A deafening explosion shook the heavens.
A mountain peak hundreds of meters tall was flattened in an instant.
Amid the smoke and dust filling the sky, a woman in a brown coat with a Konohagakure forehead protector tightly cradled a man whose body was drenched in blood, his face so badly injured that his features could barely be made out.
Tears streamed down her cheeks and fell onto his face.
“Razan!
Wake up, Razan!
Don’t leave me alone!” Perhaps the tears splashing against his face woke him, or perhaps it was the trembling voice choked with sobs.
Razan Mitarashi struggled to open his eyes.
The beautiful face right before him somehow seemed impossibly far away.
“A…
Anko-sama!” His voice was hoarse, weak, and filled with unwillingness to let go.
Razan Mitarashi strained to focus on the tear-streaked face before him, his pitch-black eyes overflowing with reluctance and attachment.
“Please…
don’t cry anymore.” “If you don’t want me to cry, then you have to get better!” Anko Mitarashi’s voice broke as she spoke.
“You promised you’d never leave me again.
Are you going to break your promise?” Whoosh.
Whoosh.
Whoosh.
Dozens of battered figures appeared around them, yet not one of them made a sound.
“I’m sorry, Anko…
Anko-sama.
You have to…
keep living…
and live well.” Razan Mitarashi raised a trembling hand, seemingly wanting to wipe the tears from her face.
In the end, however, all strength left him, and his hand fell limply to the ground.
“RAZAN!” …
Endless darkness.
There wasn’t a trace of light.
Neither his body nor his soul could move.
The suffocating silence and crushing loneliness surrounded him completely.
So this was what death felt like?
What a miserable feeling.
I’m sorry, Anko-sama.
I really can’t stay with you anymore.
There were still so many things I wanted to tell you.
…
I grew up among wolves.
I had no name and no parents.
Living within a merciless wolf pack, I was simply another kind of wolf, one that happened to be different from all the others.
Then one day, our peaceful life was shattered.
Out of that enormous pack, only I and a wolf pup that had barely been born managed to escape.
Maybe it was pure survival instinct, but I wanted to live, even though back then I didn’t even understand what living was supposed to mean.
From then on, the pup and I depended entirely on each other.
We didn’t dare approach human territory because humans would kill us.
As the years passed, however, I gradually came to understand something.
I was human.
I wasn’t a wolf.
War broke out not long afterward, and life became even harder for us.
We not only had to compete with other animals for food, but also protect ourselves from humans who wanted to hunt the wolf pup.
I still remember those days clearly.
We were constantly starving and covered in wounds.
Then came one winter.
The coldest winter I had ever experienced.
The pup and I hadn’t eaten anything for a very long time.
Every day, we survived by swallowing snow just to put something in our stomachs.
Eventually, neither of us could endure any longer, and we collapsed.
I remember that clearly.
It was the first time I had ever faced imminent death.
Strangely, I wasn’t afraid at all.
There was only calm, a tranquility so complete that even I found it unbelievable.
Against all expectations, someone saved us.
They were passing shinobi.
Each wore a metal plate on their forehead engraved with a symbol.
I later learned those were called forehead protectors.
The shinobi leading the group was the first to notice us.
Afterward, he brought us back to his village, Konohagakure in the Land of Fire.
Konohagakure took us in, but for the wolf pup and me, it wasn’t salvation.
It was the beginning of another kind of suffering.
The reason was simple.
Although I was human, I couldn’t speak like one.
No matter how anyone looked at my behavior, I acted far more like a wolf than a person.
The wolf pup’s fierce appearance frightened people too.
The people of Konohagakure avoided us, despised us, and sometimes even punched and kicked us.
It wasn’t only adults.
Children did the same thing.
The civilians were afraid of us.
They called us beasts and told us to stay away from them.
The members of prominent clans looked down on us even more.
Every beating became another nightmare that the wolf pup and I would wake from in terror.
Until I met her.
Anko Mitarashi.
She also came from one of Konohagakure’s prominent families, yet to me, she was like a god descending into my world.
She pulled me out of the darkness and filled my life with color.
That’s right.
She was the only ray of sunlight in my entire life.
I still remember the first time we met.
The wolf pup and I had been cornered and were being beaten.
My body hurt so badly that eventually I couldn’t even feel the pain anymore.
Perhaps I would have died moments later.
Truthfully, part of me hoped I would.
At least then everything would finally be over.
But that was the last time such a thing ever happened.
Because she appeared.
Her hair was tied into a short ponytail, and her young face was filled with stubborn determination.
She stepped directly in front of me and claimed I was with her, then drove those people away.
Afterward, she turned around and held out her hand with a cheerful grin.
Her eyes curved with her smile, and she looked unbelievably cute.
To me, that innocent smile was something I would never forget for the rest of my life.
Later, I learned her name.
From that point on, I stayed by her side.
She taught me how to speak, taught me how to read and write, and taught me how to live like a human being.
She even gave me a name.
Razan.
Razan Mitarashi.
I was so happy.
Mitarashi was her family name.
Not long afterward, Anko-sama entered the Ninja Academy.
She brought me along with her, and because of that, I was given the opportunity to become a shinobi as well.
Ninjutsu was such a pain.
Having to form hand seals for everything was irritating.
Compared to that, I much preferred kenjutsu and taijutsu.
Simple.
Direct.
The moment I picked up a blade, something inside me became impossible to restrain.
I wanted to fight.
I wanted to kill.
Back then, I was called a genius alongside a guy named Kakashi Hatake.
A genius?
What a boring title.
The war continued.
After graduating from the Ninja Academy, Anko-sama became the student of Orochimaru, the Snake Sannin and one of the Legendary Sannin, at the recommendation of her uncle, Shisho Mitarashi, one of the legendary Eight Colors of Konoha.
As for me, I sought out Sakumo Hatake, Konoha’s White Fang, who was also counted among the Eight Colors of Konoha.
I had heard that his kenjutsu was the strongest in the entire shinobi world.
And I wanted the strongest.
I expected the White Fang to refuse to teach me his kenjutsu so easily.
But strangely enough, although I never learned why, he agreed.
The only condition was that he never allowed me to call him sensei.
I didn’t care.
As long as I could learn from him, that was enough.
After training for some time, I discovered that I had been born with an extraordinarily strong affinity for Raiton.
When using it, I didn’t even need to form hand seals, and its power exceeded Raiton techniques of the same level.
That was war.
Anything could happen.
Things you expected.
Things you never could have imagined.
Shisho Mitarashi died.
When I saw Anko-sama sobbing uncontrollably, I understood my own weakness and helplessness for the first time.
That day, a conviction took root deep within my heart.
I had to become stronger.
I never wanted to see Anko-sama cry again.
Soon afterward, more terrible news arrived.
Konoha’s White Fang, Sakumo Hatake, had abandoned a mission in order to save his comrades.
For a shinobi, abandoning a mission was considered unforgivable, especially when the consequences supposedly prolonged the war.
Condemned by the entire village, the White Fang eventually took his own life at home.
I didn’t understand why the White Fang had chosen to end his life that way.
I only knew one thing.
I needed power.
Enough power to make everyone afraid of me.
Blinded by that desire, I stubbornly left Konohagakure behind.
During the years I wandered through the shinobi world, I learned too much and came to understand too much.
But I also forgot too much.
And lost far too much.
By pure chance, I eventually learned that Orochimaru had been experimenting on living people while researching kinjutsu and had defected from Konohagakure.
When his laboratory was discovered, the person lying on that freezing examination table was his only student.
Anko-sama.
If someone hadn’t found her in time, Anko-sama might have died there.
Even though she survived, Orochimaru had still branded her with a Cursed Seal and sealed away part of her memories.
At that moment, I finally realized something.
I had been wrong from the very beginning.
Power had never been the most important thing.
Anko-sama was.
But I realized it far too late.
I returned to Konohagakure.
Looking at Anko-sama lying in that hospital bed while she was still the one trying to comfort me, I suddenly felt like crying.
When you were at your saddest, I wasn’t there.
When you were suffering the most, I wasn’t there.
When you needed someone beside you more than ever, I still wasn’t there.
Maybe I was afraid.
Because after that day, I never dared leave Anko-sama’s side again.
I often wondered how my life would eventually end.
Truthfully, death itself never mattered much to me.
A beast had to be prepared to die like one.
Still, I never imagined I would die this way.
That masked man…
I don’t care who you are.
I don’t care what you wanted.
You hurt Anko-sama.
That meant you had to die.
No matter what price I had to pay.
Even if that price was my life.
Mutual destruction?
If I could die in Anko-sama’s arms while knowing she was safe, then I was already satisfied.
I had no regrets.
No hesitation.
Anko-sama…
I did everything I could.
I’m only sorry that I couldn’t keep my promise to you.
…
When I opened my eyes again, I had inexplicably become a baby.
Apparently, my name was Shima Kawasaki.
What kind of joke was that?
I would never accept it.
I would always be Razan Mitarashi.
This place was Soul Society, a world in which everything was composed of Reishi (Spirit Particles).
It was a world of Soul Reapers and souls.
And just like the shinobi world, it was a world where the strong preyed upon the weak.
Strength was the foundation of everything.
Perhaps because of my previous life, I had been born possessing an enormous amount of what this world called Reiryoku (Spiritual Power), as well as a long, pitch-black Zanpakuto shaped with the ferocious character of a wolf.
I simply never allowed anyone to discover either of them.
Soul Society’s Reiatsu (Spiritual Pressure) and the shinobi world’s chakra were structurally different, but there were also many similarities between them.
So I secretly began training.
Maybe one day I could return to my original world.
It was an unrealistic hope.
But it was also the only thing keeping me alive.
Several years later, the woman who gave birth to me died.
My father in name, Kai Kawasaki, had accidentally injured her.
She never received proper treatment, and eventually died from the resulting illness.
Before she passed away, she asked me not to avenge her.
She told me she didn’t hate him.
I promised her I wouldn’t.
My mother had only been a servant, and I was merely the illegitimate son Kai Kawasaki had fathered while drunk.
After a simple funeral, nothing really changed.
In his eyes, I was a worthless child without even a trace of Reiatsu (Spiritual Pressure), nothing more than a disgrace to the Kawasaki Family.
But what did his opinion have to do with me?
Time moved slowly in Soul Society.
Over those long years, I eventually recovered the peak strength I had possessed in my previous life.
I had no idea how powerful that made me by Soul Society’s standards, but I doubted I could be considered weak.
And yet…
What did any of that matter?
I still couldn’t go back!
If I couldn’t return, then what meaning did my existence in this world even have?!