---Konoha Cemetery - Midnight---
The village of Konohagakure slept, wrapped in the quiet embrace of the early autumn night. Above, a pale crescent moon hung suspended in a sea of stars, casting long, silver shadows across the manicured lawns of the Konoha Cemetery.
It was an hour belonging only to ghosts and the living who could not let them go. The only other soul within the perimeter was an elderly groundskeeper, his lantern was a distant, bobbing speck of orange light on the far side of the civilian sector, completely oblivious to the anomaly standing in the shinobi quadrant.
Alaric Jonathan Kenway stood motionless before the twin headstones of the Fourth Hokage and the Red Hot-Blooded Habanero. The night air was crisp, carrying the faint scent of wilting lilies and damp earth.
He took a slow drag from his cigar, the cherry glowing fiercely in the dark, before exhaling a plume of smoke that drifted over the engraved kanji.
His gaze drifted to the adjacent stone, where the name Nohara Rin stood as a quiet testament to a tragedy that had broken the world. For a brief, fleeting moment, Alaric entertained the thought of resurrecting her. If he brought Rin back, perhaps Obito's fractured psyche could be mended. Perhaps the mastermind behind the Akatsuki would lay down his arms, abandoning his delusion of the Infinite Tsukuyomi.
Then, reality set in.
Alaric paused, the cigar hovering inches from his lips. His brow furrowed in a deep, uncomfortable grimace.
'Wait a minute,' Alaric thought, running the mathematics of aging in his head. 'Obito is in his early thirties now. A fully grown man, carrying decades of trauma, war crimes, and bitterness. If I bring Rin back... she'll be thirteen. Fourteen, max. The exact age she was when she died.'
A visceral shudder ran down his spine. The image of a thirty-something Obito professing his eternal, undying love to a literal middle-schooler was not a geopolitical solution; it was a restraining order waiting to happen.
"Yeah... no," Alaric murmured aloud, shaking his head firmly to dispel the mental image. "That's a logistical and moral nightmare. It's not just weird; it's aggressively creepy. Obito can deal with his grief the normal way. With therapy. Or a Chidori to the chest."
Refocusing on the task at hand, Alaric turned his attention back to Minato and Kushina's graves.
He took a step back, widening his stance. He didn't reach for a shovel. He didn't weave a complex string of hand seals.
He simply extended his right arm, palm facing the sky. His blue eyes sharpened, glowing faintly in the moonlight as his vast chakra reserves commanded the elements to obey. Slowly, deliberately, he curled his index and middle fingers upward.
Rumble.
The earth did not break or tear; it parted. It was a fluid, dramatic separation, like the Red Sea yielding to a prophet. The rich, dark loam rolled backward in perfect, geometric blocks, revealing the deep, six-foot shafts without disturbing a single blade of grass on the surface.
There, resting side-by-side in the cold earth, lay two heavy wooden coffins, their timber sealed with the crest of the leaf.
Alaric stared down into the pits. A profound wave of distaste washed over him. He was a being of immeasurable power, a man who possessed the biological framework of a god and the wealth of an emperor.
But touching exhumed dead bodies? That was where he drew the line.
"Ew," Alaric muttered, his nose wrinkling.
Using his absolute mastery over Wood Release, Alaric willed the rusted nails and degraded timber of the coffins to unseal. The lids groaned, sliding backward with a haunting creak that echoed softly in the quiet night.
Inside lay the skeletal remains of Namikaze Minato and Uzumaki Kushina, draped in the decayed remnants of their final clothes.
Alaric didn't hesitate. He summoned a gentle, highly compressed vortex of Wind Release. The air swirled down into the coffins, wrapping around the fragile bones like invisible, silken hands. Slowly, the skeletons were lifted from their resting places, hovering securely in the air between Alaric and the open graves.
With a flick of his wrist, the wooden lids slid shut. Another subtle motion of his fingers, and the earth rolled back into place. The grass knitted itself together, the soil compacted perfectly, leaving absolutely no trace that the graves of the village's greatest heroes had just been breached.
"Grave robbing complete," Alaric murmured, thoroughly amused by the sheer absurdity of the situation.
Now came the problem of transportation.
He couldn't simply fly back to the compound. Traveling at high speeds with two brittle, decomposed skeletons hovering beside him was not only a structural risk to the bones, but it was also undeniably suspicious. If someone looked up and saw a man in a crimson coat floating through the sky with a pair of skeletons, he would have a lot of explaining to do to the ANBU.
He had to use Hiraishin. And to use Hiraishin, he had to physically touch them.
Alaric groaned, his face contorting in an expression of profound disgust. He approached the floating remains, leaning as far back as his torso would allow, trying to maximize the distance between his face and the dead.
He extended both of his index fingers, closing one eye as if bracing for an explosion.
"Gross, gross, gross," he chanted under his breath.
He lightly tapped the top of Minato's skull with his left index finger, and Kushina's shoulder blade with his right. The moment his skin made contact with the cold, porous bone, he flared his golden chakra, coating them in a protective, spatial envelope.
FLASH.
The graveyard was empty, the silence returning to the undisturbed stones.
---The Kenway Compound - Study Room---
Just as fast as he had vanished, Alaric materialized in the center of his expansive study room.
The room was a chaotic testament to his week of hyper-focused genius. Stacks of high-grade parchment teetered precariously on the edges of his mahogany desk. Discarded sealing tags covered the floor like fallen autumn leaves, and complex, three-dimensional geometric equations were drawn directly onto the walls in glowing chakra ink. The air itself tasted of ozone and ozone, vibrating with the residual energy of extreme Fuinjutsu drafting.
Alaric immediately withdrew his fingers from the skeletons, shaking his hands vigorously as if to fling off invisible grime, before wiping his fingers thoroughly on the lapels of his crimson coat.
Using the residual wind chakra, he carefully lowered the skeletons to the floor, laying them a few feet apart on a pristine rug.
He let out a long, heavy sigh, crossing his arms as he looked down at the remains.
If this succeeded, it wouldn't just be an advancement in his arsenal; it would be a complete subversion of the natural order. But despite his confidence in the code, the physical preparation was a macabre, unsettling process.
Alaric walked over to his desk, leaning against the heavy wood as he mentally reviewed the mechanics of what he was about to do.
He remembered the day he had healed Caroline in his previous world. Her brain had been locked in a state of irreversible shock, despair, and comatose trauma. To cure her, he hadn't used medical ninjutsu; he had used the Hourglass of Samsara. He had physically and temporally rewound the state of her neurons to a point before the trauma had occurred.
It was an overpowered ability, a divine cheat code that made his purchase of the Fuinjutsu: Ascendant level worth every single system point. But it came with a staggering, almost prohibitive cost. Rewinding a single, living human's mental state had required almost all of his astronomical chakra reserves.
This? This was exponentially worse.
Minato and Kushina's bodies weren't just injured; they were completely decomposed. They had been subjected to sixteen years of entropy. The process of using the Hourglass of Samsara to rewind this decayed calcium and dust back into healthy, perfectly functioning biological shells… flesh, blood, organs, and pristine chakra networks… would require a volume of energy that defied reason.
The math was clear. The process of rewinding just one of these skeletons to its prime state would drain him entirely. It would surpass his limits, consume his life force, and kill him instantly.
Alaric stared at the bones, the silence of the study pressing in on him.
Then, a slow, predatory smirk spread across his face.
'Well, it doesn't really matter, does it?' Alaric thought, a dark humor lighting up his blue eyes. 'I have Phoenix Rebirth anyways. Death is just a temporary inconvenience. A glorified nap.'
He pushed himself off the desk, his demeanor shifting. The casual, laid-back mercenary vanished. The squeamish, grave-robbing aristocrat was gone. In his place stood the Ascendant Seal Master, an entity preparing to wrestle with the fundamental laws of time and space.
He approached Minato's skeleton first.
He took a huge, deep breath, expanding his chest, and released it slowly, centering his mind.
Usually, Alaric didn't need hand seals. His control was so absolute, his intent so pure, that reality simply bent to his will. But this was different. To throttle and direct an output of chakra large enough to kill him, he needed the physical anchors. He needed absolute, unwavering perfection.
His hands came together, moving with a fluid, terrifying speed.
Rat. Ox. Tiger. Hare. Dragon. Snake. Horse. Ram. Monkey. Bird. Dog. Boar. Rat. Tiger. Snake. Dragon. Ram. Bird. Monkey. Ox. Horse. Snake. Rat. Boar. Dog. Tiger. Dragon. Hare. Ram. Snake. Ox. Monkey. Bird. Dog. Boar. Rat. Tiger. Snake. Dragon. Horse. Ram. Monkey. Bird. Dog. Ox. Rat. Snake. Dragon. Hare. Tiger. Ram. Monkey. Bird. Dog. Boar. Horse. Snake. Dragon. Rat. Tiger. Ox. Dragon. Snake. Bird. Monkey. Dog. Boar. Ram. Tiger.
With every seal, the temperature in the study plummeted, while the ambient light flared.
Golden seals began to manifest in the air around him, hundreds of them, spinning into a brilliant, spherical matrix that enclosed both Alaric and the skeletal remains of the Fourth Hokage. The characters shifted and locked into place, forming a three-dimensional clockwork of temporal syntax.
Alaric stepped forward. He disregarded his previous disgust entirely, operating with cold, clinical professionalism. He dropped to one knee and placed his bare, glowing palm flat against the cold crown of Minato's skull.
The golden matrix flared, blindingly bright, as Alaric poured the entirety of his life force into the anchor point.
His voice rang out, vibrating with power that shook the very foundations of the Kenway Compound.
"Fuinjutsu: Hourglass of Samsara!"
.
Consider buying me a coffee!
patreon.com/kulark
I'm uploading dozens of chapters ahead there!