The Oracle's Library
Late Evening, Three Days After the Baron Twins Battle
The great doors of the Oracle's Library opened without sound, their ancient hinges well-maintained by generations of careful hands. Chikamatsu Shin stepped across the threshold, his plague doctor attire a stark silhouette against the warm lamplight that illuminated endless rows of shelves. The bone-white crow mask gleamed in the flickering light, its curved beak and dark glass eye-lenses giving him an otherworldly, almost spectral appearance.
His boots—black leather reinforced with brass buckles—made barely a whisper against the polished stone floor. The tight leather of his outfit creaked softly with each movement, a subtle reminder of the armor he'd worn just days ago when golden light had bled from cracks in metal and his wings had threatened to gutter out entirely. That armor was gone now, replaced by this... the garb of tge Plague, the Oracle who documented what others wished to forget.
The short cloak draped across his shoulders shifted as he moved deeper into the library's heart. His gloved hands—fingers ending in riveted leather caps that resembled talons—trailed along the spines of books as he passed. The gesture was automatic, almost meditative. Touch became a way of grounding himself when his mind threatened to spiral into the void where six other voices used to speak.
Silence.
Still silence.
Three days since the battle. Three days since Akkuma's corrupted chakra had flooded through him, sustaining life when he'd been willing to burn it all away. Three days since flowers had bloomed unbidden at his feet, proving that even diminished and broken, he could still bring life to devastated earth.
Three days of being utterly, completely alone inside his own skull.
Shin paused before a shelf marked with Runic Terran script—وقائع الحروب القديمة—Chronicles of Ancient Wars. His masked head tilted slightly, the gesture bird-like, considering. Not what he was looking for. He moved on, his flat-topped black hat casting strange shadows in the lamplight.
The library was vast, three stories open to public access with countless more levels below where the truly dangerous knowledge slept. As Plague, he had access to much of it. As the former—and recently reclaimed—12th Kazekage, even more. As someone who had experienced possession by an entity that had nearly destroyed everything he loved... he understood now why some things remained locked away.
"Wei's corruption was learning the pathways of the bond," he had confessed to the Inner Court in that terrible confrontation. The words echoed in his memory, accompanied by Kohana's fury, Maho's misguided protection, Seishinko's spiritual wisdom, Seikatsu's theological objections.
"I will kill you," Kohana had promised.
Perhaps she would. Perhaps he deserved it.
His gloved fingers found another spine: Botanical Mutations Under Extreme Chakra Exposure. Closer. He pulled the volume free, its weight familiar in his hands. The glass lenses of his mask made reading possible even in the library's dim corners, filtering and focusing light in ways natural eyes could not.
But he didn't open the book. Not yet.
Instead, he stood there in the shadows between shelves, holding forgotten knowledge, and allowed himself a moment of raw honesty that the mask permitted. When you wore the face of Plague, you could acknowledge uncomfortable truths. When you were just Shin—stripped of titles, bonds, and certainty—those truths became unbearable.
I burned my life force to save them—he thought, fingers tightening on the book's leather binding—and I severed the bond to save them. Every choice I make to protect the people I love seems to destroy something irreplaceable.
The irony wasn't lost on him. A man who had dedicated his existence to healing, to nurturing growth, to understanding the delicate balance of life—and his greatest acts of love were all acts of destruction.
Somewhere in the library's depths, he could hear the soft footsteps of another Oracle making their rounds. Shin pressed deeper into the shadows, not ready yet for conversation or recognition. The plague doctor aesthetic served multiple purposes: it protected his identity, yes, but it also warned others away. Who approached a figure of pestilence willingly?
He finally opened the book, its pages crackling softly. Notes in his own hand filled the margins from years ago—observations about how extreme stress could trigger evolutionary responses in plant life, how trauma could be encoded into cellular memory and passed to the next generation.
How roots remain even when flowers wither, he thought, remembering Seishinko's words. How what the soil remembers, the spring may yet reveal.
The Yurei Orchid was dead. The bond was severed. The Inner Court walked separate paths now, learning to be individuals rather than aspects of a collective. And Shin... Shin was here, in a library that held the accumulated wisdom of generations, trying to understand whether the choices he'd made in fear could somehow transform into wisdom.
He turned a page. Then another. The familiar rhythm of research, of documentation, of preserving knowledge for those who would come after—this, at least, remained constant.
Outside these walls, the Baron Twins plotted in their Golden Sanctuary. Sunagakure rebuilt from the battle's devastation. The former members of his Inner Court struggled with independence they'd never asked for. And somewhere, Akkuma carried a stolen Sharingan that could track enemies across impossible distances.
But here, in this moment, Shin was simply an Oracle doing what Oracles did: seeking truth in the written word, documenting what others might forget, and trying to understand the thin line between protection and destruction, between sacrifice and violation, between love and fear.
The plague doctor mask concealed his expression as he continued deeper into the library's labyrinth. Somewhere in these endless shelves, there had to be wisdom that could tell him whether roots severed in terror could still grow into something beautiful.
He just had to keep searching.