>>5805769>>5805774>>5805779>>5805787>>5805794>>5805820>>5805823>>5805870>>5805874No.
Something was wrong here.
You checked yourself for genjutsu.
There was none.
Your blood.
You check for it on your thigh from where Masami stabbed you.
It wasn’t there.
Something was off.
That thing wasn’t right.
You were walking away from where that thing was.
It didn’t want you near it.
That thing wasn’t right.
You look back to where Naoki, Kenji, and Hotaru were. They’re there, but… Would Hotaru seriously just be looking at you worriedly if you were staggering around confused? Masami had leapt away from you in alarm. She wouldn’t have just forgotten about it. Even if you had traveled into the past, your behavior was abnormal, someone would have come to you, put a hand on your shoulder, asked you what was wrong.
Looking around was waking you up from some kind of stupor. A nightmare you didn’t realize you had fallen into. Every detail observed made you more alert, more aware. Your awareness hits a critical mass and you take a clearer look around, seeing your surroundings for what they truly were.
<span class="mu-r">RED.</span>
There are figures wandering through the reeds. They’re looking at you. Figures of ninja from before this place’s time, from some unknown battle that took place before the founding of Konoha, probably during the warring clans period.
Lost echoes from some moment lost in time, not really souls, but memories of blood and war baked into the soil of this place, drunk by the rice and the reeds and the thing that spawned from them. You knew that thing for what it was now: DEMON. Like a dim memory, your time at the river with your mom flickers before your mind's eye, something that you had learned without needing it taught: Kami were everywhere because there was life in everything. It would be very unlikely for Kami of the rice paddy to manifest in any other way than as just the humble animating force of the rice paddy, without form or any semblance of care to gain one. To take a form of its own was an indication that something was wrong with it from the very start.
A spirit of the rice must have drunk deep from blood and war, and some wire must have been crossed, some spiritual cell become cancerous. And then it just sat there, tangled in the invisible energy of the field, lurking in wait for a time it could once again drink deep from the cup of blood and death and war.
But then you saw it.
And with every moment of human contemplation, an invisible thing became real. A human’s observation, a human’s chakra, and the thing was granted form and will to feed on death once more.
And now it had brought you here, to some place between worlds.
And it wanted to be invisible from you once again.
You take a deep breath, but only the raw flow of chakra enters your lungs and is expelled by it.
When it brought you here it was to a place you were supposed to fear.
