Konoha breathed as though nothing had changed.Children trained in the courtyards, merchants argued over the price of herbs, and the faint scent of wood smoke threaded through the air. Yet beneath it all, something pulsed — a rhythm no one could name.
Kakashi felt it first.
He had always lived in the subtle spaces between seconds, able to sense the shift in chakra currents before a storm. But this was different. It wasn't a storm; it was a heartbeat — deep, slow, coming from the ground itself.
He stood outside the ruins of the old Uchiha compound, the edges of his cloak stirring in the wind. His Sharingan eye, hidden beneath the forehead protector, throbbed faintly.
"What are you hiding, Ishi…"
He crouched beside the ancient well. Faint patterns marred the stone — spirals, intersecting rings, fragments of a language older than the village itself. He brushed his fingers across them, and the world tilted for half a breath.A whisper, like a sigh through time, answered him.
You shouldn't have looked.
Kakashi's pulse spiked. He pulled his hand back, but the mark had already burned faintly into his glove — a single looping thread that shimmered and vanished.
He straightened, eye flicking toward the rooftops. "So it's spreading…"
Across the village, Ishi sat on the steps outside his apartment, a half-eaten rice ball forgotten in his hand. His body still felt wrong — as if parts of him existed a fraction of a second ahead of the rest. He'd woken three times last night with blood on his pillow and whispers echoing through his skull.
When he tried to sleep, he dreamed of water. Deep, black, endless. Beneath it, something is breathing.
He pressed his fingers to his temple. "You're losing it," he muttered. "Congratulations, you've become your own jump scare."
A knock came at the door.Naruto, bright-eyed and irrepressible, holding a takeout box of steaming ramen.
"You look like you haven't slept in a week!""Time's a social construct," Ishi replied dryly."What?""Never mind."
Naruto plopped down beside him, talking about training, ramen flavors, and Sasuke being grumpier than usual. It was ordinary — painfully ordinary — and for a few minutes, Ishi let himself breathe with the rhythm of it.
Then Naruto's voice warped mid-sentence.The world blurred.
Ishi blinked — and suddenly he wasn't on his doorstep anymore.
He stood in a vast, dark corridor lit by floating lanterns that glowed with chakra — identical to what he'd glimpsed beneath the Uchiha district. The air here felt ancient, heavy with incense and rot.
From somewhere ahead came the sound of weeping — soft, rhythmic, like the drip of water.
He took a step forward. The ground rippled like liquid.
"I shouldn't be here," he whispered, though his voice sounded like two voices overlapping — one higher, one lower, both his own.
He turned a corner and saw the door.
It was carved directly into the stone — enormous, circular, breathing as though it were alive. The surface undulated faintly, veins of gold and black light coursing beneath its surface. It wasn't sealed with chakra; it was chakra.
Words crawled across it, burning in a script that hurt to look at.
𐌋𐌄𐌉𐌃𐌕𐌄𐌃 𐌋𐌄𐌉𐌃𐌄𐌋𐌋 𐌔𐌕𐌄𐌋𐌋𐌅
The translation filtered into his mind like oil through cloth:
"Those who were unmade shall weave again."
The weeping grew louder.He reached out, hand trembling — not with fear, but something worse: recognition.
When his fingers brushed the surface, the air shuddered.
Somewhere else.
Sasuke jerked awake in his bed, drenched in sweat. His eyes burned — his Sharingan had activated on its own. The dream still clung to him: a white-haired boy standing before a breathing door, whispering his name in a voice that wasn't his.
"...Ishi?"
He looked toward the window. For an instant, the moon outside his room flickered between red and white.
Back beneath the earth.
The door opened a fraction.
Not outward — inward. As though something on the other side had been waiting all along.
Light — no, threads of energy — spilled through the crack, twisting and writhing through the air. They brushed Ishi's skin and sank beneath it.
He gasped. Images flooded his mind — worlds beyond this one, fragments of memories not his own. A desert with two suns. A forest where time looped endlessly. Faces — people he'd never met — calling his name as if they'd known him forever.
Then a voice — the same voice that had whispered to him since the beginning, but now clear, intimate, inescapable.
"You were never meant to belong to one world."
The door's light engulfed him. His body convulsed, threads of golden chakra bursting outward like wings — brilliant, terrible.
And in that blinding moment, he heard someone whisper from beyond the Veil:
"Welcome home, Tanaka Ishika."
When the light faded, he was back by the well.The sky was dimming — the hour before sunset. His heart hammered painfully in his chest, and the ground beneath him pulsed like something alive.
The door was open. He could feel it.Not here — not physically — but elsewhere.
A shadow passed behind him, stretching long across the stones.
"You found it," said a voice.
He turned — Kakashi stood there, mask lowered, face grim. The Sharingan glowed faintly beneath the tilted headband.
"Tell me what you saw," Kakashi said quietly.
Ishi smiled faintly, though his lips trembled. "Something that shouldn't exist. Something that remembers me."
The wind shifted — carrying with it the faintest echo of laughter, not from this world.