Chapter 1
The world dissolved in a haze of pain and metallic blood. A nameless Senju shinobi of the Third Great War felt his chakra gutter out on a rain-sodden battlefield, his final sight the grimacing mask of an Iwa ninja. Darkness swallowed him… only to recede into a suffocating, visceral agony. He was small, weak, and choking on his own blood, a deep gash across his chest. Memories not his own flooded his mind—Itama Senju, youngest brother of Hashirama and Tobirama, dying alone in a skirmish against the Uchiha. Despair threatened to drown him. But beneath it, two concepts burned with crystalline clarity in his soul: **Copy** and **Devour**.
With a gasp that tore at his wounded lungs, the reborn consciousness—now fully Itama—focused. His hand, tiny and blood-smeared, touched the cold body of the Uchiha warrior who had struck him down. *Copy.* A silent command. In an instant, a perfect, inert replica of the Uchiha's body formed in his mind's repository, complete with every muscle memory, every flicker of fire-nature chakra, the knowledge of the Great Fireball Technique, and the latent potential of the Sharingan. The original corpse crumbled into dust, its essence transcribed.
But he was still dying. Turning his palm inward against his own chest wound, he whispered, "*Devour.*" A pinprick of absolute darkness, a controlled singularity no larger than a pea, appeared at his fingertips. It consumed the injury—the damaged tissue, the spilled blood, the invading pathogens. In return, a surge of vitality, a minuscule boost to his physical resilience, flowed into him. The bleeding stopped. The pain dulled. He would live.
As he lay panting in the mud, the implications unfolded. He was Itama Senju, in the Warring Clans Era, with powers that defied the very logic of this world. And they were *his* skills, innate and uncontrollable by any other. The first thought was not of glory, but of cold, stark survival. And the second was a vow: he would not be a footnote in Senju history again. The era of silent suffering was over.
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