"Yo, Kurama. It seems you are a little bit bigger than in my memory."
The name—his true name—hit him not like a key unlocking a door, but like a sledgehammer smashing through a brick wall. In the profound silence of his prison, it echoed with the force of a tectonic plate shifting.
Kurama.
How long had it been? Two hundred years? Five hundred? He'd lost count somewhere between the reign of the xxx Daimyo of some backwater land and the invention of a particularly chewy rice cake that the God of Shinobi seemed to enjoy an unreasonable amount.
Time, for an entity of near-infinite chakra, became a blurry, monotonous slideshow of human folly.
But the name… the name was a bookmark in the endless, tedious novel of his existence. The last human to speak it had been a man with eyes full of stars and a heart foolishly devoid of greed.
A man Kurama had, against his better judgment, actually liked. And what was humanity's reward for such a paragon? The usual: a knife in the back from lesser men desperate to steal a fraction of the power he'd been trusted with.
That was the day Kurama's internal "Maybe Humans Aren't Total Garbage" meter had shattered into a million pieces.
Oh, a decent one popped up every few centuries, like a single non-rotten apple in a barrel of fetid sludge, but it didn't change the essential truth: humanity's default setting was a ravenous, all-consuming greed for what he possessed.
His train of thought, a locomotive of bitterness fueled by millennia of resentment, was suddenly shunted onto a new track of pure, undiluted irritation.
The evil Uchiha. Evil Madara.
That pompous, kaleidoscope-eyed peacock with a haircut only his mother could love (and even that was debatable).
The memory of being found, hypnotized, and paraded around like a particularly murderous poodle to fight the Senju show-off still made his chakra boil.
The sheer indignity of it! He, the mighty Kurama, reduced to a glorified battery for a man whose fashion sense involved wearing armor that looked like it was stolen from a depressed lobster.
And then, the ultimate insult. After their defeat—a loss he still attributed ninety-nine percent to Madara's incompetence and one percent to the Shinobi God's annoyingly proficient Wood-Style jutsu—the victor had the audacity to point a finger and declare, with the gravity of a man stating the sky was blue, "Kyubi, you are too strong, you must be sealed."
Well, no kidding! What did he expect? A participation trophy? A "Sorry We Subjugated You And Used You As A Weapon" fruit basket? The hypocrisy was so thick you could build another Hokage monument out of it.
And that's not even getting started on the time he'd tried to make a break for it during Mito's childbirth. The sheer outrage from the humans! The scolding! As if desiring freedom from a damp, dark prison was some profound moral failing on his part.
He let out a mental sigh that would have blown the roof off the compound if it were physical. For all his hatred, it all felt… petty, sometimes. A dim candle next to the supernova of his time with the Old Man, Hagoromo.
The only being who ever looked at him and his siblings not as monsters or weapons, but as children. With that old fool, there had been purpose. There had been… conversations. And, unfortunately, prophecies. A lot of very tedious, very ominous prophecies.
One prophecy in particular, involving a certain ocular jutsu requiring the Rinnegan and the ghastly reassembly of their grotesque progenitor, the Ten-Tails, was a particularly looming headache. A world-ending, "we're-all-probably-screwed" kind of headache.
This cascade of millennia-spanning grievances and memories took less than a second. His focus snapped back to the present, to the girl on the other side of the gate.
His massive form, usually a languid sprawl of contained power, tensed. One enormous, slit-pupiled eye cracked open, focusing on the small, arrogant figure. The gaze was pure menace, a look that had made seasoned jonin lose control of their bodily functions.
"Tell me, young girl," his voice was a low rumble, like mountains grinding together, each word dripping with enough malice to poison a lake, "how did you know about my name?"
The girl, to her credit, didn't flinch. She didn't even sweat. She just… looked. And Kurama could feel her impressions washing over him through their tenuous connection.
First: a clinical assessment of his size. Check. Obviously. Moving on. Second: a basic but surprisingly adept sensory probe. He felt her mental touch recoil slightly as it brushed against the bottomless, raging ocean of his chakra. To her credit, she understood the scale immediately. Her own potent but finite reserves were a dewdrop compared to his hurricane.
He preened, just a little, internally.
That's right, he was the real deal. Not some fraction, not some half-baked bisected version. The whole, magnificent, incredibly powerful package.
She finally spoke, her tone breezy, as if discussing the weather. "Um, an old man said your name. He called you Kyubi. There are also Shukaku, Matatabi, Isobu, Son Gokū, Kokuō, Saiken, Chōmei, and Gyūki."
Kurama's internal preening screeched to a halt.
She'd just… listed them. All of them. Their true names. Not "One-Tail" or "Five-Tails." Shukaku. Kokuō. Names known only to them and the Old Man.
This wasn't a piece of forgotten lore; this was a classified database she'd just accessed and recited with the casual air of someone listing ingredients on a ramen menu.
The surprise was immediately eclipsed by a sharper, more urgent curiosity. The old man.
"In the past hundred years or so," Kurama said, his voice losing some of its predatory rumble and gaining a note of genuine, bewildered intensity, "you are the first to speak my name. And you are the only human who knows the true names of so many of us. Tell me, how does this old man look?"
The girl—Azula, he'd caught her name from Mito's vision—didn't even blink. She delivered the description with the flat efficiency of a police report. "He has some weird purple eyes, which according to my research are called the Rinnegan. And if I'm not wrong, he should be the Sage of Six Paths, right?"
Bingo.
The confirmation hit its mark. It was Hagoromo. But the how and the why were a tangled mess.
The Old Man wasn't in the habit of doing guest lectures for random children, especially not sharp-edged little things who smelled of evil and ambition. The Prophecy… it had to be connected to the Prophecy.
The one about a child who would unite the tailed beasts and bring change to the world. But everything about that prophecy, from the dusty scrolls of his memory, screamed "boy."
This was very much not a boy. This was a girl who looked at the world like it was a nail waiting for her very particular hammer.
A new, deeply irritating thought occurred to him. Was she the Child of Prophecy? Had the Old Man gotten senile in the Pure World? Misplaced his notes? The very idea was absurd. She radiated the kind of energy that suggested "making friends" involved lightning-based coercion and thinly veiled threats.
"Hmm?" Her voice cut through his internal rant. "I feel like you are thinking about something very disrespectful."
The little brat was perceptive. A thousand years of perfecting a poker face that could stare down an erupting volcano served him well. His expression—what little of it was visible—didn't change a micrometer.
"What are you talking about, Uchiha girl?" he deflected, his tone shifting back to a familiar, weary cynicism. "Since you came here, do you also want my powers?"
It was the eternal question, the core of every interaction with her species. He was the ultimate prize, the golden ticket to an unimaginable amount of power.
He could feel the desire in her, a sharp, acquisitive spike amidst her cool control. But it was… different. It wasn't the desperate, pathetic clawing of most humans.
It was more… practical. Calculated. Like a master chef considering a new, exceptionally powerful stove. There was no reverence, only assessment.
And underneath that… was something else. Something he hadn't felt directed at him in a millennium. It wasn't greed, or fear, or hate. It was… loneliness? A desire for companionship?
The impression was so foreign, so utterly bizarre, that his ancient chakra brain short-circuited for a nanosecond. Did she… did she want a pet?
Was the great Kurama, the embodiment of primordial fury, being considered for a role usually reserved for fluffy dogs and talkative parrots?
He recoiled from the thought as if it were coated in acid. No. Absolutely not. Adjust parameters.
He recalibrated his assessment. Not a pet. A… conversational partner? A confidant? The sheer, unmitigated gall of it was almost impressive.
She was lonely, and she had apparently decided that the solution to her loneliness was to befriend a bijū of incalculable power currently sealed in her friend's grandmother? Great-aunt? The family tree was irrelevant.
He pushed again, watching her carefully. "Well? The power to level mountains. To command the very elements. It's what they all want. Is that why you're really here? The sealing techniques were just an excuse to get close to the main event, weren't they?"
Azula was silent for a long moment. He could feel the conflict within her, a war between profound practicality and deeply ingrained pride. Azula was a creature who believed in power that was earned, honed, her own. Borrowed power was the tool of the weak.
And yet…
She looked at him, and in her eye, he saw a cheat code. A shortcut of glorious, ridiculous proportions.
The image was startlingly clear: not of her wielding his power to burn nations, but of her creating not one, not ten, but thousands of shadow clones.
An army of Azulas, each one learning, training, researching, experiencing. And when their time was done, they would vanish, and their collective knowledge—every scroll read, every technique mastered, every secret learned—would flood back not to her, but to Kurama.
He would, as the generator of the chakra, receive the raw, exhausting data dump. And then, in a bizarre act of symbiotic cooperation, he would have to filter it, strip out the soul-crushing fatigue, and send the clean, pure information back to her.
It was the most audacious, lazy, and brilliant plan for academic cheating she had ever thought of. She wouldn't be borrowing his power to fight; she'd be borrowing his chakra to outsource her homework. On a galactic scale.
By then, master the Rasengan? A month of shadow clones practicing in a dedicated training ground and she would have it spinning like a top.
The Chidori? A fascinating application of lightning-nature chakra; a bit flashy, but the piercing power was undeniable. She would have that down a week after the Rasengan.
And why stop there? Mastering all five basic chakra natures seemed like a perfectly reasonable hobby to pick up between meals. Sage Mode? Now that was the real prize.
The thought of tapping into the natural energy of the world, of achieving a power that was… well, natural, not stolen or inherited, sent a thrill through her. She could already picture an army of shadow clones: one group meditating at Mount Myōboku, another getting slapped around by the toads, a third in a library dissecting every scroll on fuinjutsu ever written.
She would have her own scientific research division, a think tank comprised entirely of herself. The progress would be exponential. The possibilities, endless.
But all those glorious plans hit a big, furry, nine-tailed roadblock named Kurama.
Because obtaining his power, the vast, bottomless ocean of chakra that was the Nine-Tails, wasn't a matter of grueling practice or intellectual genius. It was a matter of… feelings. Ugh.
The prerequisite for this particular power-up was a level of emotional honesty that made Azula's skin crawl. It required "acceptance," a "true connection," a meeting of souls or some other nauseatingly sentimental nonsense.
The price of admission? Letting the grumpy fluffball have a front-row seat to the messiest, most classified cinema in existence: her mind.
He'd see it all. The scorched earth of her first life. The desperate grab for a father's love that turned her into a weapon.
The betrayal, the fall, the insanity. He'd see her second life's beginning, the disorienting splash of color and noise that was the Naruto world, a story she knew by heart long before she had ever drawn breath here.
He'd know her every advantage, her every meta-knowledge trump card. He'd know about the Fourth Hokage's greatest technique, about Obito's pathetic crush, about Madara's retirement plans. He'd know everything.
And that was simply not happening. Her secrets weren't just thoughts; they were her armor, her arsenal. Handing them over felt like giving an enemy the blueprints to every trapdoor and weak point in her fortress—because what if Hagoromo had some access to Kurama's mind?
"I do want your power," she admitted, her voice cutting through the thick silence. No point in lying to a living lie detector. "Who wouldn't? It's the equivalent of a continent-sized battery for all my… projects."
The fox snorted, a puff of red chakra escaping his nostrils. "Projects," he repeated, his voice a low rumble that seemed too big for his small body. "You humans and your 'projects.' Always so eager to wield a hammer you can't even lift."
"But I know that's not what you want," she continued, ignoring his jab. "What you truly want is just… freedom. Stretching your legs. Seeing something other than these four walls. You're only willing to share your power with someone you trust. And unfortunately, my biggest secret isn't something I'm willing to share with a soul, least of all a cynical, millennia-old tailed beast with a known grudge against my current species."
There. It was out on the table. The ultimate negotiation stall: she wanted what he had, but she wasn't paying his price.
While their little heart-to-heart was happening, a third party was slowly reaching her boiling point. Mito was watching them with an expression that was a masterpiece of mixed signals.
One half of her face was etched in polite confusion, a grandmother trying to decipher the cryptic slang of teenagers. The other half was dawning with a terrifying, gut-level understanding.
She'd seen the way Azula moved, the things she had casually referenced, the utter lack of surprise at… well, everything. She, like Kurama, was piecing together that Azula's "future vision" was a little too detailed, a little too specific.
But more pressingly, she was feeling profoundly ignored. Here she was, a living monument to shinobi history, a master of the sealing arts that kept the very beast they were discussing locked away, and they were debating trust issues like she was a piece of the furniture.
She cleared her throat. It wasn't a polite, ladylike ahem. It was the sound of a volcano warning a nearby village of an imminent eruption. When both finally deigned to glance her way, she fixed them with a look that could have pinned a charging Susano'o to a wall.
"Okay, you two," she began, her voice deceptively sweet, like honey laced with ground glass. "This is not why we are here. Might I remind you who actually holds the lease on this particular chakra prison? I'm declaring this tangent over."
She turned her gaze fully to Azula, who felt the weight of generations of Uzumaki willpower settle on her shoulders. "It seems increasingly clear that your knowledge extends far beyond simple yochi (future sight). The ground between us is… shaky, but level. So. Now that we've established that you indeed know the future, let's talk about it."
She didn't need to specify what she wanted to know. The questions hung in the air between them, charged with a mother's fear. What happened to her grandchildren? To her legacy? To the village she helped build?
Azula took a breath. How do you condense decades of tragedy, war, and convoluted villain plots into a coffee chat?
"The story," she said, "is very, very complicated. Its roots tangle back to a time before the Sage of Six Paths."
Azula saw her eyebrow twitch. Right. Maybe skip the editorializing.
"But to simplify a universe's worth of chaos," she offered, "the future gets… messy. More so than the Warring States Period, but in a brighter, more explosively colorful way. For instance, Nawaki…"
She paused, watching Mito. The woman walked forward without fear of being struck. "He… doesn't make it past his genin years. A very stupid, very preventable tragedy involving two paper bombs and a trap so obvious a blind badger could have spotted it."
The temperature in the room dropped several degrees. Azula pressed on, a masochistic part of her wanting to get it all over with. "Tsunade… the loss breaks her. Then she loses the love of her life, Dan, in another spectacular display of Konoha's mission-assignment incompetence."
"She leaves the village for decades, drowning her sorrows in sake and debt. She only returns after the Third Hokage's death to take up the hat herself, becoming the Fifth Hokage only for the village to be destroyed under her."
Azula could feel the pressure building around Mito. Not chakra, not yet. It was the sheer, focused intensity of her emotion, a pressure that threatened to crack the stone floor. She was definitely, as the Earth Kingdom peasants would say, "poking the bear-lion." Or in this case, the bear-lioness.
"And the one who flattens Konoha?" she continued, her tone conversational, as if discussing the weather. "Oh, he's a remnant of the Uzumaki clan, would you believe it? A boy from the Land of Rain."
"His civilian parents were killed by Konoha ninja who strayed into his home during the war. He somehow managed to forgive the village thanks to his sensei, but then Konoha's own resident villain, Danzō Shimura, schemed to have his best friend killed."
"That little push was all it took. Oh, and minor detail: the boy also happened to be the rightful owner of the legendary Rinnegan. So when he decided to express his grief, he did so by Shinra Tensei-ing Konoha, literally wiping the village off the map."
Azula swore she wasn't trying to be flippant. This was just… the facts. As she knew them.
But from the way Mito's knuckles were white, and the way a tiny, almost invisible crack appeared in the mental space, she gathered Mito's "bearing capacity" for world-shattering news was perhaps not as robust as one might hope for a former Jinchuriki.
If Mito could read Azula's thoughts right now, she would probably be giving her a firsthand, intimate experience of the Senju clan's famous "Fist of Love" technique.
The air grew heavy, saturated with a silent, maternal rage. How could she not be furious? Her sunny, optimistic granddaughter becomes a bitter, nomadic gambler? Her bright-eyed grandson is blown up on a beginner's mission? And her entire clan is wiped out, only for a surviving orphan to be driven to destroy the very village she helped create? It was a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, with worse fashion sense.
To her credit, Mito Uzumaki did not explode. She took a long, slow, measured breath. The older one gets, the easier it is to control one's emotions. And Mito was very, very old, and very, very good at control.
"Tell me," she said, her voice dangerously level. "What exactly happened that made Tsunade so… disappointed? What broke her faith so completely that she would abandon her home?"
Even as she asked, she saw a flicker in Azula's eyes. The girl was already guessing—the Uchiha pride of not liking being commanded.
Azula understood her drive. Anyone who gets a peek at a loved one's future suffering would want to arm themselves with knowledge to prevent it. It was a fundamentally understandable, deeply human impulse.
But underpinning it was that faint, unmistakable Uzumaki trait: a spark of self-righteousness. The unshakable belief that knowing meant they could fix it. It was the same fire Azula saw in Naruto, in Karin, in Nagato. It was both their greatest strength and their most glaring weakness.
"To be perfectly honest," she said, choosing her words with the care of a bomb disposal expert, "this knowledge is my greatest strategic advantage. I can't afford to change the game board too much, not yet. The butterfly effect could create a hurricane that washes away the very outcomes I need to leverage. But…"
She glanced around at Mito. "…considering you're likely to be my new fuinjutsu sensei, and also considering you could probably unseal Kurama and blame it on me if I annoy you too much, I'll be more direct."
"In the future, it's not just the Uzumaki who get annihilated. The Uchiha are also completely exterminated. Every man, woman, and child. Wiped from the face of the earth, with no more than two to three survivors left to angst about it."
"And for the brutal, unvarnished truth? All of these tragedies… they have the fingerprints of Konoha's highest leadership all over them."
Mito was disappointed. She'd just been singing the praises of Hiruzen Sarutobi, Tobirama's chosen successor, confident he'd be a great Hokage. Now Azula was telling her he presided over a reign that would see two of the village's founding clans obliterated.
From Azula's point of view, even in the most generous, optimistic, sunshine-and-rainbows interpretation of events, Hiruzen didn't know.
But even so, he was a very incompetent Hokage. He was just… spectacularly, catastrophically negligent.
He allowed a human cockroach like Danzō Shimura to fester in the roots of the village, creating a black-ops organization that made a mockery of Hokage authority.
He turned a blind eye to the scheming, the assassinations, the kidnapping of children for experiments, the destabilization of foreign nations… all because it was "for the good of the village."
He allowed the situation with the Uchiha to fester and rot until the only solution a monster like Danzō could see was wholesale slaughter.
So even if Hiruzen's own hands weren't dripping with blood, they were tied by the strings of the puppets he refused to cut down.
And let's not even get started on his two esteemed advisors, Homura and Koharu, who had the collective backbone of a wet paper bag and an insatiable thirst for clinging to their sliver of power.
Mito was utterly speechless. Her face was a pale mask of disbelief. Her mind was racing, trying to square the bright young shinobi she knew with the failed leader Azula was describing.
But how? her expression screamed. The Uchiha, annihilated? In Konoha?
Think about it—if she were alive at that time, she would have sensed it! Not only her, but any good sensory ninja, even when not actively trying, would have felt the flare of so many powerful chakra signatures being snuffed out at once! Unless…
Unless they were deemed to have committed a great crime. But even then… the children.
As if seeing her doubt, Azula clarified. "When it was done, not a single soul in Konoha knew it was happening. It was a perfectly silent, perfectly executed coup. The Anbu who were constantly monitoring the Uchiha compound—because of the very rumors of rebellion that Danzō himself helped foster—were 'unexpectedly' recalled for a 'routine briefing' on the other side of the village.
"The village's famed sensory barrier was mysteriously, temporarily blind to that one sector. And then, a single person—a Uchiha himself, no less—went through the entire clan, from the strongest jonin to the youngest newborn, and ended them all."
"It wasn't until the next morning that the news broke: the Uchiha clan had been massacred by Uchiha Itachi, a rogue ninja who had awakened the Mangekyō Sharingan and gone mad with power."
The silence that followed was absolute. Even Kurama opened his eyes wide, looking… thoughtful.
The Senju clan dissolves itself into nothing, The Uchiha are butchered by one of their own. The Uzumaki were also slaughtered. All the descendants of the Sage… pitted against one another. The old man creates this world hoping for peace, and this is the harvest his legacy reaps. How utterly… predictable.
(END OF THE CHAPTER)
I'm on my way to the university which is a major chapter of my life, I may not be able to update in the next two days because I need to adapt to the situation, don't forget to vote, wish me luck and have a nice day.
Oh and, there's an advanced chapter on my Patreon.
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