The best thing about being seven years old in the Uchiha compound wasn't the training dummies or the secret clan meetings Dad sometimes muttered about under his breath. Nah. The best thing was the smell of Mom's miso soup drifting through the paper screen door at 7:45 AM when you were specifically told you didn't have to go to the Academy.
Yūrei Uchiha lay spread-eagled on his futon like a starfish who'd given up on life. Sunlight, warm and annoyingly cheerful, poked him right in the eyelids.
"Yūrei! Breakfast! And stop pretending you're a corpse, it's bad luck before noon," his mom, Hanako, called out. Her voice was like honey that had been used to soothe a thousand skinned knees—which was accurate, because Yūrei fell over a lot during shuriken practice.
He groaned, rolling over. "Mom. I'm not a corpse. I'm fermenting. There's a difference. Corpses smell bad. I smell like… potential."
"You smell like the dusty scrolls you hid under your pillow last night. Up. Now."
Yūrei grinned. That was the official signal. Today was a Free Day. The Academy had sent a hawk or a note or whatever boring adults used, saying something about "faculty development" or "roof repairs after that kid with the bowl cut kicked a hole in it." Yūrei didn't care about the reason. All he knew was that Sasuke had to go sit in a stuffy classroom learning about the First Hokage's favorite tree, and Yūrei got to eat an extra bowl of rice while watching the clouds.
He padded out to the main room. His dad, Kenji, was already seated, sharpening a kunai with the kind of intense focus that made the neighbors nervous. Kenji wasn't Police Force brass. He was just a grunt. A very good grunt with a scar on his jaw and a laugh that sounded like rocks grinding together. He was also, in Yūrei's very biased opinion, the coolest dad in the compound because he actually laughed at Yūrei's stupid jokes.
"Morning, squirt," Kenji grunted without looking up. "Heard you got a free pass. Fugaku's kid is probably seething with jealousy right now."
"Sasuke-sama," Yūrei said, drawing out the honorific with as much seven-year-old sarcasm as he could muster, "is probably learning how to blink in a cool, aloof manner. I, on the other hand, am mastering the art of the mid-morning nap. Who's the real genius here, Dad?"
Kenji snorted. "Definitely not the one who tripped over the garden gnome yesterday."
"That gnome was a tactical obstacle placed by an enemy shinobi!" Yūrei protested, shoveling rice into his mouth. "I was testing its defensive capabilities… with my face."
Hanako sat down, her dark hair tied back in a messy ponytail. She wasn't a ninja. She was a textile weaver, and her hands were perpetually stained with indigo dye. She had eyes that didn't have the Sharingan, but they could see right through a lie about who ate the last dango. "Eat your fish, Yūrei. You need the protein for all that 'tactical falling' you do."
This was life. This was the pink-tinted, rose-colored bubble of being seven and having a mom who smelled like fabric softener and a dad who taught you how to punch a log without breaking your own wrist. The whole day passed in a golden haze.
They went to the market. Yūrei spent fifteen minutes trying to catch a stray cat with his bare hands and got a scratch that made him look "super tough" (it was a papercut, but he lied about it). His mom bought him a new shirt, a dark blue one, because his old one had a hole in the elbow from "tactical falling." His dad let him hold a real, adult-sized kunai for five seconds—supervised, of course—and Yūrei felt the heavy, cold weight of it and thought: Yeah. One day I'll be strong enough to protect this. This whole boring, awesome, sunny day.
They laughed. A lot. His dad told a story about the time he mistook the Hokage's advisor for a burglar and almost got demoted to sewer patrol. Yūrei laughed so hard rice came out of his nose.
As the sun dipped below the Hokage monument, painting the sky in hues of purple and burnt orange, they sat down for dinner. The house was warm. The lanterns cast soft shadows.
"Here's to free days," Kenji said, raising his teacup. "And to Yūrei not destroying any more gnomes."
"The gnome had it coming," Yūrei said solemnly.
He was reaching for the soy sauce when the world broke.
It didn't break with a bang. It broke with a scream.
Not a scream of anger or a sparring match getting out of hand. It was the sound of a soul being ripped out of a body two streets over. It was high, guttural, and wet. And then another. And another. A chorus of the dying.
Yūrei dropped the soy sauce. The ceramic shattered on the wooden floor, the dark liquid spreading like a prophecy.
His dad was already on his feet. The jovial, gnome-hating father was gone. In his place was a shinobi. His eyes, normally warm brown, were hard black stones. He looked at Hanako. "Stay here. With him. Do not open the door for anyone but me. Anyone."
"Kenji—" his mom started.
"Do not. Leave. This room," his dad said. And he was gone. A flicker of motion, a rustle of the door, and silence.
The screaming outside got louder. Closer.
Yūrei's heart was a trapped bird slamming against his ribs. "Mom?" His voice sounded tiny. He was seven. Seven years old and the miso soup was still warm on the table but the world outside was ending.
Hanako grabbed him, pulling him behind her. She wasn't a ninja. All she had was her body. A wall of flesh and indigo-stained love.
The front door didn't slide open. It just… stopped existing. It splintered inward, a hurricane of paper and wood.
And he walked in.
Itachi Uchiha.
Yūrei knew him. Everyone knew him. He was the prodigy, the genius, the guy Sasuke worshipped. But the person standing in the doorway wasn't the Anbu captain Yūrei had seen from a distance. He was a demon wearing a human face. His entire body was drenched. Not in rain. In red. The blood was so thick on his Anbu vest that it dripped in a steady rhythm—plink… plink… plink—onto the wreckage of their home. The sword in his hand was a sliver of frozen moonlight, and it was wet to the hilt.
And his eyes. They weren't the normal Sharingan. They were a pinwheel of nightmare geometry.
"Hanako-san," Itachi said. His voice was quiet. Gentle, even. Which made it infinitely worse. Like a lullaby sung by a corpse.
Hanako didn't scream. She didn't beg. She charged. With nothing but a kitchen knife she grabbed from the counter, she lunged at the man who had slaughtered their neighbors. A civilian, armed with cutlery, against the monster who is Clan Killer.
"RUN, YŪREI!" she screamed.
He couldn't move. His legs were made of wet sand.
Itachi moved. It wasn't a fight. It wasn't a struggle. It was a sigh. A flick of the wrist. The sword didn't make a sound as it passed through the space where Hanako's neck met her shoulder.
She stopped. The knife clattered to the floor. Her eyes, those beautiful, all-seeing brown eyes, found Yūrei's. She tried to smile. Her lips moved, trying to form words, but only red came out. She fell forward, a puppet with cut strings, landing in a heap that looked so much smaller than she did when she was alive.
The warmth of the room vanished. It was just cold. And red. And the sound of dripping.
Yūrei couldn't see. His eyes were burning. It wasn't tears. It was something deeper. Something hot and molten clawing its way out from behind his optic nerves. The world snapped into horrific, crystal clarity. He could see the dust motes frozen in the air. He could see the exact trajectory of the blood droplet falling from Itachi's chin. He could see his mother's hand, still reaching for him.
The Sharingan. Awakened by love. And the immediate, catastrophic loss of it.
"Mom?" Yūrei whispered. The word was a prayer to a god who had just been murdered.
Itachi stepped over Hanako's body like she was a piece of furniture.
Yūrei looked up. He wasn't a tactical genius. He was a kid who tripped over gnomes. But in that moment, the Sharingan in his eyes, two perfect tomoe swirling with grief, gave him clarity. He didn't try to run. He tried to attack on Itachi's. It was a final, defiant, stupid act of a seven-year-old boy.
Itachi's sword answered.
It was a cold line drawn across his stomach. Not a stab. A slash. A deep, unzipping of his future. Yūrei gasped. It didn't hurt yet. It just felt wrong. Like a door inside him had been kicked open and all the heat was escaping.
He fell next to his mom. His face landed in the pool of her blood. It was still warm. It smelled like her. Like fabric softener and miso.
The last thing he saw as his vision tunneled was Itachi's sandal stepping over the soy sauce stain. Then nothing.
Hours Later.
The compound was silent. A graveyard of eyes.
In the wreckage of the small house on the edge of the district, the boy's body lay cooling. He wasn't breathing. His heart was a silent drum. The slash across his abdomen was a ruin of torn flesh and dark fabric. The Sharingan in his open, unseeing eyes had faded back to the dull black of a corpse.
And then something wrong happened.
It started in the wound. A faint, pale light. Not the warm green of medical ninjutsu. It was the color of old bone, of moonlight on a frozen lake. The edges of the gash began to crawl. Fibers of muscle and skin reached out like desperate fingers, knitting together with a wet, squelching sound that was obscenely loud in the dead quiet of the room. It wasn't healing. It was unmaking the injury. The blood that had soaked into the floorboards began to seep backward, defying gravity, retreating into the body.
Inside Yūrei's skull, in the dark theater of his dead consciousness, a silent scream was building. His mind, a fragile seven-year-old construct, shattered under the weight of witnessing his mother's death and his own.
CRACK.
The fracture wasn't a clean break. It was a spiderweb splintering across a frozen lake. But instead of water rushing in, memories rushed out. Memories that didn't belong to him.
A Yūrei who had survived. A cold, calculating Anbu captain with a black mask and a heart full of revenge. He was dragging a wounded comrade through the rain.
A Yūrei who had caused this. A fanatic with a twisted Mangekyo, laughing as he helped Itachi, convinced it was for the "good of the village." His hands were stained with clan blood.
A Yūrei who was just tired. A rogue ninja, twenty years old, sitting in a bar in the Land of Lightning, nursing a drink and a thousand-yard stare. He had run from this very house and never looked back.
A Yūrei who was a healer. Gentle hands, a soft smile, living in a timeline where Madara never existed. He was planting flowers. He had never known the weight of a kunai.
A Yūrei who was a monster. A deranged killer who had embraced the Curse of Hatred fully, a demon wearing his face.
Hundreds of them. Thousands of flickering, vivid, real lives. Different personalities. Different skills. Different scars. All of them Yūrei Uchiha. All of them, at this exact moment in their respective timelines, had died. And in that final moment, the multiverse did something it wasn't supposed to do. It got confused. It saw a boy with this specific genetic signature and this specific soul die and live and run and fight.
And so it shoved them all back. All of them. Into this one body. This seven-year-old frame lying in a puddle of his mother's cooling blood.
The minds crashed together. A cacophony of voices, of pain, of rage.
Yūrei's eyes snapped open. But he didn't see the ceiling.
He saw a kaleidoscope. The gentle healer screamed in horror. The Anbu captain analyzed the bloodstains with cold precision. The fanatic whispered: It was worth it. The rogue sighed: Not this again. And the monster? The monster just laughed and laughed and laughed.
Yūrei's body convulsed on the floor. He tried to scream, but only a wet gurgle came out. He reached for his mother. "M-mom…?"
He didn't see her body. He saw a hundred versions of her dying. He saw the version where she got killed and a younger sister. He saw the version where she abandoned him. He saw the version where she held him as he died.
Get up.
The voice was clear. It cut through the noise like a scalpel. It was the voice of the Anbu captain. Cold. Decisive.
Kill him.
That was the monster. Gleeful. Hungry.
Destroy the village. The rot is too deep.
That was the fanatic.
No. Just survive. Just… run. Please.
The healer. Weak. Pleading.
Yūrei Uchiha sat up. The movement was wrong. It wasn't the clumsy lurch of a seven-year-old. It was fluid. Precise. Terrifying.
His eyes were burning again. The two-tomoe Sharingan, frozen at the moment of his death, began to spin. It spun faster and faster, the tomoe bleeding into a new shape. It wasn't a pinwheel like Itachi's. It was a fractured, shattered geometric pattern. A broken mirror. A Mangekyo reflecting the shattered mind behind it. The name of the ability bloomed in his fractured consciousness, whispered by a dozen different versions of himself: Kyouki no Kyōen (The Fractured Banquet).
Blood—fresh, hot, real—began to pour from his eyes, carving crimson rivers down his cheeks, mixing with the dried blood of his mother.
Get up.
Kill.
Burn it all.
Cry.
This is so tedious.
All the voices laughed. A discordant symphony of madness inside the skull of a seven-year-old boy. And Yūrei? He was drowning in them. But he was the one with the body. And as their laughter echoed in his head, his own lips curled upward.
It wasn't a smile. It was a rictus. A baring of teeth.
He felt the insane power of the Mangekyo thrumming in his skull. He felt the cold, hard knowledge of a dozen lifetimes of combat techniques. He felt the bone-deep, psychotic hatred for the village that had birthed Itachi. And he felt the soul-crushing, seven-year-old grief for his mom.
His face went slack. The smile vanished. His expression became a smooth, emotionless mask. A porcelain doll left out in the rain. Only the steady, thick stream of bloody tears showed that anything was happening inside.
We will have our revenge. The voices agreed. On Itachi. On the elders. On the Hokage. On the world.
Yūrei's head tilted to the side, a jerky, unnatural motion. He looked at his mother's hand. He looked at the broken soy sauce bottle.
Then the fractured consciousness, the broken banquet of souls, simply overloaded. The Mangekyo flickered and died, receding back into tired, bloodshot black eyes. The boy slumped forward, his forehead hitting the wooden floor with a soft, final thud.
He was unconscious. But he wasn't alone. Not anymore.
And somewhere deep in the back of his head, where the laughter had faded to a dull, persistent echo, a single thought rang out from the original, the scared seven-year-old who just wanted his mom.
What the hell is happening to me?