Even if it was only a guess, the nine-tailed fox had just dragged far too many of Ryu's secrets into the open.
Ryu laughed hard, the sound echoing freely across the vast, oppressive corridor of the Nine-Tails' prison.
*
Inside a deeper, visually isolated layer of the seal, Minato and Kushina shared a look of pure bewilderment.
"Why is he laughing?" Kushina asked. "The fox just exposed his biggest secret."
Minato watched the boy closely. "Because he doesn't feel exposed. He feels entertained."
*
Ryu finally caught his breath and wiped a non-existent tear from his eye. "And what made you reach this new conclusion? Care to share, Mr. 9?"
Fox did not look amused. "I listened. Whenever people talked around the brat, I heard them. Even before I officially met you, your name was already echoing around him just from passing conversations."
Ryu smirked. "You are such a peeping tom."
The fox ignored the comment, keeping his massive head lowered toward the chessboard.
*
Kushina blinked. "Wait. If the fox is a peeping tom for listening through Naruto, does that make us peeping toms too?"
Minato rubbed the back of his neck with a sheepish smile. "Well... technically, we are doing the exact same thing."
"I am a mother watching over my own son," Kushina huffed, crossing her arms. "That is completely different from a giant fox eavesdropping on children."
*
"I didn't choose this life," fox said. "I didn't ask to be sealed inside another, trapped inside a brat."
Ryu shifted a pawn forward, advancing his line. The stone scraped quietly against the board.
"It's impressive for a brat to invent so much in so little time," fox continued, mirroring the pawn's movement. "And you can even form diamond crystals. It has been centuries since I saw Crystal Release jutsu."
Ryu then said, "My inventions and knowledge of history – those can't be the only reasons."
Fox rested his chin on his massive paws. "You said to that Uchiha boy, 'There's only one milestone left now.'… You spoke as if you knew the milestones he would achieve...The Mangekyo. A kid like you knows about it... I doubt half the Uchiha clan even knows it exists."
Ryu said nothing, studying the board.
"And there was something else," Fox added. "That name… Boruto… You said that name with absolute confidence: 'One with the name Boruto is not yet born.' The way you said it... it felt strange. Like you knew this person would be born someday."
*
Now that Minato and Kushina heard this from Nine-Tails, both remembered the conversation Ryu had with Arata.
"Boruto," Kusha whispered, "what a familiar name."
Minato also recalled the conversation but was not fixated on the name but on how Ryu said what he said.
*
Ryu leaned back and crossed his arms. "I thought you were all rage and shouting and hatred for mankind, but you are pretty observant." A faint smile touched his lips. "I guess when you are not angry, you can actually think."
"You still have not answered," Fox said. He slid a rook across the board, pressuring Ryu's center. "Am I right?"
Ryu looked at the newly positioned rook. "Who knows?"
He did not like lying when he could avoid it. Most of the time, he preferred to divert questions or mix in small truths that made people think they had cornered a strange, eccentric boy instead of a deliberate one. Fox, however, was speaking with such absolute conviction that flat denial had stopped being easy.
"Still trying to deny it," Fox grumbled. "Come on. You are not the first seer I have come across. There have been many who prophesied the rise of ninjutsu, the warlords, the rise of the hidden villages, and even the great wars."
Ryu sighed. "I am not like those seers."
Fox asked, "Then what kind of seer are you, boy?"
"What do you know about time?" Ryu asked as he moved his bishop to block the rook.
"Time?" Fox scoffed. "You mean history?"
"No. I mean time. The flow of it. The never-ending cycle, infinite, unreachable, and all-powerful."
Fox fell silent, waiting.
"In one theory, the flow of time is static," Ryu said. "Even if one knows the future, the future is fixed. Knowing it doesn't change it. The events will happen exactly as prophesied. In fact, the more you try to fight the future, the closer you move toward making it a reality."
Ryu pointed at a captured piece beside the board. "Take this for an example. There is a prophecy of a child being born who will one day overthrow the king. The king learns of this prophecy and has the child's parents killed before the birth. But the chain of those exact events leads to the rise of a boy who will eventually overthrow that very king."
Fox's eyes narrowed. "So the king fulfilled the prophecy himself by pushing the child toward it."
"That," Ryu said, "or maybe the boy was always meant to overthrow him. If the king had not killed the parents to prevent the prophecy, his men would have. Or his policies. Or his own blind actions."
*
Minato and Kushina listened in complete silence.
Kushina's hands tightened into fists. The masked man had attacked the village, targeting the Nine-Tails, which ultimately left Naruto orphaned and burdened with a heavy destiny. The parallels were chilling.
"Is he talking about Naruto?" Kushina whispered.
"The masked man's target was the Nine-Tails, not Naruto," Minato replied gently. "But the chain of events... the result is the same."
*
"What is the other theory?" Fox asked.
"Other theories state time is not static. It is fluid, dynamic, and constantly rewriting itself based on present actions," Ryu explained. "If you know the future and actively choose to make a different choice, the future alters."
"That means prophecies are a bunch of bullshit if this theory is true," Fox said bluntly.
"Maybe… maybe not."
"Then how and why do they exist?" Fox demanded. He had several prophecies locked in his own memory, waiting to be fulfilled. He wanted to know how the boy viewed them.
Ryu smiled. "Why do you ask? Are you waiting for one yourself?"
"I think you know the answer already. I want to know why and how prophecy exists."
Ryu chuckled, then tilted his head as if he were choosing a lecture topic. "I will tell you how. One theory is that time is not a straight line. It is a circle. Things that are going to happen have already happened before. Think of the world as a storybook. Each time someone reads the book, that universe completes a cycle. The seer can read this book from inside the story, but he cannot change what is written on the pages. The story is simply read infinite times."
Ryu paused, letting the weight of the concept settle in the dark space. "Another theory is that the seer has seen it happen in some other universe."
"Some other universe?" Fox repeated.
"That leads us to a broader theory of time. And this one can contain the earlier ideas without contradicting them."
"Great," Fox muttered. "Another theory."
*
Kushina said, "This brat has too many theories."
Minato, "What do you expect from a mental bloodline?"
*
Even though the fox sounded dismissive, he was listening carefully.
"Irrespective of whether one knows the future or not, each action creates a new branch in the timeline," Ryu said. "If you flip a coin and it lands on heads, there exists a branch timeline where it landed on tails."
"I think I understand," Fox said.
"Now replace coin flipping with a more complex game," Ryu said, gesturing to the board between them. "Like this game we are playing, with a multitude of possible moves. We are simply walking into one timeline out of billions when we make a move."
Fox shifted his massive tails. "That would mean there are infinite versions of the same world with different outcomes."
"Yes."
"How is that possible? The amount of energy needed for infinite universes to exist is impossible. You cannot generate so much matter and energy from nothingness."
"Your hesitation is valid," Ryu agreed. "If the universe is spawning infinite new timelines, it requires an infinite amount of mass and spatial volume. But it is possible if there is balance. A cycle of energy to regulate and circulate in an infinitely growing universe. A collapsing counterweight to regulate reality."
"Regulate? How?" Fox asked.
"The infinite multiverse is collapsing into itself infinitely," Ryu explained softly. "Creation and destruction intertwining as one entity. It is a limitless feedback loop. I call it the Multiverse Cycle Theory."
Fox stared at the boy, fully absorbed by the scale of the thought.
Ryu advanced a knight, locking Fox's queen into a tighter lane. "You can think of the multiverse as a playground belonging to two brothers. It is sealed and has a limited amount of air. One brother likes to blow bubbles, and the other brother pops them. Each time the second brother pops a balloon, the air inside returns to the playground, so they never run out of air. Seers are just looking from one bubble to an almost similar bubble of the same frequency, but with a slight phase difference."
"And within each bubble," Ryu added, "the first theory—fixed time—can still hold true."
Fox looked from the chessboard to Ryu. "You have some very interesting theories on how prophecy works. But that does not answer why prophecy exists. What is the point of such a universe?"
Ryu leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "Maybe both brothers in the playground are peeping toms like you. Maybe they like to watch the world unfold and collapse repeatedly, and each time, they enjoy it."
Ryu leaned back with a small, mocking smile and glanced upward, towards Mr Beginning and Mr End, the two cosmic peeping toms.
Ryu adopted a stiff, dramatic tone, like a narrator reading a dusty scroll.
"A boy would one day be born who would unite the world against the forces of darkness... blah, blah, blah."
He dropped the robotic voice and offered Fox a wide grin.
"Who doesn't like that in a story?" Ryu explained why seers exist.
A/N:
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