Rip.
The crisp sound of paper tearing mixed with the crackle of sparks, both of them rising together from the balcony like a small, stubborn confession.
Yami wore a gray yukata and sat on a wooden stool. In front of him was a small brazier, its orange glow steady in the winter air. He tore a diary apart page by page, then tossed each sheet into the flames.
One after another.
The inked lines curled, blackened, and collapsed into ash.
As the content of those pages vanished, Yami felt as if he were watching an older version of himself burn away with them. He could not help the faint, complicated heaviness in his chest.
The confidence he had now was exactly the kind of confidence he once lacked. Back then, it had not been a choice. It had been something he could not afford.
Minato had been his heart demon.
And this diary was the symbol of the part of him that had grown in the dark.
No one but Yami knew what was inside.
Not just notes and reminders.
Not just tricks and counters.
It was a blueprint, a set of plans so extreme and so cold that if they were ever carried out, the shinobi world would have produced something terrifying and pathetic at the same time, a stitched together monster created by knowledge, paranoia, and desperate calculation.
If the plan succeeded, it would win.
And it would also destroy the person who won.
But that future would not exist now.
The diary's pages were written in romaji and Cantonese syllables, corrected and rewritten for six straight years. Watching them vanish, Yami realized how much of that obsession had been fear disguised as preparation.
He tore the last pages.
He fed them to the fire.
When the final sheet collapsed into gray dust, he stood.
The winter moon hung high and pale, and for a moment Yami stared at it as if he were staring directly into the prison sealed inside it. As if his gaze could pass through rock and distance and stare back at the ancient thing hidden there.
He took a slow, deep breath.
Then he exhaled.
The breath left his mouth as a thin stream of white mist, sharp and clean like an arrow released from a drawn bow.
In that instant, he felt it, clearly.
Something inside him shifted.
Not a technique.
Not a sudden jump in chakra reserves.
It was the rise of his spirit, the sharpening of his will, the weight that had been sitting on his chest finally loosening.
A transformation of essence.
And with that change came something shinobi understood instinctively.
When the mind becomes clear, the body follows.
When the fear dissolves, the chakra stops trembling.
From this moment on, Yami was no longer dragging his past behind him like a shadow. He would stop living as a performance.
He would stop calculating every second as if the world were waiting to punish him.
He would finally live as Yami.
A new life, starting now.
He extinguished the brazier and went inside.
But he did not go to bed.
Instead he returned to the underground room carved with dense, careful inscriptions. The walls were layered with symbols that likely blocked sensing and prevented probing eyes from seeing through. The air down there always felt slightly heavier, like the room itself refused to leak secrets.
Yami organized what remained of his notes, locking away what still mattered and letting the rest stay dead in the ashes.
Then he began his nightly training.
He raised his hands.
His fingers snapped into seals with a speed that left faint afterimages, each movement precise like a practiced ritual. Anyone watching could have seen the truth in it, the endless repetition from childhood to now, day after day, until the body remembered even when the mind was tired.
He finished the final seal.
"Shadow Clone Technique!"
Pop, pop.
Two sharp bursts echoed in the room like balloons exploding.
White smoke bloomed on his left and right.
When it cleared, two Yamis stood beside him.
At first glance, it looked successful.
But after the first second, the flaws became obvious.
Normal shadow clones were physical. They carried an independent mind. They could move freely, think, react, and even speak with natural rhythm. They were fragile and their chakra was divided, but otherwise they were nearly identical to the original.
That was the entire reason the technique was so valuable.
It created extra hands.
Extra minds.
Extra lives for experience and learning.
These two were wrong.
Their eyes were empty.
Their faces were dull, as if the soul behind the expression had been hollowed out.
They stood like puppets waiting for strings.
And worse, their bodies flickered and warped, twisting as if the world itself could not decide whether they should be solid. They looked like a damaged screen, unstable and half broken.
Yami stared at them, brows tightening.
"This is still not it."
He circled slowly, studying them from different angles. He did not touch them yet, as if even his hand might disturb the fragile balance and make them collapse.
The experiment was simple in theory but brutal in reality.
For months he had been working toward a single goal.
Fuse normal chakra with his spacetime chakra, then use that fused chakra to cast techniques.
He had already achieved the first stage.
He could create a new composite chakra, a mixed power that contained both. That alone was a breakthrough.
And with that power, he could already cast the Clone Technique and produce an illusionary body that refused to vanish when struck.
But the Shadow Clone Technique was different.
It required more than shape and density.
It required a stable anchor for consciousness.
It required the technique to carry a complete imprint of the mind.
And here was the problem.
The clones had bodies.
But they had no mind.
Yami narrowed his eyes.
He thought through the possibilities like he was dismantling a mechanism.
If spacetime chakra was too dominant, the moment the clone became independent, the balance might collapse, forcing the technique to release. That would explain failure.
But these clones were not dissolving.
They were persisting.
Which meant something else was happening.
Another possibility was more disturbing.
Maybe his spacetime power carried a trait that could not be duplicated.
A single ownership.
A rule.
A uniqueness that only the original body could hold.
If that was true, then any attempt to create a second instance, even inside a shadow clone, would result in a malfunction. Not because the chakra could not form, but because the principle behind it refused replication.
Yami's gaze hardened.
He did not like that implication.
He dismissed one clone with a touch.
It wavered, then collapsed into smoke.
He dismissed the other.
The room returned to silence.
Yami exhaled slowly.
"So this really is a power that demands respect."
He did not feel frustrated.
Not the way he used to.
Instead he felt the strange excitement of confronting a higher rule and surviving.
Because the truth was obvious.
Even this failure was proof.
It proved that his fused chakra had reached a threshold where it could produce physical presence.
It proved he was not imagining the path.
He was simply trying to climb a wall meant for something far above ordinary shinobi.
He shifted his stance.
If shadow clones would not work with his fused chakra yet, then he would continue sharpening what had already been born from it.
He began practicing the Phantom Body Flicker again.
The technique that had turned the battlefield into a puzzle for everyone watching.
The technique that looked like an illusion, felt like a body flicker, and moved like something that should not exist.
Back in March, after receiving Orochimaru's scroll, Yami had started to understand yang nature at a deeper level. Not just as a theory, but as a principle tied to the body itself. That understanding had helped him learn basic medical ninjutsu and refine how he moved chakra through his pathways.
With that foundation, he had achieved a critical step.
He could fuse his chakra.
He could cast with it.
Even if only at the level of the simplest techniques.
That alone was incredible.
Because spacetime power was not meant to be handled.
It was the kind of force that existed like a law, not like an element.
Most bloodline abilities did not create new laws. They only borrowed a thin slice of one.
Even the pure blood Ōtsutsuki, with their terrifying techniques, often only touched the surface of what spacetime truly was.
And yet Yami, with only one evolution behind him and a spacetime reserve still barely at genin level, had managed to force a foothold.
It was not mastery.
But it was proof of direction.
And from that thin foothold, he had created a combat style that belonged only to him.
His Phantom Body Flicker was not like Shisui's.
Shisui's version leaned on powerful visual illusion and overwhelming speed.
Without the right kind of illusion talent and the right kind of body flicker talent, no one could imitate it. Not even geniuses who surpassed most Uchiha.
Yami's version was different.
His phantom bodies were built from fused chakra carrying a thread of spacetime, and that thread was what changed everything.
It made his phantoms refuse to vanish from simple impact.
It let them remain present even when struck.
And when combined with his silent body flicker, it allowed him to trade positions with those phantoms so smoothly that the enemy could not tell what was real until it was too late.
And during these months, he had discovered something even more valuable.
Spacetime chakra was hard to sense.
When he drew it out with a chakra blade, it could be seen.
When he tried forcing it into a Rasengan, that black thread could be noticed.
But when it remained inside him, or when it fused into his ordinary chakra, normal sensing techniques could not detect it at all.
He had proven it with his shadow clones.
A clone using standard sensing could not find it.
It was as if spacetime existed one step above their perception, hidden behind a higher dimensional curtain.
A natural concealment.
A built in superiority.
If someone in the shinobi world tried to explain it, they would call it mysterious, divine, impossible.
To Yami, it was simply the truth.
Spacetime was a higher rule.
And higher rules did not announce themselves to those who could not understand them.
The day he finally revealed what that black chakra truly was, the shinobi world would have its understanding rewritten.
They would realize he was not just fast.
Not just talented.
Not just clever.
He was holding something that did not belong to this era at all.
(End of Chapter)
[Check Out My P@treon For +20 Extra Chapters On All My Fanfics!!][[email protected]/euridome]
[Thank You For Your Support!]