A small figure sprinted wildly down the silent street.
An inexplicable dread had wrapped itself around Sasuke's heart, tightening with every step, driving him toward home on pure instinct. But the deeper he ran into the clan district, the stranger it felt. The night was too still, too empty, too wrong.
Then he saw it.
Scattered kunai lay across the ground. Dark red blood was splashed over the wall in ugly streaks. And not far away, a body lay collapsed on the street, motionless forever.
"Dad... Mom?"
Fear hit him like a bucket of ice water. His knees nearly gave out beneath him, but he clenched his teeth and forced himself forward, stumbling into a run.
As he rounded the corner, a figure stepped into his path.
Short black hair. Familiar clan clothes. The Uchiha fan emblazoned on his back. Sasuke's eyes widened, and hope surged through him so suddenly it almost hurt.
"Brother!"
He rushed toward him as if he had just found the only safe place left in the world. "Everyone... what happened to everyone? What happened...?"
The words died in his throat.
He saw Itachi's eyes.
They were not the gentle black eyes he knew, not the calm gaze that had always rested on him with quiet warmth. They were blood-red now, marked by cold, sinister patterns like spinning blades.
And then Sasuke saw the blood dripping from the kunai in his brother's hand.
"Foolish little brother."
Itachi's voice was colder than the night wind.
Before Sasuke could even understand what he was seeing, crimson flooded his vision. The world around him twisted violently, and in the next instant he found himself bound to an enormous cross in a dark, distorted realm that did not belong to reality.
Tsukuyomi.
In that world, time stretched without end.
And there, again and again, Sasuke was forced to watch from the clearest, cruelest angle possible as his beloved older brother raised that same kunai and murdered their parents.
Once. Twice. Again. Again.
Each repetition drove the blade deeper. The pain, the terror, the helpless despair—everything seeped into his bones until it felt as though his entire mind was being flayed open.
"Why... Brother... why did you do this?!" Sasuke screamed, his mind hanging on the brink of collapse.
Itachi stood before him like a demon made flesh, expressionless, untouchable, merciless.
"To measure my worth," he said flatly. "A foolish younger brother like you isn't even worth killing."
"If you want to kill me, then resent me. Hate me. Live in misery. Crawl forward however you have to. Run. Survive. And one day, come before me again when you possess eyes like mine."
Back in the real world, within the blood-soaked Uchiha district, Sasuke's eyes rolled back. His body toppled backward and hit the ground hard, his consciousness shattered beneath overwhelming fear and mental torment.
Itachi looked down at his younger brother's pale face, still wet with tears.
Behind those ice-cold scarlet eyes, a single tear finally slipped down his cheek.
He stood there for one last moment, fixing Sasuke's face in his memory. Then he turned away without hesitation and vanished into the night.
Nearby, Danzo stood watching the Uchiha compound with narrowed eyes.
At last, his teacher's long-held wish had been fulfilled. More than that, when dawn came, there would be a harvest waiting for him—an entire trove of Sharingan that could be taken and replaced at will.
At that moment, a figure appeared behind him soundlessly.
"Konoha will guarantee Sasuke's absolute safety," Itachi said. "If not, I won't mind selling every secret the village has to its enemies."
It was not a plea. It was a warning, naked and direct.
Danzo's gaze turned cold for an instant, but he quickly smoothed it over.
Just a fool who had been used and still believed himself important, he thought.
***
The Hokage's office.
The air inside was so heavy it felt as though water might drip from it.
The Third Hokage, Hiruzen Sarutobi, looked at the blood-soaked boy standing before him. Itachi's eyes were frighteningly calm, calm enough to unsettle even a man who had seen the darkness of the shinobi world for decades.
Hiruzen took a long drag on his pipe, held the smoke in his lungs, then let it out in a slow, exhausted sigh.
"You have my gratitude, Itachi... and my apologies."
"I will join the Akatsuki and watch them from the inside," Itachi said. "Sasuke's future is in your hands."
Hiruzen closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, he gave a heavy nod. "I promise you in the Hokage's name."
Itachi inclined his head slightly. In the next instant, his body dissolved into a whirl of crows, their black wings scattering through the office before vanishing into nothing.
After he was gone, only the ember at the tip of Hiruzen's pipe remained, brightening and dimming in the silence. Its unsteady light revealed an expression so complicated it was difficult to name.
Shock. Regret. Weariness. And beneath all of it, something colder.
A chill he could not shake.
That child had slaughtered his own clan with his own hands. He had carved endless hatred into the heart of his only younger brother and turned that hatred into fuel for the boy's future growth. He had then accepted the name of traitor and prepared to infiltrate the most dangerous organization on the continent.
And all of it had been done beneath a single banner—protecting the village.
Was this not, in its own terrible way, the ultimate expression of the Will of Fire?
Yet it was so obsessive, so extreme, so cruel that even Hiruzen Sarutobi—the man who had preached the Will of Fire for half a lifetime—felt his heart tighten with fear.
He thought of the Uchiha clan, of the fire that had always burned too hot in their blood. Passion. Obsession. Intensity. Once stirred, those traits did not fade; they only deepened until they consumed everything around them.
"The Uchiha... are they truly a cursed clan?" Hiruzen murmured to himself.
His voice carried lingering fear and a weariness that seemed to come from the bones.
"I thought Itachi was the genius who could rise above the limits of his blood. But in the end, not only did he fail to transcend them... he pushed every Uchiha trait to its absolute extreme."
"This kind of obsession... this nearly pathological fixation... is even stronger in him than in the rest of his people."
For the first time, the Third Hokage was forced to admit a truth he would never speak aloud in public.
Even he was afraid of a Will of Fire that burned like this.
***
Within a mysterious space that overlapped reality while remaining utterly isolated from it, someone had been leisurely watching the entire tragedy unfold.
Yin An—a soul that did not belong to this world—sat cross-legged as though lounging on an invisible sofa, his chin propped against one hand as the slaughter in the Uchiha district played out before him like a private show.
He watched Itachi kill his parents. He watched Sasuke collapse unconscious. He watched that single tear slide silently down Itachi's face.
A playful smile curved at the corner of Yin An's lips.
"What a pack of lunatics," he muttered, his voice echoing through the empty space. "Paranoid, insane, and so self-righteous they can even romanticize their own self-sacrifice... But that just makes them more interesting."
He stretched lazily, but there was a calculating gleam in his eyes.
"The script is ready. The emotions are in place. As the director, it is about time I started revising everyone's understanding of the story so this performance better serves my financial goals."
There was one iron law for transmigrators:
They had to have a cheat.
Yin An's cheat was a system built around deception and emotional exploitation.
The 'Absolute Hidden Space' from his beginner gift pack perfectly concealed him from all detection. Without his permission, no one could enter this place, no matter how powerful they were.
And now it was finally time to make use of the system's core function.
As long as Yin An deceived someone, or altered the ninja world's understanding of something, and as long as another person genuinely believed the lie, the system would reward him.
The greater the deception, the richer the return.
***
The next morning, dawn spread over Konoha.
Then the official news burst through the village like a blast wave: the Uchiha clan had been annihilated during the night, and the culprit was the missing-nin Uchiha Itachi.
The entire Hidden Leaf was thrown into an uproar.
Among the major clans, the reactions were subtle but strikingly uniform.
The rabbit grieves for the fox, perhaps. Or perhaps they simply understood too well what it meant for one great clan to be erased in a single night.
Even so, every family chose silence. No one stepped forward to challenge the Konoha leadership. No one raised questions aloud.
For the common people, however, things were entirely different.