The darkness was thick as ink.
Nono floated in the chaos.
There was no light, no sound, only a bone-deep weariness and a lingering scent of blood.
She felt like a rotten skiff, adrift in piercingly cold seawater.
The scene abruptly shifted.
The acrid smell of gunpowder violently flooded her nostrils, mixed with a rust-like stench of blood.
Before her was an abandoned outpost on the outskirts of Konoha Village, its broken walls and ruins casting stark silhouettes under the dim moonlight.
She wore the distinctive uniform of a Root Ninja. Her movements were swift as a ghost. A Chakra Scalpel coalesced at her fingertips, slicing through the air with a faint hum.
The target was ahead… a figure dressed in ordinary Ninja Attire, its back to her, frantically rummaging for something in the ruins with clumsy, desperate movements.
The Root's orders were etched coldly in her mind: Eliminate the deserter. Recover the confidential scroll they carry.
No hesitation.
Her body's instincts drove her, like the most precise killing machine.
Her steps were soundless over the rubble, closing the distance in an instant.
The Chakra Scalpel in her hand stabbed with precise and ruthless force towards the target's back, right at the heart!
This strike was enough to sever the heart's arteries, causing instant death.
Thump!
The sound of the blade piercing flesh was dull and clear.
The figure stiffened violently, as if its spine had been ripped out. It turned around, slowly, extremely slowly.
The hood slipped back, revealing a face smeared with dust and blood… young, yet etched with shock and agony.
Through a pair of somewhat familiar glasses, those eyes stared fixedly, unbelievably at Nono.
"Dir... Director-" A weak, dry sound, squeezed out with the last ounce of strength, escaped the other's throat.
It carried broken gasps and an indescribable despair of betrayal by one's closest kin.
'Director?'
This address was like a steel needle, plunging without warning deep into the chaotic mess of Nono's brain!
A sharp, utterly unfamiliar and intense pain exploded from the depths of her heart for no reason, instantly sweeping through her entire body!
The hand forming the Chakra Scalpel trembled violently, uncontrollably.
Just then, the blood-stained face of the dying youth twisted, melted, and distorted like water-
Facial features rapidly changed. The dust and blood faded away. The skin turned pale and tender. Behind the round glasses, the large eyes that always held a gentle smile and a touch of timidity were now looking at her in terror and sorrow...
It was Kabuto!
Kabuto as a child!
"No-!!!"
A shrill, distorted scream tore through the dream!
Nono jerked upright from the cold, hard stone bed! Her heart hammered wildly in her chest, almost bursting out!
Cold sweat instantly soaked through her thin gray prison uniform, bringing a piercing chill.
She gasped for air in huge, ragged breaths, like a fish out of water, each inhalation bringing a stinging, burning pain to her lungs.
Her hands clutched tightly at the clothes over her chest, her knuckles white with force, as if trying to hold down the heart threatening to leap from her throat.
Cold sweat trickled down her temples, dripping onto the rough hemp bedding.
In the darkness, she looked around blankly. Only a narrow strip of faint, flickering oil lamp light from the corridor seeped under the iron cell door, casting a distorted band of light on the floor.
The familiar smell of mold, the dampness of the stone walls, and the scent of despair wrapped around her once more.
'It's a dream…'
'Just a nightmare.'
She tried to tell herself this, using the cold reality to dispel the heart-stopping images.
But that 'Director', those eyes belonging to Kabuto, filled with sorrow and terror, were branded onto her retina like the clearest seal, repeatedly scorching her nerves.
An indescribable emptiness and panic seized her, more suffocating than the prison's confinement.
However, as her gaze habitually scanned the small stone cell that had held her for who knows how long, a sense of wrongness, like a cold snake, quietly coiled around her heart.
It was too quiet.
No suppressed coughs from the neighboring cell. No heavy footsteps of patrolling guards in the distance. No grating screech of iron doors opening or closing.
Even the echo of her own ragged breathing and pounding heart had vanished.
An eerie, hair-raising silence enveloped everything.
She instinctively looked down at her hands… the hands that had once healed the sick and saved the dying, but had also carried out countless dark missions.
They were resting on a surface smooth as a mirror.
Nono sharply drew in a breath, her body instantly rigid!
She wasn't sitting on a cold stone bed, but suspended, sitting on a boundless expanse of water, dark and deep!
The water reflected the equally vast starry sky above.
Countless stars burned, rotated, and flowed, converging into a brilliant Milky Way. The cold, pure starlight showered down, illuminating this space like a divine realm.
The water beneath her feet wasn't solid, yet it clearly reflected her own terrified, disheveled figure.
'Where is this?!'
Immense shock instantly overwhelmed the lingering fear from the nightmare.
She jerked her head up, looking around wildly.
It was still absolutely silent, only the magnificent spectacle of the stars' silent rotation.
A cold, vast, inhuman sense of emptiness enveloped her, making her feel as insignificant as a speck of dust.
"What you saw was not a dream."
A voice sounded abruptly.
Low, calm, devoid of any emotional fluctuation, as if resonating directly within the depths of her soul.
Nono, startled like a rabbit, whipped her head towards the sound.
Not far in front of her, also standing on the starry water surface, a figure hovered silently.
He was completely shrouded in a wide black robe, as if merged with the deep background.
His face was covered by an expressionless white three-eyed fox mask, the three hollow eye sockets gleaming with a cold, inorganic light under the starlight.
Two symbolic fox ears extended from the top of the mask, adding a trace of eerie liveliness to this inhuman visage.
His wide sleeves hung down naturally, and an aura of heart-stopping solemnity and profound depth emanated from him.
It was none other than the ruler of the Land of Stars, the mysterious Shura.
"That was the script carefully designed for you by Shimura Danzo." Shura's voice came through the mask, still steady and unfluctuating, as if stating a cold fact: "It is also his method of screening, polishing, and ultimately completely controlling the sharpest and most concealed 'tool' in his hand."
Nono's entire body trembled violently.
Not from the cold, but from the cruel truth contained in those words, pointing directly to the darkest core of her life.
'Danzo... script... tool...'
These words were like poison-tipped daggers, stabbing fiercely into the barriers of her chaotic memories.
She shook her head subconsciously, her gray-white hair sticking messily to her sweaty temples, her voice hoarse and broken: "No... impossible... You're lying! Danzo-sama, he-"
"What he needs is absolute loyalty, absolute obedience." Shura interrupted her futile denial, his voice carrying a trace of icy mockery that saw through everything, "A spy with a 'mother' identity will always have a soft spot in her heart, a place that could be pried open, exploited."
"Therefore, he needed to sever this bond with his own hands. Use a perfect substitute to replace the real child in your memory, becoming a new 'weakness'."
"Then, at the most opportune moment, arrange an 'accidental' encounter, a cleanup mission that 'must' be carried out... Let the 'mother' personally kill the 'son', or the 'son' personally kill the 'mother'. Use the most extreme pain and betrayal to utterly crush your or his humanity, erase the last trace of possible 'weakness', forging you into a truly cold, absolutely obedient 'blade'."
Every word was like a cold hammer, striking violently at Nono's heart.
Those deliberately forgotten, deeply buried worries began to churn madly!
Regarding what kind of man Danzo was, what kind of organization Root was… she knew better than anyone.
And the dying youth's desperate call in her dream, his face finally transforming into the child Kabuto's...
The fragments spun and cut through her mind like sharp glass, trying to piece together a bloody truth she dared not face!
"No… it's not like this-" She struggled futilely, her voice growing weaker, her body shaking like a leaf in the wind.
Something solid inside her was emitting the sound of unbearable strain, cracking.
Shura hovered silently, the white fox mask facing her without any fluctuation.
That silent posture was more oppressive than any words.
He seemed to be waiting, waiting for the moment her inner defenses completely collapsed.
Finally, that cold voice sounded again, like a final judgment:
"Yakushi Nono, haven't you realized it yet?"
Yakushi Nono looked up, her bloodshot brown eyes filled with alarm and resistance, staring through her disheveled hair at the cold fox mask.
Shura slowly raised his right hand, shrouded in the black robe.
It didn't point at her, nor at any particular place… it was just raised casually.
With his movement, the mirror-smooth water beneath their feet, which reflected the vast starry sky, suddenly rippled silently.
The water no longer reflected the stars. Instead, like the clearest mirror, it instantly displayed a scene.
It was the dim, oppressive corridor of the Seventh Prison Block.
A boy wearing Hoshinin's dark blue Genin Uniform, with round glasses, was distributing food to the prisoners in their cells.
The boy's gaze behind his lenses was downcast, maintaining a deliberately calm demeanor as he placed a black bread roll into her broken bowl.
The image froze.
It clearly showed the boy's face.
Gentle, somewhat youthful, the eyes behind the glasses hiding an unstoppable storm of shock and pain.
It also reflected her own face.
Haggard, numb, eyes empty and unfocused, like a shell that had lost all its soul, showing not the slightest reaction to the face right in front of her, etched with complex emotions!
"You've seen him." Shura's icy voice, like a heavy mallet, struck savagely upon the frozen image, and upon Nono's completely collapsed defenses.
"Just today, right in front of you. But you couldn't even recognize your own child."
Nono collapsed onto the water's surface. Her world shattered with a deafening crash.