The scorching, suffocating heat, and the metallic stench of blood vanished—not in a gentle fade, but with a violent, instantaneous expulsion—replaced entirely by the cool, crisp, almost sterile aroma of aged parchment, bleached white paper, and fresh, iron-based ink. The transition was a shock, so profoundly unnatural in its clinical purity that it caused a momentary, physical vertigo in Kagami's young body. It felt as though he had been violently wrenched from a humid, feverish nightmare world—a pit of mud and gore—into a surgically pristine, high-security laboratory. This was a place where the memory of the pervasive horror was not erased, but meticulously formalized, categorized, and filed away behind intricate protective layers.
The span of time separating the visceral terror in the village from this moment was not a fluid, continuous timeline, but a jagged, administrative schism. The weeks immediately following the attack were a blank void of enforced sterility and silence. Kagami was not questioned, not comforted, and barely touched. He was moved through clean, anonymous rooms by shinobi whose faces were as blank as their walls—people who saw him as an unprocessed piece of evidence, too volatile to be disturbed. His small body held the secret of the massacre, but no one dared to break the seal of his traumatized silence.
The thick, rusty layer of metallic death was scrubbed from his skin, replaced by the scent of antiseptic soap, but the red mirror remained burned onto his retina. Weeks were swallowed up by the dry, emotionless language of diplomatic reports, hollow formal statements, and the arduous, tedious struggle over the initial, fragile conditions of peace. While the future leaders intellectually drafted the utopian blueprint of Konoha, Kagami himself was reduced to a silent, visible diplomatic pawn. The Uchiha clan, though deep in their suspicion, grudgingly offered him as a gesture of superficial trust. He was intended to be a silent witness, a temporary hostage of goodwill, and a fragile, pathetic attempt at mutual understanding.
Yet, Kagami did not register as a messenger or an ambassador. He felt like a disposable commodity, bartered between colossal, fearful factions to appease a greater, uncontrollable, and eternally hungry entity: the endless, consuming war itself. He was cruelly stripped of any claim to the visceral, raw truth he had seen; his new, bitter assignment was to internalize and live within the fabricated illusion of peace.
He found himself confined within a massive, circular tent, its interior suffocatingly filled with hundreds of sealed, potent scrolls, complex barrier formulas, and masses of brittle paper covered in arcane, unreadable glyphs. The sharp, volatile smell of potent ink and chakra paper permeated the heavy air, a dense, intoxicating fragrance; the thick canvas walls themselves seemed to vibrate with contained order and unwavering discipline. The world of Ninjutsu combat was a brutal truth he had learned with his own eyes, but Sealing Arts (Fūinjutsu) was an entirely new, disturbing revelation. It was not battle; it was absolute architecture and constraint. It was a precise language of indelible lines and perfect circles that did not violently release energy in explosions, but instead imprisoned, channelled, and dictated its flow with tyrannical authority. This meticulous methodology was the total antithesis of the Uchiha way, which traditionally converted raw, corrosive, untamed fury into unleashed, spectacular fire.
His custodian was Mito Uzumaki, the wife of Hashirama Senju. Her hair was a vibrant, deep red of a blood that had been purified and pacified, and her eyes appeared not to glance at Kagami's face, but to penetrate directly into the hidden architecture of his mind, examining the psychological damage. She instantly registered the sharp, analytical coldness that had replaced the terror in his gaze—the stark, mineral residue of the battlefield's trauma—and she did not pass any judgment. She saw only a vast, untapped potential for calculated masterful control. Mito radiated a meditative, almost religiously calm serenity, presenting a direct, absolute contrast to the volatile, choleric passion Kagami knew intimately from his own clan's inner circles. Her silence held more authority than any Uchiha yell.
"Sit down, Kagami-kun," Mito said, her voice a low, steady current, without inflection, gesturing to a simple cushion. She was meticulously drawing a complex sealing knot, its flawless, terrifying symmetry utterly hypnotic and demanding. "The world is a barrel, Kagami," she began, the specialized brush scratching a quiet, steady rhythm across the paper. "It is entirely full of churning, dark emotion, unchecked hatred, and spontaneous, uncontrolled rage. Chakra itself is but a raw, volatile mirror of that untamed, destructive emotion. This indiscriminate rage seeks only to destroy everything in its path. It is the demon—the pure, chaotic spirit—we cannot see with the naked eye, but that we must address with logic."
Kagami instinctively bent closer to her work, his cold, young eyes tracing every stroke. He recognized the analogy with immediate, stark clarity. The senseless, scattered corpses, the broken, incoherent logic he had seen mirrored in the blood-slicked trough — that was the result of the rage, the chaos unbound. That was the fundamentally inefficient, destructive loss of control his own clan blindly and tragically mistook for strength. Kagami briefly considered the Uchiha's Genjutsu – a Jutsu designed to directly assault and dominate the mind. Fūinjutsu, by stark contrast, was subtler, more profound: it was about fettering things at their source, defining boundaries, and precisely redirecting their inherent, dangerous energy. This, he registered with cold certainty, was the superior, ultimate form of control.
"What do you do with a barrel that is too full, that threatens to burst, Mito-sama?" he asked, his voice entirely devoid of a child's natural curiosity, sounding instead like a field operative seeking an answer to a tactical problem. Mito offered the slightest, almost imperceptible hint of a smile, a fleeting moment of warmth that vanished instantly. "You build structural dams. You create controlled, measured vents. You seal it, completely and perfectly." She completed the seal with a final, energized, perfect stroke, the lines locking into an immutable pattern. "A seal doesn't merely hold something in; it controls it entirely, defining its limit. It takes a chaotic, destructive force and compels it to go only so far. No further. It gives destruction an immutable, unbreakable rule. Is that not the absolute highest form of power? The ability to recklessly start a war is an act of simple passion. The ability to end it and prevent its inevitable recurrence with order is the true, ultimate art."
Kagami saw in this stark, unforgiving logic a blueprint for survival, an architectural plan for the future. Seals were not merely physical fetters; they were hard logic made manifest and weaponized. He spent the subsequent weeks observing the methodical inner order of the Uzumaki and Senju – their clean, unbreakable chains of command, Tobirama Senju's unsettling, almost robotic discipline, Mito's calm, relentless, meditative work. He formed a final, chilling conclusion: The Uchiha's volatile, self-consuming hatred was not their strength; it was a systemic, fatal flaw that could be ruthlessly neutralized and exploited by the superior, administrative structure of the Senju. The Uchiha fought emotionally, losing control to fury; the Senju fought administratively, managing the conflict and its consequences as a resource.
The profound lessons extended far beyond the raw mechanics of Chakra manipulation. In a moment of severe, rare openness, Mito showed him an almost unnoticeable, yet incredibly powerful, seal she wore permanently beneath her pristine clothing. "Do you see the true monster in me, Kagami?" she asked calmly, her eyes piercing and absolute, a challenge to his Uchiha vision. "The Nine-Tails Beast is sealed within me. It is the single greatest, most violent concentration of rage and fear in the world – a living, unholy chaos. But the simple knowledge of its existence, the raw truth of its nature, would destroy the people outside these walls. Not the beast itself, but the sheer, uncontrollable panic it would incite, the resulting mass fear. Therefore, that truth must remain perpetually hidden, sealed away from the unprepared."
She summarized her lesson in a chillingly detached manner, a lesson that settled upon Kagami's mind like a new, unbreaking seal forged in his soul: "You will see many truths in this world, Kagami. Terrible, unforgivable truths – exactly like the ones you witnessed in the war's aftermath. But you cannot, you must not, show that truth to everyone – not while they are weak, chaotic, and unready. Truth, left unchecked and exposed, is more explosive and destructive than any Fūinjutsu when it enters an unprepared, undisciplined mind. It must be controlled."
Mito spoke of the moral obligation of the powerful to shield the populace from destabilizing panic so they could peacefully build their new home. But Kagami, who still had the stark, blood-red mirrored surface permanently burned onto his retina, heard only the single, crucial instruction for his own survival and ascendancy.
The honest fear of the civilians killed them, Kagami thought, his thoughts cold and precise, like the lines of a seal. *The honest, unchecked rage of my clan will inevitably kill us. I must not only tame the truth I see, but I must also ruthlessly replace it with a controlled narrative. *
He immediately transferred the cold, geometric logic of the seal from Chakra to information, perception, and consciousness. If a seal could contain the volatile, destructive power of a Tailed Beast, then a well-placed lie or a carefully removed, manipulated memory could completely control the loyalty and direction of an entire clan, perhaps an entire village. The rage, the ingrained distrust, the pervasive fear – all of it was just uncontrolled emotional energy that had to be sealed and redirected towards a calculated, functional end. If Mito could build a Chakra prison, he could build a memory seal, a psychological prison for inconvenient truth.
His dormant, unique power did not yet physically manifest, its nature latent. But in this singular, pivotal moment, sitting at Mito's meticulously ordered table, its cold, theoretical, philosophical foundation was laid in concrete. The war had shown him, without mercy, that honest, emotional people died. Mito now showed him that the superior, ultimate weapons of the survivors were not just Kunai and Jutsu, but also the total control of information and the flawless manipulation of collective memories. And these could be sealed, controlled, and deployed with the detached logic of a Fūinjutsu master until the world was finally ready to accept his ultimate, perfectly executed illusion.
Kagami nodded slowly, his small body perfectly still and rigid with newly found purpose. He no longer looked at the sterile parchment scroll before him, but through it, directly at the cold, flawless, brutal architecture of power and stability. The fearful, chaotic question that had been screamed into the red mirror of the battlefield was no longer an agonizing, desperate plea; it had been successfully converted into a cold, rational, logical plan of action and eternal control.