Chapter 331: A New Story Is Born (Grand Finale)
Sakura spent three years in that bookstore.
Three full years, spent writing down every technique she knew, every principle of chakra manipulation she understood, every insight she'd ever gained on her path to Six Paths and beyond — all of it, committed to paper.
The sheer volume of it, the breadth of what she covered, filled an entire bookstore from floor to ceiling.
The last drop of ink drained from her pen as she wrote the final line.
When Yin and Yang reach their absolute peak, one may enter the Six Paths.
Beyond the Six Paths, one finally comes to know the True Self.
The Realm of the True Self.
A name Sakura had coined herself — no one before her had ever reached this state.
Hagoromo, perhaps, could have reached it too. But he'd chosen to persist as a soul alone, without a body, and a realm like this required a physical form to touch at all.
Not that it mattered anymore now.
Sakura had already left everything she knew behind, for this world to keep.
"Sister Sakura."
A black-haired little boy approached, carefully carrying a steaming cup of tea.
Sakura's expression softened at the sight of him, and she accepted the cup from his hands.
This was Uzumaki Meng's son — another of Naruto's descendants.
Sakura hadn't bothered hiding herself here. The Mingyao Empire had found her easily enough.
Not that it mattered to her either way. There wasn't a single person left in this world she'd once known.
Ino. Karin. Naruto. Sasuke. Hikaru. Tobirama. Hashirama. Her father, her mother, Mirai...
All of them had died, three thousand years ago.
But this world had still been the one that raised them. It had raised her, too.
Sakura had decided she wanted to leave something behind, for this world's sake.
The knowledge filling this bookstore was, in her own estimation, the single most valuable thing she had left to give.
Anyone could come read it. Anyone could come learn from it.
If they had questions, she'd answer them herself.
The material could be copied, studied — but not taken. She had no interest in writing it all out a second time.
Not unless she left this place someday. Then, whoever wanted to take it could have it.
"Hui. I'm leaving."
Sakura took a sip of the tea and ruffled the little boy's hair.
"Where are you going, Sister Sakura?"
Uzumaki Hui tilted his head, looking up at the pink-haired young woman.
"Because someone's coming."
Sakura set down the still-steaming cup and rose to her feet.
Hui didn't understand what she meant, but his father had told him — all he needed to do was listen to whatever this big sister said.
Sakura glanced once more at the obedient little boy, then left the bookstore behind.
Hui was well-behaved, certainly — nothing like the troublemaking blond kid she remembered from her own memory, who'd once caused chaos wherever he went.
Now, she had something she needed to do.
The pink-haired young woman took a single step, and her figure appeared over a thousand meters in the sky.
Another step, and she stood in the troposphere above.
A few steps more, and she'd crossed the stratosphere, the mesosphere, reaching the thermosphere — and, finally, out into open space.
She gazed out at the abyssal darkness of the universe stretching before her, her eyes perfectly calm.
Just as she'd said.
A guest had arrived.
Not a welcome one.
Sakura settled cross-legged into the emptiness of space, waiting for her target to arrive.
Another thousand-year cycle had come around once more.
In her final moments, sensing her own time running short, Katsuyu had broken Sakura's seal to prepare her for the Ōtsutsuki clan's coming arrival.
And now, three years later, exactly as Katsuyu had foreseen, the Ōtsutsuki had once again set course for this planet — the one that had repelled them again and again across the cosmos.
After four consecutive failures, the Ōtsutsuki clan could no longer afford to sit idle.
This time, they'd committed nearly their entire force.
This was, after all, the single planet that had defied them four separate times.
They understood perfectly well what that meant.
As the undisputed rulers of the cosmos, they were the ones who conquered — never the ones conquered. What right did anything else have to stand against them?
And a planet capable of raising so many powerful beings had to be sitting on an extraordinarily rich reserve of energy.
Shallow water bred no true dragons; barren land raised no fierce tigers.
So, for the sake of claiming this one planet, the Ōtsutsuki clan had sent out virtually its entire elite force — sparing only the old, the weak, the women and children.
Except...
Several dozen of them arrived at Earth, having crossed a thousand years of distance to get there.
And found a single figure standing in their way.
"Heh. One of this planet's natives?"
The Ōtsutsuki leading the group was built massive and powerful, his voice carrying faint, unidentifiable ripples of power.
That power surged forward, trying to invade Sakura's chakra pathways — and was blocked instantly.
"Thirty-six of you."
"Quite a crowd..."
"What a shame."
Sakura rose slowly, her calm gaze taking in the Ōtsutsuki before her, a flicker of something like genuine regret in her eyes.
"A shame? What's a shame?"
One of the younger Ōtsutsuki, unable to hold his tongue, spoke up warily.
Before setting out, he'd been told by the clan elders that this mission had to succeed, no matter the cost.
Ten of their kin had already died on this planet.
"A shame that your whole clan isn't gathered here."
"I'll have to go hunt the rest down one by one."
"Bit of a hassle."
Sakura shook her head.
"Insolence!"
One of the Ōtsutsuki roared in fury at that.
At that moment, the gold flame behind the young woman's jade-green eyes flickered brighter. She raised one palm and brought it down.
"Watch out!"
The lead Ōtsutsuki shouted, alarm flashing across his face.
A single colossal hand — vast enough to blot out the sky, large as a planet itself — slammed down toward all thirty-six of them.
"Break through it! NOW!"
Three of the Ōtsutsuki tried to combine their strength to punch through that giant hand — but their combined power fell tragically short. In an instant, all three were crushed beneath it, obliterated.
At the same moment, the lead Ōtsutsuki clasped his hands together, and a great, blazing sun bloomed into existence behind him, radiating light for ten thousand miles — and everything that light touched was reduced instantly to ash.
Even the colossal hand wasn't spared, bursting into raging flame.
"Now that's interesting."
Sakura's expression didn't so much as flicker.
Pink chakra surged upward from her palm, and a golden tiger — vast as the moon itself — roared to life, charging straight for the remaining thirty-three Ōtsutsuki.
Fifteen of the Ōtsutsuki, wielding weapons that looked like something out of a war god's arsenal, charged the divine tiger head-on.
But in a single exchange, five of them were already dead, blood scattering across the void.
Cold sweat broke out across the lead Ōtsutsuki's forehead at the sight.
Even he would have needed real effort to defeat just one of those three fallen kinsmen. And now, they were dying in a single exchange.
"Sir—!"
"We were reckless to come at you this way, today."
"Let us negotiate — please!"
Even as he spoke, two more Ōtsutsuki died.
"Heh. So the Ōtsutsuki know fear after all."
Sakura laughed lightly, sweeping one hand through the air. Wings sprouted from the back of the moon-sized tiger, and its speed multiplied several times over.
The divine tiger, vast as a planet, moved with the speed of lightning — one bite, and the remaining five Ōtsutsuki were reduced to nothing but fragments.
In the span of only a few minutes, thirteen Ōtsutsuki had already died.
A cold dread crept over the lead Ōtsutsuki, watching it unfold.
Great power always demanded a great price.
The Ōtsutsuki clan, one of the rare truly long-lived races in the entire universe, had always had a painfully low birthrate. New generations came only once every few decades, sometimes once a century.
But that very rarity was what gave them access to absolute power that few other cosmic civilizations could ever hope to touch.
Losing thirteen members of the clan in a single engagement was, by any measure, a devastating blow.
Its work here finished, the divine tiger folded its wings and settled behind the Empress of Heaven.
A pair of eyes, fierce and imposing as mountain ranges, stayed fixed on the remaining Ōtsutsuki, frozen where they stood.
"If you're willing to stop here, we'll split this planet with you, fifty-fifty!"
The lead Ōtsutsuki spoke hastily.
As Ōtsutsuki, they carried a pride that belonged to their kind alone.
Even outmatched as they clearly were now, that arrogance hadn't fully left him.
Because his clan possessed a being who transcended dimensions entirely.
Not merely godlike — a true, literal god.
The God of the Ōtsutsuki.
Ōtsutsuki Shibai.
Carrying blood equal to that of a true deity gave him every right to that confidence.
"I see. So someone else's strength is what's funding your arrogance?"
The pink-haired figure let out a quiet sigh and slowly extended her hand.
Pointed straight at the leader of the group.
Inside her mind, countless techniques combined and rearranged at a speed impossible to comprehend.
A brand-new technique was born.
From the body of the Ōtsutsuki the divine tiger had killed earlier, a single drop of blood shot toward Sakura's palm.
It hung there, suspended, perfectly still.
The instant that blood touched her hand, a wave of overwhelming dread crashed through every remaining Ōtsutsuki at once.
"Bloodline, hm."
"What an enviable thing to have."
Sakura spoke, calm.
Only truly exceptional bloodlines earned the right to be called that at all. A superior bloodline granted extraordinary natural talent — a privilege, a resource, power that came almost too easily.
But now, the Ōtsutsuki bloodline was about to become every last Ōtsutsuki's worst nightmare.
That single, blindingly crimson drop of blood was wrapped in Sakura's own Sage chakra.
The Ōtsutsuki had no knowledge of Sage chakra — this was a power native to Earth itself, something entirely beyond their understanding.
But that didn't stop them from sensing the danger closing in.
Every remaining Ōtsutsuki charged toward Sakura at once, desperate.
"Suppress and kill."
Standing before her divine tiger, backed by the blue-and-white planet behind her, the pink-haired woman spoke, soft.
Every Ōtsutsuki charging toward her, in that instant, turned a deep, blood-red across their entire bodies, cracks spreading across their skin like fault lines.
These beings — beings who'd always represented purity and holiness, cloaked in white — bloomed, nearly all at once, into countless intoxicating flowers of blood.
And it wasn't just here. On a thriving planet countless light-years away, an entirely different battlefield, more than three hundred Ōtsutsuki — worshiped as gods by that world's native people — met the exact same fate, in that exact same instant.
Flowers of blood bloomed across that world too, leaving the natives who'd once served them frozen in horror and confusion.
With bloodline as the thread, every last pure-blooded Ōtsutsuki in existence was annihilated, all at once.
A single technique, wiping out an entire race that had run wild and unchecked across the cosmos.
Sakura watched it happen, expression calm.
She felt no joy in it.
Because, in that same instant, she felt a pair of eyes fix on her.
Eyes that defied any possible description.
But Sakura knew, without question, exactly who those eyes belonged to.
The God of the Ōtsutsuki. Ōtsutsuki Shibai.
Using bloodline as the vector to strike down every pure-blooded Ōtsutsuki in existence meant, inevitably, that not even the God of the Ōtsutsuki — the being who carried the purest bloodline of them all — could be spared from it.
But that had never stopped Sakura for a moment.
From the very first step she'd taken on this path, this had always, ultimately, been about him.
"To think a world like this could produce a being like you."
Shibai spoke no words aloud — and yet Sakura understood every syllable of it, perfectly, all the same.
He had arrived. In this universe.
The mere fact of His arrival alone was enough to be described as a god's descent.
Which spoke volumes about exactly what tier of existence He occupied.
An unfathomable presence materialized before Sakura.
A form so vast that the eye could find no end to it, in any direction.
A divine authority so boundless that the surrounding celestial bodies seemed to freeze in place, unable to shift by so much as an inch.
A gaze so fathomless that all things bowed before it — that entire galaxies lowered their heads.
This was Ōtsutsuki Shibai. A true god, in every sense of the word.
Sakura looked at the incomprehensible being before her, and there was not the faintest trace of fear in her eyes.
What she had come here to do today was, simply—
Kill a god.
"I have seen your future."
"You will die by my hand."
Ōtsutsuki Shibai's voice sounded again inside her mind.
He wasn't speaking to intimidate her, or threaten her. He was simply stating a fact.
He could see the future. That was all there was to it.
He deceived no one. He only ever told the truth.
"Is that right."
Endless flame kindled across the young woman's body.
Gold. Pink. Blue. Purple. Green — and, at last, a pink vast enough to blanket the entire universe.
A colossal, sharp-edged flower pattern, its origin unknown, etched itself across the cosmos itself.
Even beings countless light-years away could faintly sense it happening.
That flame burned through the void of space, consuming everything — and within it, life itself, endless and unbroken, blossomed to its fullest, most radiant peak.
Pink flame washed across the young woman's face.
Space itself became the longbow in her hand. Time became the string.
Her will became the arrow, nocked and ready.
She sensed every planet across the universe that the Ōtsutsuki had ever annihilated.
Every one of them, in that instant, became part of her own strength.
Dozens. Hundreds. Thousands. Tens of thousands of worlds, weeping, wailing in silent grief.
They had been waiting. Waiting for something — someone — capable of standing against the Ōtsutsuki at last.
So it turned out, in the end, that everything came with a price.
And all those annihilated worlds had been the price the Ōtsutsuki had paid, without ever knowing it, to bring this moment into being.
In this instant, Sakura surpassed even a god. Surpassed the Ōtsutsuki entirely.
She became the purest will the universe had ever known.
Dimension. Time. Every foundational, and therefore most powerful, force in existence — all of it now belonged to Sakura's will alone.
The entire universe shimmered with a soft, radiant pink light.
In that moment, the arrow forged from Sakura's own will was loosed.
A silent light swept across the entirety of the universe, without a sound.
Ōtsutsuki Shibai had said He'd seen Sakura's death.
That was because, in this moment, Sakura's own will had obscured the future entirely — leaving even Him unable to see it.
Or, to put it another way — the Sakura He had glimpsed in that vision was a being Ōtsutsuki Shibai could still suppress and kill.
But the Sakura standing here now...
She was the Empress of Heaven.
The one and only sovereign of the entire universe.
One who could reach into the past, the present, the future, dimension itself, possibility, reality, illusion...
...
...
...
Everything seemed to have changed. And yet, somehow, nothing seemed to have changed at all.
Somewhere on Earth, a handsome young man — a student at a prestigious East China university — stared at the ending of his own novel and let out a faint, satisfied smile.
Completed.
He typed the final two characters.
"So — that's how it ends?"
"You're not going to write anything else?"
An unfamiliar voice spoke up beside him, out of nowhere.
"No, this is good. This works."
The man answered, on instinct — before turning sharply toward the voice, startled.
Standing beside him was a figure whose face and form were entirely obscured, impossible to make out clearly, and yet somehow not the least bit out of place. He could just barely tell — it was pink.
The figure reached out and typed a few quick strokes across his keyboard.
Then, just as suddenly, it vanished completely — as though it had never been there at all.
Ha— haunted? Was that a ghost?
Unable to make sense of it, the man bolted from his desk and fled the room as though his life depended on it.
He never noticed the line of text that presence had left behind, already sent.
A new story has been born...
(End of Chapter — THE END)