In the dead of winter, the world was silent.
Throughout the village of Konoha, aside from the shinobi on night duty, there was almost no one on the streets at all.
Outside the village, in the forest, thick white snow had buried almost every trace of life. A cold wind hissed through the trees, shaking loose the snow on their branches. Flakes drifted down and gathered on the ground in tiny, lumpy drifts.
"Damn, it's cold… Still, that's not a bad thing. If this were midsummer, I wouldn't dare come into the Forest of Death."
A boy of twelve or thirteen moved through the trees, wrapped in white from head to toe, his figure ghostlike against the snow.
The Forest of Death was one of Konoha's training grounds. Not only were there plenty of ferocious beasts captured by shinobi and dumped here, the forest itself was full of monitoring devices. Even though there was no Chunin Exam going on right now and most of the cameras were powered down, that didn't mean no one could catch him on a random feed.
But in winter, under a heavy blanket of snow, that stopped being a problem. The falling snow naturally covered the lenses of every camera it landed on.
Strictly speaking, there wasn't anything too taboo about the way this boy trained. Still, he had no doubt about how sharp shinobi could be at noticing tiny details. If he wanted fewer eyes on him later—and to keep some trump cards—then winter was the best time to act.
A thunderous roar shattered the quiet.
The ground shook as something forced its way out of a hollow in a tree. A massive bear emerged, its four paws alone lifting it nearly three meters off the ground.
Beasts like this were the result of prolonged exposure to chakra. They were halfway between normal animals and full-fledged ninja beasts—brutal creatures that lacked the near-human intelligence and refined chakra control of true ninken, but could still use chakra crudely to strengthen their bodies. Their raw combat power far surpassed ordinary animals.
Especially in the case of already-powerful predators like lions, tigers, bears, and boars. Their base strength was nothing to scoff at, and once chakra-enhanced, they became walking calamities. In a world without chakra or any supernatural element—just cold weapons and flesh—this one bear alone could wipe out several villages or even destroy a small town.
"Damn. As expected of the 'Naruto world'—even the wildlife doesn't fully hibernate."
The boy's eyes lit up with interest as he looked up at the beast. He casually pulled a kunai from his pocket.
Sensing a threat from the small figure in white, the bear rumbled twice in its throat and rose up out of the snow.
On all fours, it was already close to three meters tall. When it reared up on its hind legs, the hulking brute towered a full six or seven meters into the air, almost as tall as a three-story building.
Ordinary people wouldn't stand a chance against something like this without firearms. Yet the boy in front of it showed no sign of panic. He simply tilted his chin up and met the beast's gaze head-on.
In that instant, his eyes turned blood-red. A single, tiny tomoe spun into existence on each pupil.
The bear made eye contact with those scarlet eyes and its whole body jolted. For a moment, its mind went blank.
The boy didn't waste that opening.
The kunai in his hand flashed through the air, whistling as it buried itself cleanly in the beast's throat, slicing right through its trachea.
"Ghu–rrr—"
The sharp pain snapped the bear back to itself. A strangled, broken roar tore out of its ruined throat as it threw its massive body at the boy in a last-ditch charge.
By then, however, the boy had no intention of fighting it head-on.
A severed windpipe was a death sentence even for this kind of chakra-mutated beast. It would take a few minutes to finally die, and until then its fighting ability would barely drop at all. He had no interest in wrestling a dying monster in its death throes.
In terms of pure strength and toughness, an average Chunin might not match this thing. To make matters worse, a dying beast often hit the hardest in that brief flare of borrowed life.
And a real shinobi avoided pointless fights whenever possible.
His figure flickered. With a light tap of his toes and the aid of chakra, he sprang up into a nearby tree in an instant, watching calmly from above as the bear slammed into the trunk in a frenzy. The tree shook violently, top-heavy with snow, and toppled. The boy simply leapt again, landing lightly on another tree.
He kited the bear around like this for a few minutes.
Eventually the giant beast crashed to the ground with a heavy thud, its massive frame heaving like a bellows. The rough, ragged sound of its breathing grew weaker and weaker… until it finally faded away completely.
The boy waited a moment longer, balanced on his branch. Only when he confirmed the bear was truly dead did he let a faint smile curl his lips. He stretched out a hand.
"Come here."
The word had barely left his mouth when pinpricks of light—too faint for a normal person to see—rose from the bear's corpse, gathering together above it. They merged into a glowing orb that shot through the air and landed neatly in his palm.
The orb wasn't large, about the size of a rubber ball. Inside the light, the bear's head twisted and contorted, jaws opening in a perpetual silent roar.
The boy slapped the glowing sphere lightly against his own chest and closed his eyes, feeling the roaring spirit within and the power it brought with it. A helpless sigh escaped him.
"Barely any improvement at all. Just a tiny bump to my strength and stamina… and my chakra went up by, what, a sliver?"
"The 'quality' of this spirit is way too low. Other than burning it as fuel to grow my chakra, it's practically useless."
Despite his complaining, the boy tugged the bear's spirit-ball back out of his chest again. He studied it for a couple of seconds, then opened his mouth and bit down.
The light shook violently, sending out chaotic waves of mental energy, like a dragged-out, soundless scream. The boy ignored the psychic noise completely. Two, three bites, and the entire orb of soul-light was gone.
A gentle warmth spread out from his stomach. He clenched his fist, feeling that tiny bit of new chakra flowing into his system.
"The Soul Ingestion Method really is wasteful… That bear's chakra wasn't much less than mine, but when you convert it, it only gives me maybe one or two hundredth of my own chakra."
"At this rate, who knows when 'chakra' is ever going to turn into 'chakra-tons'…"
Along with the little bump to his chakra, the bear's spirit also left behind a thin residue of hatred clinging to his mind. The negative emotion seeped in, only to be dragged under as the tomoe spun in his eyes. The foreign malice was ground away bit by bit and turned into nourishment, deepening the foundation of his Sharingan.
Of course, the hatred of a mere beast wasn't much in either quantity or quality. For his Sharingan, this tiny trickle of chill emotion was barely even a sip of water on a burning coal.
Back then, it was only because he'd used the Soul Ingestion Method over and over that the resentment gnawing at his spirit finally reached a critical point. That was what had shocked his eyes open into one-tomoe Sharingan.
And if he wanted that Sharingan to evolve further, he'd need a lot more hatred than this.
Once he was done dealing with the bear's soul, the boy looked down at the massive corpse beneath him. After thinking for a moment, he hopped down, drew a kunai, and was just about to slice off two huge bear paws when a voice sounded behind him.
"Uchiha Feiyu, you're sneaking into the Forest of Death to poach again."
The boy—Uchiha Feiyu—turned his head and saw a kid of eight or nine standing on a nearby branch, white hair ruffled by the wind and an exasperated look on his face.
"You know the animals in the Forest of Death were all captured by other shinobi at great effort, right? Some are used for training, some are meant to be developed into ninken or kikaichu hosts. They're not here for you to kill for fun."
Feiyu rolled his eyes and snorted.
"Of all people, you, Hatake Kakashi, don't get to say that to me. The damage you've done to this place during your training isn't any less than mine."
Kakashi shrugged, not refuting him. In truth, the boy who trained here regularly had never cared much about that. He'd only been looking for an excuse to scold Feiyu.
He jumped lightly down from the tree and walked over to the bear, giving its huge body a once-over.
"Even a regular genin squad would have a hard time dealing with something like this… and you took it down alone. In terms of strength, you're not much worse than a Chunin already, Feiyu."
"I really don't get it. With that kind of power, why are you still in the Academy? Why not just graduate early and become a full-fledged shinobi?"
Feiyu rolled his eyes again, his tone turning sour.
"Forget 'graduating early'—I don't even want to be a shinobi. I got dragged into this mess."
"Life was just fine before. Then I awakened these eyes, and suddenly I was hauled off and told I had to join the Uchiha clan, had to go to the Academy, had to become a shinobi."
"My life goal is to work less, get more, and profit without lifting a finger—not go to war and kill people for a living."
Kakashi was momentarily speechless.
This guy didn't think like a shinobi at all. His worldview was basically that of an ordinary villager.
With their values that far apart, anything Kakashi said was destined to be like a chicken talking to a duck.
He sighed helplessly.
"I really don't get it… How does someone like you end up with such talent? From what I've heard, none of your ancestors awakened the Sharingan. And you've only got one-quarter Uchiha blood besides. Awakened Sharingan with that kind of blood ratio is basically impossible…"
Feiyu absently rubbed his eye socket, mind drifting back to the day he'd first awakened the Sharingan.
That had also been the day he'd crossed into this world.
When he first arrived in Konoha, his "cheat" had awakened in his mind—a black book titled Compendium of Demonic Legacies.
Despite the grand name, Feiyu had only ever managed to obtain one thing from it: a power from the world of The Outcast, one of the Eight Miraculous Arts—Juling Qianjiang, the Soul Marshal.
The art's ability was to manipulate other people's souls, even devour them directly to increase one's own cultivation. For something like that, being listed among "demonic legacies" was hardly out of place.
Relying on the Soul Marshal, Feiyu devoured soul after soul from animals, and somewhere along the way, without noticing, his eyes had opened into single-tomoe Sharingan.
At the time, he'd had no mirror and never saw the change himself. He hadn't even realized anything had happened.
He hadn't taken any precautions to hide it, either, so the news of his Sharingan awakening leaked out. That was what got him dragged into the Uchiha clan in the end.
After all, he hadn't been a member of the clan at the start. He didn't even know his grandfather's generation carried Uchiha blood. When he first felt something was off with his eyes, his thoughts never once went to the Sharingan.
The result was that a no-name civilian suddenly made a splash in the Hidden Leaf, and the Uchiha clan wasted no time in snatching him up and slapping their surname on him.
In Konoha, most of the bloodline clans practiced internal marriages. But there were a few exceptions—members who never became shinobi and married outside the clan. Even then, if a descendant awakened the clan's kekkei genkai, they were required to return to the bloodline clan.
Cases like that, though, were incredibly rare.
The ones who married outsiders were almost always those with extremely diluted blood and little strength, sometimes not even shinobi. Another generation of that, and the blood weakened even more.
For someone like Uchiha Feiyu, with only one-quarter Uchiha blood and yet successfully awakening the Sharingan, there was no precedent in the clan for a hundred years. There was no way they were going to leave him outside.
What Feiyu himself thought about being dragged in… was completely irrelevant.
"It's not like I can help it," he muttered. "My bloodline awakened all on its own. If not for that, I wouldn't have to come to the Forest of Death to 'train my courage' every day…"
"Train your courage? Most Academy students who walked into the Forest of Death would end up dying here, not 'training' anything."
"If you want to sneak in and train, just say you're training. Why hide behind that excuse?"
Kakashi snorted, full of disdain.
As far as he was concerned, this weird Uchiha might be completely out of sync with shinobi values—worse suited to the job than even that "rare beast" Might Guy—but in terms of raw ability, Feiyu wasn't lacking in the slightest.
"Training his courage," huh. What an excuse.
Back in the Academy, he'd joined early and bulldozed through the ranks, and yet the one person he couldn't reliably beat had been this very boy.
Of course, while the two had entered the Academy around the same time, there was a big age gap between them. Feiyu had never wanted to be a shinobi; he'd only joined the Uchiha and the Academy after awakening his Sharingan.
So among the horde of overachievers who'd entered the Academy early, Feiyu, the ten-year-old latecomer, was a true outlier.
None of the teachers or students had ever treated Kakashi's close fights with Feiyu as some kind of stain on his legend. After all, Kakashi had been only five at the time, and Feiyu was already ten.
But as someone who'd sparred with Feiyu over and over, Kakashi knew the truth all too well.
Yes, Feiyu was older, but Kakashi had been training under his father's guidance for two full years. Feiyu, on the other hand, had basically started from zero. The difference in their starting conditions wasn't nearly as big as it looked.
Uchiha Feiyu was a genius not much inferior to himself.
In Kakashi's eyes, all of Feiyu's slacking and half-hearted attitude was nothing more than an act. A guy who came to the Forest of Death regularly to "mess around" was clearly just as much of a grind freak as he was.
"Sure, sure. Whatever you say."
Feiyu brushed him off with a couple of lazy replies, enough to make a vein pop on Kakashi's forehead.
"You—! If you really want to train, why waste the Forest of Death's animals? Let me be your opponent instead!"
Feiyu pulled a face like this was all a huge hassle.
"Kakashi, you chased me all the way out here just to say that, didn't you?"
"Of course. I've been wanting a rematch with you for ages. I'm a lot stronger than I was back in the Academy."
"Oh, I've heard. The youngest genin in the village's history, and the youngest Chunin too… You really have the nerve to pick a fight with a humble Academy student like me?"
Kakashi went silent, expression flat.
Since his graduation, he'd run into Feiyu plenty of times, and every time he so much as hinted at a challenge, the older boy had deflected with something or other. No matter what, he just refused to fight.
This time, though, Feiyu's tone suddenly shifted.
"That said… if you're willing to introduce me to your father, I wouldn't mind going a few rounds with you."
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