"Then choose now."
Kozan finally turned.
For the first time in years, Mei saw real fear in his eyes.
And something else.
Resolve.
He looked down the last tunnel, where a faint light pulsed slow, steady, like a sleeping heart.
"I need to know what I am," he whispered.
Mei stepped beside him.
"You won't face it alone."
They walked forward together.
But only Kozan felt it
The faint vibration in the air.
The whisper riding the darkness.
"Prototype… returned."
And somewhere deep below, something woke up.
Waiting.
Remembering him.