Chapter 511: Tobirama, You Should Reflect on Whether You've Invented Another Forbidden Technique
Shinobi Headquarters base.
Under the watchful eyes of assembled jonin, Hiruzen performed the Summoning: Impure World Reincarnation himself, using condemned prisoners as vessels to call back the former shadow leaders from every village across every generation.
Everyone present stood in solemn, respectful formation as the summoned figures rose. Everyone except Yasushi, who waved his arms enthusiastically and cheered at the top of his voice.
"Welcome, welcome, welcome with enthusiasm..."
Takeshi stood beside him with hands pressed together, smiling apologetically at anyone who caught his eye.
"I am so very sorry. Please forgive him."
Yasushi was still a teenager and no one expected complete decorum from someone that age. Most took it as excitement at finally meeting legendary heroes rather than anything worth reprimanding.
When the former shadow leaders opened their eyes, five of the six present stepped forward at once to pay their respects, leaving only the Amekage standing back. Rain Village's lineage was not considered significant enough to have warranted an invitation.
Hashirama scanned the room and immediately understood his situation.
"Tobirama," he said with gentle reproach, "look what your creations do to people. They cannot even rest in peace after they die."
"Stop complaining," Tobirama told him flatly, then turned his attention to Hiruzen.
"Little monkey. You've gotten old."
"Has something happened? What brings you to call us dusty old relics back?"
Before Hiruzen could answer, Yasushi appeared in front of everyone with an enormous grin.
"What else? We came to share good news with our distinguished predecessors!"
"Through the combined effort of every village, the shinobi world has finally achieved real peace. All nations are now unified as a single entity. The fighting is over. There are no more borders between us."
"Isn't that worth celebrating?"
Hashirama's eyes lit up immediately. He straightened.
"Is that true? Everyone is family now?"
"That is wonderful news!"
His reaction was the only genuinely happy one in the room. Every other former shadow leader's expression tightened, and they each looked toward their successors.
"The situation is as described," Hiruzen said, smiling uncomfortably. "Only there are a great many things that happened along the way that require some explanation."
He outlined the relevant events, then bowed his head.
"I am deeply sorry, Sensei. I was not capable of protecting the village you left behind."
"Ah, don't worry about the village. The important thing is that people have stopped going to war with each other. Whether the Leaf still exists is a separate question."
"As for these Otsutsuki enemies, simply leave them to me. I'll protect this new World Government of yours."
Hashirama laughed with the easy confidence of someone who had personally fought most of the shinobi world's hardest battles and won.
Tobirama, however, was already looking sideways at the Uchiha contingent, his expression cold and calculating.
"Brother, don't accept everything you're told at face value."
"Intelligence can be fabricated. Who can verify whether these so-called Dragon Vein travelers are actually what they claim to be? All those different and distinctive dojutsu abilities, each one unlike the next, why does that combination sound so familiar to me?"
"How do we know this isn't the work of some rogue Uchiha who found a way to make it look like something else?"
"And another thing: who exactly is this Black Zetsu? I have never heard you mention him even once. He claims he gave you your Wood Release. Does that ring any bells for you?"
"Hmm?" Hashirama blinked and scratched his head sheepishly. "I honestly cannot remember anything about that."
Heads turned toward Black Zetsu.
He had faced far more dangerous moments than this. Without any sign of alarm, he maintained his position with complete steadiness and firmly held the line that he had indeed given Hashirama his Wood Release.
Hashirama was easily convinced once someone sounded certain enough.
"I suppose it is possible. I don't always remember things. That might explain why someone as clever as you never managed to learn Wood Release, Tobirama. The origin was never something you could inherit through bloodline."
Tobirama's skepticism remained fully intact despite this answer, but he was operating without complete information after only just returning to the living world. He set the line of inquiry aside to revisit once he had reviewed a great deal more material.
The other former Hokage leaders had meanwhile each had brief private conversations with their successors, absorbing the scope of what had changed in the shinobi world with varying degrees of disbelief.
"Those daimyo and nobles, all they ever did was drink and surround themselves with women. They actually agreed to a merger?"
"Genjutsu, probably."
Eyes drifted toward the Uchiha side of the room.
It was not the most subtle implication. Fugaku absorbed it without moving. Yasushi did not.
He stepped directly in front of the crowd, one hand on his hip and the other pointing.
"Excuse me. What exactly is that expression supposed to mean?"
"Do you have any idea how rude that is?"
"Let me tell you something about the unified shinobi world: the territory is larger, the ninja forces are larger, and your individual authority as shadow leaders is now one-sixth of what it used to be. You each hold a fraction of what you had before."
"But the Uchiha clan remains the first and greatest clan in the shinobi world. Under the World Government, we are also the first and greatest clan. We are considerably more significant than your ordinary clans and their small fry."
"Yasushi, please stop talking like that..."
Fugaku moved quickly, clamped his hand over Yasushi's mouth, and attempted to steer him backward.
Yasushi pried the hand away and kept going.
"Stop putting every inconvenient thing on the Uchiha clan's account! Try looking inward for once. Ask yourselves whether someone in this room invented yet another unpleasant forbidden technique that caused all of this!"
"A certain someone's Flying Thunder God marker has turned up on the enemy's side. I don't believe for a moment that there is nothing to reflect on there."
He stopped well short of using a name, but the implication could not have been more direct.
The other nations settled into comfortable silence and turned their attention toward Tobirama with expressions of mild entertainment.
"My Flying Thunder God marker?" Tobirama's confusion was genuine. "Someone is using it?"
Hiruzen stepped forward and gave a quiet summary of the battlefield intelligence, including the combat account and the sketch Uesugi had drawn.
Tobirama stared at the drawing for a long moment. The three-tomoe Sharingan looking back at him from the face in that sketch was specifically aggravating.
He turned to look at Hiruzen with a hard expression.
"Little monkey. Did someone put you up to showing me this as a joke?"
"No, absolutely not, Sensei, I would never."
Hiruzen shook his head repeatedly until Tobirama was satisfied that no deception was involved.
Tobirama closed his eyes and reached inward, extending his awareness along the network of Flying Thunder God markers he had placed over the course of his life.
He drew in a sharp breath.
"There are new ones."
His face moved through several shades in rapid sequence.
Then the cold certainty settled, and with it came a different kind of focus.
"How this happened is something I can determine directly. They placed my marker without realizing I can use it from the other side as well."
Hiruzen registered the implication and felt a genuine wave of relief.
"If you can track through the marker network, we can finally locate wherever Urashiki and Isshiki are based! We have been reacting to their attacks for weeks without any way to find them."
"This is the turning point."
The entire assembled force moved out immediately, with Tobirama leading the way through his marker connections. They made rapid progress.
What they found at each location was nothing.
One empty clearing after another. Every marker present, every destination confirmed, not a single enemy or base to be found anywhere.
After several days of this, the army's morale, which had risen sharply at the start, had dropped back to somewhere below where it had begun.
Hashirama kept the group's spirits up with steady encouragement.
"Don't lose heart. There are only so many markers in the network. We search them one by one and eventually we find the right one."
His sentence was interrupted by a toad, which dropped out of nowhere onto Jiraiya's shoulder and delivered its message in a tight, urgent voice.
"Otsutsuki Urashiki has attacked the Shinobi Headquarters. The Nine-Tails chakra has been extracted."
Outrage broke out across the group.
"What were Minato and his people doing? How was the Nine-Tails jinchuriki not protected?"
The toad looked at Tobirama for a moment with a peculiar expression, then continued.
"Someone calling himself Uchiha Tobira appeared and occupied Minato directly. Two more Black and White Eye fighters engaged the rest of the escort. That created the opening Urashiki needed."
"Uchiha..." Tobirama's jaw tightened audibly. "...Tobira."
The combination of those two names produced something that had no good explanation.
"They are openly mocking me."
He was furious. He was also thinking clearly.
"Moving this entire army to investigate is too slow. I will go ahead alone, use the Flying Thunder God network to move quickly, confirm the enemy's actual location, and come back to lead everyone in. No alerting them before we're ready to commit."
Hashirama immediately offered to come along.
"With me beside you, even if you run into a full ambush we can fight our way out."
Tobirama considered it, then shook his head.
"Your strength speaks for itself, Brother. But the bodies we are working with now are not ideal vessels. We cannot perform at full capacity."
"And this run is about intelligence, not combat. If I bring a larger force I risk tipping them off and losing the trail again."
"One person using Flying Thunder God moves fastest and leaves the least trace. If I am detected, I am an Edo Tensei body with access to the full contents of my sealed technique archive. Getting rid of me is not simple."
Hashirama thought about his brother's considerable collection of sealed forbidden techniques and said nothing further.
The group made camp and waited.
Tobirama moved out alone, running through the marker network with the fluid efficiency of its original creator. With an Edo Tensei body and unlimited chakra, the distance consumed nothing. He moved like a series of flickers, appearing and vanishing in rapid succession.
The anger was still in him, sharpening his focus rather than clouding it. He wanted to find the person wearing his face with those offensive red eyes and have a direct conversation.
Then, after more jumps than he could count, the nature of what he arrived at changed.
There was a person waiting there.
Tobirama landed and looked at what stood across from him. The face was unmistakably his own, built from the same template, carrying the same white hair. If not for the Sharingan blazing red in those eyes, he might have spent a moment wondering whether some forgotten event had produced a child he had never known about.
He scanned the area. No hidden ambush force. No visible base infrastructure.
"You came here specifically to wait for me."
"Who are you? How do you have my face, and how are you using my Flying Thunder God marker?"
Uchiha Tobira said nothing. The moment Tobirama appeared, the clone charged.
"Not talking? I'll ask again once I have you in custody."
Tobirama drew his blade and met the attack.
They exchanged an immediate, ringing clash. Both of them, in nearly the same instant, reached with the hand not holding their weapon and pressed a Flying Thunder God marker onto the other.
Both of them canceled their respective marks in almost the same beat.
It was like looking in a mirror with a functional mind behind the reflection.
The same base, the same technique set, the same combat approach. Every combination Tobirama opened, Uchiha Tobira already knew. Every exchange closed without a decisive advantage.
But the Sharingan was not a minor factor.
Under the elevated dynamic perception the three-tomoe provided, Uchiha Tobira's reaction speed and combat rhythm ran just slightly ahead of his counterpart at every exchange. Not by much. Enough.
The fight ended in a single swift stroke. Uchiha Tobira's blade took Tobirama's head.
The follow-through came in an immediate sequence of precise cuts that separated the body into pieces.
"Pointless," Tobirama said, calmly waiting for the regeneration cycle to complete and mentally reviewing his options. Did Uchiha Tobira have a Mangekyo? Would Susanoo appear? Should he use the Mutual Explosive Seal formation to end the engagement?
Before the body had finished knitting itself back together, a dozen black rods dropped from above and drove through both his arms and both his legs, nailing him to the ground.
The sensation that followed was not pain. It was the complete and absolute failure of everything he tried to make his body do.
"What is this?"
The intelligence briefing he had received covered a great deal, but not everything. The specific properties of black rods as Yin-Yang Release constructs, their ability to suppress chakra completely even in an Edo Tensei vessel, had not been part of what was shared. The Shinobi Headquarters itself did not know they could do this.
That gap in knowledge cost him the opening to respond.
A Black and White Eye fighter appeared in front of him, opened a Daikokuten portal with one hand, and dropped him through it without ceremony. The portal closed.
Clone #2 opened a second portal and stepped through alongside Uchiha Tobira.
They arrived at the Kara Organization base.
Amado and the research team had been waiting.
Chapter 512: World-Destroying Disaster Arrives
Senju Tobirama hit the floor hard, straining to push himself upright. The black rods had sealed his chakra completely. He could not move a limb.
"If my original body were still intact..."
He lay face-down against the ground in the indignity of helplessness, turning his head sideways to track Amado's approach.
"Second Hokage-sama, when you stake everything on a gamble, you accept the result. Stop appealing to conditions that do not exist."
"Combat between ninja has never been decided purely by strength. Intelligence is always the more important factor in determining who wins."
"When you placed too much faith in the immortality your forbidden technique granted you, losing through exactly that blind spot was entirely predictable."
"And frankly, even in a direct fight on equal terms, it was not guaranteed that you would have been the one walking away."
"Uchiha Tobira." Tobirama repeated the name with visible distaste. "Some counterfeit thief borrowing my face. On what grounds does it carry my name?"
"It is not a counterfeit."
"He was built from tissue taken directly from your own remains."
"Your two finest students are owed a certain gratitude for that, actually. The Leaf's secure archives contained preserved biological material from every significant figure in the village's history. A remarkably thorough collection."
Tobirama's expression went dark and he stopped responding.
He was not in a position to object. The practice of preserving biological samples from the village's strongest fighters had not been initiated by his students. He had started it. Hiruzen and Danzo had merely continued what he established. Blaming them would have been hollow.
Amado crouched beside him, reached out, and pinched his shoulder. With a deliberate motion, he pressed a fingertip into the surface and pried away a small fragment of Edo Tensei material, then held it at eye level and observed it as it slowly dissolved.
"Extraordinary work. Truly."
"Sealing techniques producing an energy-bound physical form that can carry a soul and consciousness. I have not seen anything like it."
He looked down at Tobirama with genuine appreciation.
"Would you be willing to explain the underlying principles of the Impure World Reincarnation to me? Purely out of scientific curiosity."
"No."
Tobirama filed away everything visible in the room with methodical care: the dimensions, the equipment layout, the spatial characteristics that marked this as a pocket dimension rather than any location in the shinobi world.
"So this is your hidden base."
"Concealed inside a dimensional space. That explains why no one could find you."
"We are not affiliated with the Otsutsuki," Amado said pleasantly.
"We are an organization devoted to advancing the shinobi world and eliminating its conflicts. The unification you returned to find was largely the product of our effort."
Tobirama's eyes sharpened.
"I knew it. Someone was orchestrating all of this from the shadows, forcing the outcome into place. Those daimyo and nobles would never surrender power voluntarily."
"What have you done? What do you actually want?"
Amado dropped another fragment of Edo Tensei material he had been examining and shook his head with mild regret.
"Without the technical documentation, reverse-engineering this technique from the material alone is not going to be straightforward."
He met Tobirama's gaze steadily.
"I already told you. The shinobi world's peace and advancement. That is our goal. If you want to understand how we accomplished what we did, the most direct path is to join us and find out directly."
"Keep dreaming." Tobirama's expression did not shift. "Rats who work from sewers and call it service to the world are not a group I plan to associate with."
"You find the sewer offensive?" Amado said evenly. "The daimyo and nobles stood in daylight their entire lives. Every action they took was more corrupt, more contemptible, and more beneath the standards of the sewers you describe than anything done here."
He argued the point seriously and at length. Tobirama's position did not move. He was a man of fixed convictions, and the model of the shinobi world he had built and defended was one he still believed in. The Kara Organization's approach was not something he would accept regardless of what arguments were offered.
Amado looked at the set of that expression and sighed.
"Irreducibly principled. I see."
"We move to the backup plan."
He stood, signaled to Uchiha Tobira, and Uchiha Tobira lifted Tobirama and followed Amado deeper into the facility.
The route wound through several corridors before they reached a laboratory. Two operating tables stood side by side at the center of the room, surrounded by a dense arrangement of medical equipment.
Uchiha Tobira placed Tobirama on one table and secured him with black rods, then took the other himself and lay back.
Tobirama ran his eyes across every instrument he could see, cross-referencing against everything in his knowledge base, trying to read the function of each piece of hardware. Many of them he could not place at all.
"What are you planning?"
"This body is an Edo Tensei construct. No surgical procedure can produce results on it."
"You are half right," Amado said, lifting a helmet from a nearby device and fitting it onto Tobirama's head. He pressed an array of sensor patches firmly against the acupuncture points distributed across his skull, then brought out a set of probes and drove them through the bone into the tissue beneath.
"Edo Tensei renders the physical form artificial. But the soul is genuine. The consciousness is genuine. And the chakra is genuine."
"This particular approach is actually only feasible with an Edo Tensei subject. Applying it to an ordinary person would leave them permanently nonfunctional after a single session."
He positioned the final component.
"This will likely be somewhat painful. You will need to bear with it."
"What exactly are you doing?"
Amado turned on the machine.
A current moved through the probes. Small, precise, traveling directly through the brain tissue rather than across the skin.
The magnitude was minor by any conventional measure. The location was not.
"Ah!"
The involuntary cry came before Tobirama could control it. Simultaneously, some response in his internal chakra system triggered without his instruction. Chakra began flowing outward through the sensor patches in steady streams, channeled into the machine.
Amado watched the data readings and made several adjustments. Once the output profile matched what he was looking for, he came to Uchiha Tobira's side. He positioned a second device over Uchiha Tobira's shoulder, mechanical and narrow-mouthed, shaped like a serpent's jaw.
It closed.
The machine's stored chakra flooded through the contact point. The comma-shaped markings of a Magatama Curse Mark formed at Uchiha Tobira's shoulder, building across the skin in the pattern of an inheritance seal completing itself.
When the mark stabilized, Amado removed the device and shut the machine down.
"Well? How does it feel?"
Uchiha Tobira did not respond immediately. He lay with his eyes closed, processing whatever the seal had delivered.
After a long pause, he sat up and turned to Amado.
"The knowledge transfer was successful. I now understand the foundational principles of the Impure World Reincarnation. I can explain the full mechanism to you when you are ready."
Amado's reaction was immediate and visible.
"What about the broader framework? Can you integrate it? We do not need a living reference archive. We need someone who can work alongside us as a collaborator."
Uchiha Tobira gave a cold, precise smile. The three-tomoe pattern in his eyes spun inward rapidly, the three marks contracting and merging into a unified shape.
"Mangekyo."
"Your Mangekyo Sharingan has awakened?!"
Amado stared.
"It has," Uchiha Tobira said, with an expression that carried something unresolved.
"When I received the knowledge inheritance, I also received fragments of Tobirama's personal memories. Incomplete, degraded by the process. But they arrived as though they were experiences I had lived through myself."
"My own mind rejected that identification. The conflict between what I recognized as my own identity and what those memories implied produced exactly the kind of profound internal rupture that causes the awakening."
"I have been troubled since my creation by the question of who I am. That uncertainty has shaped everything. The ability that emerged from this Mangekyo reflects it."
"Its name is Reverse Genesis."
"It allows me to trace the origin of any constructed thing by reversing the process of its creation. I can apply it to external constructs, to techniques, even to my own genetic structure to determine what it was derived from and what its original state was."
"Applied to research purposes, I believe it would be useful."
"That would be an understatement," Amado said, pulling him off the table and toward the workbenches before the sentence was finished.
At the door, he remembered to call Clone #1 over to properly seal Tobirama and store him inside Daikokuten.
At the Shinobi Headquarters, the extended wait without Tobirama's return made the situation obvious. An attempt to re-summon him through Impure World Reincarnation produced nothing. He was not in the afterlife for the technique to reach.
"Something must target spirits or souls specifically. That has to be what happened."
Hiruzen was visibly shaken by the failed summon.
The others wanted to mount a rescue and had no mechanism to do so.
"Everyone stay calm."
Hashirama raised his hand with the measured authority of someone who had navigated worse.
"We are all dead already. Getting killed a second time is the outer limit of what they can do to us. Tobirama was almost certainly caught in a sealing technique, not destroyed. He is not at risk."
"What matters now is preparation. The enemy has collected all nine tailed beast chakra extracts. Ten-Tails revival may be imminent. We need to be ready when they come to us."
His manner brought the room to order and the preparations began in earnest.
The assembled forces, thrown into a real war footing with Hashirama in the room, settled into something calmer than panic. The first-generation and second-generation former Kage understood exactly what they were looking at when they looked at him. Several of them had personally experienced being beaten by him. All of them had seen what he was capable of at his peak.
That was worth something in a room full of people preparing for the worst.
Days passed and Urashiki did not come.
The assumption was that he was preparing something, accumulating power, building toward the Ten-Tails revival.
Yasushi knew better. Urashiki had hit a wall. The tailed beast chakra was in the creel, ready. But the Demonic Statue was sealed in Daikokuten, and there was nothing in the shinobi world that could substitute for it. The shell that Ten-Tails had left behind when it was originally destroyed was the only vessel capable of holding all nine tailed beasts' combined energy. Without it, the revival simply could not proceed.
He watched the Shinobi Headquarters accelerate its unification process in response to the crisis and said nothing about the real situation to anyone.
The threat of an imminent Ten-Tails revival was an exceptional incentive for cooperation. He saw no reason to take it off the table.
On the other side of his schedule, Uchiha Tobira's Reverse Genesis ability had significantly accelerated the Karma Seal research. The analysis moved faster than any previous timeline had projected.
The good news arrived shortly afterward.
Magatama Curse Mark version 2.0 was complete.
Yasushi found an opportunity to return to the Kara base and put himself through the update.
The new version divided the Karma Seal's compressed contents into distinct categories. The clean material, the energy reserves and bloodline data, Yasushi retained for himself. The contaminated material, specifically Isshiki's memories and cognitive architecture, was extracted and distributed across a large number of different clone bodies in small, divided portions.
With the knowledge scattered across many hosts, no single clone carried enough to form a coherent reconstruction of Isshiki's consciousness. As each clone accumulated its own life experience, the tiny Isshiki fragments would diminish and eventually vanish entirely.
The loss of Isshiki's knowledge base was a minor regret. Against the elimination of the possession risk, it was irrelevant.
He ran through a series of switching tests. Rinnegan. Black Eye. Rinnegan. Black Eye.
Clean transitions, no limitation, no countdown. The modes operated as fully independent tools he could pick up and set down at will.
He was still appreciating this when he looked up at the sky and registered what he was seeing.
The moon was falling.
Chapter 513: The Six-Tomoe Rinnegan and the Rinne Black Eye
When Urashiki found that the Demonic Statue could no longer be summoned through any technique he attempted, he understood that his original plan was finished.
Without Ten-Tails to anchor his work, defeating the World Government and planting the Divine Tree again was simply not achievable at his current level.
He had no way to know Yasushi was behind the failure. The logical assumption was that Nagato and the others had managed to seal and hide the Demonic Statue themselves. The problem with that conclusion was also straightforward: the statue was not a jinchuriki. It could not be ambushed. Getting it back would require defeating the Shinobi Headquarters in a direct engagement, which was categorically impossible with the forces he could bring to bear.
He needed an ally with a different kind of power.
Going through his options, the only candidate he could identify was the Otsutsuki he knew from the future, the one he had personally sealed away inside the Dragon Palace: Toneri Otsutsuki.
Urashiki had expected to spend considerable effort coercing him. What he found when he reached the moon surprised him: both Toneri and his grandfather Yukio were already hostile to the shinobi world, predisposed to exactly the kind of operation he needed.
With that alignment clear, Urashiki identified himself as a clansman descended from Hamura Otsutsuki and brought both of them under his direction without significant difficulty.
Toneri was a child, too young to activate the Tenseigan even with transplanted eyes. He could not be used as a combat asset at this stage.
Urashiki turned to Yukio instead.
Using Yin-Yang Release, he healed Yukio's accumulated injuries and worked with him to establish control over the Giant Tenseigan. After a period of adjustment, Yukio's white eyes evolved into the Tenseigan naturally. The clan's long-deferred dream of cleansing the shinobi world resumed, and the moon began its descent toward the planet below.
"What in the world is that thing?"
Even Nagato, looking up at the descending moon, had gone pale with sweat, his expression showing something close to despair.
This was not something that could be countered by human force.
A single Planetary Devastation sphere could pin down five Kage. The moon was hundreds of times larger than the largest stone he had ever lifted into the sky.
The assembled forces stared upward at the growing white disk in the sky and the noise was immediate and disorganized.
"What is happening?"
"Has Ten-Tails already been revived?"
"Is this a Ten-Tails jinchuriki attack?"
"Where is Uchiha Yasushi?"
"Did this happen in the future as well?"
"How was it stopped?"
"How do we stop it?"
Yasushi was genuinely surprised by this development.
In his internal timeline, Toneri was supposed to be a young child at this point, nowhere near capable of manifesting the Tenseigan. But the situation was what it was, and there was no value in dwelling on the gap between expectation and reality.
He estimated the moon's approach speed, concluded there was enough time to work with, and addressed the group.
"This attack is being driven by an Otsutsuki named Toneri, using the Tenseigan."
"To stop the moon, we have to defeat him. He is currently on the lunar surface."
"Reach him and fight him. That is the solution."
The tension in the room dropped measurably. What people feared most was having no target and no direction. With a specific enemy to go after, the path was obvious.
"So the Otsutsuki have been hiding on the moon all along. That explains why we could never find them anywhere in the shinobi world."
"Then let us stop talking and move. All forces, assemble, and go deal with this."
Yasushi spoke up quickly.
"Most of you should not make this trip. Toneri can fly, and the Tenseigan's attack output is very high. Sending ordinary ninja up there would be sending them to die."
That cut the force down to a few dozen elite jonin.
Yasushi ran through Toneri's Tenseigan abilities in reasonable detail, giving everyone enough to work out a tactical approach. He deliberately omitted the Giant Tenseigan entirely. Without knowing it existed, the group would focus their attacks on Yukio himself rather than on the artifact providing his power.
If they dismantled the Giant Tenseigan directly, the artificially induced Tenseigan would lose its energy source, the eyes would revert to white, and the threat would be resolved almost trivially.
Yasushi was not willing to let that happen. The Giant Tenseigan, formed from centuries of accumulated Byakugan, was far too valuable to lose to a group whose approach would be to smash it as quickly as possible.
A Savior in the mold of Naruto was supposed to win through overwhelming direct confrontation, not by breaking the light switch.
While the tactical planning continued, Yasushi slipped out and found Tsunade.
"This is the best opportunity we are going to get."
"Black Zetsu will not follow us up there. Use blood aversion as your excuse for staying behind. Once the base is emptied of its main combat strength, find your moment and seal him. One attempt is all you will have with surprise on your side."
"I cannot stay without drawing his attention, but he has no particular suspicion of you. Your odds of success are good."
"I will have Clone #1 and #2 come to you quietly. If the ambush works, it works. If not, switch to a direct assault and finish it."
Tsunade held his gaze for a moment before answering.
"I will do it. But if I find out afterward that you have been lying to me about any of this, I will not forget it."
"Feel free to keep Black Zetsu sealed and hidden somewhere only you know. If I have been lying to you, releasing him later is always an option." Yasushi met her expression with a comfortable smile. "You have that as a guarantee."
With the Tsunade arrangement settled, he left a shadow clone in his place and the real body returned to the Kara base.
The window was exactly right. He needed to swap the One-Tail for the miniature Ten-Tails and achieve the Six Paths level before his entrance on the moon could mean anything.
The Shinobi Headquarters force departed on flying summons, cutting through the distance toward the lunar surface. Everything proceeded as Yasushi had planned: Black Zetsu did not join the departure, and Tsunade stayed behind as arranged.
Yasushi sent Clone #1 and #2 to rendezvous with Tsunade, then went to where the miniature Ten-Tails was contained.
He looked at it. It was still snarling at him.
He switched his eyes to Mangekyo and smiled.
"Be patient. We are about to become one."
He extracted Shukaku from his body first, releasing the One-Tail completely.
The moment the bond severed, his life force began dropping rapidly, the vitality that tailed beast chakra had sustained draining away in a rush. He went down at Shukaku's feet.
Shukaku did not take the opening.
Instead, the vast sandy form turned toward him, and a wave of chakra poured into him, warm and enormous, refilling what had emptied and holding him together.
"You actually kept your promise, kid."
"Does this mean I'm truly free now? Forever?"
Yasushi used his Mangekyo to rebuild the depleted vitality, climbed back upright, and looked up at the great bulk of the One-Tail with a genuine expression.
"Yes."
"Once I become the Savior, tailed beasts will no longer be weapons of war for any nation."
"I will designate territories in the shinobi world specifically for tailed beasts to inhabit. As long as a tailed beast does not attack people, people will have no right to hunt or capture them."
"The cycle of tailed beasts being controlled by humans ends with this generation."
Shukaku let out a laugh that carried across the space between them.
"I look forward to that day, sincerely."
Once his body had fully recovered, Yasushi switched to Rinnegan mode, fixed his gaze on the miniature Ten-Tails, and activated the Six Paths Ten-Tails Coffin Seal.
The moment the seal completed its pattern, the miniature Ten-Tails' roaring stopped.
Its enormous form, saturated with destructive force, offered no meaningful resistance. Like wax before heat, it softened and liquified, becoming a roiling, pressurized mass of dense energy. Something within that mass continued to thrash and howl as countless beasts seemed to rage against the seal, but the Coffin Seal pulled it regardless, an irresistible current directed toward Yasushi, forcing entry through every pore, every opening, even directly through the skin.
Within seconds, the colossus was gone. Only Yasushi remained in the space where it had stood, his body beginning to shift.
The Rinnegan was a tool the Otsutsuki clan had built specifically for controlling Ten-Tails. Its effectiveness over this process defied easy description.
He had expected resistance. What he had read suggested that becoming a Ten-Tails jinchuriki involved a genuine mortal crisis, as Obito's transformation had shown in the original timeline. With both Rinnegan eyes fully functional, the miniature Ten-Tails' struggle was compressed and suppressed without any real turbulence, leaving nothing in its wake.
And then, with the Six Paths energy fully integrating, something else happened.
The Karma Curse Mark at his neck and the Karma Seal on his arm both began to fade, dissolving inward, merging cleanly into his body as the excess capacity they represented became space his transformed physiology could simply contain.
He was now a complete vessel. The body had ripened.
The future Six Paths Yasushi, who could theoretically use that ripeness, existed twenty years from now.
The Isshiki memories that the Karma Seal had stored were already scattered across dozens of clones in fragments too small to reconstitute, with no mechanism left for reversal.
Everything resolved without incident.
He absorbed both seals fully.
With two extra power sources now integrated on top of a Six Paths foundation, his body moved one step closer to Bloodline Encompassing.
When he opened his eyes again, the left was blood-red with concentric circles at its center, ringed by six black tomoe arranged at equal intervals around the innermost ring. It was the Six-Tomoe Rinnegan, the same configuration as Sasuke's eye.
His right eye mirrored the shape but not the color. The background was pure gold. Where the left eye showed tomoe, the right showed eight black triangular spokes radiating outward from the concentric rings, a pattern unlike anything the shinobi world had seen before.
This was the Rinne Black Eye, formed from the fusion of all his bloodline inheritances combined.
With this eye open, he could draw on the Mangekyo Sharingan, the Rinnegan, and the Black Eye simultaneously, without cycling through modes or switching bodies.
The Bloodline Encompassing threshold still sat slightly beyond his reach. Even with everything he had absorbed, the gap remained. He could feel exactly where the boundary was.
The Giant Tenseigan was waiting for him on the moon.
Something that had accumulated enough Byakugan energy to approximate the level of Hamura Otsutsuki himself, integrated into his body, would almost certainly close that gap. The precise method for incorporating it was not worked out yet, but he had confidence in Amado's team to find one.
If that path did not produce results in a reasonable timeframe, there was always the option of what lay sealed beyond it: Black Zetsu's mother, waiting in the dark for someone to release her. Once Black Zetsu was gone, there was no one left with a reason to rush.
Decision made, he turned his attention upward.
With the perceptual depth of his new eyes, he could see the battle on the lunar surface clearly across the distance. Nagato's Rinnegan was performing at its highest level, amplified by the Wood Release that the White Zetsu had installed in Jiraiya, and the combination was finally showing something resembling the power that a true Six Paths Sage would bring. Every ninja watching the fight was genuinely shocked.
But against Yukio in full Tenseigan Chakra Mode, with the Giant Tenseigan behind him, Nagato was still losing ground.
The power was not truly his. The Rinnegan had belonged to Madara before it was passed to him. The Wood Release had been injected rather than inherited. Neither ability performed at its theoretical ceiling because neither had taken root in his bloodline.
Yukio, meanwhile, was fighting at a level that matched the technique's actual specifications. His Golden Wheel Reincarnation Explosion cut through Wood Release forests and shattered Planetary Devastation spheres with the same casual economy of motion. His defenses held against virtually everything the Shinobi Headquarters could bring to bear.
The only techniques that landed were Nagato's Rinnegan abilities and Jiraiya's Sage Art techniques. Everything else glanced off.
And every wound closed instantly under Yin-Yang Release.
Without the ability to break Yukio decisively in a single exchange, the stalemate would outlast the moon's remaining travel time. Even a successful defeat at this pace would arrive too late.
Yasushi watched this with quiet satisfaction.
"Perfect. Exactly the entrance I needed."
He stepped forward, crossed the space between them in one move, and arrived on the lunar surface.
He did not go to the battlefield.
He went to the far side.
The Otsutsuki clan's palace was built there, in the dark. The Giant Tenseigan was kept there as well.
Urashiki had not participated in the battle on the near side. He had been here, guarding this location, ensuring no one came to take what mattered most.
The only one who was going to take it was Yasushi.
When he materialized in the palace, what he found was Urashiki with both hands pressed against the Giant Tenseigan, leaning in, face bright with naked greed.
The eye had been enormous, larger than a person, when it was fully active. Under Urashiki's compression, it had been reduced to the size of a human head.
It was still channeling energy outward toward the far side of the moon. But its internal structure was already changing, and the color had begun shifting toward a deep blood-red.
If Yasushi had arrived a little later, there would have been very little of the original left.
Chapter 514: The Final Gift from Future Six Paths Yasushi
"Stop! What are you doing to my Giant Tenseigan?"
Yasushi's shout was sharp enough to cut across the distance.
Urashiki startled, wheeled around, and found Yasushi behind him. The fury that crossed his face was immediate.
"You! My Chakra Pill was almost finished! Why do you have to show up now and ruin this?"
Then he registered what he was actually looking at. The form. The eyes. The level of presence that had not been there before.
"You became a Six Paths Sage? How is that even possible? I have been watching the shinobi world. Ten-Tails was never revived!"
Yasushi laughed.
"Wonderful. I had been trying to work out how I was going to absorb the Giant Tenseigan."
"And here you are, already processing it into a pill for me. I should be thanking you."
"I have noticed you never kill in your attacks. As it happens, I have no particular desire to kill you either."
"Hand over what you have made, and I let you leave intact. You can go find your next opportunity and keep causing trouble for the World Government at your leisure."
"It is mine!" Urashiki's voice cracked with outrage. "Nobody is taking it from me!"
"Once I eat this pill, I evolve again! And then I kill every last one of you wretched ninja!"
The cold light in his eyes made his intent plain. He grabbed the creel from his hip and swallowed it in one motion. The vessel dissolved into red light and vanished into him. Then he reached up toward his own eye sockets to remove both Rinnegan eyes and bring them to his mouth.
Yasushi had already seen the opening he was waiting for. The moment the eyes came out, Urashiki was blind.
He smiled, lifted one finger, and drew a small spatial rift directly in front of Urashiki's hands.
Urashiki felt the spatial disturbance an instant too late. He tried to pull back and failed.
"Urashiki. Where exactly did you think you were taking my Rinnegan?"
Yasushi's hand closed around Urashiki's forearm on the other side of the rift and pulled. The rift sealed.
The sound it made was brief and clean.
Urashiki's arm came free at the elbow. The two Rinnegan eyes, still in the severed hand, fell into Yasushi's grip.
A scream came out of Urashiki as he clutched the stump. Blood came hard and fast.
For an Otsutsuki, losing an arm was not a mortal wound. Urashiki pressed his other hand over the end, and within a few seconds the bleeding stopped and the tissue sealed.
"Give them back!"
He swung the fishing rod toward Yasushi's position with everything the newly absorbed chakra had added to him.
Something had changed. The creel's stored tailed beast chakra, now integrated into his body, had begun condensing and compressing toward something that resembled Ten-Tails' energy. Not complete without the Rinnegan to anchor the final transformation, stalled just short of the threshold, but the quantity of power behind his attacks had grown noticeably.
Yasushi stepped back and kept his distance. Fighting Urashiki's hook directly was exactly the wrong approach: it ignored chakra defenses entirely, and trading jutsu with something that could drain chakra on contact was wasteful.
The correct approach was to treat him as a blind opponent and hit him first.
He gave Urashiki a moment to finish yelling.
"I see the gentle approach is not working. I suppose I have to demonstrate something first."
He stopped smiling, closed the distance in an instant, and drove his fist into the side of Urashiki's head.
The impact carried no restraint at all.
Urashiki dropped from the sky like a stone, an uncontrolled descent that ended when he hit the lunar surface at full force. The shockwave radiated outward from the impact point. A crater formed. The structures nearby collapsed under the pressure wave, and the dust that rose from the ruins blocked the view entirely.
Yasushi waited in the air above the ruin without following up.
"That should have cleared your head somewhat."
"I am keeping you alive specifically because you provide useful pressure on the World Government. If that were not the case, you would already be gone."
"You are a practical entity. You know how to read a situation. Give me the method for making the Chakra Pill and I will return your arm and your eyes. You walk away, recover, and continue your mission."
"There is a certain old wisdom here: while the hill stands, the firewood does not run out. You live today, you have chances tomorrow."
"Die on this moon and you have nothing."
Urashiki climbed out of the shattered crater with blood running from every opening in his face, his blank empty sockets turned toward the voice in the sky. The hatred on his face was everything that words could not reach.
"How did you know what I was doing? Do you have time-related dojutsu abilities as well?"
The value of intelligence had never been clearer. Yasushi's nature as a Dragon Vein transmigrator was known within the Shinobi Headquarters at a certain level of leadership, but none of that information had reached someone like Urashiki. He had no contacts in the shinobi world who would pass him that kind of classified intelligence, and his general contempt for ninja had never motivated him to investigate carefully.
That contempt had come back around.
Yasushi did not answer the question. He turned the arm and the pair of Rinnegan eyes over in one hand, considering them.
"Your clan measures lifespans in centuries. You have lived long enough that I would guess you have forgotten how many years it has been."
"Are you genuinely prepared to die here, thrown away on this moon, your mission unfinished? Is that what your clan's investment in you comes to?"
The longer a being lives, the more carefully it calculates death.
Urashiki went quiet. The silence stretched for a long moment before the anger dropped below the visible surface.
"Fine. I teach you the Chakra Pill process. You give back my arm and my eyes."
"And the Giant Tenseigan. That too."
"This is not finished between us. Do not mistake your current strength for permanent superiority."
"Six Paths-level fighters with full Yin-Yang Release ability, and fighters who have achieved Bloodline Encompassing, exist in my clan in numbers you cannot calculate. The retrieval teams will continue coming until the Chakra Fruit is back in our hands."
Yasushi acknowledged this with comfortable disinterest.
"We shinobi are a short-lived species. Whatever comes after my time here is someone else's problem."
"I have complete confidence in the next generation."
Urashiki made a sound of disgust and provided the method.
Yasushi followed the instructions and applied them to the Giant Tenseigan immediately. The eye had been partially processed already under Urashiki's long compression, and the remaining steps moved quickly. With a final concussive internal burst, it shattered and condensed into a single pill, deep blood-red in color.
He looked at it for one brief moment, his eyes moving to Urashiki with a thought that he did not pursue. The process could work on powerful ninja as well as on the Giant Tenseigan. Urashiki himself was right there.
He let the thought pass. There were things that sat on the wrong side of a line even for him.
He took the arm and the Rinnegan eyes and dropped them back to Urashiki.
Urashiki caught them, reattached the arm with quick, practiced efficiency, and pressed both eyes back into their sockets. Within a few breaths he was intact again.
He fixed Yasushi with one long, cold look, said nothing, opened a dimensional rift, and stepped through it. He was gone.
Yasushi did not watch him leave. He looked at the blood-red pill in his hand, then put it in his mouth and swallowed it.
The energy that detonated inside him was not subtle.
It spread like superheated magma through every meridian simultaneously, moving too fast and too hot to track through individual channels. His Six Paths-level physiology had the capacity to contain what would have obliterated an ordinary body, which meant most of the sensation registered as pressure and heat rather than damage.
But this was not just a matter of volume. The Tenseigan's chakra quality was fundamentally compatible with the Six Paths energy he had already integrated, similar in nature but distinct in origin: the bloodline of Hamura Otsutsuki meeting the concentrated Six Paths baseline he had built from Hagoromo's lineage. Two high-quality sources of the same deep root, converging in one body.
Where they touched, something began.
The seven chakra natures within him, Yin, Yang, Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, and Lightning, started changing in character rather than simply accumulating. What Kaguya's original energy had divided between her two sons Hagoromo and Hamura was being drawn back together inside a single vessel, the separated currents reversing their ancient divergence.
A crack appeared on his forehead. Something stirred within it, beginning to form.
"Come. Bloodline Encompassing. Come now."
The energy continued building and the opening on his forehead continued to widen. Then the process slowed.
The different energies had merged. The quantity was unquestionable. But the qualitative threshold refused to give way. Something was missing. Without the final qualitative shift, the accumulation was just accumulation, more of the same rather than something genuinely new.
The crack began to close again.
He was going to be shut out of Bloodline Encompassing for the second time.
Then something activated in the deepest layer of his cells. A trace of chakra that had been buried so far beneath the rest of it that it had never registered in any of his self-examinations. It rose now, slow and certain, carrying a quality unlike anything else in his body: ancient, vast, and refined to an extraordinary density of personal information.
The quantity was nothing. A single thread. But the quality was something that operated in a completely different order of magnitude from everything around it.
The moment it touched the rest of him, every cell responded as though it had encountered something it recognized as absolute authority, and for just a moment, even the cellular processes seemed to hold still.
This was not just chakra quality. There was also the mechanism left behind by the Karma Curse Mark's body modification working alongside it.
He had believed, when he achieved the Six Paths level, that everything the Karma Curse Mark and Karma Seal had carried was fully absorbed and integrated. This one thread had been waiting beneath all of that without giving itself away.
If that thread had wanted to overwrite his consciousness, he would not have been able to resist it.
It did not.
A voice he had never heard and immediately recognized spoke in the deepest part of him.
"Bloodline Encompassing is not so easily achieved."
"It requires not only chakra of sufficient quality, but also a fragment of divine standing, the kind that the Divine Tree draws up from the planet's deepest core."
"Whoever I am, whether past or from another world, let me offer you one last piece of help."
"The suffering I carried cannot be taken back. All I can do is wish, sincerely, that you, in all the days that come after this, know nothing but happiness."
With those words, the stalled transformation restarted.
The chakra that had resisted the final crossing of the threshold moved through it cleanly. The evolutionary process that had slowed to nothing resumed without hesitation.
Within a handful of breaths, the crack on his forehead opened completely.
Inside it was an eye. Blood-red in its base color, with concentric rings at its center and nine black tomoe set at equal intervals around them.
The Nine-Tomoe Rinnegan. The Tomoe Rinnegan. The marking of Bloodline Encompassing achieved.
He had made it.
He barely registered the accomplishment. He turned his attention inward immediately, searching through himself with everything the new eyes gave him.
"Are you still there? Don't say one thing and disappear."
"The Six Paths Sage managed to produce a projected form for a conversation. A little dignity, please."
"Talk to me. Tell me what happened in your future. You didn't sound like someone who was doing well."
Something responded.
A shadow appeared in his consciousness space, standing across from him.
The face was identical to his own. The Bloodline Encompassing form was the same. Apart from the eyes, the two figures were without any visible difference.
The eyes were the difference that mattered.
What looked back at him from the face of his future self was dark, cold, and without warmth in any direction.
Whatever he was looking at, it did not look like a good person.
Chapter 515: To Plant Trees Among the Stars (End)
"Holy, am I going to become a villain?"
Yasushi was genuinely alarmed and pressed the question before he could stop himself.
"What happened in the future? Did someone expose what I was doing behind the scenes?"
Then he caught himself.
"Wait, no. The timeline you lived through should be before mine."
"Which means I had a bad start on my first playthrough."
"Actually, that makes sense. What ordinary person goes through a Mangekyo awakening without some kind of tragedy?"
"So what kind of terrible thing happened to me?"
Six Paths Yasushi looked at the openly bewildered face of his younger self and felt something he could only call helpless envy.
He watched him for a moment. In the end, he decided the pain belonged to him alone. There was no reason to carry it forward into a version of events that had already diverged into something different.
He allowed himself a small smile, complicated and layered.
"It is not as dramatic as you're imagining."
"The root cause is one thing. Say it once and you will understand immediately."
"I awakened on the night of the Uchiha Massacre."
Yasushi stared at him.
"Your awakening timing," he said at last, "is literally straight out of the worst kind of web novel."
He had read those stories. The protagonist buys a Mangekyo with his entire family's lives, goes into hiding, and then lives happily ever after with Sasuke and Naruto in the Leaf Village while the rest of the plot resolves itself through variations on the same theme. He did not need the specific details.
"I will not ask for the rest. The outcome was fine in the end, wasn't it?"
"Of course. Otherwise I would not have achieved Bloodline Encompassing and revived the entire clan."
"Right, revival is possible." Yasushi nodded, working through the implications. "Which means the Uchiha Divine Nation was not the only solution. It was just the particular path you chose from where you started."
"Exactly. The whole god-nation concept is not that interesting when you get down to it. Do whatever feels right to you."
They stayed in the consciousness space and talked for a while. Yasushi went through everything he had experienced and built across the parallel timeline. When he reached the part about his parents and younger brother, still alive and well, the expression on his older counterpart's face changed completely.
Everything that had been held back settled. The complicated smile became something genuine.
"That is all I needed to know."
Six Paths Yasushi said goodbye and began to dissolve.
Before the last of him faded, he sent two spatial coordinates.
"The first is an Otsutsuki ruins stone tablet. The second is where Otsutsuki Shibai's body was buried."
"Find them both. Evolve further."
"Are you serious? There is more?"
The consciousness space was already empty.
Yasushi locked both coordinates into memory, confirmed them twice, then stepped through space and arrived at the battlefield on the near side of the moon.
The sudden appearance of someone who had not been in the fight a moment earlier drew every eye. His form had changed significantly, but the outline was recognizable to anyone who had spent time around him.
Then everyone noticed the shadow clone that had been fighting in his place, still wearing a Susanoo, drop its hand and vanish in a puff of white smoke.
"I have good news," Yasushi said to the room of wary faces.
"While the fighting was drawing everyone's attention, I circled around to the back of the moon and took what I came for."
"I have absorbed the Ten-Tails that the enemy was sitting on. I am now a Six Paths Sage."
"Without the Giant Tenseigan feeding him unlimited chakra, the enemy's Tenseigan cannot hold. It will revert to the Byakugan shortly."
"This battle is already won."
Cheers broke out across the assembled force.
Yukio, however, had no idea what the man was talking about.
"What Ten-Tails?"
"What are you saying?"
Yasushi grinned at him.
"The thing Urashiki was guarding. I ate it. Does that explain things?"
Yukio's expression went hard. He reached for the Giant Tenseigan through his ocular connection, pushing to draw chakra from it, expecting the familiar rush of power.
Nothing answered.
"What did you do to it?"
He dropped Nagato and Jiraiya entirely, turned toward Yasushi, and charged.
At range he raised the blade of condensed chakra in his hand and brought it forward in the Golden Wheel Reincarnation Explosion.
Yasushi's expression did not change. A Truth-Seeking Orb drifted forward from behind him, expanded, and formed a black shield directly in the path of the strike.
The gold blade hit it and the impact sent a shockwave expanding outward in every direction, scattering everything within range.
The two forces held against each other for a moment. Then the blade shattered, dissolving into cascading fragments of chakra that fell across the surrounding hundred meters like brilliant debris.
Yasushi's form flashed.
He was behind Yukio before the old Otsutsuki registered the movement.
"Your numbers and your mechanics are below mine."
His arm went through Yukio's chest from the back.
"You..."
Yukio looked down at the arm protruding from his chest with an expression that could not settle on any single emotion. The speed had been incomprehensible.
Yasushi released a controlled burst of energy inside the body. Yin-Yang Release healing was powerful, but it worked from an intact body outward. What happened next gave it nothing to work with.
The upper half of Yukio Otsutsuki came apart.
The remains fell, and the Tenseigan's light went out with them.
The assembled force was briefly, completely silent.
The enemy that had been destroying everything they threw at it had not survived a single exchange.
Was this genuinely the strength of a Six Paths Sage?
Yasushi had no interest in explaining the gap between the Six Paths level and Bloodline Encompassing. He raised both arms toward the sky and addressed everyone present.
"I am the first Six Paths Sage of this generation!"
"I am the true Savior!"
"Under my leadership, every Otsutsuki who comes will find nothing waiting for them but defeat. The shinobi world will never be threatened by them again."
"From this day forward, real peace begins!"
The assembled force looked at each other, then gradually turned toward Nagato with the unspoken question of what he made of all this.
Over the course of working alongside the Alliance, Nagato had developed a habit of rarely expressing direct opinions on the Six Elder Stars' decisions. When he had positions, Jiraiya or Black Zetsu usually voiced them instead. That careful political restraint was how the Kage had gradually, reluctantly, come to accept the presence of an outside figure claiming the Savior title over their heads.
Now there was a second one declaring himself the authentic version.
Nagato's brow was furrowed as he looked across the distance at Yasushi. He was not pleased.
Yasushi had known exactly where the Ten-Tails was. He had withheld that intelligence and let the Shinobi Headquarters spend its combat strength fighting Yukio while he handled the real objective alone. If that information had been shared, the force could have moved directly to the back of the moon. The one absorbing Ten-Tails would have been Nagato.
In his view, Yasushi had simply stolen what was meant for him.
"You had this planned from the beginning," Nagato said. His voice was flat and cold. "The moon crisis, leading us up here, using us to occupy the enemy while you went to take the Ten-Tails for yourself."
"Yes," Yasushi said without hesitation.
"You did not seriously believe I came back through time just to serve as support staff, did you?"
"If any of you had shown any real willingness to cooperate, the Ten-Tails would have been revived months ago and a Six Paths Sage would already exist. You dragged your feet at every opportunity and handed the situation to me."
He leveled a finger at the assembled Kage.
"I gave you every chance. You chose not to take any of them. That is entirely on you."
The expressions in the room were uniformly dark.
Yasushi turned back to Nagato.
"The Ten-Tails is mine now. I am not giving it back. If you want to contest that, you are welcome to try, and we will find out very quickly how that goes."
Jiraiya moved to stand beside Nagato without a word. His position was clear.
Nagato and Yasushi looked at each other across the silence. Neither moved.
The silence stretched.
Then Nagato looked away first.
"Fine."
"What I have always cared about is the shinobi world's peace. Children living without war. The Savior title itself means nothing to me."
"If you can genuinely deliver that, then having you hold the position is not a problem."
"But remember this: if you fail, I will come for it. Whatever it costs me."
"Ha."
Yasushi's tension dissolved into a genuine laugh. He clapped a hand to his chest.
"The shinobi world's peace is exactly why I came back. The cycle of nations destroying each other ends with this generation. You have my word."
Then he addressed the Six Elder Stars directly.
"Day-to-day operations of the Shinobi Headquarters stay with the Six Elder Stars. I have no interest in administering ordinary affairs. My function is handling the Otsutsuki threats that you cannot. Everything else is yours to manage."
The visible relief around the table was immediate.
Everyone was satisfied.
Yasushi turned toward the moon hanging too close overhead, extended his awareness downward, and drew on the gravitational capability the Bloodline Encompassing had given him. Slowly, with enormous but measured force, the moon began to rise. The trajectory reversed. Over the course of several minutes, it moved back to its proper distance and settled.
The end-of-the-world crisis was over.
They returned to the shinobi world.
What they found there stopped everyone briefly.
Black Zetsu was gone. No announcement, no farewell, simply absent from the Shinobi Headquarters without explanation.
The White Zetsu remained in place, and since Black Zetsu had always been the one who disappeared without warning to handle urgent matters, the general assumption was that he had gone to deal with something important and would eventually return.
They were wrong about that.
In the days that followed, life simplified considerably.
Yasushi retrieved Otsutsuki Shibai's body and delivered it to Amado's research team. He kept one eye on the research progress and, at intervals that maintained a credible level of threat, deployed clones operating under Urashiki's identity to harass the Shinobi Headquarters. Then he appeared as the Savior to resolve each incident, to the cheers of the assembled forces and the gratitude of the general population.
As Amado's cloning technology matured and the fabricated Otsutsuki attacks became harder to handle, the Shinobi Headquarters' dependence on Yasushi deepened precisely as intended. The pressure those incidents applied to the old inter-village grudges proved to be exactly the right amount: too great to ignore, not so overwhelming that cooperation broke down. Ninja who had spent years trying to kill each other's clanspeople found themselves standing shoulder to shoulder, keeping each other alive against something worse.
The National Medical School helped considerably. With medical ninja trained to a common standard across all nations now available on every major front, even engagements against opponents who could have been lethal produced wounded rather than dead. Shared near-death experiences have a way of resolving old hatreds that years of political negotiation cannot.
Yasushi managed the World Nobles from behind the curtain and through them shaped the World Government's direction. The replacements he had installed turned out to be, by the consistent observation of everyone who dealt with them, remarkably decent administrators: principled, responsive, and surprisingly free of self-interest. The World Government grew faster than anyone had projected and ran better than anyone had expected. People who experienced good governance did not want to go back to what they had before.
Once things were functioning smoothly enough that the underlying structure would hold without constant management, Yasushi staged a large-scale operation that eliminated the supposed Otsutsuki bases in one coordinated action. After that, the clone attacks stopped. The threat level dropped to nothing. Peace, actual peace, settled over the shinobi world.
The operations with Amado continued well after the public threat ended. The Shibai body yielded results that pushed Yasushi's evolution through several more stages, each one moving him measurably further from the human origin point and closer to whatever was at the end of that road.
Momoshiki and Kinshiki arrived in time, as he had known they would. Urashiki came back as well. All three were processed into Chakra Pills and consumed. The evolutionary dividend from Momoshiki alone was substantial.
Finally, when the last useful information had been extracted from Otsutsuki Shibai's body, Yasushi turned that into a Chakra Pill as well and swallowed it. He left nothing behind. The most powerful Otsutsuki ancestor on record had been reduced to a step in someone else's progress.
Even that was not enough.
He sat with the result and understood what remained. The path forward was the same path the Otsutsuki had followed. The only way to the final threshold was to keep walking the road they had built. The farm cycle, the Divine Tree, the Chakra Fruit, the traversal between worlds.
He settled his affairs in the shinobi world. He told Nagato and Jiraiya the truth, one evening when they were alone, and found that Nagato accepted it with more peace than anger, and Jiraiya with more recognition than surprise. Both of them joined what had become the Kara Organization in its final form, and for several more years the three of them ran the Shinobi Headquarters' six old men in cheerful circles, which the six old men never quite suspected.
When he was satisfied that the World Government was stable and self-sustaining, that the hatreds had dissolved far enough not to reignite, and that what had been built would last without him, he said his goodbyes to the people he had come to know in this life.
He took the Ten-Tails with him.
He opened a portal to the space beyond the atmosphere.
Before him: the stellar sea, immeasurable and full.
This time, he would tend the crop himself.
He set out among the stars to plant trees.
(End)
mediocre ending as usual...... anyway I wanna thank all u readers for your continuous support AND check out my other translating projects! THANK YOU