Snow cracked beneath his boots.
The wind whispered warnings.
But Raien didn't stop.
His left eye—fractured, bleeding, burning—pulled him forward like a leash tied to fate itself.
Dozens of threads shimmered before him.
Gold.
Silver.
Red.
Each vibrating with a different frequency. Each humming with forgotten memories.
But one thread—Pitch black.Thin as spider silk.Cold.
It didn't move.
Didn't shimmer.
Didn't sing.
It simply waited.
Raien's eye locked onto it.
His heart stilled.
A whisper passed through his mind.
"Don't follow that one."
He followed it anyway.
The black thread led him through the dead woods of the Land of Iron.
No chakra beasts.
No wildlife.
Not even birds.
Everything avoided this path.
Even the moonlight.
Branches scraped his cloak like skeletal fingers.
His breath came out in frost.
The deeper he went, the quieter the world became.
Then—
It stopped.
The thread ended in the middle of a frozen clearing.
Nothing there.
Just silence.
But Raien could feel it.
A presence.
Watching.
Waiting.
A moment passed.
Then another.
Then the earth cracked.
A massive burst of steam exploded from the ground.
Raien was thrown back.
He hit a tree.
Hard.
Blood spilled from his mouth.
A figure rose from the cracked earth.
Clothed in bandages.
Eyes glowing like dying embers.
Its voice was low. Ancient.
"You weren't supposed to find me."
Raien stood, barely.
"Who are you?"
The bandaged man stepped forward.
"Someone whose thread was cut… but refused to vanish."
He raised his arm.
Raien's left eye reacted instantly—cracking again.
Vision blurred.
Pain surged.
And then—
He saw.
Not the man—
But what he used to be.
Flashes.
Images burned into Raien's mind.
A battlefield.
Rain pouring.
A man with that same eye—But it wasn't broken.
It was whole.
A perfect spiral.
He stood atop corpses.
Enemies.
Allies.
Didn't matter.
He devoured memories.
Devoured names.
Even devoured time.
A monster in human shape.
Then—
The world turned on him.
Dozens of shinobi villages united.
They hunted him.
Tried to erase his existence.
And in the end…
They failed.
But they did cut him from the threads.
His name forgotten.
His legacy erased.
But not… completely.
Raien gasped.
Reality snapped back.
The bandaged man raised his hand again.
"I thought I was the last."
Raien's voice came out broken. "You're not."
Their eyes clashed.
For a second—time froze.
Then—
They attacked.
The world blurred.
Each of his movements echoed five times.
Each of the bandaged man's strikes came from the future.
Raien dodged one—Only to be hit by the next before it even began.
Blood splattered the snow.
He dropped.
Coughing.
But he smiled.
"You're slow."
He triggered it—
The moment his blood hit the black thread on the ground.
A flash.
The air cracked open.
Both were sucked inside.
Inside the Thread.
There was no time here.
No ground.
No sky.
Just a spiraling tunnel of shattered memories.
They fought as they fell.
Clashing across fragments of old wars.
Past villages.
Forgotten lives.
A scene flickered—Raien standing in front of a child version of himself.
The bandaged man grinned.
"You don't know what you are."
Raien screamed.
His broken eye surged with light.
Red turned white.
Then—black.
And then—
Everything stopped.
He woke up alone.
In a field.
Green.
Warm.
Peaceful.
The black thread was gone.
So was the bandaged man.
Raien stood.
Looked at his reflection in a nearby pond.
His left eye—
Was whole again.
Not broken.
Not cracked.
But different.
Still spiraled.
Still alien.
But now it blinked slower.
Like it had seen too much.
A voice behind him.
"You broke the cycle."
Raien turned.
An old woman stood there.
Eyes sewn shut.
The Loom Mother.
She walked toward him with no footsteps.
"You reached the end of the thread that shouldn't exist."
Raien asked quietly, "What now?"
The Loom Mother smiled.
Now her face was visible.
And she was beautiful.
Terrible.
"Now… the real story begins."
Far away—
Konoha.
Neeta stirred from sleep.
Sweating.
Heart racing.
She rushed to the mirror.
Looked into her eyes.
Normal.
But something was off.
A flicker behind her iris.
A whisper in her thoughts.
"You were part of the forgotten too."
She collapsed.
Unconscious.
Elsewhere—
Sasuke opened his eyes from meditation.
He looked toward the northern mountains.
Sharingan activated.
"Something just changed."
Behind him, Naruto stepped into the room.
"Again?"
Sasuke's voice was a whisper.
"No… not again."
He clenched his hand.
"This time… it's something we can't rewind."