NNT -- 13:00PM -- Land Of Fire -- Konoha Ninja Academy
It started like a held breath—just before dawn had the nerve to break.
In Konohagakure, the academy grounds were quiet except for the soft shuffle of early morning practice. Twelve-year-old Mitazuki was mid-kata when his hands just... stopped. The tiger seal paused between his fingers, like trying to hold smoke. His sensei noticed first—the way every kid in the courtyard went statue-still at the exact same moment.
"What the hell?" Hiroma whispered, and his voice cracked on the words.
The birds came next. Not flying—fleeing. A whole murder of crows erupted from the academy roof like someone had lit a fire under them, their cries sharp and panicked. One of the instructors, a scarred chūnin named Hiroma, felt his stomach drop as the chakra in the air went thin and strange.
"Everyone inside. Now." His voice was steadier than his hands.
The kids didn't argue. They could feel it too—something pulling at the very air around them, like the world was being squeezed through a fist.
----
NNT -- 16:00 PM -- Land of Wind -- Duino Defence Border
Three hundred miles south, in the endless dunes of Wind Country, Suna scout captain Sadu pulled his patrol to a halt. The morning winds had just... died. Not slowed—died. The sand that should've been stinging their faces hung motionless in the air like golden rain that didn't know how to fall anymore.
"Captain?" His youngest scout's voice was barely a whisper. The kid—couldn't be more than nine —was staring at his own footprints. They were glowing. Faint, but definitely glowing.
Sadu's mouth went dry. In twenty years of desert warfare, he'd never seen anything like it. He knelt and traced a line in the sand with his kunai. The mark pulsed once, then faded like it had never been there.
"Nobody moves," he said, but his voice came out hoarse. "Nobody even breathes hard until I figure out what's—"
The words died in his throat. Because that's when he felt it—not through his feet or his chakra network, but deeper. In his bones. In the spaces between his thoughts.
Something was waking up. And it was vast.
----
NNT -- 15:30PM -- Land of Rain -- Amegakure
In Amegakure, where the rain fell like clockwork—had fallen every day for the past decade since the war started—Konan pressed her face to the tower window and watched the sky held its breath.
Not a single drop.
The silence was worse than any explosion she'd ever heard. Below in the streets, people were starting to emerge from their homes, faces turned upward in confusion and growing fear.
"Yahiko-san, Nagato-kun" she called, not taking her eyes off the motionless clouds. "Something's wrong."
Yahiko was sitting on a slanted ledge while Nagoto was already behind her, his Rinnegan spinning slowly as he tried to make sense of what his enhanced senses were telling him. The rain had been his heartbeat for so long that its absence felt like dying.
"It's not wrong," he said quietly, and his voice carried a tremor she'd never heard before. "It's... changing. Everything's changing."
---
In the temple quarter, old monk Jishin set down his prayer beads with shaking hands. Forty years of morning chants, and his voice had never failed him. But now the words stuck in his throat like stones.
"He's coming," he spoke silently in the empty prayer hall, though he couldn't have said who 'he' was or why the certainty struck him like lightning.
The incense smoke curled sideways, then up, then froze mid-air like painted brushstrokes.
---
NNT --SAME TIME --LOCATION UNKNOWN
Deep beneath the earth, in a tomb that existed for almost forever, Isshiki Ōtsutsuki jerked awake in his stolen flesh.
The Karma seal didn't just pulse or tremble—it screamed. Black fire raced down his spine and splattered across the stone floor like living ink. For one terrifying moment, his vision fractured into a thousand pieces, showing him the world as it was, as it had been, and as it was becoming all at once.
"What... what the hell is that?" The words came out in Jigen's voice, cracked and human and afraid.
He slammed his palm against the wall, and the obsidian cracked under the force. But the sensation didn't stop. It was like standing next to a forge when the smith strikes the metal—that deep, resonant ring that you feel in your teeth.
Except this wasn't metal being shaped.
This was reality.
"You're not supposed to exist," he snarled at the darkness, though he wasn't sure if he was talking to the presence he felt stirring or to himself. "I would have sensed you. I would have known."
But even as he said it, he knew it wasn't true. Whatever was out there—whatever had just torn a hole in the world's chakra network—it was beyond his understanding.Wilder and completely outside the neat little categories he'd built his existence around.
For the first time in centuries, Isshiki Ōtsutsuki felt not like the manipulator and more like the chess piece
------
NNT -- 00:53AM -- UNKNOWN LOCATION
In his cave , Madara's old and almost dying body twitched.
It shouldn't have been possible. The Gēdō golem behind him was burning out his lifespan, had been burning out for months now. His body was more wood than flesh, held together by will and the fading strength of jutsu that should have killed him years ago.
But something had changed. Something big enough to make even death pause and take notice.
His transplanted Sharingan spun lazily, the tomoe blurring as they tried to process what he was sensing. It tasted like... like standing in a thunderstorm while the lightning was still gathering. Like the moment before a dam breaks.
"Not mine." The words scraped out of his throat like gravel. "Not Hashirama's—he's dead as dirt. Hell, it's not even that rabbit goddess bitch."
He tried to push himself up on his elbows. Failed. Tried again.
"Then what are you, I wonder?"
In the distance, he could hear young Obito training—the boy's frustrated grunts and the sharp crack of kunai against stone. The kid had no idea that the world had just shifted on its axis. Lucky him.
Madara's dried lips cracked into something that might have been a smile.
"Heh. Maybe the next era won't need an Uchiha's eyes to see it clearly."
The presence pulsed again, and this time he could taste it—red flame and ancient power and something that sang like steel being forged. Not stolen power. Not inherited power.
Earned power.
It made his millennium of planning feel suddenly, laughably small.
-----
TIMELESS --BEYOND THE NINJA REALM --PURE LAND
Hagoromo Ōtsutsuki opened eyes that hadn't truly seen in centuries.
The Sage of Six Paths existed now as little more than will and Fairy tales, a ghost haunting the margins of the world he'd helped create. But even in his diminished state, he could feel the ripples spreading out from... where? Somewhere in the desert. Somewhere a Mortal had just reached out and grabbed hold of forces that should have been beyond any mortal's grasp.
"Impossible," he murmured, but even as he said it, he was reaching out with senses older than the hidden villages, older than the ninja system itself.
What he found made him recoil.
It wasn't the Dragon Vein Energy being conquered or corrupted. It was... harmony. Fusion. A merging so complete that he couldn't tell where the boy ended and the ancient power began.
And it was wrong. Wrong in the way that evolution was wrong to creatures who couldn't adapt. Wrong in the way that sunrise was wrong to things that lived in darkness.
He turned his attention toward the moon, where his mother's essence writhed in her prison of root and stone.
Even from here, he could feel her terror.
----
--$€÷$£€¥¥ --§§×÷€ --TH3 M0oN
Kaguya had forgotten what fear tasted like.
It had been so long since anything in this reality had been capable of surprising her, let alone threatening her. The Ten-Tails was hers. The chakra fruit was hers. The very concept of chakra itself bore her fingerprints.
But this...
"Not mine," she whispered, and the words echoed through her lunar prison like a terrible Orchestra. "Not mine, not mine, not mine..."
The red flame she could sense burning in some distant desert felt like antimatter against her chakra—not destroying it, but transforming it into something she didn't recognize. Something she couldn't control.
For the first time since her sons had betrayed her, Kaguya Ōtsutsuki knew what it meant to be afraid.
---
In a crater of glass and impossible silence, Raghoul stood alone having reconciled with his flames.
The sun hung motionless on the horizon, afraid to rise. The wind held its breath. Even the desert itself seemed to be waiting.
For what? he wondered.
Then he opened his eyes, and the red light that spilled out wasn't just chakra anymore. It was possibility made manifest. It was the promise that the world could be remade by will alone, if that will was strong enough and desperate enough and angry enough.
---
NNT — 6:04 A.M.
Day Zero
The World Remade
In every village, in every hidden compound, in every place where power had learned to wear a human face, the message was the same:
The game has changed.
The board has been flipped.
And the once little boy in the monetary dreaming of the outside world no longer remembers how to lose.