Chapter 160: The Changes in the Dragon Vein
Just as Jiraiya and Naruto Uzumaki stepped through Konoha's battered gate, eyes wide as they tried to understand this changed village, a subtle disturbance rippled far away, across the desert of the Land of Wind.
There, in a wasteland of stone and sand, lay the ruins of a once proud kingdom.
It had been called the Land of a Thousand Towers, the ancient kingdom of Loulan.
Decades of ninja wars and the aftermath of countless conflicts had worn it down. Its people had scattered long ago. The towers that once pierced the sky were now broken teeth jutting from the earth.
Scenes like this were all too common in ninja history.
Any country with a ninja village was at least large and structured.
Places like Loulan, without their own village, built only on population and a few secret techniques, sprouted and vanished like mushrooms after rain. New nations rose from rebellion or ambition, then faded under the heel of the Five Great Nations. Loulan was hardly unique.
What hardly anyone knew, and what even Aizen Sousuke himself had not fully grasped, was that this unimpressive little country possessed something terrifying.
The Dragon Vein.
A massive chakra aggregate, buried beneath Loulan like the heart of the earth itself.
Its power could truly distort space and time.
As a source of earth vein energy, the Dragon Vein's chakra could send people into the past and twist the threads of future events. Its peculiar properties had remained hidden for ages, and those who brushed too close to the truth had either been sealed away or erased by overwhelming will.
That was why this power had never become a toy in human hands.
It was remembered only as a dangerous legend and then buried.
Now, amid the shattered towers, something stirred.
At the center of the ruins, a broken seal stood half buried in sand, its only visible anchor a single kunai driven into the stone.
Around that kunai, faint points of light pulsed to life.
Like fireflies escaping from deep underground, bluish green motes rose from the seal, hovering briefly in the dim air.
In the space of a breath they drank in the surrounding air and dust, pulling matter into their cores.
The lights elongated, solidified.
In moments, humanoid figures stood where the particles had been.
They were tall, draped in white, their eyes a cold, pale white tinged with blue. Twin horn like protrusions jutted from their heads. Their movements were precise, mechanical, eerily in sync.
Each of them raised their hands to the watch like devices on their wrists.
Pale blue chakra ripples spread outward in silence, filling the chamber, then washing through the ruins and sweeping across the entirety of the dead Loulan kingdom before rolling out into the desert beyond.
With the arrival of those chakra waves, a cold, mechanical voice echoed from within their bodies.
"…Time anchoring, begin."
"Everyone, activate timeline positioning."
"Timeline confirmed: Konoha year sixty six. Period marked by Naruto Uzumaki's return to his home village."
"Local chakra network system not detected. Switching to language description mode. Commencing final mission briefing in spoken form."
"…Everyone, please state your last words freely."
As their mechanical motions stilled, one of the figures, taller than the others and clearly the leader, lifted his gaze and spoke in a low, measured tone.
"We have arrived at the final moment of Aizen Sousuke's life," he said. "The last hope of the Otsutsuki clan rests with us.
"We will bear the consequences of Urashiki's actions. What lies ahead is a one way trip.
"Without a chakra network, language is all we have left, so our final words must be spoken aloud."
"…"
"…"
"…To curb the wrath of the infinite gods, there is nothing more we need to say."
Compared to their leader's faint sentimentality, the other white figures remained almost expressionless. Only a subdued sadness flickered in their pale eyes as they quietly accepted their fate.
"Aizen Sousuke's dream can only end in ultimate destruction," the leader continued. "Urashiki gave him too much inspiration.
"We can no longer avoid the outcome. What happens after this point is already carved into history. All we can do now is try to nudge it, however slightly."
"Yes. With our lives."
"…"
The others stirred at that, barely more than a ripple of motion.
Each of these beings possessed enough power to destroy the current ninja world alone.
Yet none of them questioned the idea of laying down their lives.
They simply accepted that this might be the best result they could hope for.
They were remnants of the Otsutsuki clan, travelers from a future that should not have existed.
Urashiki's understanding had been flawed.
The will of the Otsutsuki clan had never truly given up on resisting Aizen's endless evolution.
Urashiki had been nothing more than a tool, thrust into the path of a naive, earlier Aizen to guide his development down a particular line.
But the ripples from that one move had grown into a tide so great that even the Otsutsuki deity had been forced, at the very end, to bow his head and use everything he had left to try to stop Aizen.
The Otsutsuki god traveled between stars, wearing the collective will of their clan like a cloak.
The clan existed on countless worlds, clinging to time and space like parasites on the fabric of reality.
His pure white Byakugan had evolved, capable of gazing into both past and future, pinning down unknown, uncertain things and collapsing them into singular outcomes.
The ability to manipulate an entire world, to define what would and would not be.
That was the power of a god.
Yet even that power looked meaningless before the future born from Aizen Sousuke.
Infinite Wrath of the Gods.
That was the ultimate conclusion.
The final shape of a world ruled by Aizen.
After dissecting chakra and the laws of nature, Aizen had turned his gaze outward.
He instinctively began to draw in and pull on parallel worlds.
Using shifting chakra frequencies and resonance patterns, he brushed against world after world, absorbing them one by one, testing theory after theory.
Worlds that should have remained separate, existing in muddled chaos without clear hierarchy or contact, began to merge and assimilate under his hand.
When all chakra in those worlds compressed toward a single point under the force of aggregation, no one could say what lay beyond that threshold.
But the Otsutsuki god had glimpsed it.
He saw the convergence point swelling like a black hole, devouring everything.
Natural energy, space itself, the structure of worlds, all were drawn into that single, infinitely dense chakra core.
That future was named the Infinite Wrath of the Gods.
It was the end of all things.
Of course, Aizen himself did not believe in such prophecies.
He always maintained an impeccable attitude toward the Otsutsuki clan.
He pursued, as he put it, a very "friendly" policy of extermination.
He was enthusiastic about refining them, extracting their essence, and grinding gods down into mortals.
It was a future the Otsutsuki could not accept.
After countless calculations and tests, they finally found a flaw in Aizen's design.
It was not truly a flaw, but it was the closest thing to a handhold they could find.
If their timeline was correct, then tomorrow Aizen would begin what history later called the One Day War in this world.
That event marked a turning point in his actions.
Through calculations based on Naruto's existence and chakra, Aizen would reach a clear conclusion: the Otsutsuki did not possess enough power to perform such a large scale "cleansing" of an ecosystem on the scale of Earth, across all worlds as he had originally imagined.
Once he accepted that the Otsutsuki clan did not have the godlike mobility he had been assuming, he would show another side of himself.
The side of a being unchained.
In a single day, he would gather the chakra of all the Tailed Beasts, summon a Divine Tree, use reverse summoning to drag the Ten Tails down from the moon, break Kaguya's seal, and study the Otsutsuki's methods directly from her.
Then, armed with that knowledge, he would begin calling out to other worlds.
All of that, in just one day.
He needed only one full day to complete the entire chain.
The Otsutsuki had not come back to stop him from carrying out that plan.
They had come because they had found a sliver of opportunity hidden within it.
Because they knew one thing.
Aizen Sousuke most likely did not belong to this world in the first place.
The reason he could keep innovating, summoning Kido, sword arts, Shunpo, Hakuda, and other techniques that had no place in this universe, was because he was not originally from this universe at all.
He had come from another ninja world.
That alone cracked the door open for them.
Once Aizen confirmed that no one in this world could suppress him, he would wage that one day war, subdue the entire ninja world, and then treat two worlds as a single testing ground.
Theoretically, it was impossible.
In practice, Aizen had used his power as a transmigrator to begin blending two ninja worlds together.
The Otsutsuki's countermeasure was simple.
Increase the dosage.
Feed more chakra into the Tailed Beasts to extend the range of resonance.
For example, by using his original world.
It was a tactic with no direct counter, one that took effect quickly once initiated.
Their own lives, however, were fleeting.
By the time they reached this point in the timeline, they had become like mayflies diving into a storm.
They had just one mission left.
There were nine of them.
Eight would be refined into chakra pills and implanted into the Tailed Beasts, strengthening them from within.
When the time came to begin the summoning, the ninth would merge with the seal on the moon and become the central axis of a new resonance formation.
Aizen's original plan had been relatively straightforward.
Using the principle of chakra aggregation, he would swap chakra between his alternate world and this one.
In theory, once the summoning was complete, a gap between worlds would open, and the Kakashi Hatake from Aizen's original world would emerge as a representative.
From there, the cooperation and fusion of the two worlds would formally begin.
The Otsutsuki's plan was to interfere with that.
Not by stopping the call, but by seizing the root of it.
If they could just send Aizen back to his original world, that would be ideal.
But such a perfect outcome was unlikely.
All they could do now was try, and leave the rest to fate.
"Since no one has any last words," the leader said softly, "we will proceed according to plan."
He glanced around at the others.
They said nothing.
They all understood what awaited them.
No one wanted to face the end of their life.
Even those who claimed to accept death struggled at the last moment.
They might intend to die, but that never meant they truly liked the idea.
Some hands trembled.
Some breathing turned shallow and fast.
These were Otsutsuki who had walked through space, yet their bodies still held all the instincts of living beings.
They were intelligent, and their spirits were no different from those of any other thinking race.
They could fear.
They could sacrifice.
And now they were walking toward a ritual of death.
They used to scoff when lesser species gathered together to shout slogans and hold ceremonies before facing planetary harvests.
But in this moment, they understood.
When faced with an overwhelming, incomprehensible disaster, people needed something to cling to, something that told them their sacrifice had meaning.
The leader of the Otsutsuki looked at his clan, perhaps the last of them, and remained silent for a long time.
Then he spoke.
"Tomorrow," he said, "Aizen Sousuke will decide to subjugate this world and use it as a laboratory. A field test for chakra radiation across worlds."
"We have one chance. The timeline is unstable. The Otsutsuki deity has burned his last strength to hold this gap open. We do not know what consequences our interference will bring, but we must act.
"The future of Infinite Wrath must be contained."
"The eight of you will begin strengthening the Tailed Beasts according to your system procedures," he continued. "You will expand the chakra they carry to its upper limit, so that when the formation is set, they can be drawn into the highest order of resonance.
"I will go to the moon to merge with the final seal.
"When the nine of us fuse into the system, we will most likely die.
"But if our actions succeed, the light that returns to this world will be real."
"…"
"Check your equipment."
He pressed the device on his wrist. It opened with a whisper, revealing a metal frame bearing eight small glass vials.
"Eight Tailed Beast indexes, ready," he said. "Chakra diluent, ready. Begin self testing.
"Each of you, confirm your equipment. Make sure sensitivity is unaffected by interference. If there is a problem, I have three spare sets."
"…"
"There are no further issues, correct?"
"Then we proceed.
"In a single night we will fill the nine Tailed Beasts and the Divine Tree in this world with these pills, expanding their chakra traceability to the absolute limit.
"The moment you make contact with a Tailed Beast will be the moment you die.
"But at the same time, if this succeeds, we will eventually be reborn within their chakra patterns.
"The odds are small, but this is not guaranteed death."
"This mission is not necessarily our end," he said. "The probability of death is high, but we must believe in the Otsutsuki god.
"We must believe in the meaning of the Karma seal.
"We will not die for nothing. Do you understand?"
"I hear you clearly."
"Then I wish you all good fortune in battle," the leader said. "The war to save the world begins now."
With a dull hum, the gathered Otsutsuki dissolved into motion.
Their bodies shattered into countless pale blue streaks of light that streaked out of the ruined hall, vanishing into the star dotted desert sky.
They scattered across the ninja world.
To the Jinchuriki in their villages.
To the free roaming Tailed Beasts hidden in wild lands.
None of their targets knew that their chakra could be used as an anchor.
The bluish, almost transparent lights moved silently, crossing rivers, mountains, and forests.
They slipped into bodies unnoticed.
Jinchuriki blinked and rubbed at their arms as a brief warmth flooded their cores.
Deep within sealed spaces, Tailed Beasts stirred as something warm and alien flickered in their chakra pools.
The sensation was faint, gone in an instant.
They dismissed it.
Nothing major happened in the ninja world that day.
That was what everyone believed.
Meanwhile, in Konoha, Aizen Sousuke watched Naruto Uzumaki creeping along in the shadows, trying to stay unseen as he moved through the village.
Aizen's brows drew together.
For a moment, he felt a strange, prickling unease, as if some distant thread had been plucked.
As though, somewhere far away, something had just shifted.
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