Before the morning light fully took hold, there was the silence of the transition.
The darkness behind Duy's eyelids wasn't the void of death, but the heavy, velvet blackness of a deep sleep. His mind, still vibrating with the frequency of the Eighth Gate, expected the roar of steam and the scent of ozone. Instead, there was the smell of cedarwood and miso soup.
He felt a frantic, desperate thought: Where?
His hand reached out, but it met a soft, threadbare tatami mat. He bolted upright, his heart hammering—not from the Gate's pressure, but from a raw, primal shock.
He looked at the corner of the room. There was the small, chipped wooden toy he had carved as a boy. There was the window with the uneven latch that whistled when the wind blew from the north.
This wasn't an "unfamiliar place" This was the home he had buried in the back of his mind decades ago. The realization hit him like a physical blow: he wasn't just alive; he was home.
The room was exactly as Duy remembered it—small, cramped, and smelling of sun-warmed dust and old laundry. It was a space he hadn't stepped foot in for over twenty years, yet the peeling wallpaper and the slight dip in the floorboards felt like a physical weight pressing against his chest.
"Duy? Are you still in bed?"
The voice was like a lightning strike. It was high, sharp, and laced with a maternal annoyance that Duy hadn't heard since his teenage years.
Mother
His heart—the same organ he had felt explode into a star of red mist just moments ago—gave a frantic, healthy thump against his ribs. It wasn't the rhythmic explosion of the Gate of Death; it was the panicked fluttering of a child.
He scrambled out of bed, but his mind moved at a speed his legs couldn't match. In his mind, he was a master of the Eight Gates, a man who could crack the earth with a step. In reality, his center of gravity was several inches lower than it should be, and his limbs felt like leaden weights.
"Oof—!" Duy's face met the floorboards with a dull thud.
"Honestly, Duy! You're going to be late for the Academy again!" The door creaked open.
There she was. His mother—a civilian woman with calloused hands from housework, not kunai, and eyes that held no knowledge of the bloody wars to come. Behind her, his father peered in, holding a steaming cup of tea. He was a simple man, a laborer who had always looked at Duy's shinobi aspirations with a mix of pride and deep, quiet confusion.
They were alive. They were young.
Duy stared at them, his breath hitching. To him, they were ghosts returned to life; to them, he was just their clumsy, untalented son who had probably tripped over his own feet again.
"Ahaha..." Duy rubbed the back of his head, forcing his lips into a sheepish, familiar grin that hid the trembling of his hands. "Sorry, sorry. I guess I was just... having a very intense dream about youth!".
"A dream about sleeping in, more like," his father joked, though his eyes softened. "Go on, wash up. Your mother made extra rice today. You'll need the energy if you're going to keep up that 'Genin' training of yours."
Duy flinched. The Eternal Genin. Even now, before he had even graduated, the label was already sticking.
As his parents retreated back to the kitchen, Duy looked down at his small, trembling hands. The "soul-body mismatch" was worse than he thought; his will was high-density, forged in the fires of the Eighth Gate, but his physical frame was a fragile vessel that hadn't even begun to hit its growth spurt.
He tried to flex his chakra—just a tiny pulse toward the Gate of Opening.
Snap.
A sharp, stinging pain shot through his nervous system, forcing him to gasp. It wasn't that he couldn't open the gate; it was that his current muscles would shred like wet paper if he tried to channel even a fraction of the power his mind was used to.
"Growth is going to be painful," Duy whispered to the empty room, his expression hardening with a focus no child should possess. "And very, very confusing."
He had a second chance. He had his parents, he had his home, and most importantly—he had the knowledge of the "Eighth Gate of Death" without the immediate consequence of dying.
He wouldn't just work hard. He would optimize.
"Youth..." he muttered, standing up and testing the weight of his small body again.
"Is definitely on my side."