I vomited blood on the third day. I'm not talking about those coughing with a throat rust - I'm talking about falling on my knees, spitting thick red in the mud while the instructor looked with disgust. I had arrived a fat sedentary 19, coming from a world where the greatest pain was to get out of bed on Monday. Now I was in a leaf hidden training camp, surrounded by masked ghosts, being treated as a worm.
On the first day they sent us to run with weights in their legs and arms. I thought it was a joke. Fifteen minutes later, my thighs trembled like gelatin and I stumbled on a branch, rolled down a ravine below and hit my chin on a stone. The instructor - a guy that no one called by name, only "white crow" - looked at me and said, "Get up. Or die." There was no compassion on his voice. It was a command. I got up. Crying, but I got up.
The training did not stop. He ran in the morning, crawled in the afternoon, fought in the evening. I didn't really fight, "he picked up. The other recruits were all thin, dry, with eyes of people who already killed. And I there, soft, sweating fat, being thrown on the floor like a flour bag. Every blow I carried seemed to tear me a part of the soul. My body hurt in places that I didn't even know existed. One day I woke up with a pain on the side of the trunk so strong that I thought I had broken a rib. I was told it was just the liver complaining.
On the tenth day without bathing, I started to lose the smell of sweat. I only felt iron and earth. The food was cold, tasteless feed. Sometimes not even that. A whole day without eating. Two. Three. I entered a strange state - hunger and exhaustion to the point of forgetting my own name. The worst was sleep. They made us sleep two, three hours a night. Sometimes not even that. And when we dozed, they came and threw buckets of cold water to see our reaction. If it took a long time to get up, it was picked up with a wooden staff.
But nothing compared to psychological training.
They locked us in a dark room for hours, days maybe. Without light, without sound. Just a voice that said, in whispers, "everyone hates you, everyone forgot you, no one will save you." Then they put a boy beside me. He cried, trembled, said he was my friend. "Let's escape together." I tried to hold his hand. The next day he was dead. I was told it was a simulation. An illusion. But I didn't forget the warmth of his hand.
Then came the interrogation part. It was all staging, they said. But they tied me, tortured me, called me a traitor, used illusions that showed me my mother dying burned. Only ... something happened. In that illusion, when the fire consumed it, I felt something inside myself react. A heat that didn't come from the scene, but from my chest. Small. Fine like a redhead. But real. I trembled. Not from fear. Of anger. The illusion disappeared. The interrogator looked at me with a confusing expression, as if he had seen something he should not.
No one said anything after that. But they watched me more closely. In disguise.
And then came the teachings about Anbu. Indoctrination. The village above life. The name doesn't matter, the face doesn't matter, the feeling doesn't matter. Just the mission. They made us burn our clothes. Break a mirror with your own face. Write the mother's name on a wooden plate and bury it.
At the end of the month, I was no longer the same. It was still fat. It was still slow. But my eyes had changed. I felt. As if a part of me, a part that I never knew, was waking up. As if I was not just made of weak meat and modern laziness - but of fire. An old fire. Crude. Hidden.
I don't know what will happen. But one thing I learned: hell is not red. It's gray. Silent. And one learns to love the heat when everything around is cold.
I started the second month without hope, but angry. AngerFrom myself, the world, the stupid smiles I gave when I ate Fast Food sitting in front of a screen. I no longer remembered what that world was like. There are cloudy images, distant voices. But the body didn't forget. Each movement still ranges. Each step still hurt. Fat still followed me as a curse stuck to the soul. But the mind… The mind was different.
The first thing they did was throw us into the swamp. Literally. Water to the waist, leeches, mud that sucks your foot in. We had to cross carrying trunks on the shoulders. An hour of crossing. The trunks sank, we sank, and the damn Anbus watching from afar, with cold eyes behind the masks, noting everything. The trunk fell on me three times. In the third, I stayed there, lying in the mud. And I thought, again, to give up. I thought of screaming. To beg. But instead, I got up.
I stopped talking. Simple as that. In the first week of the month, I said two words. In the second, none. The sound of my voice seemed too weak. As if I betrayed my own will every time I opened my mouth. I started learning from silence. Listening to the environment. The squeak of the leaves, the sound of the breathing of the others, the subtle noise of a suspicious movement. That's what they wanted. An animal with hunter ears, with eyes that do not distract themselves. And I was becoming it.
Infiltration training began to climb. They left us in an abandoned village and said, "You have 48 hours to break into five houses, mark a symbol on the wall and leave without being noticed. If you are seen, you failed. And if you fail ... they will be hunted." The night fell fast. The others moved as shadows. I was a fat shadow. I dragged myself, hid between pigs, entered the dog holes. I almost died suffocated in a tonel to escape the vision of a sentry. And yet, I marked the five houses.
On the way back, they said I was seen three times. I received three slaps on the face. Not out of anger - by precision. Calculated slaps to activate fear, to create reflection. They trained me with subtle violence. If I breathed wrong, a stomach blow. If you stepped too hard, a bamboo stick on your legs. It was not punishment. It was conditioning. The body catches until learning.
And that's when the first strange thing happened. During a night workout, they made me track a veteran Anbu for a dry leaf field without a noise. I was sneaking, focused, almost reptilian. And then I felt… a warm. Coming from the ground. But not common heat. It was as if the floor was whispering, telling me where he would step. And he stepped there, exactly where I felt. I diverted seconds before. Almost unintentionally, almost by instinct. That scared me. But it gave me a spark. It was not a chakra. It was not logical. It was primal. The inheritance. I felt her for the first time. Weak but present.
The following week, the test was even worse. They took one of the recruits and simulated their death. He was a boy who spoke to me sometimes, in the few moments of rest. They put an enemy mask on him and had us eliminated the "target." I just found out who it was after I hit the blow. He fell, cracked mask, wide eyes. It was not dead, but injured. They did this to break the loop. To kill confidence.
I didn't cry. I was not in shock. I felt a hole open. But inside him… an ember lit. As if the pain was not an end but a fuel. My body began to react differently to training. The pain is no longer enemy. Began to be allied. When they broke my finger during a containment exercise, I laughed. For the first time, I laughed. Because I realized: I was resisting. I was winning. Not fast. Not with glory. But winning.
They started to watch me more. Two instructors talked from afar looking straight at me. Separated me fromGroup for three days and put me to train with a hooded, silent man. He only used gestures, never spoke. It made me repeat a single movement - walk over plain oil -covered, absolute silence. Fifteen hours a day. When she slipped, she would take a stick on her back. And at the end of the third day, I managed to cross all the way. He nodded once. And disappeared.
Then came the "judgment of masks." A circle of fire. Seven Masked Anbus. Us in the center. One by one, we were placed in front of one of them. The masquerade said a crime, and we had to answer with a punishment. If the answer was considered weak, we would catch. If it were too cruel, we would also catch. The goal? Teach balance between justice and brutality. When it was my turn, they put me in front of the masked that represented betrayal of the village. I answered: "Removal of the tongue. Eternal prison in silence." Silence in the field. I didn't catch up.
Last week, the instructions began to change. They came to call us "candidates." A new term. And with me, they started using the word "unstable." He heard when they passed by: "He is unstable. But there is power." I don't know what they saw. Perhaps they have felt. Maybe my body released an abnormal heat during a genjutsu session where I simply broke the illusion without knowing how. They said I forced the body chakra to get rid of it. But I know… I know it was not a chakra.
It was fire.
The second month ended with me kneeling in a silent field, covered with sweat and dry blood, panting. I looked at my now calloused, cracked hands with my fingers deformed by repeated blows. But there was something about them. A trace of energy. Like an invisible smoke, pulsing inside. A power that grew slowly, such as coal being blown by persistent wind.
I was no longer the same. It wasn't Anbu yet. But it was no longer a civilian either.
I was coal about to become embers.
And the ember… she wants to burn.
I woke up with a shoulder cut and a bloody caught on the skin: "You failed. Training starts over." I don't remember sleeping. I don't remember having failed. But it didn't matter. Anbu does not live in memory, lives on results.
The third month began as a death rite: they ripped our temporary masks, broke our training weapons, scraped our hair. "You are nobody." It was the first lesson. The second came shortly thereafter, "If you want to be someone, you kill this one." And let us go in the bush. Alone. Seven days. Without food. Without shelter. Without instruction.
It was supposed to be a survival test, but it was more. It was a trip to the hell of the soul. I spent real hunger. I ate insect. Lici stone by water. The pain of abstinence was worse than anything. My body was still screamed for sugar, salt, fat. But that no longer existed. I learned to hunt squirrels with hair traps. Camuflar my smell rubbing wolf feces on the skin. Sleeping hugging hot stones at night. It was in this silence, in this primitive despair, that the fire inside me pulse again.
On the fourth night, I dreamed of embers dancing on an altar. It was not a common dream. It was vivid, as if the bones burned with the heat. One of the embers called me by name. Not the name of the recruitment form. The real name. The one I never knew. When I woke up, my hands were sooty. There was no fire around.
I returned on the eighth, thinner, silent, silent, with the eyes of a animal. Crow Branco looked at me and smiled. It was the first time I saw something like satisfaction on his face. He said that now real training would begin.
They taught us to kill with silence. Clean blows. Lethal. Twelve points of the human body where the light goes out with a finger. We spent hours lying on false bodies, practicing the insertion of bone blades between ribs. It wasHow to learn to play an instrument - a funeral violin. With surgical accuracy. An an inch error and the enemy screams. A mistake of two, and he bleeds slow. Anbu kills with economy. No show.
And came the simulated operations. Host homes, fake targets, traps. All in real time. All with punishment. I failed the first one. I hesitated to see a child - even knowing it was illusion. I punched the jaw that erased me for hours. When I woke up, my face was swollen, my soft teeth, and my marked form: "Emotion above the function." It hurt. But deep down… I needed it.
So I hardened. And in the following training, I acted with coldness. I stepped on fake bodies without looking away. I cut throats made of hay as if they were real. I learned to recognize traps by the smell of oxidized metal. Listening to the silence between steps. My body was still slow, heavy. But my mind was sharp. And more than that: something new emerged from my senses. A sensitivity to heat. To intention. To the living presence.
During a hunting exercise, where we should follow a traitor to the snowy mountains, I got lost from the group. It had no traces, no sound, no chakra. But I felt… heat. Under the snow. A warm trail, like invisible footprints burning the air around. I followed that. And I found the "target". Before the others. When I reported, they looked at me strange. They asked me as I realized. I said it was intuition. Lie. It was the sparkling eye. He opened for a moment without warning. I only felt the heat shape the landscape as a paint on the ember. Then closed. But it was the taste of power.
They started calling me a "brazier". A nickname. Unofficial. But spread. Some with derision. Others with fear. I saw it in their eyes. The other recruits… were starting to fear me. Not by force. I still lost in most combat. But for unpredictability. Because, from time to time, when the blood rose and anger burned, my hands were hot. And once, just one, I touched the floor during a containment exercise and the clay bubbled. They pretended to be poorly conducted chakra. But I saw the terror in the eye of the evaluator.
At the end of the month came the night of the mirror. A ritual. Each recruit alone in a dark room with a mirror of Obsidian. Clear instructions: "Stay face to face with what you are. If you break the mirror, fail. If you run away, fail. If you lie, die inside." I sat there for hours. I looked at my reflection - fat, sweaty, with deep dark circles. But behind the eyes… there was something. A flame. Small. Stubborn. I faced. And smiles. For the first time in a long time, smiles without pain.
Not that it was beautiful. But it was real.
When I left the room, they were waiting for me. The instructors. Danzo was not, but I felt his presence in the echo of the room. The white crow said to me, "You're still weak. But your fire ... is starting to show form. It's not a chakra. And that intrigues us. Continue. Or die trying."
And that was it. A third month of killing the weak self, of accepting the monster, of sharpening the spirit. The civil mature? Died in the first month. The surviving Mateo? I was burning now. In ember. Low. But growing. And the world would feel.
Because the true fire does not explode. He waits.
And when you burn, nothing left.
Do you know what no one tells you about the pain? She smells. A metallic, hot, half sweet smell. Almost like cooked meat that was too long in the fire. In the fourth month, this smell was the air that I breathed.
The routine has changed. If in the first three months the goal was to break and sculpt the basic form of an ANBU, now the focus was to season the steel. Which means, in practice, to immerse the body and mind in controlled, repeated, and without warning. The name of the module was "dynamic conditioning". But among us, recruits, we called "hell of living."
We woke up with blows. Never in the sametime. Never with warning. Sometimes it was gas in the dormitory. Others, boiling water falling from the ceiling. One day I woke up with a knife between my toes and the voice of the white crow whispering, "If you move, you cut a tendon." And I stayed there for an hour, sweating cold, without moving a muscle. When the knife was removed, the hand trembled. Pride too.
The fourth month was the month of simulated mutilation. Yes, simulated. But only because, technically, the wounds were not permanent. Cuts, burns, fractures. All controlled, all with the presence of an "doctor" Anbu, who looked more like a butcher with clean gloves. They wanted our body to accept pain as a routine. That the mind no longer fired the natural survival alarms. May the pain become just one more data on the battlefield. A background noise.
And it wasn't just physical pain. They brought the interrogators. Masters of the Word. Psychologists trained to break convictions. They sat in a cell with a table, a low light and the dark - the oldest interrogator of the foundation. He read my record. He looked at me. He smiled, but his eyes were stone. "Mateo Valverde," he said. "Do you believe you have any purpose here? You're wrong. You're just another stranger with luck. But I'll take it out of you." And took it.
He made me doubt everything. Made me confess crimes that I never committed. It made me beg for my mother's name - which doesn't even exist in this world. And then it left me alone. For three days. Hungry. Thirsty. With a light that never turned off. On the third day, I started talking alone. In the room, I started listening to answers.
It was there that the inheritance manifested itself for the second time.
I was lying, muttering my own name, trying not to forget who I was, when I felt the air becomes denser. The door metal began to sweat. The floor, cold before, was now warm. I closed my eyes and saw. Not with normal eyes - with an incandescent eye. I saw the cell inside. I saw the dark sitting across the wall. I saw the seal that kept the hunger genjutsu. I broke. No chakra. Without technique taught. Only with anger.
When I left, the supervisors stared at me as if they saw a ghost. The seal was still active, but I acted as if it wasn't. I didn't understand myself on time. I just knew that something in me burned the lie. The hunger is gone. The thirst was false. The suffering, imposed. But my fire was real.
After that, they transferred me by group.
I was placed among the worst. Those who were about to be discarded. And the order was clear, "Either you elevate them, or die with them." It was not a test. It was sentence. But I understood the message. Danzo wanted to see if I was a leader or just a useful accident.
So I spoke to them. Three recruits. One without voice, another without faith, and the third without will. And in a week, I turned the three. Not with beautiful speech. But with practice. I taught what I knew. I showed how to use fear as a weapon. How to feel the heat of intention before the attack. How to hear the sparks of the world before violence began. When they realized it worked… they started following me.
In the last exercise of the month, we were sent to the "Blind Zone". An abandoned installation within the limits of Konoha, full of traps, simulacros and wild dogs. It was supposed to be survival. No one expected us to go. But not only do we pass - we dominate. We don't kill the dogs. We burned them with steam - I used the "Rubra tide" by instinct, mixing sweat and internal heat. The floor was slipped, their eyes blinded. We pass as shadows.
When we left, Danzo was there. First time I saw him closely.
He looked at me, and for the first time, he didn't smile. But said:
"True fire doesn't need chakra. Just willing. You're not a mistake. It's a threat. And that ... it's useful."
It was the only approval I received.
And it was enough for me to know: the fire is growing. Not in blind fury, but in shape. In control. In purpose. I'm not just Mateo anymore. Not just a recruit.
I am a living inheritance.
And no one will erase me.
The fifth month was the month when pain stopped being a concern. Not because she disappeared, but because I learned to ignore her. Fear has also become an irrelevant concept. In the fifth month, everything I did seemed to be a natural extension of me - no fear, no pain, no tiredness, nothing prevented me from going deeper.
Now the training was no longer just about resisting. It was about using pain and fear against the world itself. The white crow said we had to learn to "take control" of our environment. Do not control hard, but with mind. Not with jutsu, but with essence. And for that, it was necessary to understand the true nature of the mission.
What was taught to me was simple, and at the same time, terrifying: "In a mission, you are the shadow that will never be seen. If you are seen, you have already failed." The word "failed" was stamped in every word. And, as much as it was infiltration training, what was really being molded was my soul. As if, under the lessons, I was being made to be the very idea of invisibility, of absolute silence, of complete control. Not just physical, butpsychological.
The first part of the month was intense. The Anbu told me that we could no longer depend on physical training to survive. No more races with weights, no more military training. Now the weapon was the mind. They forced us to perform mental concentration exercises, where we were exposed to extreme stimuli: incessant sounds, terrifying images, words that appealed to our greatest fears. All of this as we kept real -eyed, with the full darkness. If a reaction were detected, a high voltage shock hit us. But the worst was not shock, no noise, no images. The worst was when the images stopped, when the silence took over. This silence… It was worse than torture.
I had nightmares inside those sessions. It was not a simple nightmare, but a mental storm. Scenes of people I had never met, places I had never visited, but they were so vivid, so real, that the line between dream and reality began to dissolve. The fire appeared again, as a constant view, burning everything around me. It was not destruction, it was purification. I saw the flames dragging my own flaws, my own weaknesses.
In the second part of the month, I started training with the "incandescent eye". Not as any trick. I should use it to realize the essence of things. It was not about seeing the chakra, but to realize what was hidden, what people didn't say, what they tried to hide. It was an entire week of frustrated attempts. But then, one night, while the others were sleeping and Konoha's silence involved everything, I saw him.
There was a man. In the street. He was still, but the heat that emanated from him was something that didn't match that place. He was not a villain, but he was not in tune with the environment. The warmth emanating from him was something dense, as if he had an invisible pressure around him, a tension that was corroding the peace of the city. I didn't see with my eyes. I saw with an incandescent eye.
I lowered my head, preventing him from seeing me, and followed his steps like a shadow. At some point he turned and stared at me, but not for long. He noticed my presence, but it didn't seem surprised. It just gave a slight nod and walked away. I still didn't understand what it meant, but I knew I had just touched something bigger than Anbu herself.
The last weeks of the month have been dedicated to real infiltration tests. They sent us to a mission in a neighboring village - an intelligence mission. It was not about defeating enemies, but of remaining invisible. There was a clandestine operation, but I didn't know who was behind it. The goal was simple: not being seen, not being identified. We had to invade without leaving trail, leaving without a noise.
On the first night, one of the recruits failed. He hindered when entering the target's house. A single sound, a single wrong movement, and everything has been compromised. What happened later was not a surprise, but it was necessary. The error was not forgiven. He was exposed, and the rest of us had to deal with the consequences. Everyone was in the line of fire. Everyone had their eyes on us. There was no mercy.
I followed the plan. Subtle. Silent. The incandescent eye was my guide, allowing me to see through the walls, through the bodies, through the eyes of those inside the village. It was as if the world were before me, like an open book. I knew when a guard turned, I knew when someone said something improper, I knew how far the security system was fail. I concluded the mission accurately. The target was reached. Not a shot bullet, but a whispered word, an understood look. The whole world seemed to be burning under my perception.
Konoha's Anbu lookedFinally understand what I was becoming. It was no longer a simple recruit. I was no longer that boy who started training with fear. Now I was the controlled flame, the knife that cut without warning. When they looked at me, it was more with caution than with contempt. The fire was real. But it was controlled.
The last part of the month was a final test, the hardest. It was a suicidal mission simulation. We entered a closed training field, where we were surrounded by fictitious soldiers, armed to the teeth, with elite training. The mission was simple: infiltrating, killing and extracting. There was no time. There was no margin for mistakes.
In that mission, I dealt with the enemies. With a volcanic eye, I launched gusts that burned and melted the metal of the weapons. With the "blade of the spectral pyre," I cut the targets before the sound of the blade warned them. Everything moved in a pace of its own, where fire did not burn, but purified. I was no longer a man with limitations. I was an extension of inheritance.
When we left the field, the words of Corvo Branco marked the end of the month:
"You have fire. Now learn to use it to rewrite your own world."
And I knew. I was starting to be something beyond what they expected of me.
The sixth month was the month of transformation, a month when, instead of just breaking and rebuilding, I was shaped in a way that I would never imagine being possible. Now, physical training was no longer so brutal, nor the psychological tests so intense, but the challenge was different: they wanted me to become the thing they feared most - an absolutely relentless human being, without remorse, without weakness, without mercy. They didn't just want me to be good - they wanted me to be the best. The best hunter, the best spy, the best executor.
In the early days, I was surprised by the way training had changed. There were no more simulations of torture, no such brutal resistance tests. No, now I was being taken to the field once again, but with a fundamental difference: it was not any mission. It was a high -risk mission, high profile. A real test, a clandestine operation to capture a Konoha traitor. If I failed, it would be seen as an ANBU failure. If I was successful, it would be the validation of everything I had become so far. I was no longer an experiment, but a gun.
The goal was clear: infiltrating an enemy cell that operated on the fringes of Konoha's laws, find the leader, and extract the information he had. But besides, the always relentless white crow warned me: "If you need to eliminate, eliminate. If you need to break, break. Don't let anything or anyone hold you. Konoha doesn't need doubts, you need certainty."
Again, it was me against the world. And to be honest, I had already accepted the fact that my humanity was slowly dissolving. It was no longer about fighting for a noble cause or saving lives - it was about doing whatever was necessary to ensure the survival of the hidden village of Folha. It was a matter of pure and simple survival.
Me and the other Anbu were sent to the border, a village that had already been a plague for Konoha's safety. They were silent, but we knew that enemies could appear at any time. They were never where we expected, always one step ahead. I felt this more than anything else - the fire in my soul, growing up, fed by pressure. I knew what was ahead was more than just a mission - it was a chance to transform everything I had learned into a decisive action. I had to prove myself that I was more than a piece of a board. I had to be the fire that consumes everything around.
The infiltration was well performed. We use the shadows andnight silhouettes like our allies. I moved my legs at a speed that, when I looked back, seemed impossible to me. But at the moment it seemed natural. The incandescent eye, now sharper, allowed me to see through the walls, the disguises, the lies. I focused only on the heat-I felt the warmth of each heart, with every mind that was there. And each of them seemed to emanate a distinct aura of guilt and fear. I felt that the fire was already consuming them without them knowing.
The capture was quick. The traitor, a Konoha ninja who had been corrupted, had no chance. He tried to escape, but I had seen him, had already analyzed him before he even realized my presence. There was no fight, there was no hesitation. Using the "burning chain", I held your arms, cauterizing any attempt of resistance. He didn't shouted. He didn't have time. When I stared at him, flame in my eyes burned like never before. "You failed, and Konoha doesn't forgive flaws," I said, and the voice wasn't mine. It was the fire speaking. Hell.
What happened next was… not exactly a mistake, but something that made me question the line I was going through. The traitor knew nothing of immediate value, but in his mind, he carried a deeper secret. It was a secret about Anbu herself, the Danzo foundation, the hidden control, and the internal games that even Hokage didn't know. He failed to give me the answers I wanted, but something about him… aroused a flame. The fire didn't burn him only - burned what he knew. He revealed everything in detail before being executed.
At that moment, I realized what Danzo wanted from me. I was not just a tool. I was purification. He used me like a torch to burn the traces of corruption inside Konoha herself. And I did what he asked me. I didn't feel guilty. I didn't feel afraid. Fire leaves no room for weaknesses. But somehow a doubt haunted me, one I never imagined feeling. I was no longer just a soldier. I was an executor, the hand of Danzo himself, the shadow of a world that we would never see the light.
In the following days, the operation was closed. The cell was decimated, but what really was was what I carried inside me. A need to know more. More about what Anbu really was. More about what Danzo really wanted. What's more, much more, what I was becoming.
When I went back to the base, something changed me. It was no longer the 19 -year -old who had entered the foundation. I was no longer that lost boy. The training had shaped me, the fire had consumed me, and now I was more than a blade forged by the need. I was the blade that would never return to its original state.
And Danzo knew that. He knew that if the fire were not controlled, there would be nothing left, not even the rubble. He watched me closely, as a flame waiting to see if the fuel was still there. The fire had transformed me, but what he really wanted to see was how far he could push me. And now, I knew he would never stop. He wanted more. And sooner or later, I would be forced to decide how far I would take this flame.
The seventh month was the month when everything I thought I knew about. I was no longer the confused young man who had entered Anbu, but it wasn't the unbeatable being I imagined to be. This month was about deconstruction. I had to look inside and wonder if I was really in control or if I was being controlled. The pain, which was once just an obstacle to overcome, now seemed a reflection of something much deeper and more insidious, something that hid within me and still did not fully understand.
The always enigmatic white crow appeared with a different mission. It was not an infiltration mission, nor adirect elimination operation. No, this time the mission was more… introspective. He told me that I needed to learn to control my own fire. Not the fire of the techniques, but the inner fire. What was in me, but that I had not yet understood.
This mission was not made of combat, but of loneliness. For almost two weeks, I was isolated in a cave in the mountains, without communication, without light, without resources. Only me and my own mind. The goal was simple but terrifying: being alone and meditating. But more than that, it was about facing its own emptiness, the absolute loneliness itself. There was nothing more to distract the mind. I only had the fire on me and the darkness around me. The white crow said that in this environment what I would find could destroy my humanity - or make me transcend.
In the early days, I felt the weight of loneliness. The shadows seemed to extend infinitely and the silence was absolute. My thoughts began to become confused, as if the walls of my mind were closing. But then… the fire came. I don't know if it was the training, if it was the awakening of the inheritance, but something inside me lit. I was no longer alone in the cave. I could see the fire in the darkness, dancing around me, like an eternal flame. But it was more than a common flame. It was my essence.
For the next few days, I began to realize that fire within me was not just destruction. He was also creation. I felt the warmth of the flames burning, but at the same time there was something alive in that. It was as if the fire had a soul of its own. He moved, expanded, retracted. I needed to understand what he wanted from me.
It was in this isolation that I realized a fundamental thing: I did not control the fire. The fire controlled me. He was part of me, but it was also bigger than me. It could no longer be just a technique, something I used as a tool. The fire was transforming me, and I needed to learn to be more than a simple receptacle for him. I needed to be the fire itself.
Meanwhile, physical training continued. The white crow and others forced me to perform strenuous tasks every day. But now, something had changed. I didn't see them anymore as obstacles. They were the way I could test my transformation. The training was increasingly intense, not just the physicists. The psychological burden increased almost unbearably. They wanted to see how far the fire inside me would take me.
There was a day when I was placed in a real combat situation. Not a mission of capture or elimination, but a simulation where my life was at risk. I was placed against one of Anbu's best fighters, a many -year -old veteran who was there to test my skills. The fight started like any other, but I soon realized that the difference was that instead of fighting only with the body and the techniques it already dominated, something new manifested itself. Fire inside me began to expand, to influence each movement. I wasn't just reacting to the attacks-I was anticipating them.
The combat was brutal. The veteran tried everything. He attacked me with speed, hard, with Taijutsu and Ninjutsu techniques, but every blow, each movement seemed to be answered by the fire that burned in my essence. When he launched a series of quick punches, I felt the heat spreading through my body, something that seemed more natural than forced. I used the "scorching pulse blow," not as a planned movement, but as an instinctive answer. The force of impact, with the heat that now permeated my body, sent the veteran backwards.
However, he got up. I realized that there was something more in this combat than just skill. There was something I couldn't control, a force that was going beyond what I was prepared. I attacked again, more furious, but he, with a scary calm, began to anticipate all my movements. He knew exactly what I would do, because the fire on me was starting to get uncontrollable. The mental pressure, the rabies that grew, the fire expanding - all this began to consume me.
It was at this moment that I realized the truth. The fire, which once seemed to be my strength, was becoming my weakness. I was losing control. I was fighting the fire, but he was burning me inside. The combat was no longer between me and the veteran, but between me and my own nature. The fire I had inside me could not be used without care. He was destroying me from the inside out.
It was a bitter lesson. I won the fight, but only because the veteran stopped, recognizing that I had something more - something he couldn't explain. I felt victorious, but at the same time, empty. Fire was no longer a blessing, but a curse. I needed to learn to control it completely.
In the following days, Crow Branco approached and, for the first time, spoke without the usual distance. He said, "You are stronger than you thought. But fire is only useful when it is controlled. When he controls you, he will destroy everything. To you."
These hard and true words were jammed into my mind. The fire was part of me, but I was not yet worthy of it. In the seventh month, the truth became clear: I was not just being shaped by training. I was being forged. And there was still more to learn, more to control. The way ahead would not be easy, but now I knew that, in the end, what really mattered was notFire force on me, but my ability to guide you without being consumed by it.
The eighth month was a watershed. The fire that still burned inside me, as a flame about to consume everything around, began to become more controlled, more refined. But this change did not come without a price. I knew that to master my power, I would have to make sacrifices. What began as a search for strength, survival, now became a battle for identity. I no longer knew if what I was creating was me, or if it was a darker and darker version of something I couldn't control.
The white crow continued to press me, but its methods became more ... subtle. He forced me to work on more advanced techniques, but this time the focus was not just about improving my combat skills. He wanted me to learn to control fire in every respect - not only on the battlefield, but also in my emotions and my own psyche. The challenge was no longer to fight physical enemies, but against the very fire that consumed my wills.
There were days when I was left alone to meditate and refine my skills with the "sparkling eye". Learn to see the world around me with such a deep, so penetrating look that lies and disguises disintegrated before me was both a blessing and a curse. I could see the heat in people's souls, hidden intentions, true motivations. But I also saw how is it isolated me. I could no longer trust anyone in the way a normal man would trust. I saw the shadows in their hearts, and they constantly reminded me that no one, not even me, was really immune to corruption.
In the early days of the month, I was placed in another test: an infiltration mission in a nearby village, where a Konoha traitor was supposed to hide. Nothing different from the previous missions, but the detail was in the methods required to capture it. The white crow wanted me to use my ability with the elements of fire more creatively. It was not enough to knock down enemies or surround them with flames. I needed to be fire in every way.
When I arrived in the village, I mixed myself quickly with the local population. Using the "incandescent steps", I moved almost ghostly, like an impeding shadow without being detected. The traitor was hidden in a construction in the city center, and I needed to get to him without anyone knowing my presence. Using the "gray clone", I created illusory copies of myself, sending them to strategic points to distract the watchmen as I advanced to the main objective.
The biggest challenge came when I finally found the traitor. He was setting an ambush, waiting for someone from Anbu to go there. It was not just the capture that became a test, but the way he challenged me. The man turned to me and, in the midst of his attempt to escape, looked into my eyes with fierce anger, as if trying to intimidate me. At that moment, I felt the heat rise inside me - the incandescent eye was activated, and I saw his fear, the true essence of man. He wasn't just running away from Konoha, but something much deeper, much more human.
And that's when the fire within me manifested itself in a different way. It was no longer about defeating him physically, but mentally. I used the "embers mirror", and what happened was a reaction that I didn't expect. The illusion I created, reflecting the traitor's own fears, was so intense that he fell to his knees, suppressed by the flames of his own conscience. He did not know if he was seeing the reality or hallucination, and when he tried to react, he was already immobilized by the streams of fire.
This mission was a turn to me.For the first time, I didn't have to be the monster merciless. I didn't have to destroy everything around me. I used the fire more refined, more subtle, and, to be honest, that's when I realized how far I was far from a tool of pure destruction. I was no longer a gross blade, but a sharp, calculated sword that knew when cutting and when not.
But at the same time, the white crow was watching me, attentive. He knew I was starting to approach something that he didn't even expect. I was no longer the same as it had entered the Anbu. It was no longer the tool he imagined. I had my own ideas, my own intentions. And that was what he feared. The white crow, which always seemed to be in control, knew that if it wasn't careful, I could easily exceed the boundaries than he wanted me to go.
In the following days, he put me in more missions, more tests. Increasingly, it seemed that I was being pushed to the limit of what I could bear, but also to the limit of what I could achieve. The fire was inside me, yes, but now I understood that he was not an enemy to be defeated. The real enemy was controlling me - in my ability not to let the fire consume me.
Over the weeks, I realized that the eighth month was somehow more difficult than any other. The pressure no longer came from the outside world, but from inside me. The fire, which I once saw as a means of strength, now became a reflection of my own internal struggle. Each step, every mission, each action seemed to test me more deeply. It was no longer just about physical control. I was facing the hardest truth of all: true control was not about what I could do with fire, but what fire could do to me.
The white crow was watching me closely, but now he knew I was starting to question everything - and that made him uncomfortable. He wanted me to be an obedient piece, an sharp tool, but he was beginning to realize that I could be something else.
The last mission of this month, however, would make me understand that even the most intense fire can go out if it is not fed correctly. And more than ever, I had to choose who really wanted to be.
The ninth month arrived as a silent storm. At first, I thought I was starting to understand what it meant to be a member of ANBU, which meant being able to control the fire within me. But what the white crow and the other Masters of ANBU were preparing me was something beyond anything I had imagined. The ninth month was about turning pain into a tool, not just a sacrifice. He who is shaped by fire can no longer be a spectator of his own destruction. He must become the flame itself - with conscience and willingly. It was a lesson about being immortal in spirit, even if my body was pierced.
The first days of this month were about loneliness again. I was placed on a high priority mission: to sabotage a criminal organization that operated in the shadows, without Konoha having the least information about it. What awaited me was not just another infiltration mission. No. It was a journey in which the darkness around me should be transformed into a reflection of my own essence. I would be the fire on the denser night.
I was sent to a remote village, where this organization hid. The mission seemed simple: infiltrating me, discovering the structure of the organization, identifying and eliminating leaders. However, true tests were not in the targets or physical missions, but what they represented. Every step I took to push me to the boundaries of what I believed I was able. As the weeks passed,I felt the weight of the transformation that occurred within me.
In the middle of the month, something began to happen with the fire I carried. He no longer behaved as before. It was no longer just a brute force to be commanded. I started to understand that he was somehow guiding me. In the background, the fire was the expression of my deepest emotions, my anger, my loss, my loneliness. And it was in the ninth month that I finally understood that the fire I used was not just linked to the chakra or inheritance of true fire. He was linked to what I felt at every moment of my life. Fear, doubt, the desire to survive. It was an extension of everything I was - and everything I still feared becoming.
During this mission, I was challenged to confront the darkness not only around me, but inside me. In the village, where the criminal organization had settled, there was something that seemed unbearably familiar. The smell of death was in the air, but not as a simple presence. He was there as a reflection of what I could become. I knew that if it allowed, this mission would become too personal. And I couldn't let it happen.
I didn't know what was worse: the fear of failing or the fear of losing me. But then something happened. During an operation to capture one of the organization's leaders, I felt the fire inside me intensifying, as if it were becoming a volcano about to erupt. Something inside wanted to break free - anger, a boost that I no longer recognized. The white crow always talked about controlling the fire, but that night I realized I was controlling the fire without knowing. I became hell itself, a storm of uncontrollable flames. During the confrontation, in a fraction of a second, I felt as if the whole environment around me is absorbed by fire. But the strangest thing was that I was no longer afraid. The fire no longer consumed me. I controlled him somehow. My own anger, my desire to destroy the criminal organization, had been directed to something greater.
I destroyed the hideout without hesitation. It was not an explosion of brute force, but a meticulous burning, an insane accuracy. I no longer felt the boundaries of the body, mind, or emotions. I was beyond that. It was not just the fire that consumed that place. It was my desire to destroy evil, to clean the ashes of corruption and lies. I was ... purifying.
The white crow observed me, but he said nothing. He knew I had achieved something, but I was not ready to accept what it meant. In the following days, he started training me differently. Instead of forcing me to perform intense physical tasks, he mentally challenged me, forcing me to think of alternative ways to use fire to "purify" situations, to transform them. The lesson was clear: fire was not just destruction. He was also transformation, renewal. I had to learn to see beyond the surface.
The ninth month was also marked by the most direct confrontation with my own identity. During a meeting with Danzo, where other Anbu were called to report the progress of our missions, there was a tension in the air. Danzo, always calculating, looked directly at me. He didn't say a word, but the way he observed me made my blood boil. I didn't know if he knew what I had become, or if I was just trying to test myself, but at that moment, a part of me wondered: was Danzo seeing what I became - or did he see me like a piece that was not completely shaped?
Danzo always talked about the use of power, the control and the need to be relentless. And somehow it resonated inside me. I saw myself at the limit of being what he wanted me to be"But the truth was that I didn't know if that would be possible." The fire on me did not fit into anyone's molds. He was mine, and only mine. It was no longer something I could use without thinking about the consequences.
That night, after the meeting, I was alone for a long time. The fire inside me was quiet, but only for a moment. I knew that somewhere inside, he was still waiting to explode. But now I knew. It was not just about controlling what I did with him, but to understand what he represented in me. The real battle was not to let the fire consume me, but learn how to use each particle of it to keep me in balance.
The ninth month, then, was about understanding. Not from something external, but of myself. I began to understand that the greatest transformation did not come from physical training or missions - but how I dealt with my own fears, doubts and impulses. I didn't know what the next step would be, but I was starting to accept that somewhere inside me had already overcome many of my own limits. And perhaps that was just the beginning.
The tenth month was the apex of a long cycle of transformation, and in a way that I could no longer ignore. The fire that once seemed to be a blind force, something brute and unmiqued, began to manifest in ways I could barely understand. It was no longer about being just fast, strong, or even unbeatable. I was beginning to realize the true meaning of mastering something as primordial as fire. It was a matter of deep understanding, of vision beyond the surface. I was no longer just using the fire. I was becoming him, and he was becoming part of me in a way that transcended the physical.
In the early days of the tenth month, I was subjected to a mission that would once again test the limits of my patience and morality. Konoha had received information about a group of renegade ninjas, who, apparently, were preparing for something that could focus on the village. The mission seemed simple: infiltrating the group, identifying their intentions and eliminating any potential threat. But as everything that happened since I entered Anbu, simplicity was just a facade for a deeper test.
The infiltration was difficult, not because of the renegade ability, but because of myself. They knew nothing about me, but I knew that by infiltrating myself, I was not just dealing with potential enemies, but with the weight of a moral decision. I was there to destroy. I was there to kill. And deep down, something inside me began to question what exactly made me different from any other monster or war machine. It was hard to ignore the discomfort that grew in my chest.
During the mission, with every step I took, it was as if a part of me was lost in the darkness. When one of the renegades - a man with a past as dark as mine - looked at me during a word exchange, I felt something I never expected: a reflection. He did not know, but what I saw in that man was a glimpse of what I could have become if I had made different choices if I had given in to the pain and hatred that always consumed me. And at that moment, I realized that the biggest battle was not just against them. She was inside me.