Preventing The Inevitable

Chapter 21

There was total silence around her. She couldn't hear her heartbeat.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck. What the hell is this?"

A jelly-like texture underneath her naked feet.

"This isn't how it's supposed to go. The text didn't say anything like this." She muttered angrily.

She stepped on something. The gel squelched. Ew. But at least there was sound other than her voice now. She looked down at the floor. A crystal-clear, gel-like substance. The jelly floor stretched on indefinitely underneath her. She wasn't sure if it went down like that into all of infinity.

"Where the hell am I? I thought I was supposed to go into my mindscape? Is this...?"

Was her lower consciousness really a void of white and... and jelly?

"No way. This can't be it. Where is—?" Where was the stuff?

She didn't have access to her chakra. It made her feel bare. Her feet shuffled in uneasyness. A squelch. She looked down. There was something inside the floor.

It was her forehead protector. Her Hitai-ate. Not the plain black one she had worn the last five years of her life. (Picking and choosing colors wasn't possible in times of war. Forehead protectors only served the use of differentiating between ally and foe in the guise of allys, or else they wouldn't have produced them anymore. After all other resources had run dry, she clung to this one—the last vestige of their alliance, the only symbol that stood as proof of their unity, the mark of a shared fight they could never afford to lose.) Nor was it the one with the rose-colored band that she would later adapt for her first 'Shinobi' headband to use during the war.

It was the very first Hitai-ate she had owned.

A blue band and the engraved symbol of the Hidden Leaf. She had only used this one for two years. Sakura hadn't liked the color. For sake of memories, she had kept it and put it inside a drawer inside her desk. But at some point, she stopped seeing it, partially because she didn't bother to take it out again.

Maybe she had misplaced it. Maybe she had taken it with her when she moved out. Or maybe it had never been gone. And it could have always been there, in the bottom drawer of her childhood desk. Maybe it had only been fully gone after Pain's attack on Konoha.

But now, there it was, trapped inside the glossy gel.

Her eyes stung. She had no chakra to stop it.

Sakura pinched her arm. She shouldn't be getting sentimental. It was distracting. She had things to do—to find.

—

She didn't know when she had started walking. One moment she was kneeling on the floor, and the next she was traversing the endless plane, walking in no particular direction. A concept of time didn't exist anymore. Perhaps that's why she couldn't remember when she had landed here—because she had been here for an eternity and only just now remembered what she was here for.

There was no time and no aging in this vast place. She was twenty-four years old again. Her arms were just long enough, and her viewpoint was exactly as high as she wanted it. It felt good to be back in the correct body. It felt right.

Just as there was no time, there was also no pain and no exhaustion. She could continue on forever, just like how the world stretched on forever.

The surface felt like walking on a living thing—soft, pliable, yet solid enough to support her weight. It shifted slightly with every step. The silence was suffocating, broken only by the faint squish of her steps against the transparent gel. There was no horizon, no sense of direction—just an infinite sea of emptiness, interrupted only by the strange, gelatinous surface she stood on.