"A yōkai?"
Kagetsu's hand paused midair.
"A yōkai? Then… what about it?"
The woman blinked at him, clearly confused.
"You destroyed it, my lord."
Seeing the faint crease in his brow, she carefully recounted what had happened,how the scroll had unfurled, how the monster had been swallowed by black incantations and white dust, and how he had emerged in its place.
After Yuriko stepped outside to help clean the ruined house, Kagetsu remained seated alone in the dim room, lost in thought.
"A yōkai… Could it be some kind of powerful summon? Or a mutated beast?" he murmured. "But Edo Tensei requires a human sacrifice… doesn't it?"
He wasn't entirely certain.
If yōkai counted as something close enough to humans… then maybe?
He lowered his gaze to his hands.
Cracks spiderwebbed across pale skin.
There was no mistaking it. This was an Edo Tensei body.
But this place,
This was not the shinobi world he knew.
"…Did I transmigrate again?"
His voice carried both disbelief and weary resignation.
In his first life, he had been nothing more than an overworked office employee on Earth. One ordinary day, he stepped outside,and when he next opened his eyes, he had become Kagetsu, a child of the Uchiha clan.
The original body had been the same age as Uchiha Sasuke and had perished during the Uchiha Clan Massacre. Too young to awaken the Sharingan, he hadn't drawn the attention of Root.
He had regained consciousness just as the Anbu were disposing of the corpses.
A dead child who suddenly breathed again.
Under the Third Hokage's watchful protection, he entered the Ninja Academy and graduated as a shinobi.
He had no system. No cheat abilities.
Only memories of another world,and the subtle changes brought by transmigration.
Combined with the Uchiha bloodline's natural talent, that had been enough.
Not long after entering the Academy, he awakened his Sharingan.
Two years after becoming a genin, he unlocked the Mangekyō Sharingan.
But without a second pair to evolve into the Eternal Mangekyō, blindness loomed.
So he sought out Orochimaru in secret.
By trading fragments of "future knowledge," he convinced the Sannin to assist him in fusing Hashirama's cells into his body.
The gamble paid off.
Using the ocular power of his Mangekyō to stabilize the process, he successfully integrated the cells. He awakened Wood Release,and permanently eliminated the risk of losing his sight.
Still, he knew what was coming.
The Fourth Great Ninja War.
As someone familiar with the future, he prepared accordingly.
He created multiple Edo Tensei scrolls and hid them across the Five Great Nations, ensuring that even in death, he could be summoned back.
And his caution proved justified.
When the war erupted, he could contend with the reanimated Uchiha Madara using only his Mangekyō.
But when the Ten-Tails emerged…
When the Ten-Tails' jinchūriki appeared,first Uchiha Obito, then Madara reborn in Six Paths form,
He finally understood the meaning of the phrase:
When gods battle, mortals scatter.
Against Six Paths Madara, he fought until his heart was pierced through.
Even now, recalling it left a bitter taste.
In the face of such overwhelming power, his efforts had seemed almost laughable.
But this,
This was not the shinobi world.
He knew because of the natural energy.
As someone who had practiced senjutsu, he was intimately familiar with its flow. In the shinobi world, natural energy was calm and steady,difficult to sense, even harder to control.
Here?
It was wildly active.
Vibrant.
Almost eager to be drawn in.
Entering Sage Mode would be far easier in this world.
Such a drastic difference in the planet's energy state could not occur naturally.
He reached for the scroll resting before him.
"It really is one of mine…"
The parchment bore his mark.
His handiwork.
His fingers brushed across it absently.
"There's one more way to confirm."
He formed hand seals.
"Summoning Technique!"
His palm slammed against the ground.
A black summoning array spread outward,but nothing appeared.
He felt nothing.
No connection.
No contracts.
"I can't sense any of them…"
His frown deepened.
"If this isn't the shinobi world… why is this scroll here?"
He unfurled it again, studying the seal at the end.
Then,
His eyes widened slightly.
The next instant, his pupils bled red.
Three tomoe spun rapidly before merging into the intricate pattern of the Mangekyō Sharingan.
"Kamui."
Space twisted.
The air warped into a spiraling vortex.
In a blink, his body vanished.
Gray.
Endless gray.
He stood upon the familiar stone platform within the Kamui dimension.
But Kamui was not originally his ability.
Both of his eyes possessed a different power:
Amenonuhonotama.
A terrifying ocular technique.
By maintaining physical contact with a target while channeling ocular power, he could copy their dōjutsu.
Only ocular abilities.
But once copied, they remained permanently. New ones did not overwrite old ones.
Both eyes could perform the copying.
The stronger the technique, the longer contact had to be maintained,but the required time accumulated over multiple encounters.
Kamui was copied from Hatake Kakashi.
Through repeated "sparring" sessions,each collision, each exchanged strike adding seconds of contact,he had slowly accumulated enough time to replicate it.
Unfortunately, he had never succeeded in copying Uchiha Obito's right-eye Kamui.
Obito's intangibility prevented sustained contact. Even a single full minute had been impossible.
"Still the same…"
He looked around the dim, cavernous space and exhaled softly.
He walked to the corner of the platform where he remembered placing one of his Edo Tensei scrolls.
Empty.
"It's gone… just as I thought."
Understanding dawned.
"Did the scroll fall out when Obito's Kamui dimension collapsed?"
If Obito's death caused the original space to destabilize, it might have ejected anything stored inside.
The Kamui dimension he stood in now was newly formed after his own resurrection.
It was only speculation.
But speculation was enough.
He was alive.
That was what mattered.
Whether he had transmigrated again…
It was hardly unprecedented.
He clenched his fist.
The sensation was wrong.
Heavy.
Restricted.
"This Edo Tensei body is a liability."
Though immortal and self-repairing, an Edo Tensei vessel could never fully unleash its potential.
Worse, he sensed additional suppression.
Perhaps the sacrifice used had been flawed.
Or perhaps this world itself imposed limits.
Either way,
He needed true resurrection.
With another swirl of distortion, he returned to the ruined storage room.
Dust hung in the air.
The wooden table and simple bed were primitive,no electricity, no modern fixtures.
Through the shattered wall, he saw villagers hauling timber, tending to the wounded, moving in weary silence.
The men wore crude topknots,chonmage hairstyles common in feudal times.
Ancient Japan.
That was his conclusion.
This had once been a storage shed in Yuriko's home. When the yōkai had smashed the main house, one wall of this room had collapsed as well. But enough remained intact to serve as temporary shelter after his "awakening."
Kagetsu stood in silence.
A new world.
A new battlefield.
And this time,
There were yōkai.