The door didn't lead to stairs.
It led to a corridor that stretched longer than the tower's exterior dimensions should have allowed, which told me immediately that the normal rules of space didn't apply here. The walls were smooth and dark, lit by the same sourceless light as the outside, and along the left side ran a single line of text carved directly into the stone at eye level. Different languages, cycling slowly as I walked past, until it settled on English.
Floor One. Enter when ready.
At the end of the corridor was another door. Simpler than the first. Wood, with an iron handle, the kind of door that belonged on a storage room in a village from three centuries ago.
Lyra stopped beside it. She hadn't spoken during the walk.
"Anything you want to tell me before I go in?" I asked.
"No."
"Helpful."
"The Tower is the teacher," she said. "I'm just the door."
I looked at her. She was looking at the door. Whatever she wasn't saying, she wasn't going to say it now.
I grabbed the handle and pushed through.
The first thing that hit me was the smell. Pine resin, wood smoke, and something underneath both of them, damp earth after rain, the specific clean weight of a forest that had been growing for a long time. I stopped walking and just breathed it for a second, because nothing I had ever watched on a screen prepared me for the fact that this place had a smell.
The second thing was the sound. Wind moving through tree canopy. Somewhere below and to my left, water running fast over rocks. Birds I didn't recognize by call. And underneath all of it, distantly, the sound of people.
I was standing on a path at the edge of a treeline. Below me, visible through a gap in the pines, was a village. Walls, gates, buildings clustered in the particular density of a place that had grown organically over generations rather than being planned. At the highest point of the village, carved into the stone face of the mountain behind it, were four faces.
I knew those faces.
The Hokage Monument. Konoha. The Hidden Leaf Village.
I exhaled slowly through my nose.
Naruto. Of course it was Naruto. The most recognizable anime on the planet, the one that had defined a generation of fans, the one I had watched in its entirety twice and whose wiki pages I had read at an embarrassing level of depth during three separate periods of my life.
I knew this world. I knew its geography, its power system, its political tensions, its characters. I knew who was going to betray whom and when. I knew which battles were coming and which deaths were already written.
I started down the path toward the village gate, already organizing my priorities. First, establish a cover identity. Second, locate the timeline. The divergences Lyra had implied were possible meant I needed to confirm where in the story I'd landed before I acted on anything I thought I knew.
The gate guards were exactly where they were supposed to be. Izumo and Kotetsu, both looking moderately bored, both present at a post that canon had them staffing throughout most of the pre-Shippuden era. That gave me a rough anchor. Pre-timeskip. Possibly around the Chunin Exam period, possibly before it.
I needed more data.
"Name and business," Kotetsu said, not looking up from the clipboard he was holding.
"Stan. Civilian. I'm looking for work."
That got him to look up. He took in the sweatpants, the bleach-stained shirt, the bare feet. His expression moved through several stages.
"Where are you from?"
I had prepared for this question during the walk down. "Small settlement east of the Fire Country border. Nothing left there now." Vague enough to be unverifiable, specific enough to avoid sounding fabricated.
Izumo leaned over to look at me. "You've got no shoes."
"Bad journey."
They exchanged a glance. Kotetsu made a note on his clipboard. "Civilian registry is in the administration building, center of the village. You'll need to register before you can apply for work permits."
"Thank you," I said, and walked through.
The village was exactly what I expected and completely different from what I expected. It had the shape I recognized, the layout, the texture of a place I had absorbed through years of animation. The training grounds to the northeast. The market district to the west. The Academy visible from the main road.
But the people didn't move the way animated people moved. They had weight. They had friction. A woman arguing with a vendor over vegetable prices was fully, uncomfortably real in a way that made the screen version feel like a shadow. Two kids running past me nearly took out my left knee, and the brief impact of a small shoulder against my hip was so ordinary and physical that I stopped walking for a full three seconds.
This was real. Whatever the Tower was doing, it wasn't showing me a recording.
I was in it.
I got to the market district and found a stall selling basic supplies. I traded the information that I was willing to carry inventory for two hours in exchange for a pair of sandals that almost fit and a plain dark shirt that didn't have a bleach stain on it. The vendor, a heavyset man in his fifties, seemed more confused by the offer than suspicious of it. He said yes.
Two hours of carrying crates gave me time to listen.
The market conversations told me what I needed to know. The Chunin Exams were three weeks away. Genin teams from multiple villages were already arriving. The name Uzumaki Naruto came up twice, once with affection and once with the particular resigned tone of someone describing a problem that kept solving itself in inconvenient ways.
Pre-timeskip. Chunin Exam arc. I had landed almost exactly where I'd hoped.
I was already building the approach in my head when the vendor's nephew, a boy of around twelve who had been watching me work with transparent curiosity, said something that stopped me cold.
"Are you going to watch the exams? My dad says this year is different because of the second bracket."
I set down the crate I was holding. "The second bracket?"
"The open bracket." He said it like I should know what it meant. "For non-ninja participants. It started two years ago. The Hokage approved it. Anyone can enter as long as they pass the physical screening."
I looked at him. He looked back at me with the open, uncomplicated expression of a child sharing information he considered common knowledge.
There was no open bracket in canon. There had never been an open bracket. The Chunin Exams were a ninja institution, closed to civilians, a political mechanism disguised as a tournament.
The Tower had changed something.
I kept my face neutral. "Right," I said. "The open bracket. I've been traveling, I'm not caught up on the details."
"You should enter," the boy said with complete confidence. "The prize is fifty thousand ryo and a residential permit. My cousin entered last year and made it to the second round."
Fifty thousand ryo and a residential permit. Practical prizes, designed to attract civilian participants. Which meant this change hadn't been implemented for the story. It had been implemented for me.
The secret condition snapped into clarity with a force that felt almost physical.
Win the open bracket. Reach the final round. Without ninjutsu.
The Tower wasn't trying to hide the condition. It was handing it to me in the third conversation I had inside the floor, dressed as small talk from a twelve-year-old vendor's nephew. Which meant the Tower wasn't subtle. It was confident.
It was confident because it knew what was waiting inside that bracket.
I picked up the next crate and kept working, because I still had forty minutes left on my arrangement and breaking it now would mark me as unreliable in a village where reputation was currency.
But I was thinking about the Chunin Exams. About who else was entering. About Orochimaru, who was going to show up in that forest regardless of whether there was an open bracket or not. About the fact that I had no chakra control, no jutsu, and three weeks to become something capable of surviving what this exam was going to throw at everyone inside it.
I also thought about what Lyra hadn't said when I'd walked through the door.
She'd known I would recognize the world. She'd known I would start calculating immediately. She hadn't warned me about the divergence, not because she didn't know, but because the warning was part of the test.
Trust the map too much and you walk into a wall that wasn't there before.
The vendor's nephew was talking again, something about a famous competitor from the Sand Village who apparently had the open bracket participants taking bets. I filed it away.
Three weeks. No shoes twenty minutes ago. No chakra, no training, no standing in this world beyond a freshly stamped civilian registry card I didn't have yet.
I set down the last crate and rolled my shoulders.
Step one, I thought. Don't die before the exams start.