The valley still hadn't healed.
It lay half cratered and burned beneath the whisper of rainclouds, scarred by pressure no shinobi could explain. It wasn't jutsu that did this-no explosion tag, no chakra-enhanced technique. What flattened this land was presence. A living will that had no element. No clan. No allegiance.
And now, it walked through the forest, heading toward the heart of the shinobi world.
David's steps were slow. Not because he was tired -- his body no longer registered exhaustion in the way it once had --- but because the air resisted him. The chakra that saturated the trees, the life essence rooted in every moss-covered stone, knew him now. It remembered the weight of his silence. It flinched.
He didn't press further. He let the forest yield.
Birds had stopped singing when he entered the outskirts of the Land of Fire. No animals crossed his path. Not out of fear, but recognition. Some balance had been shifted by his arrival. Nature, unlike men, did not pretend to misunderstand what it could not control.
Ahead of him lay Konoha --- hidden in name only. For David, it was not hidden. He could feel it, like a pulse beneath a wound. Chakra wove through the mountains like veins, dense and complex. seals hummed across the treetops, buried in bark and shadow. Invisible, to most. But to him, visible. Intricate. Tactical. Defensive.
It did not matter.
----
The Hokage's office was quiet.
Minato Namikaze sat behind his desk, posture straight, eyes unreadable. The message scroll lay open before him, written in clean, clipped script by a reconnaissance team whose final member had just returned. The rest had not.
["Target eliminated an elite Mist unit without jutsu or summoning. Fiel confirms three unknown Bloodline shinobi dead. No chakra signatures detected at time of engagement. No evidence of genjutsu. Survivors described a sensation of pressure...like drowning standing up."]
Minato exhaled slowly.
["And now he's walking toward us,"
Jiraiya muttered from the corner, arms folded]
["He's not hiding," Minato said.]
["No. He wants to be seen."]
David stepped through the final ring of forest and into the open trail that led to the Hidden Leaf.
Aa full ANBU squad awaited him. They did not draw blades. They did not speak. They parted.
Between them stood the Fourth Hokage.
Minato approached without ceremony. His chakra signature bright and composed, pressed outward like a calm flame in a cold storm. It did not threaten. It did not posture.
It simply stood.
David met his gaze. The silence between them was not empty. It was filled with understanding that neither had put into words.
["You've been carving new laws into the world," Minato said, voice even. "Laws we don't understand. But we know what they do."]
David did not answer.
["You've left Kiri broken. You killed to survive. And then you killed to learn. And now you're not killing. You're walking. That tells me you've reached a new stage."]
David's hand rested on Soul Tiller's hilt -- not drawn, not defensive. Just acknowledging.
[ "We don't know what you are," Minato continued. "But I know what you're not. You're not a mistake. And you're not a threat we can afford to ignore."]
[ "So this is an offer?" David asked.]
[ "This is an adjustment," Minato said. "You're going to stay in Konoha. You'll be registered as a shinobi of the Leaf. You'll be watched. But you'll also be known."]
David looked at the trees beyond the village gates. At the seals that flickered like breath across the stone walls. At the ANBU behind him, who didn't dare speak his name.
[ "Very well," he said. "I will learn your village. and you will learn the weight of mine."]
[ "Then welcome to the Leaf."]
---
They gave David a black flask vest. No symbol. No headband. Just presence.
He walked through the gates of the Hidden Leaf without fanfare. No civilians watched. No crowd whispered. But the air thickened. The earth remembered.
Somewhere in the training fields, a boy named Kakashi paused mid-strike.
Somewhere beneath the village, Danzo opened a file that had not existed before.
Somewhere far away, Orochimaru smiled without humor.
And in the tower behind him, Minato felt a shift in the balance of the world.
---
David did not speak again that day. He stood beneath the trees in the outskirts of the village and let the chakra of the land press against him.
It did not reject him.
It simply made room.
And so the War God entered history with a battle cry---
but with the silence of a man the world could no longer measure.
-------
Night in Konoha did not fall. It settled --- slow. weightless, like memory returning to a place that had forgotten its name. The lanterns in the village dimmed one by one, casting long shadows across rooftops and stone. The Hokage's flame flickered inside his tower, but no orders were issued. Not tonight.
David did not sleep. He did not need to.
He stood at the edge of the village beneath the canopy of the first trees that had ever grown here --- where the earth still remembered being untouched. His eyes were open, but not looking. His blade, Soul tiller, rested in the earth beside him, humming without light.
The chakra in the air was dense. Ordered. Controlled. It moved through the land like irrigation through a field --- useful, confined. It had laws, borders, technique.
And for the first time, David felt something beyond it.
Not power. Not hunger. Something older. Something that did not ask to be used --- only understood.
It came not as a whisper, but as a returning --- like his body had once known it before birth.
The trees didn't move. The wind didn't shift. But the space between all things began to hum with a rhythm untouched by the shinobi world.
David placed his hand over the ground. Not to pull from it. But to listen.
And what he felt was not chakra.
It was the energy that came before chakra.
The current that had moved through the first flame, the first storm, the first name spoken into the dirt.
The Source.
He stayed that way for a long time, eyes closed, still breathing. But when he opened them, his form had changed --- barely. But meaningfully.
His skin no longer repelled chakra. It ignored it. His body no longer generated energy from pain. It now condensed it without conflict. And his blade no longer pulsed with harvested souls. It now resonated with being itself.
[ "This is the real path," David said, softly. "The current beneath the system".]
He did not need jutsu.
He did not need bloodlines.
He did not need power.
He had found truth