The familiar, dusty solitude of his home was ripped away, replaced by a vast, breathing emptiness and a deafening roar of wind. Renjiro materialised, his feet finding immediate, solid purchase on coarse, sun-warmed stone. The reverse-summoning complete, he took a steadying breath, the air thin, crisp, and startlingly cold.
He stood on the edge of a floating island; the vista before him was a landscape torn from myth. The sun was a bloated, crimson orb sinking toward a distant, impossibly far horizon of cloud peaks, casting long, dramatic shadows that stretched across the floating archipelagos and painting everything in washes of molten gold, deep violet, and bloody orange.
Renjiro paused, allowing his senses to recalibrate. The sheer scale never failed to humble him.
'It's been a long time,' he thought.
Instinctively, he waited. Usually, Tenjin would greet him upon arrival. He stood at the cliff's edge, the wind plucking at his clothes and whipping his long red hair into a frenzied banner. Seconds stretched into a minute. Only the mournful wind answered.
A cold trickle of unease seeped into his gut. The memory, sharp and sudden as a kunai slash: Tenjin, magnificent and ferocious, spiralling from the sky, injured during the war.
Renjiro had been too far, too entrenched in his own desperate battle, to intervene. The guilt, an old companion, shouldered its way to the forefront.
'He was injured. Because of my negligence. Because of my war.'
He had received only fragmented reports afterwards, and in the subsequent chaos of his own blindness and recovery, he had… let time pass. Nearly two years. The realisation was a weight in his chest. He didn't even know if his friend had fully recovered.
The waiting felt suddenly foolish, presumptuous. With a quiet sigh that was stolen by the wind, Renjiro shook off the paralysis. His gaze settled on the largest formation: a true floating mountain in the distance, where the eldest and mightiest of the eagles, like Lady Momo, made their aeries.
"Should have just gone straight there," he muttered to himself. Resignation hardened into purpose. He needed a space to work, and the floating mountain was the closest to a central hub this fragmented realm had.
The gap between his island and the next sizable chunk of earth was a yawning chasm of empty air, a hundred meters of nothing but howling wind and dizzying drop.
Standard shinobi parkour was meaningless here. Renjiro didn't hesitate. Taking a deep breath of the thin air, he focused inward. From the small of his back, just above his kidneys, a searing, familiar heat erupted.
With a sound like the ringing of great, ethereal bells, chains of pure, shimmering silver exploded from his torso. They were not metal, but solidified chakra given the impossible, adamantine density—the Adamantine Sealing Chains.
They gleamed in the sunset light, each link inscribed with faint, glowing seals. He willed them forward. Two of the primary chains shot out across the void with the speed of striking serpents, their ends flaring into spear-like points.
They struck the face of the distant floating rock with a reverberating boom, digging deep and anchoring with unshakeable certainty.
Renjiro tensed the chakra within the chains, feeling the incredible tensile connection thrum through his very being.
Then, he pulled.
The world became a blur of motion and sensation. He was yanked off his feet, launched into the open sky. The wind roared past his ears with a physical force, a cold, battering river that stole his breath and made his eyes water.
Wisps of cloud, cold and damp, slapped against his skin as he tore through them. The sensation was less like flying and more like being the pendulum in a colossal, horizontal swing.
At the apex of his arc, just before he would slam into the rock face, he willed the chains to retract with a sharp, psychic command. They spiralled back into him with a resonant shink, and he landed in a crouch on the new island, the impact sending a shower of pebbles skittering over the edge into the abyss.
He didn't pause. Again, the chains erupted—shing!—anchoring to the next viable landmass—THOOM!—and he launched himself again, a lone, red-headed figure becoming a swinging, silver-traced arc between the floating worlds.
It was a taxing, exhilarating method of travel, a full-body exercise in chakra control and nerve. The distant mountain grew slowly larger, its details resolving in the dying light.
He was mid-swing when his chakra field flared a warning. A presence. Vast, familiar, and approaching with speed that dwarfed his own.
A shadow, immense and swift, blotting out the setting sun, passed over him. The wind from its passage was a localised gale, buffeting him in mid-air and causing his chains to shudder. He looked up, the grim set of his mouth softening into genuine relief.
Tenjin descended from the golden haze like a feathered mountain given life. His wings, each the size of a ship's sail, beat once with a WHOMP that echoed across the islands, stabilising his impossible bulk.
The fierce, intelligent golden eye that fixed upon Renjiro was clear and bright. There was no sign of injury in his graceful, powerful descent. He spiralled down towards the island Renjiro was aiming for, arriving just as Renjiro's chains retracted and his feet touched the ground.
Tenjin landed. The impact was not a crash, but a deep, seismic THUD that Renjiro felt in his teeth. The force of it sent a shockwave of air and dust rolling outward in a visible ring. Renjiro's long hair was whipped into a violent, chaotic frenzy, lashing across his face and streaming behind him like a crimson flame.
"Renjiro," Tenjin's voice vibrated through the rock beneath their feet. "The winds have carried no scent of you for many seasons. Too long."
Renjiro approached, "Tenjin. It's good to see you."
His voice was earnest. "The war… and its aftermath. It took time. I was… blinded for a while, even my original Mangekyo was lost."
A shift in the great eagle's posture. The fierce head tilted, the golden eye narrowing with perceptive concern. The feathers around his neck ruffled slightly.
"Blinded?" The single word carried the weight of a storm inquiry.
"My sight was restored," Renjiro said quickly, "In a manner of speaking. I gained… new ones. A different set of Mangekyo Sharingan."
He said it with a casual understatement that belied the cosmic absurdity of the statement. Tenjin was silent for a long moment, his intelligent gaze seeming to look through Renjiro's skull to the secrets within.
"The threads of your fate are tightly wound and strangely colored, little shinobi," Tenjin rumbled at last, "You have come here with a weight upon you that is not just the weight of years."
Renjiro nodded, the smile fading into seriousness. "I need to test them. These new eyes. And… something is wrong." He struggled to find the words, gesturing vaguely at his own head.
"I can feel their power, I can't fully access their abilities. I don't understand their nature."
Tenjin's head cocked to the other side. "You possess two different sets of the evolved eyes? How does such a thing come to be?"
"I don't know," Renjiro admitted, "That's part of the problem. It's a spiritual or mental block as much as a physical one. Something is… obstructing the connection."
The giant eagle regarded him, the last of the sunset fire gleaming in his ancient eyes. He was silent for so long that Renjiro began to wonder if he'd been dismissed.
Then, Tenjin spoke, his voice a low, calming roll of thunder. "So you seek to break a dam by charging it. Perhaps you should first seek to understand the river. What you describe is not a failure of power, but a failure of communion. You need a space not for destruction, but for listening. A place for the mind to be as still as the heart of a mountain."
Renjiro nodded slowly, absorbing it. "A space for meditation… yes. That's part of it. But…" He met the eagle's gaze, "I also need to test what I can access. I need to summon my Susanoo."
The air between them seemed to grow heavier. The Susanoo, the colossal chakra avatar, was the ultimate expression of the Mangekyo; testing it here, in this fragile, floating world, was an act of immense trust and inherent risk.
Tenjin did not flinch. He lifted his head, surveying the island they stood on. He looked at the drifting islands around them, calculating winds and distances with an innate, aerial understanding.
"This place will suffice," Tenjin declared, his tone leaving no room for doubt. It was both an assessment and a grant of permission. "The stone is old and strong. The skies are clear of my kin here. Do what you must. I will observe from the wind."
Without another word, the great eagle spread his wings. The downdraft was staggering, forcing Renjiro to plant his feet firmly. With another earth-shaking WHOMP, Tenjin launched himself into the darkening sky, circling upward to become a silent, watchful silhouette against the deepening purple dusk.
Alone on the vast plateau, with only the sighing wind for company, Renjiro felt the immense isolation of his task. The time for preparation was over. He reached into the weapons pouch at his thigh, his movements deliberate. His fingers closed not around a kunai, but around a tightly rolled storage seal. With a pulse of chakra, he summoned its contents.
Into his hand, cool and unnervingly heavy, materialised the simple jar. The seal on its lid glowed faintly in the twilight. Inside, suspended in preservative fluid, was the spare pair of Mangekyo Sharingan eyes.
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