A Silent Village

The days blurred again.

But now, there was something different. The water didn't resist me like before. It recognized me. I began to move through it with intent.

Kisame noticed.

He had me run drills—hand seals underwater, chakra threads across soaked scrolls, meditation at the base of pressure columns. But it wasn't just about mastery. It was about synchrony.

"Depth isn't about how far you sink," he told me one morning. "It's how much pressure you can carry and still keep walking."

I didn't respond. I was learning.

Then came the night tests.

Blindfolded in dark corridors, barefoot and half-numb, I had to find my way using only chakra sense. Mist ninjas specialized in silent kills. If I couldn't feel intent through the fog, I was as good as dead.

And the water always returned. Bathing. Binding. Reminding.

I dreamed of eyes. Wide. Round. Watching from the dark beneath the waves.

The Sanbi never spoke again. But I felt him. Like a tide under my skin.

One night, Kisame brought me to a chamber I hadn't seen before. Inside were scrolls. Hundreds. All sealed in wax and oil. He gestured to one.

"This is knowledge. Most shinobi don't get it until they've bled for years. You're getting it now because you're mine."

I unrolled the scroll. Diagrams. Hand seal theory. Esoteric chakra constructs. Depth-mapping.

And in the margins, inked with perfect clarity—notes in an ancient dialect. Mist script. Personal.

"These are from before the wars," he said. "Water jutsu meant something else then. Not just tools. Not just attacks. Principles."

I looked up. "Like depth."

He grinned. "Exactly."

From then on, my training shifted. It wasn't about surviving. It was about becoming something else.

I began writing, too. Copying the scrolls. Annotating with my own thoughts. Learning to read the Mist's silence like a language.

I kept journals. Quiet ones. Nothing about my past life—only about what I felt. What I heard beneath the waves. What moved in the deep. What I was becoming.

And through it all, the Sanbi waited. Not for dominance. Not for escape. But for alignment.

Now, when I trained, I didn't just survive the pressure.

I moved with it.

The water didn't just press in. It flowed with me.

Like we were learning to breathe the same current.