Day Three was the breaking point. The sky had turned a fierce, endless blue by the time she stepped into the clearing. There were no clouds to soften it, no breeze to carry away the weight of what she was about to attempt. Just sky and sun and heat. Sweat clung to the curve of her spine, already dampening the fabric of her wrap top before she'd even moved. Her skin prickled, not from fear, but from anticipation that clung to her like static. The muscles in her shoulders trembled faintly, a warning she ignored. Her breath came shallow and quick, ribs stiff like they'd forgotten how to stretch. She rolled her wrists once. Twice. Her hands ached from yesterday's failures, and yet still she flexed her fingers like she could wring resolve from her bones. The sun bore down on her like it was testing her, daring her to break before she began. Her bare feet pressed into the soil, toes curling into the hard-packed earth. It was dry beneath her, cracked in places from the heat, but she stood there anyway, letting it remind her she was anchored. Alive and present. She didn't look at Guy at first. She didn't have to. She could feel his presence just behind the stillness. His breath was steady, like everything in him already knew what this would take. He didn't speak, but the silence between them buzzed with weight. 'You're not ready,' something deep inside whispered, old and familiar. 'You're tired, you failed yesterday, and you'll fail again.' But she exhaled. Slowly and quietly, and answered that voice not with denial, but with decision. 'I'm going to try anyway.' Her heart beat louder than her footsteps as she stepped forward. The clearing around her seemed to narrow with every inch, until the world had shrunk to a circle of heat, sweat, and breath. She pressed her palm to her belly once, grounding herself. Then lifted her eyes. Guy stood about twenty feet away, arms folded loosely, his stance open and calm. His green vest fluttered slightly with the heat rising from the earth, but otherwise he hadn't moved.

"You don't need to speak it aloud," he finally said, voice low, not a whisper but something just above reverent. "But I want you to be clear with yourself. Why do you want to open the Gate?" Sakura swallowed. Her throat was dry. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. But she didn't hesitate.

'Because I want to be more, healing won't be enough, and I saw what it felt like to move with purpose, to break through limits and stand in fire and not burn.' Her jaw clenched. Her eyes stung, not from emotion, but from the intensity of focus. From how much she wanted it. Her breath dragged in like smoke, dry, scratchy, thick with the heat rising off the sunbaked earth. The air felt heavier now, dense and unmoving, as if the world itself were holding its breath. Her skin tingled where the sun pressed down on her arms and face, a slow burn that mixed with the already smoldering ache in her muscles. Every part of her felt alert. Coiled. Her heart beat loud and fast, each thud like a drum echoing off her ribs. Her feet rooted deeper into the earth, soles pressing hard enough into the cracked soil that tiny grains pushed between her toes. The heat radiated up from below, a second pulse beneath her own. Her spine straightened instinctively, not out of pride, but out of necessity. Out of readiness. Sakura closed her eyes for half a second and reached. Not outward. Inward. Her chakra coiled low in her gut, slow and resistant. It wasn't wild like Naruto's. It didn't roar like a beast, it waited and measured. Demanding a reason before it would obey. She offered one, not in words, but in will. 'Because this isn't only about power, it's about protecting the one I hold dear to me. I can't be a burden to anyone if I want to protect them, not to Naruto, and not to myself.'

Guy's voice grounded her. It was calm, but carrying weight, like a steel beam laid across her shoulders just to remind her she could hold it. "Don't think of the gate as something to open, think of it as something to meet." The words hit her harder than a shout. Her mind tried to translate them, to control the meaning like she did everything else, but control wasn't the key here, she had to surrender which terrified her. Still, she nodded. Her hands trembled just once as she dropped into stance. Her knees bent slightly. Her core drew tight as a bowstring. Her fingertips hovered at her sides, barely moving with her breath. The wind had died entirely. Not even the trees whispered anymore.

Her body knew before her mind did. The moment the chakra thread coiled up through her core, she felt it, the ache in her muscles turning electric, the stillness inside her skull igniting into pressure. But she didn't resist. Not this time. She closed her eyes and trusted the rhythm. Her breath came low and deep, grounding her. Her palms rested on her thighs, fingers spread, as if bracing for a current that might lift her clean off the earth. The chakra spiraled slow and true, drawn from her lower dantian with reverence. It coiled up into her gut, bloomed into her chest, and then crept higher, featherlight, into the space between her eyes. She could feel every pulse of it, every subtle turn through her tenketsu. It was no longer a river being forced upstream. It was a thread of silk, drawn with care. Her body trembled under the pressure, not in rejection, but in preparation. Her shoulders rolled forward. Her thighs flexed, anchoring her to the dirt below. She didn't push it through, she invited it. The First Gate stirred. It didn't open like a door on hinges, it shivered like something waking beneath skin. She felt it hover just beneath her brow, a seam in her chakra network, alive and watching, testing and judging her intent. It didn't respond to force. 'I'm not afraid,' she told it, heart thudding, each beat louder than the last. Her mouth went dry. Her knees locked. Heat rushed up her back like she'd swallowed fire. 'I'm ready.' The answer came in a flicker, then everything shattered like the glass of a light bulb being shattered by a shuriken.

For less than a second, a white-hot torrent surged through her body like a lightning strike in water. Her limbs seized. Her vision exploded into a riot of stars and white noise. She couldn't even scream, the air had been ripped out of her lungs. Her chakra circuits, once smooth and clean, felt too narrow, like trying to force an ocean through a single reed. Her veins burned, her skin prickled and flushed. Her heart stuttered, skipped, then punched forward in a violent rhythm that shook her entire rib cage. Her breath caught halfway up her throat. She couldn't feel her legs. Her feet lifted an inch off the ground, maybe more, and then the world collapsed along with her, she fell without grace, her knees buckling inward as her spine gave. Her shoulder hit the ground hard. Her arms flopped outward. Her back arched in a final jolt as her lungs reengaged with a ragged gasp. Then everything stilled.

The silence afterward was louder than the collapse. Her ears rang with a high-pitched whine. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears, and it was the only thing tethering her to the present. Her fingers twitched in the grass, half-curled, every nerve alight. They burned at the tips, as if the chakra that had surged through her left residue behind, like smoke without flame, pain without a wound. Her cheek pressed against the warm dirt, and she blinked slowly, her eyes blurred with salt and wind. She tasted copper in her mouth, her lips parted, and a strangled sound escaped, a half-cough half-laugh, a cracked and breathless chuckle that rolled into something stunned and helpless.

"I did it," she whispered, more to the sky than herself. The sky didn't answer, but it was impossibly, breathtakingly blue. A shade so vivid it cut against the chaos that had passed through her like a blade. She stared at it, barely blinking. There was no victory here. Only clarity. She felt stripped bare, peeled back to bone and will, but she didn't feel broken, she felt alive in the way she was pushing herself. 'I touched it,' she thought, a slow, fierce pride rising in her chest. 'I opened the gate.' Not for long and not with mastery, but still opened the Gate of Opening. That was enough to prove it was real. Enough to prove she could become more than even her own fear allowed. Her skin still tingled, her breath still scraped, her heartbeat galloped like it had something to prove, but she was smiling. Her lips curved, soft and slow, as the realization bloomed deeper than chakra, into the marrow. 'I'm going to do this. I'm going to learn it. Not because I have to, but because I want to.' She didn't feel small lying on the ground. She felt limitless.

"You felt it," Guy said, crouching over her with a grin as wide as his pride. His voice was bright, but behind it she heard something quieter, deeper, relief. Maybe even reverence.

"Just barely," she rasped, smiling up at him with cracked lips and glassy eyes. "But I did."

"You're not afraid of it?" he asked, softer now, searching her face. Sakura shook her head, but it was more a twitch than a gesture.

"I'm not allowed to be," she murmured.

Guy didn't answer right away. He knelt beside her, one gloved hand gently resting against her shoulder. "That's not true," he said. "Fear isn't forbidden. It's a companion. But you, Sakura, you met it anyway."

She looked over at him, still smiling, though her face was pale and drawn. "I wanted to know what it felt like... not just the pain, but the power and the risk. I wanted to prove I could stand there and not break."

"You didn't break," he said, and for once, it wasn't a reprimand. "You got back up. Next time, it won't tear through you, you'll ride it."

She nodded faintly. "I didn't think it would feel like that," she admitted. "It wasn't just power. It was everything at once. Heat. Speed. Silence. Noise. I felt like I could tear the world apart... or hold it together."

Guy's eyes softened. "That's the Gate of Opening. It doesn't just open your body. It opens your will, and yours is a wildfire."

Sakura turned her gaze back to the sky. Her arms were still trembling. Her breath still shallow. Her chest ached in new and strange ways, but beneath it all, beneath the exhaustion and soreness and ringing in her ears, there was a blooming sense of awe. 'So this is what he felt,' she thought, picturing Lee, bruised and broken but never giving up. 'This is what Guy lives for. It hurts... but it's alive. It's real.' Her fingers curled weakly against the grass, pulling at a clump of soil.

'I want more, I want to do it again, but not just to prove I can... I want to wield it, and shape it... Deserve it.' Another breath. Slower now. The spinning inside her skull was beginning to fade. Her vision steadied.

'And one day... I'll open all eight for something that matters to me.'

Guy helped her sit up, his hand steady beneath her back. "No shame in falling," he said. "Only in refusing to rise."

Sakura gave a soft huff of laughter. "Then you'd better teach me how to fly, cause I'm not falling without rising back up."

His grin widened. "I thought you'd never ask."

That night, in the memory of war, Sekhmet placed Ancestral Wield, the Wisdom Form, into her hands. It did not feel foreign. It felt like coming home. A sensation of familiarity, of belonging, and off something that had always been waiting for her, just beneath the surface of her skin. The battlefield around her had changed. Still dream-forged, still unreal, but stripped of chaos. It was quieter now, reverent, as though the world itself had bowed its head in deference to what stood here. Sloped hills curved like the backs of sleeping giants in the distance, shrouded in pale, drifting mist that moved as if it had breath. The air tasted of cool metal and lilac, faint and strange. The ground beneath her feet was not soil or stone. It was language, etched script carved into wide, circular patterns that spiraled outward like ancient mandalas. Each stroke pulsed softly beneath her steps, humming with lavender and green light, the rhythm of something older than any nation, and in the center stood the book.

Sakura's breath caught. Her eyes widened before she could think to guard them. The tome was colossal, impossibly tall, towering over her like a monument built to memory itself. Taller than she was, perhaps even taller than Guy. It didn't sit still. Its surface shifted constantly, the way light played on deep water, rippling between glass and starlight and something more ephemeral; like time made tangible. Silver ink drifted across the vast open pages, but not in lines, in glyphs. Symbols that hovered and reformed midair, bending the rules of writing, reshaping themselves with no visible order. She couldn't read them. She could only feel them. Words that spoke directly to her chakra, bypassing language entirely. Wisdom born not from explanation, but from remembrance. At the center of it all was the eye. It pulsed once as she looked at it. Embedded in the spine of the tome like a beating heart, it was obsidian ringed in emerald; deep, dark, and somehow watching her without moving. Not hostile. Not warm. Just... awake, ancient, and waiting. She didn't move for a long time. The air around it thrummed like the silence in a library that wasn't empty. She stepped closer, her feet tracing over the curling script that tingled against her soles like whispers. When she reached out, her fingers didn't tremble, but her breath did. They brushed the edge of the tome and the book opened, not forward, not as a physical object, but through her. The sensation was immediate. Like stepping into water that wasn't wet. Like being read while reading. Her skin chilled. Wind rushed outward from the heart of the book, silent and ice-cold, not whipping or violent, but deliberate, curling around her shoulders, tugging at her hair, passing through her bones like forgotten names. Across the field, Sekhmet stood. She did not summon. She did not raise her voice. She simply waited. Her arms folded behind her back, her robes barely moving in the still air, her rose-gold hair braided through with threads of starlight that pulsed like constellations set in motion. There was no command. No ceremony, only faith and she let Sakura walk, not as a soldier, nor as a student. But as something else entirely. Sakura's heart beat slowly, not from fear but reverence. She didn't know what wisdom the tome would reveal, but some part of her, ancient and tender,knew it wasn't here to teach her, it was here to remind her.

"You will not read it," Sekhmet said, her voice calm and even, each word measured like a stone laid into the foundation of something sacred. "You will use it. Command it. Your hands are not meant for page-turning. They are meant for remembering who I was, and expanding that into who you will become. To protect those dear to you." Her words didn't echo, but they reverberated inside Sakura's chest like a second heartbeat, steady and ancient. Sakura didn't speak. She only nodded, her throat tight with something she couldn't name, reverence, maybe, or quiet terror at the magnitude of what had just been spoken over her. She raised her hand. At once, the book responded. It did not creak or flutter like parchment, nor groan like stone. It breathed. Glyphs peeled away from its surface in slow spirals of light, lifting from the shifting silver pages like embers that refused to die. They drifted outward and downward, curling through the mist until they reached the ground. Then they ignited, but not in flame, in shape. Glowing lines stitched themselves into the earth around her feet in precise, elegant arcs. Their light was soft at first, the color of moonlit sage, but as the pattern deepened, it began to pulse with a low golden rhythm. Not frantic nor violent. Just alive. It wrapped around her like armor made of meaning. The tome rose behind her. It did not need wings to float, nor wind to lift it. Its size remained colossal, a towering presence that should have been impossible to bear, but it carried no weight. It hovered effortlessly, suspended by something older than gravity. Power thrummed at Sakura's back, the sound low and sonorous, like a choir of voices sung from the depths of the world's memory. She could feel it aligning with her spine, each vertebra touched by knowledge that bypassed the mind and went straight to the soul. Her breath hitched. Her fingers trembled slightly, not from fear, but from the sensation of standing on the edge of something so vast, she could barely see where she ended and it began. She didn't feel like a girl anymore, but rather, she felt like a vessel.

The glowing sigils beneath her feet shifted again, sealing into a perfect circle. The air grew warmer, laced with the scent of cedar and ink, and somewhere far off, thunder rumbled, not of a storm, but of awakening. The massive tome flared to life like a summoned sentinel, its pages turning on their own, casting radiant script into the air around her like fireflies shaped from wisdom. They didn't demand to be understood. They simply asked to be held. Sakura stood taller. She did not understand the language, but her soul did. 'I'm not here to learn what I never knew,' she thought, the words settling deep inside her like seeds. 'I'm here to remember what I forgot.'

"Begin with Memory Echo," Sekhmet said, her voice folding gently into the dreamscape, as if the air itself bent to cradle her words. The sound didn't ripple, it settled like dust on sacred stone, sinking into every edge of Sakura's awareness. The dream around her shifted with her breath, and the book behind her responded. The gem set into its spine, obsidian ringed in emerald, pulsed once, slow and deliberate, like a heartbeat in stone. Sakura shut her eyes. The world went quiet. Within the silence, she searched, not outward, but inward. Past her own chakra, beyond the steady current she had always known. There, she found it, Sekhmet's chakra. Not separate from hers, but deeper, like a submerged current running beneath her own river. It was vast and steady, older than language, older than grief. It roared, resonated, and it called, moving like the weight of mountains shifting beneath the sea, patient and permanent. She inhaled. The breath caught behind her ribs, where that rhythm now lived, where wisdom curled around the edges of power like vines through ruins. It didn't need to be controlled but it needed to be recognized. 'I can feel her,' Sakura thought, the sensation blooming outward through her lungs. 'She's not teaching me how to be like her. She's teaching me her path and how to pave it into my own, as a continuation, waking up what's already mine.' She pressed into it, and the battlefield split, not with violence, but with remembrance. The air shuddered, as if memory itself were exhaled through the mist. Across the field, something took shape; no sound, no wind, just presence. A mirror image of herself rose from the mist, drawn in lines of pale violet and silver, like moonlight sketched into form. Its hair stirred without wind. Its eyes glowed softly, absent of emotion yet full of knowing. It stood with perfect stillness, a silence that was not empty but listening. Sakura's breath stilled in her throat. Her heart thudded once, hard. The echo of it seemed to bounce back to her through the clone's glowing eyes. 'Is this what I am? Or what I'm becoming?' She felt exposed, not vulnerable, but seen. The image didn't mimic her movements. It waited. For her. For instruction. Not like a puppet, but like a partner. She opened her hand slowly, fingers trembling as light gathered at her palm. 'Then let's begin.'

"Now move," Sekhmet said, her voice smooth as heated glass, the command not harsh but inarguable. And so Sakura moved. The shift was immediate. Her muscles responded before thought could catch up, as if the battlefield itself had tugged her into rhythm. What followed wasn't just a spar, it was a storm. A blur of motion and memory, striking fast and folding back in on itself like wind chasing its own echo. Her spectral double matched her pace, but not like a reflection. It was cleaner. Sharper. It danced where she stumbled. It rotated through taijutsu forms she had almost learned, filling in muscle memory she didn't know she possessed. Each strike was both unfamiliar and known. A block that shouldn't have been possible snapped into place just before impact. A pivot she'd never practiced carried her out of danger. Her real body followed the phantom's guidance half a breath too slow, always chasing its grace. She ducked, kicked, pivoted again. Her limbs burned. Her spine arched with strain. Her lungs fought to stay steady, pulling in air that wasn't real but felt thick with heat and grit. Sweat dripped down her back despite the dream, soaking into the fabric of her training gear. Her wrists began to throb with the strain of repeated parries, and a deep ache bloomed in her thighs from constant motion. Sekhmet stood at the far edge of the field, unmoving. Watching. A sentinel carved from memory and fire. She offered no praise, no criticism, only an occasional, simple correction.

"Left foot too wide."

"Guard the shoulder."

"Breathe lower."

Each word slid into Sakura like a flint into kindling. She obeyed without question. Not because she feared failure, but because every instruction made her more whole. 'This isn't just training,' Sakura realized, dodging a low strike and countering with a palm-thrust her waking self never would have thought to use. 'It's remembering. It's like... I already knew all this. My body just forgot.' Her breath came harder now, sharper. She could feel the thud of her heartbeat inside her wrists, her neck, her ribs. It vibrated through her like drumbeats echoing off temple stone, and still, the specter moved. Calm. Perfect. Its strikes never missed. Its blocks never faltered. Sakura clenched her teeth as her knee dipped too far and pain flared briefly down her side. But the mirror corrected it in real time, stepping in, guarding her from what could have been a punishing blow. 'I'm fighting beside my own potential,' she thought, chest heaving. 'And it's better than me.' The thought stung, but didn't shame her. It lit something inside her sternum; a hunger and a promise in the same flame. 'I'll catch up to her. I'll become the one she mirrors, not the other way around.' The mist swirled around them, folding into every step, and the battlefield pulsed with knowledge she hadn't earned yet, but would. Not just with sweat and pain, but with purpose and love. Love for the body that endured, and the mind that kept reaching forward, even when it should have broken.

"You're not fighting with instinct alone anymore," Sekhmet finally said, her voice folding into the mist like heat into silk. "You're fighting with knowledge now as well. That is the difference." The battlefield stilled. Sakura dropped to her knees, her palms bracing against the script-carved ground. Her breath came in ragged bursts, not from fear but from sheer exertion. Even in the dream, her lungs burned. Her shoulders shook. Her pulse thundered in her ears. Each inhale scraped like wind through broken reeds. Sweat clung to her temples, trailing down her jaw and dripping to the glowing lines beneath her fingers. Her double dissolved behind her in a shimmer of light, folding back into the spine of the Ancestral Wield. The air still hummed with the memory of movement, of impact and redirection, of choices made in the space between seconds. Her real body, far away and sleeping, twitched at the edge of a gasp. Fingers clenched into the blanket. Muscles spasmed across her shoulders as if the phantom blows had struck marrow-deep. Sekhmet stepped forward, her footsteps soundless against the luminous script. Her presence cast no shadow, but it made the air feel warmer, denser, as though Sakura was breathing in reverence itself.

"You've synchronized with my imprint," she said, not with praise, but with certainty. "Good." Sakura raised her head slowly, strands of hair clinging to her face with sweat and chakra residue. Her mouth was dry. Her hands trembled. But her eyes were clear.

"I... I felt it," she whispered. "Every move. Like it had already happened, like I wasn't deciding what to do. I was remembering what I'd already done." Sekhmet's gaze softened, though her stance remained unshaken.

"That is the essence of this form. Wisdom not read, but reclaimed. What you learn now is not only mine. It is yours, waiting to awaken and for you to continue it." Sakura swallowed. Her throat ached. Her chest rose and fell like a tide learning to steady itself after a storm. 'I didn't just survive that. I changed. I grew. This isn't an imitation, this is resurrection and shaping my own path. For my loved ones, for Sekhmet, but mostly for myself.' Sekhmet extended one hand, not as an offering, but as an invitation. The battlefield around them shimmered, warping, condensing into new shapes. The tome at Sakura's back glowed brighter, its pages now translucent with shifting diagrams and sigils that pulsed in rhythm with her breath.

"Now you will learn to see," Sekhmet said, her tone turning solemn. "Not just with your eyes. With insight. With memory. With every soul that walks beside you." Sakura rose slowly, her knees crackling, her spine stiff. But she stood. Not tall, not defiant, but anchored and changed. 'I'm not just learning to fight like her,' she thought. 'I'm learning to think like her. To see the battlefield not as a place to survive, but as a story already written... and ready to be rewritten, my way.'

The battlefield shifted. It didn't crumble or shatter, no, it folded as if the ground itself exhaled a lie. The grass turned pale, the mist thickened, and the light dimmed into a shade that wasn't dusk, but deception. Sakura took a slow step forward, and the earth beneath her foot shimmered, then bloomed. A sealing circle unfurled beneath the illusion of a wildflower, its edges inked with red script that pulsed once, then vanished again beneath the surface. Above her, a bird trilled sweetly. Another answered. Then silence. It felt too precise, too deliberate. The genjutsu laced into the birdsong made her skin crawl, like threads brushing along her scalp. Threads. There were chakra threads in the air, she felt them more than saw them, a tension in her teeth, a shiver across her wrists. Too thin for the eye, but not for her mind. The dreamscape twisted inward, dense now with wrongness. A forest that wasn't a forest. A battlefield that felt more like a trap. Her hand tightened around the invisible weight of her resolve. Then, with clarity stitched into her breath, she raised her palm. The tome at her back responded immediately, humming like a heartstring plucked by intention.

"Insight Bloom." The command rang clear. The eye in the book's spine snapped wide and gleamed, bright and alive. In the same breath, a pulse surged from her sternum, not painful, but resonant, like striking a tuning fork against her soul. The world blinked and then she saw it. Diagrams ignited around her in glowing green, not floating freely, but drawn over reality itself, as if an unseen artist dragged chalk across glass. Glyphs etched themselves across the ground in sweeping arcs. Lines appeared; webs, rings, spirals, all layered atop the world, revealing its hidden architecture. One curved sharply around a field of wildflowers. Genjutsu trapline, it was subtle, old. A jutsu radius shimmered faintly near a rock that hadn't been a rock at all, but a collapsed explosive seal waiting to reactivate. Everything opened. 'This isn't just perception,' she realized, her breath tightening. 'It's understanding. I'm not guessing anymore. I know.'

She moved forward, slow but assured. Her boots whispered over the script-laced earth. The air tingled against her skin, heavy with chakra residue. Her focus narrowed until she felt it behind her eyes, like sight, but deeper. Her heartbeat slowed, synced to the rhythm of her breath, and every illusion she passed fell apart before it could deceive. 'I used to hesitate,' she thought, weaving between invisible tripwires of spiritual current, 'always second-guessing. But this... this makes me trust my senses. My skill. My mind.' She ducked beneath a net of razor-thin chakra, stepping carefully over a pressure seal veiled by false roots. 'So this is what Sekhmet meant. Insight isn't just seeing through lies, it's being too sharp to ever be fooled.' Ahead, the forest shimmered again, one more fold, one final deception. Sakura didn't falter. She stepped forward, and the world bent around her clarity.

"This form does not lend you strength," Sekhmet said from afar, her voice threading through the dense dream-mist like silk through the eye of a needle. "Rather, it lends you perspective. Every insight gained here is yours to keep, but only if you choose to perceive it." The words settled over Sakura like mist on skin; cool, clinging, and impossible to ignore. She didn't nod out of obedience, but understanding. The shifting light caught in her hair, turning it to threads of rose-gold and shadow as she moved. Her hands flowed through the counter-seal without hesitation, fingers forming the signs as if they'd known them long before she'd learned them. Her feet shifted with instinct, landing a breath-width to the left of a spatial displacement trap disguised as a crack in the soil. She didn't see it. She recognized it. The diagrams still glowed across the landscape, but they no longer just showed. They spoke. Gentle pulses of chakra vibrated beneath her soles. Not warnings, lessons. Instructions etched into the air itself. The way the wind shifted told her which illusions were anchored. The faint scent of burnt cedar confirmed a scorched time seal hidden in a tree's roots, but the movement, the flow, it was hers. It was her hand that moved, her chakra that surged with each technique. The book behind her hovered like a quiet sentry, the eye dimming now, calm and ever-watching, but it no longer led her. It followed. She was not watching a memory, she was walking through it. 'I'm not just retracing Sekhmet's steps,' she thought, breath measured, gaze sharp as frostlight. 'I'm forging my own.'

The wind shifted, and from the mist, Sekhmet emerged, not towering, not burning, not wrapped in divinity. She simply appeared beside Sakura, as if she had always been there. Her footsteps didn't stir the etched glyphs beneath them, but her presence pressed into the world like gravity. Not as a teacher, nor as a goddess, but as a guide. Sakura didn't speak. She didn't need to. There was no lesson now, only the act of seeing, truly seeing. 'This is what it means to become more,' she realized. 'Not to gain power, but to know how to use it. To see deeper. To walk without fear.' The air tasted of lightning and clarity. Not sweet, not bitter. Sharp and clean. The kind of air that follows a storm, and promises another. She inhaled, and her chakra stirred with it, flowing outward in slow spirals, resonant with the book, with Sekhmet, with herself.

The battlefield dissolved, not into abstraction or dream, but memory, a real memory... Sekhmet's memory. The air turned heavy with heat and sorrow. Ash fell like black snow. Sakura stood in the scorched remains of a world undone. The ground beneath her boots cracked and hissed with old flame. The sky overhead groaned with pressure, split by jagged rifts in space, the last breaths of a dimension dying. No birds, no beasts, no wind. Only silence and rot and the distant, mournful echo of battle. Each breath caught thick in her throat, weighted with the iron sting of decay. She didn't need Sekhmet to explain. She knew where this was, when this was. It was supposed to be the end. Fire arced through the sky. The Ten-tails Beast roared, dying in the distance. The landscape was jagged, broken open like a wound. Forests reduced to charcoal, rivers have gone to steam, mountains left as stumps, and last a hollow crater pulsed with ancient energy where a god once stood. At the center of it all, she saw herself, but not herself. Sekhmet's form, draped in bloodstained robes and golden flame. Her hair whipped around her face, not pink but rose-bright, streaked with soot. Her chest heaved with the weight of injury, her left arm trembling slightly under the strain of holding Astra high. Even divine flesh had limits. Sakura stepped forward through the ash, barefoot now, the soil beneath her cracked and fever-hot. Her breath trembled. Her heart pounded like a drum inside a funeral pyre. She wasn't watching a vision. She was living an ending. 'This is what she felt,' Sakura realized. 'This is the weight she carried when she said goodbye to the world.'

Sekhmet's voice rose from the chaos, not loud, not thunderous, but etched in bone. "You wanted clarity. This is it." Sakura staggered closer to the center, eyes wide as the wind howled through the remnants of divine war. Across the field, two figures stood amid fire. Hagoromo and Hamura, their faces so young, but their eyes so heavy. They turned toward Sekhmet, their mother, not as warriors, but sons breaking beneath the truth. Sakura felt it in her ribs, like she'd swallowed glass. She felt the burn of Sekhmet's wounds like they were her own. The ache in her knees. The slowness in her limbs. The goddess was dying, and the Earth was dying with her and how she still stood. Sekhmet's hand lifted. Astra shimmered to life, gleaming in defiance of oblivion. "Let my last act be not war," she said, "but rebirth." Golden chakra spiraled upward like smoke made from sunlight. It wove into the land, threaded into the cracks of the world like stitching through a broken seam. The very memory bloomed. Ash became petals. Dust gave way to grass. Trees rose from flame-charred roots, and rivers ran again, but the goddess fell.

Sakura's knees hit the ground beside her as Sekhmet collapsed in real time, the light dimming behind her eyes. That weight passed into Sakura like inheritance, no, it was inheritance, she could feel it coil into her bones, her breath, her blood. 'You gave up everything,' Sakura thought. 'Not because you had to, but because you chose to.' She turned her gaze to where the sealing had once taken place, where Kaguya's scream still echoed beneath layers of memory and vengeance. Sakura's fists clenched. 'Your sons had chosen her but because of your immense love for them... You... Died to save the world from death for them. Then even as you fell, you saw behind her deception, and you chose to become a blade waiting for the future to wield.' And suddenly, she understood what this form demanded. Wisdom wasn't knowledge. It was a sacrifice and something she had endured, choices, made and owned. Pain, held until it could be passed on like a torch. Sekhmet's final whisper reached her, not from across the field, but from deep inside.

"You are the bloom that followed the burn. Let your memory guide them. Let your will outlive me." Sakura rose. The battlefield shifted again. But this time, the ashes clung to her skin like a mantle, and she wore it like a vow.

"Inheritance Trigger." The words left her lips and the battlefield responded with reverence. The book behind her pulsed once, then exploded into light. A spiral unfurled from the sky itself, vast and slow, not fire nor wind but something ancient and impossible, something carved in the marrow of stars. Its brilliance spilled across the dreamscape like liquid sun, pouring into the world, into her, not with violence, but with inevitability. It was not a gift. It was a return. The spiral touched her chest, and the moment it did, she felt the air rupture around her like breath through a dying world. A thousand chakras, some warm like hearths, others cold and unknowable, threaded through her body, through her spirit. Not all were of this world. Some pulsed with celestial rhythm. Others shimmered with moonlight memory. Symbols older than stone, older than blood, wrote themselves across her vision. Techniques to silence the wrath of forgotten beasts. Seals that could root dimensional rifts. Words of power shaped not by sound but by intent. They entered her not as invaders but as kin, like puzzle pieces falling into an empty place inside her she hadn't known was hollow. Her eyes flared open. Galaxies spun in her irises, beautifully. Then they settled, and the starlight faded into certainty. She dropped to one knee. The mist around her shuddered. Her breath came ragged, the weight of memory collapsing into her lungs. She gritted her teeth, palms pressed to the etched ground, her heart pounding too loud in her ears.

The armor of Sekhmet shimmered briefly into being, shoulder plates of sun-forged metal, translucent and weightless, yet humming with divine density. It didn't encase her, no, it crowned her. Her real body, curled in bed back in the waking world, twitched. Her muscles flexed as if reacting to invisible load. Her chakra networks swelled, too much, too fast, but they held. They expanded, reshaped, stretched like rivers meeting the ocean.

'This isn't learning,' Sakura realized, eyes narrowed, sweat sliding down her cheek. 'It's remembering what I already agreed to carry. What she left behind in me... the moment Astra chose me. What I can use when I reach full potential.' The knowledge settled like something she could access when needed. 'How many lives did you live, Sekhmet?' she thought, blinking through the sting in her vision. 'How many times did you choose to protect people who didn't even know your name?' Pain bloomed across her back, but not injury, rather expansion. Her chakra coils fought to grow, to hold what they'd never held before. She could feel it, new reserves opening, deeper wells forming, refined channels strengthening like iron woven through silk. It was only when she willed to use it that she would, however, like an intense need or wave of desperation, and still, her mind spiraled with images: diagrams of forbidden Ōtsutsuki techniques, weaknesses in immortal flesh, sealing algorithms encoded in shifting runes, and one memory that wasn't hers, a field of dead gods, their bodies cold beneath a violet sun, and a single woman standing in silence, too burdened to weep. Sakura's fists clenched. 'I won't let this be just a gift. I'll make it a vow. To heal and to protect. To end what you couldn't... and make sure your story never ends in silence.' Above her, the spiral faded into the clouds. And below, she rose again, knees shaking, eyes steady, carrying the burden of a goddess not with fear...but with the Will of Fire.

"You are remembering," Sekhmet said, her voice like the hush before sunrise, her hand warm and impossibly steady on Sakura's shoulder. "Not what you were, but what you still are and what you are becoming." The words didn't echo, they settled and sank into Sakura's bones like rain into dry earth. She didn't answer. Couldn't. Her throat was thick with breathless awe. Her eyes shimmered faintly, still reflecting the dying stars that had spun across her irises moments before. Her body thrummed, every inch of her a tuning fork for something sacred. Knowledge crackled just beneath her skin, too vast for words, too old for fear. The great book behind her closed, not with a snap, not as finality, but as pause. The whisper of its massive cover folding into stillness sent a low gust across the dreamscape, curling around her ankles like wind laced with incense and ink. It was not finished with her, it was waiting, and somehow, that felt like a promise. 'I didn't just see her memory,' Sakura thought, her breathing shallow, her heart still pacing like a runner at the edge of collapse. 'I stood in it. I moved inside it. It moved inside me.' She inhaled slowly, eyes fluttering shut. A distant bell tone shimmered across the battlefield of her mind, the sound of something ancient sliding back into place. 'I didn't just receive knowledge... I remembered it. Like a hand pressed into old fabric and finding the stitch that was always mine.' Sekhmet's touch lingered for a second longer, then faded into light.

The dream dissolved. Not like waking, but like water receding from shore, leaving her not empty, but carved deeper, and in the waking world, as the blush of dawn painted thin gold across the edges of her window, Sakura's fingers twitched, almost imperceptibly. They moved with precision her conscious mind hadn't yet caught up to, tracing the faint outline of a seal, intricate and alive, one that hadn't existed yesterday. One the world didn't yet know. The sheet beneath her was damp with sweat. Her breath was slow, each inhale cool, each exhale carrying warmth like steam off a fresh forge. Her chest rose and fell steadily, not with exhaustion, but with a kind of centered gravity. Her muscles still ached, but they no longer felt spent. They felt worked, and rebuilt. Her mind was calm. Her pulse even, and something bloomed behind her sternum, bright and quiet and unbreakable. 'I held it,' she realized, her lips parting slightly in wonder. 'I wielded wisdom older than war. Not because I was chosen... but because I chose to claim it.' A faint shimmer glowed along her collarbone, the last echo of Sekhmet's armor fading back into the soul-forged space between sleeping and waking. Her eyes opened to the light of the morning sun, the signal of Day Four.