Darkness, cold, dead silence.
It was not just darkness, but its quintessence. Stars cut through the darkness of the night sky, and lights cut through the city night, but nothing could dispel Uchiha Yue's darkness. It was an absolute black body, a hell in which not a single ray of light could be born.
Those who dared to enter did not have the gigantic body of the White Snake Sage and its colossal might. He might have been able to break out of this dead zone and forcibly draw energy from the Shinobi world in order to burn the darkness to the ground along with its creator. But they didn't have that kind of power.
They could only believe in cold calculation.
In front of them stretched a perfect spherical area, in the center of which was Uchiha Yue. But how do you find him in the heart of total darkness? The solution was simple and at the same time incredibly difficult: calculate the distance to the center, calculate the number of steps and walk strictly in a straight line.
For an ordinary person, it is certain death. But Sarutobi Hiruzen and his companions were ninjas. Feeling the rhythm of their own footsteps, they kept their course. The slightest deviation, and they immediately memorized the direction, degree, and number of steps to make a correction. They had honed this ability specifically before setting foot here. For the Shinobi, it wasn't a miracle—it was just a perfected skill.
Itachi was moving in the same darkness. He was silent, carrying Sasuke on his back like a bundle of firewood. His younger brother's body was bound with special restraints, making it impossible for him to move at all. However, even without them, he was powerless: the applied seal turned any of his chakras into pure life force, as long as he did not die. He couldn't use ninjutsu.
But Sasuke wouldn't let up. He was twitching on Itachi's back and spouting curses full of childish incomprehension and rage. The one he idolized had betrayed him. Listening to his brother, Itachi was silent, but his heart was torn apart.
"Hate me, Sasuke. One day you'll understand. Everything I do is for your sake! For the sake of the village... for the sake of the Will of Fire… When you come back, you'll understand everything!"
He repeated it like a mantra, like a spell that could keep his shattered soul afloat. His whole tragedy lay in this blind faith, in this self-deception under the slogan "I'm doing this for you."
"How cold it is…
The voice, like a faint breeze, seemed to come from far away. At first, Itachi thought he had imagined it, but when he turned around, he saw Sasuke's deathly pale face. His body was trembling slightly.
The heat was rapidly leaving him. If Itachi had been alive, he would have felt his brother's body turn into a block of ice. But his resurrected flesh did not feel the cold — it only saw its destructive signs.
"It's okay, Sasuke... it's okay."… Be patient a little, and everything will pass..." he finally said.
But the sound waves drowned in dead silence, not reaching their destination. Sasuke, already falling into unconsciousness, did not hear anything.
Itachi knew this would happen. He was told that this was just a "technical debugging", that the chakra inside Sasuke would protect him and there was no danger of death.
And he believed it. I believed how a drowning man clutches at the last straw. His spirit, already on the verge of collapse, desperately clung to this belief. Because you don't need reasons to believe.
Gradually, Sasuke's voice faded away. Absolute silence now enveloped them. There wasn't even a sound of footsteps. If it weren't for the iron chains binding the group, they would have parted in the dark long ago, having lost each other forever.
— Still, my intelligence is not enough.
Inside the Heretical Susanoo, which looked like a mournful giant, Uchiha Yue slowly opened his eyes. There was annoyance in them. He had been studying space-time ninjutsu for almost a month, especially interference techniques. But until his power enveloped the entire planet or learned how to extract energy from other dimensions, he remained vulnerable to techniques such as Kamui Obito or Isshiki portals.
Of course, it was possible to try to deprive them of chakra at the moment of activation, but so far it was unreliable. However, he didn't have to stop them. Let them run. Until they leave the Shinobi world and go into outer space, they will remain trapped on this planet, waiting for the day when the entire universe collapses. Perhaps they will hide in their pocket dimensions, like insects in amber, to freeze there and turn into fossils. But by that time, Yue will most likely already be able to draw energy from there.
However, it was far from that. He has not made significant progress over the past month. His intelligence, although it developed along with his body, was limited. He learned all the techniques of Konoha and stopped being a layman, but he was far from being a true genius. The real celestials are those who create a language or a whole system of perfection from scratch. Any technique is dutifully born in their minds, as soon as they think about it.
And Uchiha Yue was just a human being. It was the height of arrogance to demand from oneself in a couple of dozen days to create a ninjutsu that affects space and time on a global scale.
"I wonder what my life span is now."…
Uchiha Yue listened to the sensations in his own body. He…