After visiting nearly every stall the festival had to offer, buying every kind of sweet that caught his eye and several Kaede insisted he try whether he wanted to or not, Muzan and the others finally made their way back to the inn, trailing behind their various parents and guardians, all of them pleasantly worn out in the particular way only a full day of festival food and fireworks could manage.
The adults claimed a room of their own for the evening, and the five of them, Muzan, Jiro, Kenta, Renji, and Kaede, were left to a smaller room down the hall, a low table already set with a generous spread of leftover sweets and cold fruit drinks that someone, likely Suzu, had thoughtfully arranged ahead of their return.
They ate and drank themselves into a happy stupor, playing games with rules that grew looser and more chaotic as the night wore on, laughter rising steadily louder until someone, probably Kenta, was shushed by all four of the others simultaneously. For Muzan, it was exhausting in the best possible way, watching his friends grow steadily rowdier and more ridiculous around him, and he found himself simply content to sit in the middle of it, soaking in a kind of joy that had nothing at all to do with training or technique or anything that usually occupied his mind.
One by one, they dropped off. Kenta first, mid sentence, collapsing sideways against a cushion with a half eaten sweet still in hand. Jiro next, upright against the wall in a position that looked entirely too uncomfortable to actually be sleep, and yet clearly was. Renji folded over the low table itself, one arm serving as an unlikely pillow. And Kaede, last of them, drifting off sitting upright before slowly slumping down onto the table's edge, her breathing slow and even, a soft, almost imperceptible snore escaping every few breaths.
Muzan watched them all for a long moment, something warm and quiet settling in his chest at the sight, months of intense training and mounting mental weight finally, visibly loosening from every one of their faces, replaced with the particular contentment of children who'd simply been allowed, for one night, to be exactly that.
He got up slowly himself, legs a little sluggish from the long day, and picked his way carefully through the scattered limbs and cushions toward the door, stepping over Renji's outstretched arm and around Kenta's sprawled legs with the same careful precision he'd been drilling into his footwork for months now.
He'd nearly reached the door when he stopped, and turned back.
Kaede lay slumped forward at the table, clearly uncomfortable, her neck bent at an angle that would leave her sore come morning if left that way through the whole night. Muzan considered it for a moment, then crossed back to her without further hesitation, and carefully, gently, gathered her up.
She stirred faintly at the movement, murmuring something unintelligible, but didn't wake, settling instead against him with the total, trusting looseness of someone deeply asleep. Muzan carried her out, easing the door shut quietly behind him with his foot, and made his way down the hall toward the room she and the other girls attending with their families had been given for the night.
The corridor outside felt pleasantly cool against his skin after the warmth of the kotatsu heated room they'd all been crowded around, the low table's hidden heater having kept the space thoroughly warm through the whole evening, and Muzan found himself glancing up, once, through a narrow window toward the moon hanging pale and full above the capital's rooftops, before continuing on.
He laid Kaede down carefully once he reached her room, adjusting the blanket over her, checking that she seemed settled and comfortable before allowing himself to actually leave. She shifted once, murmured something that might have been his name, and then settled fully back into sleep, undisturbed.
Muzan watched her for a moment longer than was strictly necessary, then quietly slipped out and made his way back to the room where the boys remained scattered in their various uncomfortable positions.
He worked through each of them in turn, gathering pillows and spare blankets from the room's small storage cabinet, easing Jiro down from his precarious upright lean against the wall, tucking a cushion beneath Kenta's head so the sweet still clutched loosely in his hand wouldn't end up crushed against his own face by morning, adjusting Renji's arm so it no longer bore the full weight of his head against the hard table's edge. None of them stirred through any of it, deeply enough asleep that Muzan's careful rearranging barely registered at all.
Once satisfied they'd all wake without new aches to complain about, Muzan changed into his sleeping clothes and finally settled onto his own bedding, expecting sleep to claim him just as quickly as it had the others.
It didn't.
He lay there instead, staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling, mind refusing to quiet no matter how tired his body genuinely felt, and slowly, inevitably, his thoughts drifted back to the mark on his hand, and everything it had shown him.
Tachibana Kiyoshi.
The name still sat strangely in his mind, familiar and foreign at once, and beneath the familiar questions he'd already turned over more than once since that night, new ones kept surfacing, sharper now that the initial shock of the flood had settled into something he could actually examine rather than simply survive.
Why memories, and not the man himself. If a soul could cross whatever distance separated one world from another, why had it arrived only as knowledge, scattered and secondhand, rather than as the person that knowledge had actually belonged to. Something had clearly gone wrong somewhere in the process, or perhaps nothing had gone wrong at all, and this had simply been the intended shape of it from the very start. He had no way of knowing which.
What allowed me to exist in the first place, he wondered. If his soul was meant to come here, why am I still me? What interfered, and why?
Was the mark his own, some strange gift woven into his own soul from birth, or was it something else entirely, a vessel created and left behind by whatever remained of Kiyoshi's own soul, a legacy rather than a birthright. And if it was the latter, did that mean some fragment of that other soul still existed somewhere, watching, waiting, perhaps even quietly steering him without his knowledge, or had it simply poured everything it carried into that mark and ceased, entirely, the moment the transfer was complete.
He turned the questions over without finding satisfying answers to any of them, and beneath the uncertainty, another thought surfaced, quieter and somehow more unsettling than the rest.
There had never been anyone named Muzan in Kiyoshi's memories. Not in the Senju clan, not anywhere in the sprawling history that world's fiction had apparently built around a character called Naruto. The world contained in those memories was, for all its detail, a fairly finite one, circling almost entirely around that single figure and the handful of years surrounding him, with only scattered, secondhand fragments hinting at anything beyond that narrow window. The only names Muzan could confidently place from this current era, the only figures the memories actually recognized, belonged to the two men currently leading the Senju and Uchiha clans respectively, Butsuma among them, unknowing father that he was.
I'm not supposed to exist, Muzan thought, turning the realization over slowly. Whatever future those memories describe, I'm not written into it anywhere. Not as a footnote. Not even as a rumor.
There was something almost freeing in that thought, buried beneath the strangeness of it. Whatever grim future those fragmented memories had shown him, the fall of his clan, the names that would apparently see it undone, none of it accounted for him. He was an unknown variable in a story that had already, somewhere in Kiyoshi's world, been told and finished without him.
So the previous soul, he thought, and something in the thought settled, decisive and quiet, what of it. Whatever he was, whatever he carried, I'm the one still here. I'm the one who has to decide what happens next. I'm the main character now, not him.
There was another matter he hadn't fully resolved. Since the night he'd opened the second folder, the one marked for perception, he had been entirely unable to return to that strange, dim inner space at all, no matter how many times he'd quietly tried, alone, pressing his thumb against the mark and waiting for the room to dissolve around him the way it had before. It simply hadn't. Whether that door had closed for good, or whether it would open again someday under conditions he didn't yet understand, he had no way of knowing, and the uncertainty sat uneasily alongside everything else keeping sleep at bay.
Still, whatever the mark's limits turned out to be, he was grateful for what it had already given him. He knew, now, in broad and troubling strokes, what eventually became of his clan if nothing changed. That alone felt like something worth having, terrible as the knowledge itself was. It gave him a direction, however far off, however uncertain the path toward it remained. Train. Grow stronger. Become someone capable of standing in the way of whatever ending those memories had shown him, rather than simply watching it arrive the way it apparently had the first time.
The memories themselves held more than just warnings, he reminded himself, turning his thoughts deliberately toward something steadier. Concepts. Techniques. Training methods he could try, one at a time, and see which actually held up under real practice rather than simply existing as knowledge inside his own head. His chakra control training so far had mostly run through the practical channel of Strong Fist, refined and applied directly through his father's own technique. But the memories held other paths too, simpler ones in some ways, a leaf balanced against skin through concentration alone, walking up the trunk of a tree using nothing but careful, controlled chakra beneath his feet, standing on the surface of water through that same discipline pushed one step further.
And beyond that, further out on a path he understood, even now, he wasn't remotely ready to walk, something called shape transformation, chakra molded not simply into quantity or control but into genuine, deliberate form, a discipline whose absolute peak, according to the memories, belonged to something called the Rasengan.
He wanted to try none of it yet, not properly. Not until he'd finished sorting through everything the memories still held, tested the smaller, safer fragments first, learned which pieces of borrowed knowledge actually translated cleanly into this world and which might prove unreliable, or worse, dangerous, if trusted too quickly.
One thing at a time, he told himself, the thought looping slowly, gently, through a mind finally beginning to tire in earnest. Sort it all first. Then decide what's actually worth building on.
Somewhere in the middle of turning that resolve over one more time, weighing it against the bleak, uncertain shape of everything still waiting to be understood, Muzan finally slipped, without quite noticing the moment it happened, into sleep.