The wind howling over Konoha that day was vicious. It cut through Naruto's thin, threadbare t-shirt, seeking to freeze the last remnants of warmth from his body.
Today was his sixth birthday.
Naruto sat on the old swing set, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the rusty chains. The groaning iron creaked in rhythm with the rumbling of his empty stomach.
The sun dipped behind the Hokage Rock, painting the stone faces of the village leaders in the color of dried blood. Naruto knew the truth: when darkness fell, the rules of the village changed. During the day, they ignored him, looking through him like a pane of dirty glass. But at night—especially on this night—that cold indifference morphed into something hot and sticky.
Hatred.
He heard them before he saw them.
Uneven, shuffling footsteps approached. Loud, disjointed laughter dissolved into hacking coughs. Three men stumbled out of a side alley, reeking of cheap sake and stale vomit even from a distance.
Naruto shrank back, trying to merge with the shadow of the tree. He knew this breed of human. They weren't shinobi; they were ordinary laborers who, on the anniversary of the Nine-Tails tragedy, drowned their grief in alcohol until they lost their human shape.
"Hey... look," one of the men said, pointing a trembling finger toward the playground. He was heavy-set, his face flushed crimson from drink. "It's... it."
"Little monster," the second rasped. A half-empty bottle clinked in his hand. "Sitting there. Alive. While my brother is dead."
Naruto knew that look. Their eyes were glazed and unfocused, but the malice within them was palpable. On this day, adults drank to forget, and remembered only to hate.
It was a drunken, feral aggression.
CLANG!
The bottle flew from the man's hand and shattered against the iron frame of the swing set, inches from the boy's head. Shards exploded outward; one sliced across Naruto's cheek.
The sharp sting of pain was sobering.
"Catch him!" the third man barked, scooping a jagged stone from the ground.
Naruto didn't wait. His survival instinct—the only thing that had never betrayed him—screamed like a taut wire snapping.
He bolted like a hare flushed out by a fox.
"Stop! Where do you think you're going, you little rat?!"
The boy tore toward the old warehouse district. Toward the places where the streetlights had long since died.
His bare feet slapped against mud and sharp gravel. He couldn't feel the stones cutting his soles; adrenaline drowned out the pain, leaving only the thundering of his heart and his own ragged breathing filling his ears.
Behind him, heavy footsteps and drunken curses echoed. His pursuers were slow and stumbling, but fear made it feel as though their breath was hot on his neck.
He swerved into a narrow alley, hoping to cut a path to the abandoned training ground, but he made a mistake.
A dead end.
A high wall blocked his path—the remnants of an ancient fortification, choked with moss and ivy. The masonry was old, chipped, and bore traces of faded paint.
Naruto skidded to a halt, skinning his heels, and looked back with the eyes of a cornered animal. The footsteps were getting closer. There was no way out.
In a panic, he threw himself at the wall, scrabbling for a foothold, but the damp stones were slick with slime.
"I heard him turn in here!" a voice growled, dangerously close.
Naruto pressed his back against the cold stone, sliding down until he hit the dirt. He squeezed his eyes shut, praying to every god he'd ever heard of to just let them walk past.
His scraped hand clawed convulsively at the wall behind him. His palm, wet with blood and grime, slid over a patch where the moss hid a strange, spiral-shaped carving.
Blood touched stone.
Hiss...
The sound was quiet, like a sharp intake of breath.
The surface beneath his hand suddenly flared with heat. Naruto flinched and snapped his eyes open.
The liquid didn't drip down—the stone was drinking it.
The spiral pattern flashed with a dull, crimson light for a heartbeat. An ancient seal, dormant for decades, had tasted blood. The taste of Uzumaki chakra.
Deep inside the wall, something clicked. Heavy. Hollow.
The stones behind him shuddered and slid apart soundlessly, revealing a narrow, pitch-black fissure. The air that drifted out didn't smell of damp rot, but of dry warmth and old parchment.
Naruto didn't think. He simply fell backward into the saving darkness.
The moment he was inside, the passage sealed itself with a soft grinding noise, cutting him off from the outside world.
"Damn it, where is he?" a muffled voice came from the other side.
"You're seeing things. Probably just a rat. Come on, let's go back to the bar, my throat's parched..."
The voices faded.
Naruto lay on the floor in absolute darkness, gasping for air. Alive. His body trembled uncontrollably.
As his breathing steadied, he realized the darkness wasn't absolute. Ahead, at the end of a short corridor, a faint greenish glow shimmered.
The boy rose slowly. His legs shook, and his scrapes began to burn mercilessly. Limping, he walked toward the light.
The corridor opened into a small, square chamber. It was a strange place. The silence was so profound Naruto could hear the rush of blood in his own ears. The walls were covered in rows of complex symbols that seemed to vibrate slightly when seen from the corner of his eye.
In the center, resting on a simple stone pedestal, lay the source of the light.
A Jade Tablet.
It was the size of an adult's palm, deep green, and veined with patterns that pulsed with a soft rhythm, like a beating heart.
Forgetting his pain and fear, Naruto stepped closer. He felt drawn to the object. It wasn't curiosity; it was recognition. It felt like returning home to a place he had never visited.
"What is this...?" he whispered.
His hand reached out of its own accord. His fingertips grazed the cool, smooth surface of the jade.
In that instant, his world exploded in white light.
The tablet seemed to fuse to his palm.
Naruto tried to scream, but the air caught in his throat. A massive torrent of energy—pure, white, and dense as mercury—flooded from the artifact directly into his body.
It wasn't like the chakra he vaguely sensed within himself. This was something more ancient. Something "higher."
The torrent surged through his pathways, burning away exhaustion, and dived straight toward his stomach. Toward the seal.
And then, It woke up.
Deep inside, in a dark cage locked by the Fourth Hokage, a gigantic eye with a vertical slit pupil snapped open.
The Nine-Tails, the Kyubi, felt the intrusion.
Something alien, calm, and terrifyingly ordered was trying to breach his prison.
BEGONE! A soundless roar shook Naruto's inner world.
The red, corrosive chakra of the Kyubi rose like a tidal wave, lashing out to annihilate the invader. Naruto's stomach burned with hellfire. He collapsed to his knees, clutching his t-shirt.
The collision of two energies—White Qi and Red Chakra—was a war of ice and flame within his flesh.
But the Jade Tablet had been crafted by masters who knew more about demons than anyone else in this era.
The white stream did not fight. Instead, it condensed, wrapping around the raging red chakra like water enveloping a stone. It constricted, suppressing the Fox's rebellion through the sheer purity of its structure.
The red flame hissed and retreated, forced back behind the bars.
The pain vanished as abruptly as it had appeared.
In its place came Knowledge.
Information flooded his brain, not in words, but in images and diagrams. Breathing. The Center. The Dantian. Channel purification. Heaven and Earth. The Heavenly Circulation of Uzumaki.
The tablet, having given everything it held, crumbled into dust with a quiet chime and slipped through his fingers.
Naruto remained lying on the cold floor of the sanctuary. The fear of the drunkards was gone. Complex schematics of energy circulation swirled in his mind—he didn't yet understand them with his intellect, but his body had already begun to remember.
The boy took a deep breath. Air whistled into his lungs, and for the first time, he felt something else enter with the oxygen—tiny motes of the world's energy.
He opened his eyes.
In the darkness of the dungeon, his blue irises flared with a brilliant white light.