[This Chapter is Sponsored by "Kali Creation"]
Chapter [58] Continuation
This is Side Story 3... You can skip this, if you want
Long before Neji carved open the threads of chakra, long before Kali's shadow fell upon Coordinate 66835, there was a moment where even the void stirred.
66835 stood alone in the crater, surrounded by pale silence. The Moon held no echo. No birds, no heartbeat, no rustle of leaves. Only chakra drifted here... ancient and fractal, spiraling in patterns no eye was meant to follow.
And yet, he watched. Not the stars, not the Earth.
But the fractured remains of a body he had been building.
It had started as a failed experiment... a castaway husk grown from biokinetic chakra grafts and proto-organic sinew. Shaped to match a man.
But 66835... he needed more than shape.
He sat for years, his hands weaving strands of light and darkness, threading chakraline fibers into bones.
He constructed the spine first, using fragments of Threefold Needle Grid... each vertebrae was a reservoir of data.
Then he moved to the chest, etching ancient sigils into a synthetic core... a resonator modeled after his own broken heart-network.
Flesh came next: skin pulled from memory and woven from nano-particles of reflective chakra, able to mimic the softness and warmth of real human touch.
He crafted the face last.
Carefully.
As if sculpting an echo of humanity he never truly knew.
When it was done, the body lay naked beneath the voidlight. And he named it:
Ro.Na.Ld.
A designation. A homage. A hope.
"Recursive Node of Alternate Layered Designation."
A mirror... built not to see, but to watch.
The puppet was more than shell. It could breathe, it could pulse, it could dream.
And though it could not act of its own will, it could learn. It could absorb.
66835 severed a fraction of his consciousness and injected it into Ro.Na.Ld... an autonomous thread, bound to awaken should the pattern of Shingan ever re-emerge on Earth.
Then, with a whisper to the void, he descended it.
Ro.Na.Ld arrived to earth as a child. A foundling.
Picked up by a priest near the borders of the Land of Fire. Raised as an orphan. The humans gave him a name: Rōnaru (ローナル).
They did not know that his lungs were artificial.
They did not know that his blood carried strands of collapsed chakra code.
They only knew that he learned quickly. Watched carefully. And never cried.
For two decades, Ronald lived among mortals.
He studied, silently. Catalogued chakra shifts. Visited ruins. Collected myths.
He never approached Neji.
But he watched.
He watched Neji during his training.
He watched during the Chūnin Exams.
He watched when Neji's Shingan activated for the first time... and felt the pulse ripple through his synthetic ribs.
He stood in the shadows, the day Neji defeated kaguya.
And silently, he wept. Not from sadness.
But from recognition.
Back on the Moon, Coordinate 66835 darkened.
Kali, the gatekeeper had discovered the breach.
The Ro.Na.Ld was no longer safe.
66835 sat in meditation. The spiral beneath him glowed. His body began to unspool... chakra lines fragmenting, neural code threading upward like smoke.
He had no more time. And so, he left himself behind.
Far below, across space, Rōnaru awoke.
But something had changed.
His vision, once colorless, now shimmered with recursive patterns. People no longer had shadows. They had afterimages. Intent echoes.
And within his chest, a voice whispered:
"I am all of me now."
66835 had served the thread connecting to his creation, Ro.Na.Ld.
Rōnaru was no longer just a puppet.
He was becoming aware.