Chapter 2: Raijin

The ground shook as if thousands of rolling thunders had descended upon it. The very earth beneath Raijin's small feet trembled, shaking him to his core. Fear crawled through his small body. 

He squeezed his hands tightly around his ears, desperately trying to block out the deafening roars that pierced through the night sky.

Konoha, once a peaceful village, had erupted into chaos.

Raijin could hear frantic shouts, panicked cries, and the earth-shattering explosions that brought destruction in their wake.

Mother…Father…

Another ground-shaking roar pierced the air, and Raijin flinched, curling in on himself as the walls of his home rattled violently.

His wide, terrified eyes darted around, searching for any sign of his mother, Mikako, and father, Takeshi.

The boy whimpered, hot tears streaming down his cheeks. He wanted his parents, wanted them to come and whisk this horror away from him.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl as Raijin sat trembling, in the harrowing darkness.

Summoning what little courage he had left, the young boy peered out the window, his breath catching in his throat at the sight that greeted him.

He saw the towering form of the Nine-Tailed Fox, its scarlet, crimson eyes burned with primal fury, and colossal tails sending tremors through the earth with every swipe.

Raijin felt a chill run down his spine as he watched the beast unleash its devastating power, effortlessly tearing through the village's defenses.

The shinobi fought valiantly, their techniques and jutsus seemingly insignificant against the sheer might of the Nine-Tailed Beast. Raijin watched in horror as buildings crumbled, the very streets he had walked reduced to rubble.

The sounds of battle echoed through the night, a cacophony of clashing steel, shattering stone, and agonized cries.

Thousands of deaths occurred where explosions reverberated, the loud screams were overshadowed, and bodies fell like broken dolls, soaking the Konoha with hot steaming red liquid, painting everywhere crimson.

Raijin, a 4-year-old, experienced a typical war: a meat grinder of shinobi, a factory of death where bodies cook in the heat of explosions, a place where thousands of shinobi come to die in mud and jutsus with "honor."

Amidst the chaos, Namikaze Minato; The Fourth Hokage, whose face was etched with a determination that bordered on desperation. With a series of intricate hand seals, the Fourth Hokage unleashed a technique that shook the very fabric of reality, a desperate gamble to save his beloved village.

The Tailed Beast was sealed away, its half-power bound within the body of a newborn child. The silence that followed was deafening, a stark contrast to the earlier pandemonium, where Minato alongside his wife, Kushina Uzumaki, had sacrificed their lives.

A strangled sob escaped Raijin's lips as he realized the fate of Shinobi and his parents. His small hands flew to cover his mouth.

His parents were gone, taken by the fury of the Nine-Tails. They were dead.

Raijin sank to the floor, his cries of anguish muffled by his palms, his tiny body shaking with grief.

All he wanted was to wake up from this nightmare, he wanted his mother and father to burst through the door and gather him up in their loving embrace, to tell him everything would be okay.

But the nightmare was real. His dreams, his hopes, they all faded into shadows. He loathed the beast that had ripped his parents away from him.

Raijin felt empty, hollow, stripped of his parent's unconditional love and warmth that had once defined his world.

As darkness crept in, he felt himself slipping away. His body grew heavy, his sense of self slipping into nothingness, until only the cold void remained.

The lifeless small body knelt on the floor, facing the destruction he couldn't comprehend. His wide, red-rimmed eyes were swollen and puffy, faint lines of dried tears tracing his cheeks.

The battle had ended, and heavy breathing reverberated throughout Konoha, the air thick with the aftermath of destruction. Silence hung for a moment before bursts of emotions erupted on the faces of the survivors, their grief and disbelief filled vivid by the carnage.

Suddenly, Raijin gasped, a phantom pain searing through his chest. His heart raced, adrenaline surging as the familiar sensations overwhelmed him. The shockwave, the debris, the utter helplessness - it was all happening again.

In that instant, the body felt the weight of two souls converging. For within him, the soul of Wixx had been reborn, intertwining with Raijin's own.

…

With the sheer impossibility of processing the existence, Wixx had died amidst the chaos, his face frozen in shock.

His soul began to disintegrate.

The disintegration wasn't immediate, but a slow, inexorable unraveling—an imperceptible decay. Piece by piece, his soul dissolved, slipping away into an unknown dimension.

Yet, in that unknown place, the soul abruptly integrated. Faded memories resurfaced—faces, voices, and even the colors of the past that had dimmed to grayscale returned to vivid clarity. Hollowed emotions, and the indistinguishable shadows of love and hate, are now apparent to the soul.

The erosion of his essence came to a sudden halt, and the integration of his soul was complete.

The soul found itself in an unexplored dimension, a vast expanse where potent energies permeated every corner. These unknown energies slipped inside the soul, filling it with a brilliant, radiant bright light. The soul It devoured every form of energy—colorful, dark, gloomy, and eye-blindingly bright—until there was nothing left.

Once the energies had been devoured, the soul was forcefully dragged toward another dimension…or rather a new world devoid of such potent power. Instead, there was only a faint, lingering energy, weak yet ever-present in the natural surroundings.

This world was dark, a night sky stretching endlessly above. The horizon was marked by a beautiful dark blue expanse, and a pure, magnificent moon hung high, surrounded by stars. Below, the land bore an existence of life with the civilization of the past, resembling traditional wooden houses with sloped tile roofs, located at the base of a mountain with a carving of some sort, uniquely beautiful, like that of Mount Rushmore.

The soul felt a sudden surge of energy nearby – a foreign yet familiar sensation, reminiscent of the energies from the unknown dimension. It was the same type of energy it had once consumed, but now it had twisted and deviated, taking on a different form. This energy radiated from a fierce beast, a creature with one, two, three, … nine total tails, rampaging in the middle of human civilization.

This sudden surge was the result of the Nine-Tails' devastating attack – The Tailed Beast Bomb launched directly toward the mountain rock. Yet, when the attack didn't damage the mountain rock, it seemed to pass through the mountain without effect, as if the energy itself were intangible spirits.

After some moments, the soul watched the tailed beast being sealed into an infant, where the leaking energy dwindled rapidly, reducing near to nothingness.

The lingering residual energy of the crimson Nine-Tailed beast scattered across Konohagakure. Without hesitation, the soul devoured the scattered remnants of this lingering energy, absorbing every trace of the beast's energy until not a single fragment was left.

Once again, the soul was dragged, pulled swiftly toward a child – no older than three or four years. Above the child's fragile body, the remnants of its soul were dissipating, dissolving into the air like smoke. The soul recognized the familiar process—the same disintegration of spirit it had witnessed before.

The child seemed to be caught in a moment of agonizing pain, teetering on the brink of death, struggling to hold on before finally losing everything. The disintegrating spirit, on the verge of vanishing, suddenly slipped toward the soul, drawn as if by an invisible force.

In an instant, the soul was thrust into the child's body as a last straw in that pitiful lifeless child.

At that same moment, the survivors of the devastation were left gasping, their grief palpable in the thick, oppressive air. Their hometown had become a deadly battlefield—a place where the cost of victory had been measured in blood and broken lives. The sense of humiliation was heavy, as the price of survival had been steep—thousands dead, hundreds injured, and terror paralyzing the breath of survivors.

The loss of the Fourth Hokage's life was immeasurable, an irreplaceable blow to the village, and a wound that could never truly heal.

But Wixx—now inhabiting the body of Raijin Sarutobi—paid no mind to the suffering around him. His thoughts were consumed by the rampaging Nine-Tails, a cacophony of memories—explosions, shockwaves, flashes of a past life. The knowledge of both past and present coiled within him, offering a chance for his new life.

Wixx's, or Raijin Sarutobi's pale face, once marked by the terror of that moment, slowly returned to normal. With a steady breath, his wavering mind found clarity, and his soul settled into a serene calm.

Wixx then muttered, "Marigold and Pomegranate".

***