Chapter 02/03 - New Soul in the Afterlife

A/N: Two very short chapters mashed together.

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"Oh, I see. You must've died recently and just came over from the World of the Living, but yeah. This is the afterlife, or rather District 69th, North Rukongai, Soul Society."

Itachi didn't know what to think, no, rather he didn't know how to accept this foreign concept that went over everything he ever knew.

Basically, the afterlife, based on what this old man just told him, was no different than the human world. The only thing that distinguished the human world and the afterlife was how long they lived. The distinction between body and soul was pretty much the same as being basic to their own respective worlds. 

"… Is there a way I-" 

"To look for your family?" The man cut him off but Itachi didn't express any surprise and just nodded while the man only shook his head. "New souls coming to the Rukongai ask that a lot, but all I can say is to give up. This world can be said to be endless with how big it is that you might not even find a single person you knew when alive even after spending a hundred years here."

The old man looked at Itachi and saw that the young man didn't look sad or downcast by that. In fact, he couldn't say anything about Itachi's looks as not once did his facial expressions change over their conversation. 

"What about the peculiarities of the afterlife?" Itachi asked, putting the issue of meeting his family to the side for now as the information was more important. 

"Peculiarities? Well, there's the Seireitei where the nobles and Shinigami live. And then you have the hollows – evil monsters that go around killing and eating anyone they see. We have the Shinigamis for stopping these attacks anytime it happens."

Itachi sat in silence, mulling his thoughts and the likely scenarios where he could put this information to use, but he forcefully stopped himself after remembering that he was no longer a rogue nin, or a ninja in general. 

This was the afterlife, or Soul Society as it was apparently called, and the last thing he wanted was leaving life the same way he did back in the Elemental Nations. 

"That will be all for now, thank you." He stood up and thanked the man and was about to leave when they called him back. 

"Do you have anywhere to go, or are you going to continue wandering the Soul Society?" The man asked half-serious and half-joking but the reply he got surprised him a bit. 

"I've been a wanderer most of my life. I think I can manage." After thanking the man again, Itachi was gone. Leaving the man the same way they met – complete strangers. 

….. 

He could have stayed if he wanted, even the old man was about suggesting the same thing, but he didn't. 

He didn't have any good reason for deciding to leave but something told him that he had to keep moving until he had nowhere to go, and that was what he did. 

He didn't plan on going to the Seireitei as the man had told him that only nobles and Shinigamis had the right to live there, and he was none. 

....

THWACK!

The stone continued on its path until it met the bark of the eighth tree and only succeeded in making its way halfway inside it, not through it. 

The perpetrator, Itachi, was standing horizontally on a tree with a few rock pebbles in his hand that he threw at the trees while noting their driving force and speed. 

Unfortunately, while he had figured out a circulatory pathway for the new flow, he couldn't use it to replicate any jutsu. 

One thing he also figured out was that while this new flow felt lighter than Chakra, average density-wise, it was more volatile than chakra. Hence the pebbles. 

He could only take the slow route of trial and error as there was no available precedent for him. 

He had been slightly happy, for a very brief moment, when he figured out the flow only for his mood to plummet when he found himself still yet unable to use his eyes. 

With how monotonous his days have been since he arrived here, Itachi, on more than one occasion, found himself forcefully pulling himself out of whatever training trance he was about to submerge himself in. 

With almost two weeks since he arrived in the Soul Society, he'd noted almost all the key differences and similarities between his former chakra flow and the new one. 

He could do the Body Flicker jutsu no problem, but he was yet to be able to weave a single jutsu. 

"Chakra works in tangent to the dual polarities of body and spirit, and also those of the elements. But this flow feels like it doesn't follow any of that."

His days were filled with him mumbling and pondering to himself until he snaps out of it. 

"I should start moving on." And like that he wandered further in an unknown direction. At the very least, he was relieved that the flow helped increase his speed and overall physical attribute just like chakra did. 

Continuing at the same pace, never staying in one place for too long, Itachi Uchiha spent his first month in the Soul Society as a wandering lost soul. 

.... 

Inside a cave, Itachi was sleeping when his eyes immediately snapped open as the group transmitted slight tremors to his body.

A sign that there was either a huge fight off to the distance, a herd of animals were stampeding or some type of natural disaster. 

As soon as he made his choice to check out what it was, his body flickered in a blur and he was gone. 

He ran through the shades and darker parts of the dense forest to prevent anyone from noticing his incoming. 

Seeing how the ground zero for what was apparently a battle was still a good distance ahead, Itachi reasoned that the battle must be an explosive one given how far the tremors traveled. 

As he got closer, he noted that the large tremors had all but ceased which meant that the battle was likely at its end. 

He slowed down and hid himself at a vantage point and watched the end of the battle. 

The most eye-catching thing he saw was the ten-legged giant crab monster that was fighting against a group of twenty or so warriors, including the dead bodies scattered around, all garbed in black kimonos and armed with swords. 

Itachi watched on as they cut off the last legs of the monster crab while two of them used its period of anguish to pierce their blades through the bony mask that covered its face. 

Itachi noted their formations, what remained of it, the fighting styles they all used - all of them except two people and they were the only ones with different bladed weapons from the katana everybody else seemed to use. 

Listening to what they were saying, Itachi confirmed that they were part of some 7th Division military… and Shinigamis. 

'They are not what I expected them to be.' Was Itachi's honest reaction to the fabled death gods, but then again appearances were the most deceiving, reality even more so - he would know. 

The crab monster faded away moments after it was killed so the remaining Shinigamis started wrapping up the dead bodies of their fallen comrades. 

While all this was happening, Itachi stealthily made his way closer to the battlefield to see if there were any smaller yet important information to note about the Shinigamis of Seireitei. 

He was lucky enough to snag one of the katanas of a Shinigami that had half of his body blown into the forest. 

Just as silent and unnoticed as he came, so he went with not one person from the group sensing him. He'd have had to notch up their perception by a few marks higher if they had noticed him. 

He'd have preferred a tanto or a kunai to a sword but his options were severely limited… always have been. 

He sighed and laid back down to sleep with the sword by his side. 

The next day, due to the presence of what he finally identified as a hollow and the Shinigamis, fighting around where he had been staying for a few days now, Itachi moved away from the site and continued his wandering once more. This time with a sheathed blade strapped to his waist and covered under the cloak he wore. 

Times like these are when he most times finds himself thinking back to his life. Wondering if there were things that could have been but weren't, choices that could have been made but weren't. 

He'd sometimes stop his wandering to train or do something that'll take his mind off from thinking too deeply about fairytales. 

It was during one of these stops of his that he finally noticed that there was something odd about the sword. 

The sword or whatever it was made of was a very natural conductor of the flow inside his body that he didn't know when the sword automatically added itself to his flow pathway. With how perceptive he was to his own body and energy, it was impossible for him to miss it. 

Unfortunately, he could only feel it, not being able to see or analyze it because of the absence of his eyes. 

Apart from a faint sense of rejection he used to feel from the sword when he had swung it to train for the first time, now there are hardly any 'blocks' from the sword whenever he swung it. 

The things he had been learning since his arrival on this afterlife named Soul Society; from the corrupt and poor human life conditions in the Rukongai, his new pathway flow, the evil spirits – hollows –, the protecting Shinigamis, even down to this sword, was one heap of confounding questions and mysteries, each one after the other.