Asahi didn't sleep that night. He couldn't.
Sleep was a luxury for those whose world hadn't disintegrated before their eyes.
What had happened in the park kept looping endlessly in his head, every detail etched in painful, high-definition clarity.
Kushina's laughter — not that of a heroic ghost, but of an exasperated mother dealing with a mischievous child. Minato's easy smile — not that of a Hokage immortalized in stone, but of a man alive and present. The old lady's casual wave to Arashi, the Jinchūriki... a Jinchūriki treated like a local troublemaker, not a demon, not the scapegoat of an entire village.
He'd returned to the orphanage in a state of catatonic stupor.
He ignored the onigiri Emi-san offered — their fragrance of rice and sesame now felt like part of a grand farce, a bribe meant to keep him docile.
He ignored Kenji's loud retelling of how he'd almost fallen into the park fountain.
He sat in his usual corner, staring at the grainy wooden wall, trying to recalculate the years of a life.
'The script is broken,' he told himself for the hundredth time, rubbing his temples. 'Everything I know is a lie.'
No. He stopped.
'Not everything. My parents are still dead. That's a fucking inescapable reality. But I never met them. What if I had?' That was the real problem.
In the canon he remembered, the death of Minato and Kushina was the world's axis — the founding event of the plot. A heroic sacrifice that defined a generation, that set Naruto's destiny in motion, that justified Hiruzen's actions and Danzō's paranoia.
But here… here there had been no sacrifice. Only a 'natural disaster' that took a small part of the population — barely a few dozen lives compared to the anime.
'A natural disaster,' he thought bitterly, bile rising in his throat. 'How convenient. A disaster that conveniently killed a handful of civilians — including the people who conceived me — yet left the village's elite untouched. Left the Hokage and his Jinchūriki wife perfectly fine.'
The resignation and envy he'd felt at the park curdled, rotted, and turned into a cold, dark suspicion.
This wasn't a happy alternate universe. This was a cover-up. A well-constructed lie.
'Did the Kyuubi attack actually happen, but was it buried? Or did something else kill my parents — something the village decided to sweep under the rug?'
'In canon, Naruto was an outcast for something he couldn't control. In this world... I'm the outcast for something I can't even understand. Shit.'
The revelation brought no peace.
If his knowledge was useless, he was blind.
If the Hokage wasn't a tragic hero but just a happy family man… then who could be trusted? If the Jinchūriki was loved… whom did people fear? What was the mechanism of social control if not fear of the inner demon?
'If the world has no predictable villain… then anyone could be one.' The kindly Sandaime. Sweet Emi-san. Cheerful Yondaime. Anyone.
The enemy wasn't a shadowy organization in black cloaks with red clouds anymore — the enemy could be anyone.
That night, the storage shed wasn't a training ground.
Reality had dissolved into the fog of a fanfic.
The cold metal of the old pull-up bar felt real beneath his palms. The smell of rust and dust was real.
'Pain is real,' he thought, hanging from the bar. 'Effort is real.'
His motivation had fundamentally changed.
He no longer trained to fight a masked Obito or a pale Orochimaru. Those villains might not even exist — or worse, they might be allies in this upside-down world.
He trained because it was the only thing that still made sense in this strange, malleable reality.
'If I can't predict the threat, I have to be able to escape it.' Offensive power was useless if you didn't know whom to attack. Evasion, however, was universal.
Asahi needed to max out his evasion stats — like a damn Pokémon.
His focus shifted from brute strength to agility. To movement. To absolute body control. He climbed onto the highest wooden beam of the shed, roughly three meters off the ground.
One wrong move and it'd be a very real fall onto hard-packed dirt and scattered tools. He stood upright. The beam wasn't wider than his foot and was coated in a thin layer of dust and splinters.
'Balance,' he whispered. The air up here was colder, stiller. 'Proprioception. The brain knowing where the body is in space.' He remembered reading that in his previous life. Ninjas weren't bodybuilders — they were parkour artists with magic.
He closed his eyes, feeling the subtle shifts in his weight, the tiny muscles in his ankles and core (thank you, planks!) firing in small spasms to keep him upright.
Silence. Only his steady breathing.
'I have to be fluid. Like water,' he thought, recalling a hazy reference. 'Or like the Catbus from Totoro. Yeah, probably more like the Catbus. Weird and impossible to catch.'
He wobbled sharply to the left.
His eyes snapped open, panic flooding through him as his arms flailed for balance that wasn't there.
He almost fell.
He crouched down, gripping the beam with both hands, heart pounding in his throat.
The fear of a three-meter fall was a sharp reminder of his fragility.
A broken ankle here would mean the end of his training — the end of his only advantage.
'Maybe closing my eyes was too much for the first try.'
For an hour, he practiced simply walking back and forth across the beam. Slowly. Heel to toe. Feeling the wood creak beneath his weight.
Then he practiced turning 180 degrees, a move that demanded precision. Then crouching and standing up without losing balance. Walking backwards almost sent him falling again.
It was frustrating. His adult mind knew the physics, but his body lacked the muscle memory.
When he finally came down, his legs trembled with a different kind of fatigue — not the burn of squats, but the deep, electric exhaustion of a taxed nervous system.
He was drained, yet for the first time since the park, his mind was quiet.
The next day brought the dull routine of daily life.
It was Asahi's turn to sweep the entryway and front steps — a chore he hated. It made him visible. Exposed. Inefficient.
'I'm sweeping leaves in a village full of Wind users. This is peak useless labor. One D-Rank technique could clean this in seconds.'
As he swept, he could hear the orphanage waking behind him — Emi-san in the kitchen, the clatter of pots and pans, Kenji shouting about a missing shoe.
He dragged the broom in short, angry strokes, the straw bristles rasping against the stone, lost in thought — until a different sound broke through.
'Toc'.
'Toc'.
'Toc'.
A rhythmic, heavy sound. Wood striking wood.
Not the gait of a civilian.
Asahi looked up — and his blood froze.
An old man stood in the doorway, watching him.
Not the grandfatherly Sandaime. Not a civilian. A man in a dark, militaristic uniform. His expression impassive and sharp. His right arm bandaged and held in place. A cane in his hand.
Danzō Shimura.
Asahi froze mid-sweep. Every survival instinct he'd honed over the years screamed at once.
'ROOT! THE BUTCHER! THE KING OF SHADOWS! THE MAN WHO'D STEAL A BABY'S EYES "FOR THE GOOD OF THE VILLAGE"! HOLY SHIT IT'S THE TRAITOR!'
This was the man behind the Uchiha Massacre. The thief of Shisui's eye. The monster in the dark who embodied everything wrong with the shinobi system.
He wanted to run. Hide. Dissolve into the ground.
This was it. The forced recruitment.
The end of his life as he knew it. His freedom.
Emi-san rushed out from the kitchen, drying her hands on her apron. She went pale at the sight of the visitor, a genuine spasm of fear flickering across her face before she masked it with stiff professionalism.
She composed herself, bowing deeply.
"Danzō-sama! What… what an unexpected visit. We weren't expecting you today."
Asahi watched, paralyzed.
Emi-san was nervous, yes — but it was the nervousness of someone before a strict and feared auditor, not the terror of someone facing an executioner. A distinction his mind barely registered.
"My visits do not need to be expected, Emi-san," Danzō's voice was exactly as Asahi had imagined — low, cold, humorless. Like stones grinding together. "I'm here for the quarterly fund inspection. The next generation is Konoha's pillar, and that pillar must not be eroded by mismanagement."
'There it is,' Asahi thought, trembling. 'The inspection. A pretext. He's here to inspect the "assets". He'll notice me. My focus. My energy. He'll see I'm not normal.'
He tried to shrink into nothingness.
He kept sweeping, jerky and awkward, hoping to blend into the dust. 'Don't look at me. I'm no ninja. Just a weak civilian. Trash. Unfit for ROOT. Keep walking.'
Danzō began walking down the hallway.
'Toc'.
'Toc'.
'Toc'.
The sound stopped — right beside him.
Asahi squeezed his eyes shut.
'Shit.'
He could feel the man's shadow looming over him. He could smell antiseptic… and old tea? A strange scent — clean, yet stale.
The silence stretched for what felt like five minutes. Asahi could feel Danzō's single visible eye analyzing him, dissecting him.
He could almost hear a Metal Gear Solid progress bar filling up:
[Analyzing... 10%... 50%... 100%]
'He's going to say it. "This one has potential." "Take him." "Prepare the seal." "Erase his personality."'
Finally, Danzō spoke.
"You sweep poorly."
Asahi blinked. "…What?"
"Your posture is terrible," Danzō repeated, utterly serious. "You're using only your arms and lower back. Inefficient. You're wasting energy and will injure your lumbar spine before you're thirty."
Asahi just stared. 'Is he… is he critiquing my sweeping form?'
Danzō sighed — a sound like dry leaves being crushed. Not malicious, just the impatient disappointment of an elder witnessing youth's blatant incompetence.
"Use your legs. Bend your knees. Rotate from your core," he instructed, tapping the floor lightly with his cane to set a rhythm. "Power comes from the ground, boy. Even in a mundane task like this. A half-hearted job is the seed of a nation's downfall. If you can't sweep a floor properly, how do you expect to defend this village?"
Asahi could only nod dumbly.
"Continue," Danzō ordered. And with one last 'Toc'. of his cane, he walked off toward Emi-san's office — presumably to terrify her with accounting ledgers.
Asahi stood alone in the hallway, broom in hand, his heart pounding with such profound confusion that he felt he might lose his mind.
The darkest, most dangerous man in Konoha's history — the shadow villain behind countless tragedies, the village's Darth Vader — hadn't kidnapped him, threatened him, or tried to brainwash him.
He'd given him a free ergonomics and workplace safety lecture… with a dash of nationalist philosophy.
'The script isn't just broken,' Asahi thought, staring at the broom as if it were an alien relic. 'The writer must be drunk. And probably high too, to come up with this kind of shit.'
He bent his knees. Rotated from the core. And kept sweeping.