The Death of Empathy

Chapter 1 – The Scroll

I honestly don't know what I had expected. A part of me always hoped that there would be some kind of rebirth. I'd always had the niggling fear that if something like the imagined afterlife of Terry Pratchett were true, I would be gone forever, my lack of belief having sealed my fate. Then again, perhaps that truly was what happened, and my childish wish for transmigration had been granted. Whatever the situation, I certainly was not within the ailed body in which I had gone to sleep.

As I woke, and truly appreciated the lack of familiar surroundings, I noticed first the stink of rancid sweat, and shed blood. Although my body felt exhausted, I was in no pain myself. I sat up, taking in my surroundings; fine sand beneath me, and a burning sun rising above the horizon. To my left, an old man lay, his eyes shut tight; although from his ragged and laboured breathing, he seemed to be awake.

As I crawled over to him on my hands and knees, I dimly registered that he seemed far larger than normal, although in hindsight, it was just that I was so small. I might've noticed that at the time had it not been for the panic rising within me as I saw the bloodstains against his dark black robes and noted his sheet white face. I had lived a comfortable life as a software engineer, even being in a desert was something I had never experienced, let alone being in such close proximity to a man who had been so grievously wounded.

He seemed to sense me as I drew close, moaning in pain as he arched his neck; his eyes bulging as they met my own. He must've seen the fear in them, as he smiled as kindly as he could, in spite of his situation. His voice was raspy as he spoke, with no power, trailing off before each time he took a desparate breath, struggling for air. "Come closer, my grandson. Take the scroll..." with this, he gestured to the bag at his side, "Keep running north east, till you reach the Land of Rivers." I was frozen in shock by his words and his appearance, and didn't react as he reached out a wrinkled hand towards me. He gripped me gently behind the neck and pulled me forwards until my forehead bumped gently against his. I barely had time to register the cool touch of metal before he spoke again, more quietly this time. "Protect our legacy. Don't go back, just live."

My eyes stared into his, and his eyes narrowed into a steely determination as I began to pull back, fighting against the pressure of his hand on the back of my neck. Gradually, his eyes began to soften, and it was almost as if he was staring through me as the pressure his hand was exerting weakened, before stopping entirely as his hand dropped against the sand. I stood shakily, my thoughts racing as I recognised the metal attached to his forehead. It was a hitae-ate from Sunagakure, a slash scratched roughly through the centre of the identifying symbol.

Thinking back, its impossible to say how long I stood their frozen, staring at the corpse that had claimed to be the grandfather of my new body. Had my first experience of my new life not been such a brutal one, perhaps I would have been overjoyed at the prospect of a new life as a ninja, with all the advantages of prescience if I were lucky enough to be in a part of the timeline that I knew well, however, all I felt back then was an unshakeable terror.

Once I had finally gathered myself, I reached down towards the bag that the old man had gestured to. Even now I remember the fear, something that now seems childish, but I was terrified that the man would suddenly move or come back to life. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, he did not, and I was able to open the bag, and retrieve its main contents, a rather large scroll. It was not so large as how I remembered the toad summoning contract to be, however, it was still rather sizeable, espescially given my size back then. It was in struggling to move the scroll that I first truly realised the situation of my own body. I couldn't have been more than eight, if I were small for my age, or perhaps six if the opposite. Alas, I had nobody to tell me. I only knew that I wanted to get away from this place.

Unwilling to go back near the corpse of the old man, I used the long leather strips that were fastened around the top and bottom of the scroll to secure it to my back as best as possible, and waited to observe the sun. In hindsight, I was quite lucky in that the sun of this world rises and falls in the same directions as my original one. It seems a small detail, and it didn't even cross my mind until many years later in fact, but there was actually no guarantee that it would be the case. Strangely, I seemed to have some knowledge of how to act, in the sense that I could understand the characters written on the outside of the scroll and understand that old man's final words despite the fact that they were most defifintely not in English, but I did not inherit any of the memories of my new body. I just seemed to have some instinctual knowledge of how to communicate.

It did leave me to wonder how the previous occupant of this body had died. I assumed that the old man's true grandson had passed on somehow, and my wayward soul had taken over the empty shell, however I had no injuries that I could tell. Given my feeling of exhaustion and the obvious weakness of my body, perhaps the two had fled until the younger of the pair had simply dropped dead.

Having heard the urgency of the old man when he told me to keep running, I started heading north-east as soon as I had ascertained the direction from watching the sun for long enough to determine that it was indeed on the rise. The pace I could set was painfully slow, and every step made me feel like I would faint at first, until I gradually reached a trance-like rythm, in which I could barely feel the pain, nor did I really pay attention to my surroundings.

At some point, I became aware that my surroundings had begun to change. The original endless sand had begun to give way to tufts of grass here and there, although it was when the first few trees began to appear before me that I finally began to take notice. From what I knew of the geography of the elemental nations, I should be nearing the Land of Rivers, which lay as a buffer between the Land of Wind and the Land of Fire. It must have been hours that I had been walking for, as my lips had become cracked and dry. As I ran my tongue across them, I winced in pain. I had nothing else with me but the scroll and the clothes on my back, which were dark grey robes, worn and torn in many places. In hindsight, I should have searched the corpse for some supplies, but fear had driven me away before more sensible survival instincts could intervene.

The mintues passed slowly and painfully as I maintained my now shuffling cadence, and I regretted no longer being in that careless trance that had sustained my pace for so long. But steadily, the trees became more numerous, the sand now giving way to grass almost entirely, albeit a sickly pale yellow-green. The feeling of relief that I had upon hearing the trickle of running water is something that I will never forget.

I ran the last few steps toward the river. In actuality, it was perhaps more aptly labelled a stream, but for me, that was more than enough. I shrugged the heavy scroll from my shoulders and threw it to the side as I fell to my knees by the water's edge, hurriedly scooping some to my mouth using my hands. I drank gulp after gulp, despite my better judgement, which whispered softly in the back of my mind to take it more slowly. Finally, my thirst subsided, and I sat back on my haunches, breathing heavily. As I leaned forward once more, I was shocked upon catching my reflection in the now settling water. For a moment I thought I had become a girl, although a panicked feel with my hand quickly confirmed that not to be the case. My hair was long, a good couple of inches past my shoulders. It was black and straight, which I was immediately glad for compared to the wavy tangles I'd had in my previous life. My facial features were soft, one would be forgiven for mistaking my gender; even I had doubted myself for a moment. I tested out my voice tentatively, and found it to be a relatively pleasant sounding, not nasal at all, although high pitched and childish. I guessed I'd find out about that in a few years time. I splashed some water on my face, scrubbing away the sweat and dirt with my hands. Presumably I was from Suna given the old man's headband and the desert from which I had just escaped, yet my complexion belied that, without a hint of a tan; but rather, a pale and delicate white.

All things considered, I could've come out far worse appearance wise, and a little cuteness wouldn't hurt if I ended up begging for food and shelter, which I suspected I might. Wincing in pain as I stretched my arms, I began to disrobe, before slipping into the cool stream water. I scrubbed away the dirt as best I could, taking relief from the hydration, and the small, buoyant support that the water provided my aching muscles.

Reluctantly, I left the stream as I truly began to feel the cold. It wouldn't do to allow myself to fall ill due to exposure. I dried myself off with my travel worn clothes, before dunking them too in the river, and then hanging them to dry over a nearby tree branch. Although the sun was well past its highest point, I thought it would have ample time to dry my clothes before it set. Then I turned my attention to the only other item I had, one which immediately sparked my curiosity now that I'd dealt with my most pressing needs.

So it was that I sat, a small and naked child, unravelling and reading a giant scroll that was more than half as tall as I was myself. Just as I'd been able to understand the words of the old man, I was able to understand the words written in the scroll. At least, that which was plaintext. There were many diagrams within that seemed to make little sense, only collections of symbols which were unintelligible to me. I could read them individually at least, making out characters such as 'earth' and 'lock', but it meant nothing to me in conjunction.

Once I was done being distracted by the large and seemingly nonsensical arrays of characters, I returned my focus to the beginning of the scroll. The opening text read 'Take your mind to be yin and your heart to be yang. Let your five senses be the elements of this world. The art of sealing imitates the life of creation. These are the tenets of our ancestors. This is what it means to be Sumikawa'.

An immediately esoteric opening to what was shaping up to be an entirely confusing scroll. Although at least Sumikawa seemed to be a clan name, perhaps it was mine? I didn't have one that I knew of in any case, so I could just use that if I needed to. I spent the next hour or so reading, and for the most part not understanding. It was obvious that this was a scroll of sealing techniques, probably family techniques, just that they were nowhere near as elementary as would be needed for me to understand them. The plaintext explanations had elements of sense that I could make out, however, I couldn't gain any knowledge from them as a whole. I sat there for probably a few hours before I noticed, far too late, a shadow growing over my shoulder.

"Hmmn. What an intersting little find. Such a small child, and such an important scroll. What should I do with you, I wonder?".

A/N: This was quite a fun chapter to write. About the length, I've had comments before saying they wished the chapter length of TSF were longer. Honestly, I'll write as fast as I write, the breaks in chapters will go where they seem sensible, I won't hold myself to a standard length, and you won't be missing out on anything based on some kind of cut-off or minimum limit.

As a side note, I've become a little fascinated with readability indices. The various indices place this chapter in the range of grade 8-12, which I'm fairly happy with, but its interesting how each different standard calculates their results, I think Flesch-Kincaid is my favourite. I think I'll be keeping track just to see if my writing stays consistent. Also lexical density is kind of interesting of a stat too.