Two fingers curled, hooking tightly around the white sphere of unknown material.
The Yang Release clone held it out to the original. Above them, the clouds parted slightly, letting a wash of blue sky and golden sunlight spill down. The ball, smooth as polished jade and unnaturally flawless, blazed with a dazzling sheen at a glance. It was clearly no ordinary object.
Konome accepted the fist-sized sphere. It wouldn't sit securely in her grip, so she could only balance it on her palm and examine it closely.
In truth, she had already seen it when the clone returned. But at the time, she had been at the most critical stage of the Reverse Eight Gates and had no leisure to study a Six Paths relic whose purpose she didn't even know. So she'd kept it with the clone until now.
Seeing the original studying the white sphere, the Yang Release clone explained.
"These past few days, I tried everything I could think of.
Fūinjutsu. Byakugan. Forcing it with Sharingan ocular power. Even implanting Hashirama Cells and stimulating it with Yang Release.
Nothing worked.
I even fed it to Samehada, but it couldn't digest it. I don't have Shikotsumyaku, so I had to hand it to you and see if you can unravel what's inside."
"Mmnn."
Samehada, wrapped in bandages, let out a sound too, as if backing her up.
Konome gave a slight nod, signaling she understood.
Light flared in her eyes. The veins at her temples bulged, crawling like earthworms along the outer edges of her cheeks. Her dead-gray pupils rippled like liquid mercury. Invisible ocular power became a gust of wind and rushed toward the sphere's interior.
The clone's Byakugan couldn't make sense of what lay inside this ball. Konome intended to try her own gray eyes, now in the throes of that so-called "fetal stirring," to see if they would provoke some special reaction.
Her gaze passed through the smooth outer shell with almost no resistance.
And yet, Konome's expression abruptly went blank.
Black.
Endless black.
Not a sliver of light anywhere.
The sphere felt like a solid iron core, perfectly unified inside and out.
She had never encountered anything like this.
Normally, the Byakugan's sight produced only two outcomes.
Either it pierced straight through, even a completely solid object revealing every internal detail with clarity.
Or it hit a barrier like a seal array, where all she could see was chakra obstructing her vision, her ocular power unable to breach the lock.
But this mysterious white sphere was a third case entirely.
Her ocular power could enter it.
Yet no matter how deeply it sank in, it could not see anything at all, as if the interior was nothing but void.
This thing was hiding something terrifying.
Konome's eyes brightened further.
The "key" at her forehead turned slowly. The ring inside the triangle expanded, reversing and enclosing it. In an instant, all three great gates opened. A surging vitality spilled out like divine nectar.
Boom.
A fierce wind snapped her white robes into a sharp crackle.
Purple.
A dazzling, extravagant purple radiance rose around her, tinting even the daylight with a faint violet hue.
The Yang Release clone felt her heart tighten at the sight. Even Samehada squirmed without thinking, like a beast that had caught the scent of a feast.
After the Reverse Eight Gates, the original had devoured everything within half a li of the pool. Grass. Flowers. Shrubs. Trees.
Even after filtering out most impurities with the Sharingan, she still gained immeasurable benefits.
Repeatedly opening the Eight Gates, pushing Shikotsumyaku to heal at terrifying speed, then being drained by the gray-bone evolution and its hunger for life, all of that hollowed-out deficit had been filled back up by external vitality until it was overflowing.
Her life source had grown. It was like raising her base attributes at the root.
Normally, that vitality stayed tucked inside her body, not outwardly apparent.
She only felt healthier, stronger, more clear-headed. Her chakra was thicker and heavier than before.
And that was it.
After all, even someone with a high-grade Sage Body like Uzumaki Naruto only looked like someone with more chakra and faster healing. There was nothing visibly mystical about it.
But Konome had forgotten.
She and Naruto were not the same.
Naruto's chakra and life force were monstrous, yes, but he carried the old flaw of the Uzumaki and Senju. A massive fuel tank with no matching framework to use it properly.
The Senju and Uzumaki were like an engine without a cannon barrel for offense and without steel plating for defense. No matter how much vitality they had, it rarely turned into a fundamental qualitative leap.
Konome was the opposite.
Gray eyes in fetal stirring. Shikotsumyaku evolved into a third stage. Lightning Release Chakra Mode that fused offense and defense. A tailed-beast cloak with absurd chakra consumption. The Eight Gates that detonated life force at its limit. Five elemental natures that moved at her whim.
She was fully equipped.
All she lacked was a fuel tank worthy of the build.
The Reverse Eight Gates patched her last weakness.
Abilities that had once been throttled by insufficient chakra finally showed their true ferocity.
The moment she removed the seal, she saw the chain reaction.
Just the chakra converted through opening the first three gates was already more abundant than what she once produced after opening the sixth.
The Yang Release clone no longer cared about the so-called Kaguya clan treasure. All her attention was swallowed by the profound mystery of the Reverse Eight Gates.
This was the path to divinity she had obsessed over.
Devour life from the outside world, raise the body's biological limits, endlessly amplify chakra reserves, physical strength, mental power.
From the first step, it could sprout a fledgling Sage Body.
The more life you swallowed, the more violent the eruption when the seal was released.
Growth and burst combined into one.
An ultra S-rank technique.
A Yin Yang secret art that could only be constructed by assembling the Hyūga Byakugan, the Kaguya Shikotsumyaku and its flesh manipulation, the Sharingan's extreme Yin ocular power, and the Yang outer shell of Hashirama Cells.
If she reached the Six Paths tier with this one day, she could name it:
Kekkei Mōra. Six Paths: Reverse Eight Gates.
While the clone's heart churned with awe, Konome's veins swelled from the corners of her eyes down toward her cheekbones.
A purple flood poured along those veins into her eyes. Her skin was so pale and clear that the bulging vessels took on a faint violet tint, forming branching patterns like tree roots.
She could clearly feel it now.
Inside her eyes, a power not yet fully formed was being forced awake by the insane chakra injection.
Something in her dead-gray pupils underwent a qualitative shift. Her ocular power began assembling an eye-technique structure so complex it made her skull ache.
Joy flashed through her.
She had successfully drawn out that incomplete power hidden in the gray eyes.
But her ocular power was draining at a frightening rate. She didn't dare waste even a breath. Her gaze locked on the sphere in her palm.
The darkness remained endless.
And yet it was as if she had pushed aside a layer of cloud.
From the far end of the void, she finally glimpsed something real.
Infinitely fine black curse markings crawled across the inner wall of the sphere. At a glance, it looked like a labyrinth of dense, intricate lines. No exit. No end.
Chakra converted rapidly into ocular power. Her eyes, still in fetal stirring, were being forced to produce a sliver of strength. Dryness spread across her vision, a prickling sting, like the feeling after staring at a screen for three straight nights without sleep.
But it was manageable.
Pure green life energy flowed out from the "gate," mixing into the violet chakra that fed her eyes.
Under vitality at its absolute limit, the sting vanished instantly. Konome blinked, and her eyes felt warm and wet, as though they had returned to the womb.
Life force really was universal.
She couldn't help the thought.
That green energy represented the purest life source, the legendary panacea said to heal anything. A single thread could save a gravely wounded shinobi from death's doorstep.
In theory, with enough life force, as long as the soul had not yet entered the Pure Land, even dragging the dead back into breathing wouldn't be impossible.
Repairing damaged Byakugan or Mangekyō Sharingan was the smallest, most trivial application of it.
Konome continued using life force to repair her eyes while stimulating her ocular power, reading the curse markings on the sphere's inner wall line by line.
These symbols clearly did not belong to the shinobi world's sealing systems. They were utterly different from anything she had studied.
And yet, she understood them.
Something long buried began to unfold.
From somewhere in her mind, Kaguya clan secret script, half unfamiliar now, surged up like a tide.
It was a script every Kaguya had to master. Its origin, it was said, traced back to the legendary progenitor, its history unimaginably ancient.
Many of the clan's internal texts were written in this script. Even ceremonial tools were engraved with it as a symbol.
And the dense curse markings before her were extremely similar to that script.
In some places, they were identical.
So it really is a treasure of the Kaguya clan.
Excitement blazed in Konome's eyes. This Six Paths relic, rumored to come from the Sage of Six Paths, was finally about to lift its veil before her.
Seeing the original's expression glow with such intensity, the Yang Release clone realized Konome had likely cracked the secret.
She immediately hauled Samehada from her back to the front. The bandages around its body snapped and loosened.
This sphere had reached their hands thanks largely to Samehada. If they uncovered its secret, then of course everyone should share in the fun.
Even if Samehada didn't have eyes.
For some reason, the clone felt like she could hear a certain skeleton laughing somewhere, a strange, echoing cackle.
"Mmnn."
Samehada, unaware of her thoughts, opened its grotesque mouth toward the other master, the one who smelled so delicious. It whined and wagged its sword-handle like a greedy pet dog.
A dogfish made into a weapon.
The clone shook her head, throwing off the messy thoughts. Violet chakra surfaced in her palm as she grabbed the trembling handle.
Samehada immediately bristled in bliss, savoring the precious taste it hadn't enjoyed in a long time, no longer begging Konome for food.
Clone and blade-beast sat atop the boulder, waiting quietly for the original to finish unraveling the treasure.
Time passed.
Sunlight tilted west. Clouds rolled and scattered.
Even the distant thunder of the waterfall grew sharp and irritating.
Konome stared at the sphere. Her expression cycled from shock to ecstasy, then to confusion, then back to shock, over and over. The clone's curiosity itched like a toothache.
Samehada, still drinking chakra, seemed to sense its master's agitation and wagged eagerly too.
After several minutes, just as Konome's face threatened to loop back into another round of shock, the Yang Release clone finally blurted out, unable to bear it.
"What did you see?
Just tell us something. Give the two of us a taste!"
"Almost done."
Konome waved her off. She stared again, murmuring as if memorizing. Then the violet patterns on her face receded, and her rippling ocular power calmed.
She looked up.
On the boulder, the Yang Release clone sat upright, serious, waiting for the answer.
Konome couldn't suppress her joy. She looked down at the sphere in her palm, lips lifting.
"This is a sealing technique from the Ōtsutsuki."
The clone froze.
The sphere coming from the Ōtsutsuki was surprising, yes. But considering the origin of the Kaguya clan's ancestor, it also made a certain kind of sense.
"What kind of sealing technique could make you this happy?" the clone asked, bewildered.
After the Reverse Eight Gates, unless it was something that could help Konome fuse a Kekkei Mōra and step into the Six Paths realm directly, it was hard to imagine anything provoking such a violent emotional swing.
She sucked in a breath, suddenly guessing.
"Wait. Don't tell me it's Chibaku Tensei."
"Of course not." Konome didn't tease. She was desperate to share it.
"It's a space-time sealing technique. It can seal any object into another space, similar to Kamui.
But that isn't the important part.
What it seals is… the Ten-Tails."
"The Ten-Tails?"
The Yang Release clone sprang to her feet, staring at the small sphere as if it had turned into a bomb.
"How could it be the Ten-Tails? The Demonic Statue of the Outer Path is in the Akatsuki's hands, and the tailed-beast chakra isn't even complete…"
"It's another Ten-Tails."
Konome clutched the sphere, refusing to loosen her fingers. She looked up at the hazy sun. Molten gold bled into the reflection in her dead-gray pupils.
"More precisely, it's a Ten-Tails infant.
A God Tree seed."
"God Tree…"
The clone's eyes widened. Those words hit like repeated explosions, leaving her mind buzzing.
She knew exactly what the God Tree was.
The Ōtsutsuki rampaged through the universe because of it.
They planted God Trees on planets, stole all natural energy and life force, and in the end devoured the chakra fruit to become undying gods.
Kaguya Ōtsutsuki, the progenitor of chakra, was born from that path.
If this sphere truly held a God Tree seed, then it really could be the supreme treasure that solved Shikotsumyaku's Bloodline Sickness.
No.
It was a treasure that could solve almost anything in the world.
Plant a God Tree, wait a thousand years, swallow the chakra fruit, and without cultivating at all she could obtain a power that rivaled Kaguya herself.
But then a thought stabbed through the clone's excitement.
Something was off.
To activate a Ten-Tails infant, you needed to feed it an Ōtsutsuki sacrifice.
And in this world, the only living Ōtsutsuki…
Slowly, the Yang Release clone lifted her head. Along with the original, she looked up at the sky.
That person was on the Moon.
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