Mizuki watched him fall.

That was the first strange thing — not that Naruto fell, because all students fell when they tried techniques beyond their station. The strange thing was how. Most students collapsed sideways when chakra gave out. Naruto did not collapse sideways. He folded downward, precisely, as though he had been paused. His shadow did not behave the way shadows behave when a body drops. It moved before he did. Mizuki was not certain this was possible. He did not report it.

The coma lasted three hundred and seventy-one days.

Tsunade, who could count chakra reserves the way other people read faces, put her hand over his chest and said nothing for a long time. Later, to Kakashi, she said: "He isn't low. He's full. He's been full since we brought him in."

No one knew what to do with that. The chakra was his. The signature matched. But the signature had changed in a way she did not have words for. Like a word that still means the same thing but in a different language. You could use it. You could not explain it.

He came back on an unremarkable morning, in October, with rain on the window. He sat up. He looked at his hands for a very long time — not with the expression of someone who has forgotten what hands are, but with the expression of someone who has recently relearned it, and finds the learning interesting.

When Iruka rushed in, Naruto looked at him. Then he said, quietly: "You're the same."

Iruka assumed this was a normal thing to say, upon waking from a long sleep, to a person you recognize. He cried. He told Naruto how worried everyone had been. Naruto listened with an attention that felt, somehow, heavier than the moment warranted.

He did not ask for ramen.

He asked for paper.

The writing was small and regular, with no corrections. He produced pages every morning and stacked them without urgency. He did not re-read them. When one of the ANBU teams confiscated a stack, he produced the same pages again from memory, without noticing the theft had occurred, or without caring.

Sakura asked him what he was writing.

He considered the question carefully, the way he now considered most things. "Records," he said, and she waited for more. Nothing more came. She went and told Kakashi. Kakashi went and asked himself. Naruto looked at him with something that was not hostility and was not warmth and was not anything Kakashi had a word for, and said the same thing. "Records."

Then, after a pause, as though adding a footnote: "There are more than you think. Of everything. I'm trying to get the count right."

He was found in Training Ground Seven, on a Tuesday, face-down in the grass, with no wounds. The medics reported his body temperature was ambient. His chakra was absent in the way that it is absent from rocks and water, not in the way it is absent from corpses — corpses still hold a residue, a cooling signature. He held nothing. The absence was clean.

Tsunade sealed the information. She authorized cremation for the following morning.

At sundown, Naruto sat down across from her at her desk, in her locked office, without having opened the door.

She looked at him for a long time.

"We thought you were dead," she said.

"I was," he said. "Briefly."

He seemed unbothered. She told him about the body. He did not look disturbed. He looked thoughtful, in the new, heavy way he had of looking thoughtful. Then he said: "That one must have slipped. I'll be more careful."

She asked what that meant.

He looked at her hands, where they rested on the desk, and said: "You have very strong hands, Hokage-sama. I think that's going to matter."

She asked what that meant.

He said he had to go. He was not rude about it.

The mountain appeared in Training Ground Two, which had been cordoned off. There was no official name for it. In internal ANBU communications it appeared as THE ACCUMULATION, which had the benefit of being accurate.

The bodies were arranged not as thrown things but as placed things. Each new Naruto who arrived would walk the perimeter of the mountain with unhurried attention, the way you might walk a market, pricing things. Then he would climb. Somewhere on the upper third, without drama, he would stop. Sit, or stand. And stop being alive.

They did not decompose. Tsunade had seventeen theories about why not, of which she believed none. The preservation was perfect, in the way that museum preservation is perfect — attentive, effortful, deliberate. As though something wanted the record kept.

There remained, throughout, one Naruto who slept in his apartment, who ate, who received visitors, who answered questions with patience. The village called him the original. He did not correct them.

Kakashi sat with him in the last week of the second month. Outside, the skies had not been right. The quality of the light was wrong in a way that the meteorology office attributed to atmospheric refraction before quietly withdrawing the report.

"Do you know what's happening?" Kakashi asked.

"Yes," Naruto said.

"Can you stop it?"

He thought about this for what felt like a long time. "Not anymore. I could have. Before I understood what I was doing. Now I understand what I was doing, so the question changes."

"What's the question?"

"Whether I should."

He was quiet for a while. On the table between them, his hands. His orange jacket had not been worn since October. He had switched to something plain, gray-blue, with no insignia. Kakashi had asked about it once. Naruto had said, simply, that colors had started to feel very loud.

"The scroll," Kakashi said, finally. "The shadow clone technique."

"Yes."

"What did you do wrong?"

Naruto looked out the window at the altered sky. When he answered, his voice was calm with the calm of someone who has stopped being afraid of a thing through understanding it, rather than through distance.

"I understood it. Not just the hand-signs. The idea underneath. What a clone is, really. If a clone is a version of you — real enough to fight, real enough to die, real enough to love people — then what makes the original original? I started to think about that. During the coma. I had a lot of time to think."

He turned back from the window.

"I think the problem," he said, "is that I came up with an answer."

The mountain stopped growing on a morning in winter, when the temperature was below freezing and the mountain had reached, by the best estimate of the engineering division, four stories in height. The last Naruto who arrived was very tall, and moved with an economy that suggested he had shed every unnecessary thing from how a body could move, and he did not walk to the mountain. He stood at its base for some time. He looked up. He set one hand against the topmost reachable layer and closed his eyes. And then he was not there.

The mountain did not change after that. The bodies remained. The village sealed the training ground. There were ongoing discussions about what to do. The discussions continued for years. Nothing was decided.

Naruto — the one in the gray-blue jacket, the one who ate and slept and answered questions — came to look at it, sometimes, in the early mornings. The ANBU team assigned to monitor the site learned not to approach him on these occasions. He was never threatening. But he carried around him, in those moments, the weight of something they did not have the capacity to understand, and proximity to things you cannot understand is its own kind of danger.

Iruka, who came once and stood beside him without asking anything, reported afterward that Naruto had said only one thing during the two hours they stood there together.

He had said: "I wonder if any of them made it."

Iruka had asked: made it where?

Naruto had looked at the mountain for a long time.

"Further," he said. "Than I did."