The Awakened Soul (Naruto SI)

[Welydora]

A stream of energy flowed from Isshiki's soul into my maw. Once it shriveled down to nothing but a faded orb, my hand clenched, and a moment later its rapidly crumbling fragments hung suspended in the air before dissolving entirely.

"It's over," I said, glancing down at what was now, without question, the corpse of an Otsutsuki.

The dojutsu in my hand vanished, and my energy reserves tensed up...

A massive shockwave of my chakra instantly rolled out across the world, a silent declaration of my victory.

"Kgh..." I grimaced.

My central nervous system was running on fumes, strained to the limit, riddled with micro-damage throughout. No question, I could still dance if pushed. But even as things stood right now, I was looking at roughly three, maybe four months of self-repair just to claw back to where I was before the fight.

Thinking through my condition, my eyes drifted to the seal housing the Kyuubi.

"You and I were never going to be friends, were we?" I gave an ironic pat to my distorted, blackened abdomen, thinking of the emaciated fox. "And yet... if things had gone just a little differently, this Otsutsuki wouldn't have been a problem for either of us."

And that was the honest truth. If I hadn't been burning energy to suppress Kurama's hostile chakra, if I'd had his backing instead, just that one missing rung on the ladder, I could've ended Isshiki in seconds. Instead, I now had to bleed off all that aggressive energy and foot the bill for recovery myself.

I formed a one-handed concentration seal. Light and dark energies poured out of me into the world as my body visibly began to shrink, reverting to its original form. Then, pulling a change of clothes from my spatial storage, I quickly started shaping a construct-sphere in my palm, similar to the ones Hagoromo's children used, to pump energy into the cooling corpse at my feet. Without a soul, it would become useless fast, and I needed it. Even with a destroyed brain and no way to extract memories, an alien's body still had plenty of secrets to yield.

Then, sealing Isshiki away inside a separate spatial seal like a specimen in a jar, I swept one last look across the scorched desert and teleported home.

Three sets of worried eyes converged on me the instant I arrived.

Karin, who'd been sitting in a tight knot of nerves alongside an equally tense Hinata and Sakura, shot to her feet. She started moving toward me, but—

"...Oh." The redhead was immediately intercepted by Sakura's arm, her hand materializing firmly against Karin's back to stop her cold.

"You okay?" Sakura asked. That was exactly why she'd stopped Karin from accidentally putting pressure on a body that might currently be compromised.

Noting that I didn't look scratched up in the slightest, she released the redhead, who shot her a wounded glare in return.

"Not exactly at peak condition," I replied. "But I've still got enough left to put down ten Kage. Don't worry, nothing's broken that can't be fixed."

Hinata slipped up quietly and pressed my hand to her chest, offering her silent support. I found it absurdly endearing and rested my chin on top of her head.

Besides my "envoy" Sakura, the other girls had also, at their own request after yet another round of body cultivation, taken on a more mature appearance. And beyond the obvious physical changes, both Hinata and Karin had chosen to grow their hair out.

"We were worried..." Sakura noted, pressing in as well.

"Hey. That sounded an awful lot like you're blaming Naruto for having to deal with that unknown crap," Karin muttered, burying her face against my collarbone.

"I was just stating a fact. No subtext," Sakura replied evenly, with no real interest in arguing the point. Karin grumbled something unintelligible under her breath.

All things considered, a certain quiet bliss settled over us.

Gradually calming down, Karin eventually moved her hands away from my shoulders, where they'd been draped from behind, and began running them down my torso. But the moment they drifted one centimeter lower than what polite society would consider acceptable...

Smack!

"Ow!" Karin yanked her hands back as Sakura's slap connected. "What? I was just making sure Naruto was in one piece."

At that moment, eyes half-closed, I found myself contemplating my monastic existence in a house full of several very adult-looking girls.

We pulled apart.

"You had to ruin it," Sakura said, lowering her eyelids and casting a faintly disapproving look at Karin.

"Wait, so what, that means I'm the one at fault?!" the culprit managed, caught somewhere between outrage and dawning self-awareness. She got back a look from Sakura that said "Yes" as plainly as words could, with just the lightest edge of condescension.

"Let's just drop it," Hinata offered diplomatically, then redirected her attention to me. "What was that creature? Its chakra wasn't human."

"Right, what the hell even was that thing?" Karin seconded. I scratched the back of my head; the phrasing sounded awfully familiar for some reason.

"I'll explain everything. And I think... I'm taking a few days off. How do you feel about spending some time together?"

In response, I received synchronized approving nods, conveying that yes, I'd absolutely earned the rest after all that, and yes, they were more than happy to once again step away from the world for a while and enjoy life.

And so my account of events began. While I talked, I noticed the aftershocks of that battle were still rippling outward across the world. The floor beneath our feet had started to shift.

And at some point the sound waves would arrive too, rolling in like slow, muffled thunder, booming steadily for minutes at a stretch. With energy discharges that size, a strange aurora had painted itself across the night sky, so the girls drew the curtains.

So there it was: I'd essentially saved the world, and I stayed home. But outside, not everyone had the luxury of just handing the cleanup off to someone else and calling it a night. A battle with an Otsutsuki doesn't just vanish without a trace.


View From Other Nations

Of all places, the Land of Wind had it worst, which when you thought about it wasn't all that surprising, given that's exactly where everything had happened.

Residents who hadn't seen it coming were jolted awake by a violent tremor. When they stumbled outside, what greeted them was a sky far too bright for the hour, blazing with light. Then came a brutal sandstorm, and with it low, drawn-out sounds like rolling thunder that seemed to go on and on without end. It hit everyone, the outermost borders as much as the capital and Sunagakure alike. The earthquake shattered an immeasurable number of structures before dying down after about ten minutes. The thunder, though, the kind that made it impossible to think, hammered on for over half an hour, while the storms were set to flush the warmth right out of the country for more than a full day. People could only take shelter in whatever solid structures had survived. Only settlements with particularly favorable geography were spared the worst of it, places like the Hidden Sand itself, nestled deep between its rocky walls.

Konoha and the Hidden Stone, sitting nearly twice as far from the epicenter as the worst-hit parts of the Land of Wind, fared considerably better. But they still felt it, quite literally. They too saw the light first, in the dead of night, with the tremors and faint rumble reaching them later, and noticeably weaker. Both villages, built with attacks in mind, carried out successful evacuations to designated safety points. Even so, the incident left a mark on everyone. There was something deeply unsettling about knowing that somewhere out there, something so massive and so dangerous was unfolding and you couldn't touch it. Couldn't influence it. You just had to swallow it and hope fate was feeling generous.

The Land of Water and the Land of Lightning got off lightest. The former caught nothing more notable than somewhat rougher-than-usual storm swells, while the latter only felt a faint tremor considerably later. But the glow on the edge of the sky, and after an even longer delay a sound that wasn't so much heard as felt in the bones, one that left some people genuinely nauseous, was something else entirely. As for the sensors, who felt every bit of what was happening on Earth far more acutely than anyone else: not a word from any of them, except creative profanity. What colorful language was making the rounds in Konoha and the Hidden Stone, let alone the Hidden Sand, was anyone's guess.


Hatake Kakashi sat in his residence with a look that could curdle milk, listening to one report after another while keeping people posted outside to manage the evacuation.

Several hours after the "signal of humanity's victory," once things had more or less settled, Konoha convened an emergency meeting.

Presiding over it, naturally, was the new Hokage, Kakashi. Looking simultaneously bored and completely in control, honestly not sure how he kept pulling that off, the village head got straight to it, going for the jugular to kill the brewing situation before it boiled over.

Keeping an absolutely straight face and an even straighter line, he declared everything was fine and there was no reason to panic. Everyone had made it safe and sound into the shelters inside the Hokage Rock, so people were perfectly welcome to go home, write their reports, and get some well-earned sleep before noon. Oh, and by the way, their genin was home, and it'd be a real shame if anyone gave him a reason to get up. The kid was probably exhausted, and who knew what he might do if people started making noise. Besides, their shinobi had spotted some rather brazen Raikage spies out there. No point picking fleas off each other at home when there's someone sharpening a kunai right next door.

And then, without letting anyone get a single word in edgewise, he told them to go ahead and do what their smart Hokage had told them. Well, most of the shinobi did disperse. But a few stayed behind. The kind who tended to be older, far more convinced of their own authority, and conspicuously short on good judgment. They cornered their leader and promptly started tearing into one particular individual, leaving Kakashi to stand between them and whatever impulsive nonsense they were clearly itching to try.


The situation in the Hidden Stone wasn't entirely different.

Tsuchikage Onoki sat in the village council chamber in silence, sweating cold right along with everyone else. After a long deliberation, he finally arrived at a firm conclusion.

"That kind of power... capable of casually swatting down someone at Hashirama's level." The old man bared his teeth. "We weren't wrong to refrain from making any sudden moves against the Leaf. The time has come for me to make a difficult decision. I believe you'll understand. I am ordering our submission to the coming Empire. That is how we maximize what we stand to gain."

Onoki was, all things considered, a rather proud old man. But he also had just enough political sense to know that fighting the Emperor would only make everything worse, while the prospects of compliance, judging by the Mist, might not be nearly as grim as most people were painting in their heads.

The Tsuchikage had spent so many years winding his influence through the Stone that he had no doubts his word would carry. Especially now, when everyone was scared.


A, having convened his own council consisting only of his most trusted shinobi, was equally deep in thought.

"I... I don't know what the hell to do," the Raikage admitted, his bass voice filling the office in a rare moment of vulnerability that surprised even himself.

He sat behind his desk while the others stood around him. All except one, a white-haired aide seated at a nearby desk.

"Yo, doesn't matter what freak showed up to fight, our boy put him down — that's right. Chill, bro. We'll talk to the man and come out tight." said the Eight-Tails' jinchuuriki with an easy drawl, playing up his not-quite-rhymes as usual.

He shared a certain look with A, the same massive build, though with a bandana and shades pushed up on his head, plus a whole rack of thin-bladed scabbards across his back.

"Bee, shut the hell up with your rap crap!" A snarled. "You don't get it. What if we can't talk to him? Then what? We just roll over like the Mist did with the Land of Water?"

"Plan B still needs considerably more time," the aide, Mabui, noted flatly, which made A's fist tighten with barely contained frustration.

"Looks like we're gonna have to bend the knee to those bastards..." said the blond man standing against the wall with a deceptively calm face. His name was C, and he was one of A's bodyguards. Catching the extremely meaningful glare his leader leveled at him, he quickly added, "Temporarily!!!"

"A predator waits," came the voice of the blond girl across the room, the jinchuuriki of the Two-Tails. "We keep our heads down and our intentions to ourselves until we've developed either a sufficiently powerful sealing jutsu, which jinchuuriki do have a particular vulnerability to, or brought the Transfer Seal to an acceptable level."

The dark-skinned young man with voluminous white hair gave a quiet nod at that. Darui, A's second bodyguard and chosen successor.

A grimaced. Then he gave a measured nod.

"That's a plan. Now let's get the full council together and work out the details."


Mei, upon receiving the report about the wave of Naruto's victorious chakra washing over the planet, exhaled with a tired but genuine relief.

It was as if a mountain had slid off her shoulders, knowing that the words "this country might not survive the night" hadn't come true.

But when elephants fight, the grass beneath them gets crushed. And even the Land of Water hadn't been spared. A sound that drove people to the edge of sanity. Emergency evacuations. All of it whipped up panic and terror. Yes, the Emperor's victory over an unknown monster had strengthened the faith people held in him, but right now the immediate priority was reining in the chaos before too many lives were lost to it.


Interlude: Black Zetsu

Wet, rhythmic chewing sounds filled the dark cave. The creature, split into two halves, was nervously working its way through the flesh of an unknown but impressively muscled shinobi.

White Zetsu didn't particularly enjoy eating people; he found them too tough. Black Zetsu, on the other hand, had a taste for them, especially the ones with a satisfying chew. And besides, the act of eating them had a calming effect.

That said, this was the one and only situation in which Kuro Zetsu displayed anything approaching a positive feeling toward the human species. Or toward any other species, for that matter. His only revelation, his only devotion, was his creator. His mother. Kaguya.

He was furious. Rattled. And for the first time in a very long while, afraid. His plan, centuries in the making, had just cracked straight through. A bit more pressure and it looked like it might shatter entirely. And if it did, Zetsu would fail in his purpose. The very thought twisted everything inside him: that he might not be able to resurrect Kaguya.

Otsutsuki Isshiki had shown his face after nearly a millennium. A pathetic worm who once upon a time had fancied himself superior to the Mother.

Blasphemy.

Back when Zetsu didn't yet exist, Kaguya had nearly killed the one who'd dared raise a hand against her, against the Goddess. Now that lesser creature had finally died, and Kuro couldn't help but savor a flicker of petty satisfaction over it.

Still.

Zetsu stopped chewing.

A plan coming apart at the seams isn't the end.

This sudden enemy was far too powerful; even all of Zetsu's pieces together wouldn't be enough. That was a problem. But it didn't mean Kuro couldn't solve it.

Uzumaki Naruto... Zetsu choked on a bone as the name surfaced from the past, coughing it onto the cave floor. A curious kid. The one who's been making the Leaf's elders hide under their desks...

Black Zetsu had a hobby: he liked watching talented people. Collecting promising pieces, in a manner of speaking. The Will of Kaguya's curiosity had at one point extended to a certain blond. But now Kuro could only curse himself for not having given the Nine-Tails' jinchuuriki the attention he deserved.

Too entangled with the village, too complicated a target, too much heat. That had been his thinking back then. Now all that was left was kicking himself over it.

"You thought of something?" came White's infuriatingly chipper voice.

"Chew quietly," Black snapped in his low, grating tone.

But White wasn't wrong. A shape was forming in Zetsu's mind.

To resurrect Kaguya, he needed the Ten-Tails. But the revival of the Juubi didn't have to be perfect. A portion of the tailed beasts' chakra would be enough to give the Goddess her vessel.

The unfortunate reality was that without all of the tailed beasts' chakra, she would be nowhere near the peak of her power, and she would not be pleased about that.

Still, reason had to prevail. Given what that human aberration had demonstrated, Akatsuki had no hope of claiming even a scrap of the Nine-Tails, the Three-Tails, or, as Kuro was increasingly certain, the One-Tail. Which meant Kuro would have to take matters into his own hands.

They might be coming soon, and so the time had come to move fast and accept some risk.

Kuro had been watching the one they called the "Emperor" from a distance, studying his actions, and based on what he'd seen, he held certain cautious hopes that a dialogue might be possible. That he could offer knowledge. Point the man in a useful direction. With Kuro's experience, that shouldn't be beyond reach.

Kaguya's power was immeasurable. It dwarfed anything Zetsu himself was capable of. Even weakened, she would be able to walk between worlds. And so he had to do everything in his power to steer this "Emperor" toward resurrecting Kaguya, appealing to the simple truth that she knew more than Kuro did and could therefore offer more.

After Her resurrection, it would no longer matter what the "Emperor" thought, or what became of this world. Zetsu and Kaguya could simply find some other living world, consume it, and then return here for vengeance.

There was nothing left on this Earth for the Goddess to protect. And so she could move somewhere no mortal could follow and search for a suitable world across centuries if she had to.

On that note, having arrived at a difficult decision, Zetsu gave a nod to himself and, incidentally, to White. He still had to cook up a convincing story; people loved listening to those. But first, he needed to make sure one idiot in a mask didn't bulldoze through the delicate business of building a manipulative rapport before it had even started. And after that, gather more information to better know which strings of his target's soul to pull. Urgency mattered right now, yes, but a few days wouldn't break anything.

---

This fanfic is now complete. You can already read the entire story on my Patreon

 

[Lillie Jones]

thanks for the chapter

 

[Welydora]

Uzumaki Naruto's POV

The day after the Isshiki incident, I had the house to myself and was indulging in the purest form of human achievement: doing absolutely nothing. Recovery, officially. Hinata had left for a mission, because no matter how badly the world had been rattled, the Village still had quotas to fill. Sakura was helping her parents with something or other. Karin, despite the declared rest period, had already started ordering reagents for my lab on her own initiative, so that when the break was over, I'd walk back in to find everything prepped and ready.

But wallowing in laziness for too long wasn't in the cards. After lunch, an uninvited guest showed up at my door. Not quite Otsutsuki-tier, though. More like a significant step down.

"...Emperor?" Kakashi asked, uncertain, when I opened the door. He was in his white Kage robes this time.

"It's just Naruto here. Come on in, you're no stranger."

He visibly relaxed, nodded, and a moment later stepped inside.

"Recent events have caused quite a stir in the Village," he began as we made our way to the kitchen. "I've managed to sort out some of the problems. Not all of them, though."

"Come to cry on my shoulder, Hokage-sama?" I asked with a grin, nodding toward the chair by the table as I pulled the loose-leaf tea down from the shelf and put the kettle on.

"To tattle, genin-san," Kakashi corrected with a tired huff. "Speaking of which, any interest in becoming Hokage?"

"Nope. What, do I look stupid? The position I already hold comes with considerably more power and, with the right approach, considerably fewer headaches. Why would I want that deadweight?"

A sigh of pure, bone-deep exhaustion came from Hatake's direction.

"And you're already sighing just like a Hokage," I noted. "So stay one, by all means."

"My life is suffering..." he murmured, shaking his head. "Anyway. There are a couple of problems in the Village..."

A reel of images flashed behind Kakashi's eyes: jolted awake in the dead of night by waves of chakra cold enough to raise the hairs on your spine, flashes tearing across the sky, panic rippling through the streets, and then, somehow worse, hours upon hours of jōnin from the council chewing his ear off. In short, his phrasing just now had been a generous understatement. He continued, choosing his words carefully:

"One is minor, and the other is you. The minor one being brazen spies from the Hidden Cloud. I've been using them as cover for you..."

What followed was an explanation that, as things stood, both he and I had managed to accumulate an opposition of several jōnin who were deeply upset about my conquest of the world and were now demanding someone find a way to rein in this dangerous, unmanageable me. Because how dare I, apparently, reach for the power that rightfully belonged to upstanding people. Meaning them. Kakashi, for his part, had been holding the line, arguing that I was our shinobi, that I meant no harm to the Leaf, that I was by any reasonable metric a sane and functional person. Therefore: no reason for the fuss.

"I mean, I even showed them your certificate... but they simply won't calm down. They say a state cannot submit to one man. And that I need to find leverage over you before it's too late for all of us."

Siiiip. I took a long, contemplative sip of my tea, then set the cup down.

"Right, right." I nodded slowly. "A gathering of half-wits projecting their insecurities onto a ruler. Do they happen to be aware, by the way, that they already answer to one man: the Daimyō?"

"You don't understand, that's different," Hatake started to explain, but I cut him off.

"Yes, yes, indirect levers, technically not obligated to comply, blah blah blah. Fine. Here's what you tell them: if they can't stomach losing face by answering to a mere man, they're welcome to think of me as a god. And if they have grievances to air, they can find the spine to come before the Emperor and say it to my face instead of hiding behind your skirts. Pass that along."

Several expressions cycled across Hatake's face in response to my little speech. The last one landed squarely on universal sorrow made flesh. He sighed, somehow looking even more miserable.

"Still, as Hokage," the man's grimace grew more pitiful still, "I'm obligated to ask: what should Konoha be preparing for?"

A smug grin spread across my lips.

"Preparing to pledge fealty."

"...To swear an oath?"

"No, to listen while I announce that they're my subjects. Not now, though. A bit later."

I laid out the specifics of how I envisioned it, and the picture wasn't all that different from what they'd seen in the Mist. Full subordination, a handful of reforms, though nothing as drastic as what had happened in Kiri, forging much deeper ties on the global scale, a slow restructuring of the existing order, and so on. Kakashi had already anticipated most of it, but hearing the details seemed to ease something in him, the reassurance that I wasn't actually planning to run the Village into the ground or turn it into some kind of Hunger Games scenario. He lodged a complaint, as a formality, that all of this was going to be a massive headache. That's fine, I told him, he'd survive. The silver-haired martyr gave a long-suffering nod and took his leave.

Over the next several days, my humble self indulged in rest: a few restaurant outings with the girls, one trip to the theater, savoring cakes, or simply sleeping. Everything except the last one, unfortunately, had to happen in distant countries, because my recognizable face drew way too much attention back home.

Then, easing back into things gradually, I made my way to the Mist to see how things were holding up. As it turned out, quite well. My governors had proven they weren't just decoration; they didn't need me hovering over their shoulders to maintain order. Unsurprising, given that they'd been maintaining exactly that kind of order through a revolution.

The shinobi of the Land of Water had grown, on the whole, even more compliant, without so much as a flicker of thought toward overthrowing me. Zabuza had fully integrated into the system. The Hōzuki clan, whom I'd suspected might rally behind the executed leader's ideology, chose not to do anything stupid and fell neatly into line. Yagura had settled into his new post, well away from his former revolutionary associates, and was carrying out his duties conscientiously. None of it was particularly surprising, considering they were operating under the authority of an Emperor who moves continents.

Maybe I should have moved all of Konoha a couple of times just to make an impression on the stragglers. But assessed soberly, that pathetic little opposition of mine wasn't worth the theater. Honestly, they weren't worth anything.

A day later, I planted my temple outside Konoha with considerable fanfare and, with equal fanfare, announced to the sound of trumpets that the Land of Fire was now part of the Great Empire. And that they were free to rejoice and take pride in the fact that they now had an Emperor.

Under the crushing weight of my reputation, the shinobi found they could not refuse.

As for my so-called "opposition": inside the council chamber, they were a state unto themselves. But when it came time to actually handle things with their own hands, they stood quietly with everyone else, dissolved into the crowd, and put every effort into pretending they didn't exist.

After the, let's call it, oath, I offered Kakashi the first stage of the body-enhancement procedure, framed around the position of governor. He accepted. That immediately pushed the already near-zero probability of unrest in Konoha against its glorious Emperor even lower and placed Kakashi-Hokage higher and more influential than before.

Shortly after, given the opportunity, I decided to wrap the Leaf even more tightly in my authority. So I offered the body-enhancement to a man who genuinely deserved it, a man of real principle: Might Guy. And this giant of a man, weeping and lamenting that he was not worthy of such an honor, eventually yielded to my persuasion and became the protector of the Land of Fire region. After which, delighted at the prospect of finally being able to give his beloved Kakashi a run for his money again, he started chasing him through the streets of Konoha screaming about the Power of Youth at the top of his lungs.

Leaving my subordinates to sort out their petty squabbles on their own, I moved on via the next temple to the capital, where, once again beneath the crushing weight of my reputation, the Fire Daimyō also bent the knee to the Emperor. To me, that is.

Using Shadow Clones and my ability to sense deception and negative emotions, I swiftly replaced a substantial portion of the upper echelon's personnel, then mapped out the directions I expected them to move in. Fortunately, there was more qualified talent here than there had been in the Land of Water.

Then, for a rather less sweeping objective, I ordered architects to be found, to design a few residences for me. Properly lavish ones. Living in a rented cottage was beneath my dignity at this point. So I allocated land for myself near Konoha, in the capital, and in a few other particularly scenic locations for country estates, and made it clear that the architects were not to constrain their imaginations, because I would be doing the actual construction myself. After all, shinobi and Fire Country officials alike had plenty of other work ahead of them, building up and expanding the country and everything that entailed, so let them spread their efforts across the whole state. And of course, they should be prepared: within a month, key figures would begin submitting regular reports to the Emperor. Or rather, to his Shadow Clones.

Amid all of this, a day passed, and by the time things had quieted I was sitting on the throne in the Leaf's temple. Today I had company; Sakura had decided to join me out of curiosity. We were down to our last appointment for the foreseeable future.

He walked in hunched, with the bearing of a man who hadn't merely been beaten but spat on too. An Uchiha.

"Long time no see, Sasuke. How's life? How's the tomato garden?" I opened pleasantly.

My guest, however, found no joy in that. It was written all over him: being here, inside the temple, asking something of me, was a profoundly humiliating experience.

"The cursed seal. I'm ready," he cut straight to it.

"Hmm. Noted. The deal stands. Keep next Friday open, ten to eleven in the morning. I'll come by and we'll take care of it."

With that, our productive dialogue concluded. He gave a nod, turned, and left.

"Pitiful," Sakura commented from beside me once the Uchiha's back had disappeared through the door. "A man who can't accept the new reality. Can't adapt..."

"Dead weight, from Evolution's perspective." I shrugged. "Do you feel sorry for him? I do. A little."

"Definitely not more than you do." The girl let out a displeased sigh, watching the empty doorway as old memories surfaced. "Then again, let's not dwell on lost causes."

"Yeah..."

I too watched the space where that Uchiha had been and wondered why I was helping him at all. The motivation wasn't sentiment, not the kind you'd feel toward some lesser creature. It was something closer to gratitude for what he'd been able to give me. Even if most of those things weren't strictly to his credit, the Sharingan, the Indra construct, the Uchiha library were all worth a couple of favors that cost me nothing. And I should make a note to myself: arrange a meeting between this Avenger and the object of his Vengeance, to finally close the book on the story of two brothers so it stops flickering at the edges of my mind.

With that, the day's appointments were done. And so I returned at last to my favorite pastime: methodically taking things apart. Specifically, intact corpses. Back in the lab, naturally, I hadn't forgotten about the Otsutsuki's entire carcass. His body was full of mechanics I had no prior frame of reference for, and working through all of it would keep me occupied for months. And that eye of his was interesting too; the underlying principles were worth borrowing.

In addition, my clones were engaged in probing new spectrums of Earth sage chakra. Not just the one I'd accessed through Kurama's chakra, but also from the One-Tail and the Three-Tails. Those carried a distinctive concentrated power and equally potent aggressive properties.

All of it was sparking a flood of new ideas for further physical augmentation. My current level of power, incidentally, was already sufficient to begin studying the Rinnegan, which, as I'd discovered, shared certain fragmented internal characteristics with the new Earth sage chakra spectrums now available to me. That led me to the thought that I should take another look at Sasuke's eyes and Kakashi's eye, and also borrow a pair of already-awakened Rinnegan from my slightly lesser colleague, the one occasionally referred to as a god in the Rain Village. And a look at the Ten-Tails' vessel wouldn't hurt either, given that it processes the entire spectrum of Earth sage chakra simultaneously.

In the midst of these thoughts and experiments, several more days passed, split between the lab and resting at home. But just as I was getting ready to go visit the Akatsuki, as luck would have it, they came to me instead. Or rather, their true leader came.

"Did no one ever teach you to knock?" I lifted my hand from the fūinjutsu Analyzer seal, which promptly went dark, and turned around.

In the vast hall of the laboratory, rising up from the floor, stood a black humanoid figure with fully yellow eyes.

The creature tilted its head.

"I assumed you preferred getting to the point over wasting time on etiquette."

"Hmm. Fair enough."

My eyes swept the room: the bright space, several tanks with human subjects floating inside them, now with Otsutsuki genetic material, and the table behind me wrapped in sealing arrays, with a single tank at the center of the formation where an eye floated. A black sclera with a golden iris, golden triangles converging toward it like rays. The unique dōjutsu of Isshiki.

I covered the tank with my hand, sent it into my personal space, and turned back to Black Zetsu, who had likewise been scanning the laboratory.

"Let's hear your proposition," I said, my face unreadable. My eyes looked right through him, reading his nature down to the core.

"You may call me Black Zetsu."

"Yeah, I know who you are, slick. Don't keep the Emperor waiting."

He twitched, processing the implications of what exactly I might know about him. After a moment, however, he continued:

"You managed to kill an Otsutsuki... And you must be seeking answers. You hold power that humans were never meant to hold... and yet you hold it."

"Recall the beginning of this conversation," I reminded him flatly, prompting him to get to the offer already.

"...The Rabbit Goddess."

"Go on."

"You won't be able to open certain doors without her." Zetsu's voice picked up slightly; he was clearly starting to worry about losing my attention. "There is knowledge that does not belong to humans. There are keys to dimensions that are inaccessible to those who are not... Otsutsuki."

"You're not entirely right. According to Isshiki himself, my jutsu are comparable to his clan's techniques: Shinjutsu."

"Ninjutsu is only a fraction of the true techniques. You had enough of those fragments to build something greater," he continued, heaping on the flattery that, judging by the emotions he was barely suppressing, was utterly and completely insincere. "But my Mother... Kaguya, can offer so much more. The knowledge of the oldest clan, whose history predates even this world... She was betrayed by those she sought to protect. Yet your abilities are sufficient to restore her."

He glanced pointedly at the Otsutsuki clones in the capsules, making his implication clear.

I gave a short hum and folded my arms.

"Smooth pitch. To summarize: you're offering me Kaguya as a knowledge source, and in return you want her brought back. Simple enough. But what do you plan to do after? Say she's not exactly stable, say she decides she'd like to absorb all the chakra in this world? As is customary in her family of parasites."

Zetsu twitched. An entire bonfire of negative emotions erupted inside him directed at me, for having the audacity to insult his mother. None of it showed on his featureless face.

"You are powerful... but you are particular. Pragmatic. You would not kill without reason. And... you are capable of making the right decision."

A smirk appeared on my face.

"'You're not like the others, so do what benefits me.' Did I miss anything? Pathetic attempt." I extended my hand, and Zetsu stumbled backward. The tension in his emotions was unmistakable. "That trick works on Uchiha, play on their martyr complex and watch them dance. Not on me."

Realizing where things were heading, Black Zetsu made a sharp attempt to sink into the ground. But my hand was faster: it closed around his head, and spreading sealing marks pinned him in place.

"No!" A wail of genuine anguish tore out of him as he grasped his situation. "Shinobi were only ever meant for a great purpose! This is the meaning of your existence! You are instruments! How could filth ever manage to—"

I'd already stopped listening to his mounting hysteria. I sent him to a specially prepared frozen-space seal.

"Noisy," I muttered, turning back to the table. I unsealed Isshiki's eye back onto it as though nothing had happened and resumed my research.

The seal I'd used to contain Black Zetsu had been partially derived from the dimensional properties of that remarkable eye. In Isshiki's own version of such a space, he had stored his stakes, his cubes, and various other inventory, all of which I had also gotten around to examining.

As for Zetsu's idea, it wasn't actually bad on its own merits. Resurrecting Kaguya was genuinely viable. But on my terms, extracting the maximum value from the exchange? That had real promise.

Moving on to the Akatsuki. After finishing in the lab, I decided to pay them a visit sooner rather than later. I wasn't about to let them waltz into my measured life uninvited. And my first stop was one particular character in a mask.

I have an old score that it would be rather nice to finally settle.

---

This fanfic is now complete. You can already read the entire story on my Patreon

 

[Spearow]

Meh, you exaggerated a bit on how you dealt with black zetsu, he is a chakra construct given life, he is a bijuu, focused in stealth and with low power, yes, but there should be no difference form him and any other bijuu, black zetsu is not special.

If shukaku can be sealed in a jar, the same should apply to black zetsu, i never understood why fanfiction authors try to make super elaborated traps to deal with it, "specially prepared frozen-space seal." is overkill, he is just a sneaky small bijuu, any seal that works on bijuu works on him, you were one of the few authors that did not over complicated it too much, even then, its a bit unnecessary to use anything special or custom made to countian it.

 

[Lillie Jones]

thanks for the chapter

 

[Welydora]

That night, I wrapped up my business at the lab and headed toward a certain network of caves in another country: one of Akatsuki's bases.

"Figured he'd have them," I smirked, stepping into the underground chamber where an entire wall of jars greeted me, each one floating a Sharingan. "Not that they'll do him any good now."

I moved down the corridor and, a moment later, passed straight through a door into a room furnished with almost nothing.

In the far corner, darker than the rest, lay a sleeping bag, and in it, a ninja I'd known for far too long.

I approached without a sound and crouched over the man, who seemed not to have a care in the world.

His slow, steady breathing stirred something old in me. Old feelings of helplessness. Of despair.

"Calm, just like bef—"

In an instant, a hand shot toward my throat, kunai in its grip. It never arrived. My own hand moved faster than sound, and the arm went sailing into the wall, detached at the stump. The room shook with the crack of a broken sound barrier.

"—ore."

Obito grabbed what remained of his limb and lurched back. Pain carved itself across his scarred face, but he didn't let himself scream.

Now I could see him clearly: a ninja in black, both eyes blazing with Mangekyō Sharingan. The man who'd nearly killed me on my birthday. The man whose actions, if not by his own direct hand, had taken my mother's life and the lives of many others.

But I wasn't interested in the fine print. Details rarely change the reality of things.

"How does it feel, being a puppet on a very long chain?"

"Uzumaki Naruto…" he stated, his voice low. "You didn't come here to ask stupid questions. What do you want?"

"What do I want…" I rolled the words around on my tongue. "Your suffering. Obviously."

Slowly, I extended a hand toward him. Reality began to warp on cue, and from it emerged unmistakable tentacles, slipping into view.

They were woven from my soul's own energy. I had been so utterly powerless that day, I thought. Let's see what they can do today.

"Wait! Hear me out first, a world without suffering! That is my Eye of the Moon Plan. You don't understand what you're about to destroy. Akatsuki will bring true happiness to everyone!"

Halfway there, my tentacles stopped.

"I called you a puppet for a reason. Though I suppose you've already lost your strings. As for the Eye of the Moon, it's nothing more than a temporary illusion. Its endgame is this entire world becoming fertilizer for the Divine Tree."

The tentacles moved on.

In that same instant, the Uchiha attempted to phase into another dimension using one of his Mangekyō techniques, but my own Mangekyō countered and shut it down.

Realizing the ability wasn't working, Obito pivoted fast, letting his other eye go white to attempt Izanami.

Useless. An absurdly dense mass of chakra, blindingly fast and invisible by ordinary shinobi standards, was simply swept away with a flick of my wrist.

He tried to jump sideways next, but he couldn't move at all. My will had already entered his mind on Yin chakra. Only his remaining eye could shift, darting around, tracking the grey-luminescent tentacles as they drew closer.

And all he could do was let the rising terror show in his pupil.

The tentacles coiled around his soul's aura like a vise and squeezed.

When they bored through the Uchiha's aura, I felt Obito's soul radiating pain immediately. The tendrils converged on the outer core, letting me savor his despair.


The following portion of the scene has been removed due to its extreme violence and explicit sadism.


Holding the Uchiha's lifeless body, I closed my eyes. I'd finally done what should have been done long ago.

Then I let go. A body without a soul, like a puppet whose strings had been cut for good, simply crumpled to the floor.

"Nothing," I said, describing what I felt.

I'd expected something deep. Some profound sense of satisfaction. Instead, it felt roughly like taking out the trash.

Actually, no. Worse than that. My mood dropped.

I lowered my head, spared the corpse a contemptuous glance, and sealed it into a storage tag all the same. No point in wasting materials.

As for that room full of Sharingan, I'd study those dōjutsu capabilities later. Maybe something there would spark an idea for a new technique. Though I honestly doubted I'd find anything worth getting excited about.

With this Akatsuki base personally seen to, I headed home.

My next objective was to deal with the rest of the organization's members, though given my current mood, there was a very real chance I'd just kill them all if anything rubbed me the wrong way. And showing up in person wasn't exactly befitting of me.

So the next day, I sent them a messenger instead: an old "friend" of theirs who also happened to be the organization's traitor. Orochimaru.

My letter simply stated that I wished to speak. Pain, the acting leader of Akatsuki, took note of his true leader's disappearance and decided that, given their diminished numbers, it was wisest to gather together and come to the Emperor.

A couple of days later, in a considerably more neutral mood, I received several cloaked visitors in my temple: Pain, Konan, Itachi, Kakuzu, Hidan, the puppeteer Sasori, and the bomber Deidara.

As they drew closer, I spoke from my pompous throne.

"Well. You clearly have the good sense to come here rather than cause problems first. Before I get to why you're here, allow me to share a little history."

No preamble wasted, I laid it all out: the secret plan of their hidden leader Obito, the even more secret plan of their even more hidden leader Madara, and the even more secret plan of their naturally even more hidden leader still, Black Zetsu.

"And so now you may congratulate yourselves. The Akatsuki's mission is accomplished. The great villages will no longer be at war. Just not because of you, because of me."

They stood there, thoroughly overloaded with information, working hard to process it. The time leading up to this, since my public announcement to the world, had been anything but obvious or predictable, and it had generated truly colossal what-the-hell energy. Coming here and listening to me speak, they could only stand and soak in the reality that had just been dumped on their heads.

"Moving on," I continued, at which the audience snapped back to attention. "Your organization marched toward a noble goal, but the road it walked was drenched in blood."

I was about to go on when I was rudely cut off.

"Yo, hold the hell up!" shouted the silver-haired guy, jamming his enormous scythe in my direction. "Akatsuki used to help me pull off massacres just fine. But now that you've pulled that stunt in the Water Country, what, I won't be allowed to make offerings to Jashin-sama anymore?!"

"Hm." I fixed my gaze on this individual, scanning him carefully with my sensory abilities but finding absolutely nothing divine about him. "Hidan, correct? I've heard about your little Jashin cult."

At my words, he puffed out his chest like he'd just been given an award.

"Of course you've heard of us! We're the most badass cult in this whole goddamn world!"

"Right. At one point, I took an interest in you and your group specifically. And what I found was nothing but a tangled web of inhumane, forbidden techniques performed on human subjects, and you, their sole successful result. So here's the bad news: your immortality, your abilities, they're just ordinary jutsu. Not a gift from your made-up god."

In response to that, Hidan's eyes bulged with outrage, and he clearly wanted to say something very colorful.

"You—!" he started, but was cut off mid-word when the space around him began to spiral from my technique, and his body was sealed into a storage tag.

"I never liked him," Kakuzu remarked, apparently assuming I'd just killed his colleague.

A couple more Akatsuki members nodded at that, which made me look at them sideways. I'd expected a bit more solidarity from them.

"Ahem. Right, then. You are all stained with sin," I went on. "But I'm offering you a chance at redemption. Will you take it?"

"What exactly does redemption entail?" Pain, the organization's leader, finally spoke up.

"Essentially, work in your respective specialties, but under my authority. The work simply becomes less dirty. You'll be dealing with the world's problems rather than chasing money and power. Your terms, naturally, will be mandatory, unlike those of the less sinful."

The pierced redhead, or rather the puppet his true body was controlling from a distance, took a few seconds to think. Then he declared:

"Akatsuki agrees. We have been watching your actions, and they do not, in truth, contradict what we were striving for ourselves. But in fulfilling our duty, we will continue to observe." He glanced at Konan, received a nod, then turned those purple ringed eyes back on me.

In response to the Akatsuki leader's attempt to save face, I simply gave an indifferent wave of my hand, making it clear that I didn't rate them nearly as highly as he seemed to think. Also making it clear that I frankly didn't care, as long as they followed orders properly and didn't undermine my authority by stirring up chaos.

"So… we won't be making money anymore?" Kakuzu asked, sounding deflated.

"Redemption isn't permanent. Eventually, you'll be free to try something profitable. But legal."

Kakuzu perked up at that and nodded.

"And good service will be rewarded. You could ask me for something. Like the ability to walk, for instance."

I glanced pointedly at the redhead, and he and Konan exchanged a look. I'd just demonstrated that I knew their real situation: Pain being a puppet body controlled by a fellow Uzumaki, a Rinnegan user who also happened to be something of an invalid. By dangling the possibility of a full life in the new world ahead of them, I'd bumped up the probability of genuine loyalty and dedication by a few solid points.

Sasori, a shinobi who'd converted himself into a puppet and was currently operating in the form of a hunched figure, and Deidara, a blond with a ponytail and a prosthetic embedded in his eye, also exchanged glances. Their paths weren't so different: both had spent their lives in pursuit of their respective art forms. For the first, that meant puppet-making. For the second, making the biggest possible bang. Thinking it through, they likely concluded that their lives wouldn't lose their meaning; with caveats, they could still pursue what they wanted. Sasori just wouldn't be able to turn literally anyone into his next puppet whenever he felt like it, and Deidara wouldn't be blowing up everything in his line of sight. Naturally, they both had strong personalities, and under ordinary circumstances they wouldn't have simply agreed to bend the knee. But where are the ordinary circumstances, and where am I?

Having largely settled the question of their fates, I let them disperse, keeping only Itachi in the temple.

"I didn't think it would all unfold quite like this. Shisui… he would have been glad, seeing where the world is headed."

"He would have. The world awaits its own fate. As for you, your story with your brother isn't finished. Are you planning to die at his hands, or are you simply going to tell him the truth? Sasuke's unlikely to stay bitter, seeing as the main problems for the Uchiha have, in essence, been removed."

"I… will think about it," the schemer said, then turned and walked away.

"Hmph," was all I offered to his retreating back.

After that meeting, life ran its course for a while. I had a great deal to attend to. When several months had passed and my energy had restored itself to its former level, I found myself in my brand-new, absolutely enormous laboratory, or rather in one of its enormous halls, examining the husk of the Ten-Tails.

After a fairly brief inspection, it turned out that resurrecting Kaguya didn't require collecting the chakra of all nine tailed beasts. If the goal was to restore her consciousness and give her something close to her former power naturally, enough for her to reassemble her own body herself, then yes, you'd need all of them. But it was simpler for me to just do it by hand. With my own chakra, to be precise.

So a few hours later, I was looking at a female body floating in a tank of liquid: very pale skin, long light hair, horns, the Byakugan, and even a Rinne Sharingan in the center of her forehead.

I wasn't given long to contemplate the sight, or her internals in the most literal sense. From behind me, out of nowhere and from beyond this world, two old men appeared, hovering in the lotus position, suspended in mid-air.

"Wonderful. People just wander in and out of my lab like it's a bus station," I muttered, as Rinnegan and Byakugan turned on me simultaneously.

Before me hovered the sons of the very Ōtsutsuki I had resurrected, the one whose body was soon to wake.

"You are making a mistake," said the old man with the long goatee, chestnut hair, and Rinnegan.

"It pains me to say this… But she cannot be allowed to return to life," continued the second, beardless one with light hair and Byakugan.

"Hagoromo and Hamura Ōtsutsuki." I gave them a tired nod, having already made peace with the fact that they'd showed up. "You may call me Naruto."

Noticing they were still floating in the air, I walked a short distance away, dropped into an armchair that happened to be there, and turned it from the desk to face them.

"Everything is under control."

The old men pivoted slightly to follow me, and after my remark, Hagoromo looked ready to interject, but caught himself when a cracking sound came from Kaguya's tank.

The woman's eyes opened. She found those two with her gaze. Then her body moved with terrifying speed, and in an instant Kaguya was up close, lifting the chins of the spirits who had arrived from the Pure World. They froze like pillars of salt, rigid with shock.

"My children… You came to your senses." Tears traced lines down the woman's face. She had clearly concluded that they were the ones who had brought her back, even though they'd been the ones who sealed her away in the first place.

"Ahem," I cleared my throat to get their attention, at which Kaguya whipped around to face me. "For the record, I was the one who brought you back to life."

They stared at me like I'd spoken in a different language.

Meanwhile, Hagoromo, his hands trembling faintly as though still uncertain, was raising his palms. One bore the mark of the sun. The other, the moon.

"Hey!" I cut him off, annoyed. "We happen to be underground, and if you use that technique, over a hundred thousand people will die!"

I had no interest in watching this old man seal Kaguya away again, the way he once had with his brother. Or rather, I had no interest in the technique's side effect: ripping a truly staggering amount of earth out of the planet to forge a new moon. Even a scaled-down version of that would absolutely level Konoha sitting right next door.

"So it wasn't you?" Kaguya clarified, then flinched as I moved her away from the old men without asking permission.

And then this Ōtsutsuki, rather than appreciating my gesture, immediately seized my arm and began attempting to drain my energy.

"Are you feeling all right?" I asked Kaguya, and she frowned.

"All chakra must belong to me…" She immediately attempted some technique, but the sealing tags that erupted from my hand instantly subdued her, wrapping around her completely. Then I sealed her away.

"Well. Ungrateful, these extraterrestrials. Or maybe I assembled her wrong somewhere."

A thoughtful expression settled on my face while two pairs of freshly stunned elderly eyes bored into me.

"We know you managed to defeat our mother's enemy… But with such ease," Hamura said, clearly impressed, and I waved him off.

"I didn't give her much power. Right now she wasn't anywhere near the level of that alien."

"Indeed… I can sense six of the nine tailed beasts…" Hagoromo confirmed, eyeing me with slightly more suspicion than his brother.

"They're in my seal. Everything's fine."

"'Until the one who will guide them to the right path emerges, they must remain free. Do not attempt to gather them for personal power, that is the road to the world's ruin.' Look at what my descendants do," Hagoromo quoted, apparently himself, and shook his head.

"Well, technically, I saved this world with the Nine-Tails' help. He was at least one of the significant contributing factors."

"That is true…" Hagoromo conceded without reluctance. "It seems my teachings were not as solid or correct as I believed, if they could be so thoroughly turned against themselves."

"Change in this world is inevitable. One can only prepare for it," Hamura observed philosophically. "Not only your descendants cause headaches. Only one of mine is left, so that's still something."

"Our power wasn't needed," Hagoromo continued, gazing down at his own hands. "It seems you, the Emperor, genuinely do have everything under control. So why did you resurrect Kaguya? And please, indulge the curiosity of two old men: what is your vision for this world?"

To the request for information, I responded with information. By the end, the three of us had struck up a reasonably warm conversation, in which they shared their own stories and more recent experiences in turn.

Hagoromo's reaction to my fight with Isshiki had been fairly measured: he simply began nervously watching the Earth and positioning himself "energetically closer" to it, ready to manifest if the world had need of him.

Hamura's life, on the other hand, had been considerably more eventful. He told me about his clan of Ōtsutsuki, not Kaguya's kin but his own descendants who had lived on the Moon. They had, it turned out, interpreted their ancestor's words in precisely the same fashion as Hagoromo's descendants, which is to say through a particularly unfortunate part of their anatomy, and the end result was that only one of Hamura's descendants remained on the Moon. And not merely because the rest had died. No, that last surviving descendant had also developed an ambition to "save the sinful world of Hagoromo's descendants" by stealing a Hyūga woman with sufficiently pure blood from the Earth, helping himself to the eyes of another such woman for maximum potency, then using those eyes to connect to the Moon's ultimate dōjutsu, the Tenseigan, harness its power, and drop that very Moon onto the Earth, killing every living person. All of this in order to afterward repopulate the planet with the previously kidnapped Hyūga woman.

Hagoromo and I exchanged a nod at that little tale, and I asked Hamura if he'd care to enlighten me about what exactly that eye of his was. He explained that in his old age he'd awakened the next evolution of the Byakugan and fused it into something unified, intending to create an energy source that would improve his descendants' lives. But it had all spiraled into internecine genocide.

After that, I asked whether I might study the Tenseigan. The two old men, by that point fairly satisfied with my intentions for the world, agreed, and also agreed to teach me one rather impressive technique: the creation of Gudōdama, black spheres that unite all elemental natures within themselves.

Then, in parting, they invited me to drop by the Pure World if I ever wished to consult them, while I told them they were welcome to come by as well, whenever.

At the very end, Hamura made one request, about that last remaining figure on the Moon.

"My descendant, Toneri. I believe loneliness weighs on him up there. But he is not suited to society, and I cannot simply leave him on Earth alone. Might you look after him?"

"Um… Not personally, but yes. I can direct him somewhere he won't be alone. Somewhere he might learn how to interact with people. And perhaps begin to live something resembling a normal life."

"I could not ask for more." He bowed his head.

"Don't mention it. It won't cost me much." I waved my hand.

"Well, if that is so."

And with that, we said our goodbyes. The young man in question arrived on Earth shortly after, and in a spirit of genuine goodwill, I covered all the bills, set up a generous bank account in his name, and checked him into a psychiatric facility. Not to lock him up, but so that people who actually knew what they were doing could teach him how to function in human society.

After that, pleased with how things had unfolded and satisfied with the knowledge I'd gained, I headed back to the lab. I had an enormous amount ahead of me. Beyond configuring genjutsu on Kaguya so I could read her memories, I still had to study the Rinnegan, the Tenseigan, the tailed beasts' senjutsu chakras, and a whole pile of other things on top of that.

And on top of all of that, I still had to keep at least one eye on the Empire.

Sigh. My life is rough.

And so I went to work, while the world outside once again began to pick up speed.

---

This fanfic is now complete. You can already read the entire story on my Patreon

 

[Lillie Jones]

Thanks for the chapter

 

[Welydora]

A few months blew by fast. While running the empire through Shadow Clones and personally lounging with the girls, I spent a sizable chunk of my time feeding my inner lab rat down in the laboratory.

As is customary for individuals of the blonde-haired Yamanaka persuasion, I, armed with suitable material, living and not-so-living subjects alike, developed a proper memory-reading technique. One that worked not just on humans, but on the Ōtsutsuki as well.

Through this, I read Kaguya's memories… and what I gleaned from her wasn't exactly a treasure trove. The most eyebrow-raising piece was about a certain progenitor of the Ōtsutsuki: Daidare. The catch was that Kaguya only knew she existed somewhere out there, and that she vastly surpassed even the Ōtsutsuki gods. Which was… unsettling. Not in a keep-me-up-at-night way, just a thought lingering in the back of my mind. I still had time on my side, and sooner or later, new visitors from that cursed clan would show up. Maybe one of them would know more.

As for Kaguya's more practical knowledge: she'd heard a great deal about what was called Shinjutsu, but she couldn't actually use most of it. Dimensional teleportation, various forms of spatial manipulation, cultivating and controlling the Ten-Tails. That last one I actually got to poke around with firsthand; her memories held a path to the dimension where Isshiki kept the Jūbi. That turned out to be particularly useful, giving me a working example of how to make a body even more resistant to hostile chakra than mine already was. On top of that, combined with the Ōtsutsuki's accumulated knowledge, it immediately made my planned globe-trotting search for the remaining Tailed Beasts completely pointless. I no longer needed them to learn how to absorb the full spectrum of the planet's Senjutsu chakra.

It just kept happening. Whether I was picking apart Kaguya, poking at the Ten-Tails, or tinkering with the Tenseigan up on the Moon, every single time, a flood of knowledge hit me that was damn near impossible to process all at once. But little by little, I managed.

Aside from the eye-cleansing ability, the product of all that effort was a unified Dōjutsu I'd managed to cobble together from literally every single one I'd ever seen. And now, both my eyes, and it should be noted, not only mine, housed what I'd generously describe as a mega-ultra-super-Dōjutsu. By local standards, anyway, and possibly even by the standards of some Ōtsutsuki. Though for me personally, it was nowhere near the ceiling.

To spare everyone a miles-long lecture, its abilities, on top of the Sharingan and Mangekyō I already had, included: significantly enhanced chakra perception and heightened sensory awareness, a near 360-degree field of view; improved combat tracking and elemental affinity comprehension; gravity manipulation, meaning attraction, repulsion, and the ability to create a gravitational trap-satellite; body mechanization, additional limbs and integrated weaponry; extraction of a person's Yin-spirit and the ability to read information from it; mass summoning of creatures; chakra absorption and technique neutralization; the summoning of the Earth's natural construct, the King of Hell, for interrogation, lie detection, and restoration of destroyed bodies; resurrection of the dead; creation and use of black chakra-receiver rods for suppression, immobilization, and signal transmission; remote control of bodies and puppets through said rods; summoning and control of the Ten-Tails' Earth Avatar; a chakra mode with a sharp boost to all stats, flight, and the formation of chakra "hands" and manipulators; controllable chakra spheres for simultaneous offense and defense with the ability to reshape them into weapons or constructs; a large-scale rotational destructive chakra attack; an immensely powerful chakra beam or blade capable of cleaving the Moon itself; control over the lunar mechanism and the Moon's trajectory; telekinesis and force pressure for manipulation of objects and masses; control over the Moon's dolls and guardians, previously operated by the Tenseigan; planetary genjutsu via lunar reflection; mass root manipulation to encase targets in cocoons and harvest their chakra; instantaneous replacement of the surrounding environment with an alternate dimension; opening portals between dimensions for travel and attacks; an instantaneous position-swap with a target or object at range; and the creation of invisible "doubles" existing just a hair outside this reality, capable of striking into the real world while being nearly imperceptible to ordinary senses.

In short: if the Mangekyō had been, as I called it, a "vat" containing only scraps of inherited properties, then now that same vat was nearly full. Relative to Kaguya, it was outright overflowing, since I'd unlocked fragments of techniques she herself couldn't use. And on top of all that, Isshiki's Dōjutsu abilities had been thrown into the mix as well.

All of it was well and good, of course, but over time it started to feel like too much, a kind of saturation that bred boredom. So, beyond entertaining myself through the aforementioned pursuits, my attention was caught by the arrival of a certain someone in Konoha. And for a bit of a change of pace, I decided to grace her with my Imperial presence.

"Let me remind myself to get you a map and a compass," I said, materializing in a hospital office buried under mountains of paperwork, where a blonde woman was currently rummaging through said mountains. "Welcome back, Tsunade."

She startled at the voice and turned toward its source by the time I finished speaking.

"…Emperor?" she asked. It was the question that, regrettably, far too many of my acquaintances had been asking me lately.

"For you, I'll make an exception, but only in official settings," I sighed. "Honestly didn't think I'd see you again. What've you got here… paperwork, logbooks."

"Shizune was very insistent, so we came back," Tsunade offered, as if justifying herself, still not entirely sure how to behave in my presence. "Asaka-san took me on, by the way. He said he'd report it to you at the monthly meeting."

That explained both why she was here and why she was reading things not just anyone was cleared to read.

"The chief physician, yes, I remember. As for you, that took guts. Good for you. Coming back to work in a hospital, in spite of a fear of blood…"

In response, the kunoichi turned away, clearly unwilling to revisit the past, the moment a beloved person died in her arms while she stood there helpless, unable to save them, and the trauma that had rooted itself in her ever since.

But I pressed on, shamelessly. "Want me to take that fear away?"

She looked at me with a mixture of skepticism and suspicion.

"I have some experience with digging around inside people's heads… and not only in the literal sense. One technique, and you could go back to being a full-fledged iryō-nin."

"A full-fledged iryō-nin…" Tsunade went blank. First at what was, in her view, a rather pointed insult from me; then from the realization that, given my current status, she was better off ignoring it. Then, turning it all over again, she gave a sharp shake of her head. "No. I don't want anyone poking around inside my head. Why did you even come here?"

"Oh, someone's already stopped doubting what I'm capable of. As for the reason, can't I just drop in on an old acquaintance?"

"According to Jiraiya, that never ends well."

"That's an insinuation, and it's not for everyone. As for the trauma… well then. I'll come to you in the night and do it to you without asking."

"…"

"I meant the technique. Just a bad joke."

Tsunade gave a careful nod. I took my leave of this unusually tight-lipped woman.

And so, the Village of Konoha gained a very high-ranking medic, and a second highly skilled iryō-nin in the form of Shizune. But my greed was far from satisfied. Because my offer of help had been refused, I was getting access to that very high-ranking medic in frustratingly limited doses. So, added to my daily downtime routine was a daily visit to Tsunade with the exact same question: "Mind if I do a little brainwashing?"

I'd planned to stop at ten. A person can only be tormented so much before it stops being fun. And besides, the reason I was doing it at all was because the odds of Tsunade actually feeling better and more whole after being healed were, frankly, very high. So I wasn't just stalking her. I was stalking her for her own good.

I always appeared in out-of-the-way spots, careful not to damage the Emperor's image. And collecting my daily "no" got more entertaining with every attempt. If at first she kept her composure, by the third day, there was a noticeable edge to her.

On the fourth day, she hit me with a "no" before I'd even asked. I asked anyway. Then, after a full minute of staring each other down, the Senju, who had figured out exactly what I was going to say, gave me her "no" after the question. Only then did I leave.

On the sixth day, catching her in the hospital corridor, I had the luck of stumbling upon her in a foul mood. That time, my "no" came wrapped in a stream of bitter muttering: "Another one… You people are driving me insane!"

Curious, I asked whether someone from the Yamanaka clan had started pestering her as well, which earned me a heated dressing-down in response. No, it was Jiraiya, pulling his old tricks, trying to court her. She'd smacked him across the face with the roses he'd brought and told him never to ask her out again. Again.

"Since Jiraiya's so persistent, why not just go on one date with him? He might turn out to be a decent person underneath it all," I suggested helpfully.

"He is not decent! A decent man doesn't peep through windows at fifty, and he doesn't write smutty pulp fiction for hormonal teenagers! And for the record, I'm not going out with anyone!"

"Our Hokage seems to enjoy the books," I shrugged. That earned me a look from her that communicated with crystal clarity exactly what she thought of Kakashi for that, what she thought of Jiraiya, and that she would very much prefer, putting it mildly, to never lay eyes on any of us ever again. "As for your rejection of companionship. Old age? Running a bit dry? If you let me deal with the blood phobia and actually come back into the world properly, I could help with that too, if it's been eating at you."

"…" Tsunade's gaze became a hundred times more eloquent. It was plain she very badly wanted to beat someone to a pulp. Funny who that could be.

Holding her temper together by the very last thread of self-control, the Senju cut sharply around me and stormed off.

On the seventh day, as I approached Tsunade in a dim back alley after her shift, her eye started twitching.

"I'd rather run into a serial killer," she began, arms folded tight across her chest. "You can stick a kunai in a serial killer's ribs. Break their nose, their arms, their legs, their spine, however many bones you like…"

"True. Mine are a bit too dense for that, and the Senjutsu chakra keeps the skin covered," I nodded along with complete understanding. "So, shall we fix that head problem of yours?"

"Fix yours first. No," she practically spat the last word and was gone.

I chuckled to myself. Cracking already?

The next day, we met when she opened her front door. By a remarkable coincidence, teleportation being what it is, I was standing right there on her threshold.

In my hands materialized the medical certificate I hadn't thought about in months.

Taking it, Tsunade read it through. Then, alongside the indignation of finding me at her home, a second expression joined the first.

"Did you bribe a psychiatrist? Or coerce him into issuing this using your position?" For a medical professional who hadn't grown up in some cartoonish post-Soviet bureaucracy, the idea was genuinely outrageous.

"No," I said simply. "If you don't trust me, you're welcome to go see him yourself. He used to help my academy instructor… The instructor got fired, admittedly. But for an entirely different reason."

She put her hands on my shoulders, seized me with chakra, and attempted to physically lift me out.

"Ngh…" Straining considerably more than she'd expected, Tsunade did manage to push me back over the threshold. "How much do you weigh?…"

"Not much," I answered honestly, measuring in terms of my own strength.

The Senju gave me a long, strange, drilling look, then shut the door once there were no uninvited persons left on her side of it.

On the ninth day, I met Tsunade by making myself at home in the armchair in her office, feet up on the desk, naturally.

Freezing in the doorway, she stared at the furniture I'd claimed, then exhaled deeply and crossed her arms.

"You're not going to leave me alone, are you," she stated. It wasn't a question. Before I could answer, she went on: "Fine! I… I've actually been thinking about what you said. A lot. And let's do the thing you're suggesting…"

"'Let's do the thing.' One-all," I cheapened her words without a shred of shame. "Though honestly, I expected you to hold out longer. Now I understand how Shizune managed to talk you into things. You're just a pushover." I nodded at her, completely unfazed by her irritated glare. "Well. It won't take long. Look me in the eyes…"

And so my daily micro-vacation came to an end, and Tsunade was relieved of her… trauma. Afterward, with almost no provocation on my end and almost no desire on hers to rearrange my face, we managed to have a reasonably civil conversation.

Tsunade mentioned that upon arriving, she'd gone to visit Hiruzen, and casually asked me what fate had befallen Orochimaru. She'd heard from the old man that he was "with me," but without the details, which the old man himself didn't know.

In response to her question, she accepted, with some suspicion, my offer of a trade: information for information. I then told her what had actually happened, that I'd done a considerably more thorough job of brainwashing the Snake than I had with her, pressing him into my service. Tsunade was… well, rather surprised by this, though it didn't seem to make her significantly more wary of me. My strength was already common knowledge, and my repeated asking rather than simply overriding her mind had actually demonstrated some degree of moral character and the fact that I kept myself in check. And since she felt no sudden urge to start worshipping me or erecting temples in my honor, she didn't have much real cause to suspect I'd quietly installed anything extra in her head. She suspected anyway, of course, purely on principle, which I met with cheerful ribbing that drove her up the wall even further.

Then, remembering the terms of our trade, I followed up with a shameless question about why she'd gone so passive on the personal front. In response, I received an irritated explanation: there had been someone, and she was observing a kind of celibacy out of loyalty to him. And said someone had, as it happened, died in her arms from blood loss, which was precisely what had given her the phobia she no longer had.

Not quite sure whether respect or pity was the appropriate response, I left without offering either.

After that, time lurched forward again.

I lived with my future harem in sprawling, brand-new residences, occasionally building new ones whenever I felt like switching scenery. Luxury had, without question, been added to the equation. In the home that Konoha was already beginning to quietly resent us for, my estate near the Village alone covered a hundred square kilometers. It was home to vast, manicured parks, pristine lakes, and a five-story villa of wood and stone built in a Scandinavian style, woven authentically into the landscape, with not a single goddamn pipe sticking out of the roof. Ahem. The villa itself measured over a million square meters of floor space. Modest, really, well within my means to build something orders of magnitude larger. But everything in that house was a work of art, of calm, of warmth. Its entire purpose was to bring peace of mind, and it delivered.

Beneath the villa sat the laboratory. Besides my own work in it, the girls had their own pursuits to keep them busy. Primarily, this meant self-discovery through various professions, along with some assistance on my end of things.

Most of the Empire's operational matters were handled by my subordinates. But as for its expansion, in a certain respect, I offered that task to those I trusted. And they didn't say no.

Hinata, having accepted that this would bring her global renown and with it, power and greater means to realize her future projects, agreed in the end to go out and subjugate several countries on my behalf. Cruelty wasn't exactly in her nature, but living with it turned out to be less of a burden than it sounded, as contradictory as that might seem. And her assignments were, in essence, on the lighter side.

In Stone, where ties to the Empire had already been firmly established and everyone understood which way the wind was blowing, Ōnoki immediately began bowing the moment Hinata appeared. He trembled as he acknowledged the Emperor's authority, visibly flustering her. She'd thought she was merely the envoy of a godlike being capable of erasing entire countries in a single strike, so she hadn't expected that kind of reception, let alone for it to throw her so thoroughly off balance.

After the shy Hyūga's visit, the aforementioned Ōnoki practically herded the entire Land of Earth's elite to the Village, just so the Emperor could receive them all at once and wouldn't have to make a separate trip to the capital.

Then, specifically to avoid sending our pink-haired companion anywhere alone, Hinata proceeded to the Land of Iron, home not to shinobi but to those who called themselves samurai. Having observed the Empire's way of life, they joined without aggression or any unnecessary nonsense. They turned out to be some of the most reasonable people in the bunch.

Following much the same approach, Hinata visited several more countries, informing them that an Emperor was coming and they should gather at a single point. The only difficulty, if it could even be called that, arose in one country, which happened by sheer coincidence to be the smallest. By that same coincidence, its ruler had been living completely cut off from the outside world, ignoring every piece of news circulating the globe. When he first received a letter embroidered in gold thread, he threw it in his treasury and ordered the messenger, who had delivered it in an irritatingly declarative tone, killed on sight. Naturally, the guards failed entirely, and along with their ruler, they were beaten up and physically thrown out by the girl. New governors were then installed in the country, while the old ones were simply executed shortly thereafter for the attempted insurrection.

And so, Hinata broadened her horizons, tempered her character a little further, and made her mark on the world as the Empire's envoy, especially in Stone and the Land of Iron.

As for the other girls, Sakura contributed the most to the "world conquest" effort, bringing a large number of smaller countries to heel.

Among her accomplishments was the subjugation of Sand, where the Daimyō dropped to his knees and begged to be accepted into the Empire before she'd managed to say a single word. And, while still pleading, asked her to pass along a request to someone of three names: that next time he chose a battlefield, he pick somewhere outside their country.

Beyond that, her experiences were frequently similar to Hinata's last visit. Because all too often, the rulers of the least accomplished nations seemed to have egos significantly larger than the Emperor's. That is to say, very large indeed.

As for Karin, she'd been with us long enough that she'd quietly and firmly woven herself into the fabric of the group without anyone really noticing. Her assignments had progressed steadily in complexity and trust, climbing higher and higher. From the moment she'd started her shinobi training, she'd also taken on some ninja-adjacent responsibilities, not field work exactly. She'd been curious about what specifically I was doing in the laboratory, and even after I explained, she still asked to assist. Seeing eyes full of drive and an eagerness to learn, I didn't refuse. Myself, along with a few others, began bringing her up to speed in medical science.

Now, Karin, possessing considerable power following her "elevation" but with few opportunities to demonstrate it in any flashy capacity, was looking for a test. Watching what the other residents of my household were getting up to, she found herself increasingly fired up by the idea.

It took more than a few attempts before Karin finally wheedled out of me permission to go "dominate a country" herself, and a big one, at that. But in the end, I decided to give her what she wanted.

"You'll be going to the Land of Lightning," I said. A cryptic smile spread across my face as we stood in the laboratory beside the floating capsules of figures that vaguely resembled humans.

"Oh…" She actually faltered in surprise, before a shadow of contemplation fell over her face. Something about this felt like trouble waiting to happen. But soon enough, she gave a firm nod. "I'll handle it."

---

This fanfic is now complete. You can already read the entire story on my Patreon

 

[Lillie Jones]

thanks for the chapter

 

[Welydora]

Third-Person POV

In a business suit, no entourage, but radiating an almost aggressive self-assurance, Karin stepped out of a spatial rift onto the streets of the Village Hidden in the Clouds.

People immediately recoiled from her, giving way, though she barely acknowledged it, since no one actually moved to stop her either. Instead she surveyed her surroundings with a half-smile, one hand planted firmly on her hip.

The air was crisp. November was only just winding down, though there was no snow yet.

Countless rocky spires vanished up into the clouds, and thousands of buildings, grand and modest alike, clung to their faces. The architecture of Kumogakure lived up to its name; it was genuinely built at cloud level, and the mist sometimes drifted right between the floors of its towers.

So this is the mightiest Village in the world... After the Empire, naturally, Karin thought, taking it all in. She glanced at the sun's position, gave a small nod to herself, and set off toward an enormous building rendered in shades of blue. They should have everything ready by now.

Kumo had been informed of Karin's arrival ahead of time, so she'd expected to be received. What she hadn't expected, and had deliberately arranged, was to not be escorted from the very start. She'd chosen to arrive this way to gain a small but meaningful psychological advantage. And it paid off.

After walking a couple of blocks, she activated the dōjutsu she'd been granted, concentric rings laced with numerous tomoe, and through a full kilometer of solid stone and cloud she spotted something that didn't quite add up.

Some of those fūin arrays serve no obvious purpose. And there are far too few civilians inside the complex, she noted, though it didn't slow her pace. Either way, this is my debut on the world stage. I cannot afford to fumble it.

Right on cue, halfway to the residence, three shinobi moved to intercept her. They wore blue uniforms with generous white paneling and sparse red trim.

"We welcome you, Uzumaki-dono!" all three called out with reverence in their voices, though none of them bowed.

"Took you long enough," Karin snorted.

The ninja let the jab slide without a flicker of emotion. The one standing in the center stepped half a pace forward.

"The Raikage-sama and the others will receive you at the entrance. Please, it would be our honor to escort you."

"Honor," she drawled, catching a slight insincerity in the chakra of the man who'd spoken. "Sure, lead the way, since you're so dying to 'honor' me."

They soon emerged onto a wide plaza before the residence itself, massive, angular, and built from blue stone and metal. Two fully armed guards flanked the entrance, but they were beside the point.

The welcoming committee stood just ahead of those guards, exactly as expected: a colossal man in a white cape, the Raikage, with blond-haired C on one side and the dark-skinned, silver-haired Darui on the other. A little to the side stood a sharp-looking woman with the same white hair as the latter two. Completing the picture on the wings were the blond Nii Yugito, the jinchūriki of the Two-Tails, and a man built like a brick wall, Killer B, the Eight-Tails' jinchūriki.

Every last one of them wore the same expression: stone-faced and humorless. Karin clocked it the moment she came within range.

"What's with the funeral faces? Come on, crack a smile, the radiant me has graced your village with her presence!"

"Uzumaki Karin," the Raikage rumbled, ignoring her tone as if she'd wandered off a circus train, identifying her instead of offering a proper greeting. "The Emperor's Envoy."

"And you must be little A," Karin shot back, pressing her advantage by carefully omitting any and all titles. "Good of you to come out yourself. Lesser rulers tend to hide behind their walls."

The Raikage's jaw tightened, his face doing something complicated. People didn't speak to him like this. People had, in fact, never spoken to him like this.

"You're overstepping."

"I'm stepping exactly as far as the Emperor permits me to," Karin replied, her tone perfectly level. "Which is quite a distance, actually. And one more thing: our positions are hardly comparable. You'd do well to show a little more deference, unless you're keen on losing that hat of yours."

The Raikage's mustache twitched.

"We are pleased to welcome you." Mabui stepped smoothly into the breach, seeing A's composure crumbling with every passing second. "If you're not too tired from the journey, shall we move to the negotiation hall? Everything is prepared."

"Not even going to introduce yourselves? Fine by me. I never liked small talk with strangers anyway."

Shortly after, the entire group was seated at an elliptical table. All of Kumo's representatives sat rigidly on one side, while Karin sprawled in her chair on the other, alone, with all the ease of someone who'd reserved the entire room for herself.

C, Mabui, and Nii simmered at the indignity of having been ordered to host this meeting. And now, to add insult to injury, the Empire had sent exactly one person, as if one was all it would take. The only thing keeping the situation from being a complete slap in the face was that this particular individual happened to be from the Emperor's inner circle.

As for the Raikage's feelings on the matter: if A had been a tea kettle, the whistle would've been audible in Konoha. But he was not a kettle. He was a man, and no small one, so he held it all in, a living portrait of barely contained pressure. Only the sheer, undeniable display of power the Emperor had put on more than a year ago kept A's notoriously short fuse from blowing entirely.

"So. No preamble," Karin began, her voice smooth and unhurried. "By the authority granted to me by the Emperor, I am hereby ordering you to assemble your elites and submit, without objection, to the authority of the Great Empire."

A jolted in his seat, the veins in his temples rising to the surface.

"Are we able to—" Mabui tried, scraping together her last reserves of diplomacy in an attempt to ask whether alternatives existed. She didn't get to finish.

"You may observe the Emperor's welcome ceremony according to your own customs, provided it does not diminish His standing. You are permitted, and encouraged, to frame submission to the Empire as a domestic regional observance," Karin said, ticking the points off on her fingers. "Your people will become full citizens of the Empire. You personally may decline the role of regional administrators, but that does not exempt you from following Imperial law. And no, unlike you, the nation as a whole does not have the right of refusal. That is precisely why I'm giving you an order rather than a suggestion."

A's hands found the edge of the table. The surface cracked.

He held it together long enough to issue a single, clipped command: "Mabui!"

"Yes!" The Raikage's aide shot to her feet, slammed her palms onto the floor, and an enormous fūin formation blazed to life across the entire surface, with Karin squarely at its center.

The dōjutsu in Karin's eyes flared to life in response, radiating something that made a primal part of the brain scream to take a step back. Her hand began drawing in chakra at a measured, deliberate pace.

"So the plan was to relocate me... and seal me?" she remarked conversationally, as the glow beneath her continued unabated and the teleportation stubbornly refused to trigger.

A snapped his gaze to Mabui and found her drenched in sweat, straining to complete a technique that simply would not close. A shadow fell across his face.

"Take her hostage," he corrected her phrasing. "Your 'emperor' has an inflated sense of his own importance. And you are not him. We'll use this girl to show the boy where he's vulnerable, and we'll get what we're owed."

There was, without question, a far more calculated scheme lurking beneath those blunt words.

It was the first time during the entire meeting that Karin frowned. She didn't like the tone. And she especially didn't like the disrespect being aimed at her... idol.

"You people in Kumo have always had an oversized opinion of yourselves. Your whole history is one long string of stolen techniques from your neighbors. Your father tried to steal the Emperor's mother. And you tried to steal my... hm. My friend. And a friend of the Emperor's. Looking at you right now, I can see time hasn't smoothed out a single rough edge."

Karin's hand clenched.

The fūin array went dark. Mabui collapsed somewhere under the table.

"Everyone, NOW!" the Raikage roared, his body erupting in a crackling mantle of lightning.

He lunged forward at a speed that blurred the eye and immediately took a devastating palm strike to the chest. He hit the wall. He went through the wall. He tumbled off the cliff.

The others didn't hesitate.

B spat out some mangled rhyme and detonated into a six-tailed shroud. The air howled with chakra, and while the jinchūriki was holding back enough not to level the building, the floor still fractured in a web of cracks as he bore down on Karin.

It ended for him in exactly two touches. The first scattered sealing fūin across his body, locking down the beast's chakra. The second sent him flying after his bro.

"Lightning Style: Illusion Lightning Column Flash!" C shouted the unwieldy name as he finished his hand signs, and his body detonated in a blinding burst of light.

"Genjutsu of that caliber doesn't work on me," Karin said, already standing behind him. She caught his arms in a chakra grip and simply tossed him through what was left of the wall.

The moment that was done, she caught the incoming attack without even looking: the long claws of the Two-Tails' Yugito, blazing with blue chakra.

"Keep your claws to yourself." Karin snatched the second hand just as fast, snapped the claws clean off, and with her now-free hand delivered a single blunt strike to the woman's head. Yugito dropped.

The only person left standing in the room, besides Karin who looked entirely unruffled, was Darui, both hands raised.

"I... surrender."

"Really?" Karin walked over to him without a scratch on her. "Well, good for you. You wouldn't happen to know how to run a village, would you?"

"Raikage-sama named me his right hand. I was meant to succeed him."

"Then remember this well, Fifth Raikage." Her voice went dead cold. "The Empire does not tolerate disobedience."

Then, just as quickly, the lethal intensity lifted. She turned to look at the unconscious Two-Tails jinchūriki with the undisguised curiosity of someone who'd just spotted something interesting. "Wait, the tailed beast inside her is... a cat?"

"...What's going to happen to us?" Darui asked quietly.

"Typically, an attack on us, the Envoys, is treated by the Emperor as an attack on himself. And typically, that's followed by an execution."

The blood drained out of Darui's face.

"But you tried to capture me," Karin said, looking back at him. "So don't panic. I think the execution is going to be just for A. This whole thing was his idea... Don't answer that, I already know."

The Kumo shinobi could only bow his head. There might have been a spark of relief somewhere in him that his comrades might be spared. But the shadow of his lord's fate was eating at him from the inside. As was the sheer, grinding injustice of this world. Who could have guessed that one girl, just one, could throw around shinobi who'd spent years forging their strength and not even break a sweat doing it? What was even the point of all that effort?

"Alright, I've decided. I'm taking her with me."

"...Huh?" Darui didn't even notice his face was wet until he heard himself make that sound. He wiped his eyes.

"We don't have a cat at home. This one'll do." Karin relocated Yugito via spatial jutsu to somewhere unknown. "In one week, you'll assemble to formally accept the Emperor's authority. I'll come by to check. Now then, bye-bye!"

And under Darui's completely uncomprehending stare, the red-haired girl simply vanished, along with their jinchūriki.


Uzumaki Naruto's POV

"Nice work. You handled it well," I said, and Karin absolutely lit up at the praise. "The only question is, what exactly do we need this for?"

I gestured at the jinchūriki she'd brought back.

"Her? Nothing, really. But the cat inside her is incredible! I saw pictures! Can you get it out? Let it live with us!"

I looked at the woman, Yugito, I recalled, and back at Karin. "You do understand a cat comes with responsibilities, right?"

Karin's expression went through a brief but visible thinking process, and then it was like a light bulb clicked on above her head.

"Oh! Then we keep the blonde too! She can look after the cat. We've already got tons of staff, what's one more?"

"She's a living person, you can't just… And the tailed beast is sentient, besides—"

"They both attacked me. So they can deal with the consequences!"

I could only shrug at that. Fair enough, I supposed. Couldn't have people going around attacking my Karin.

And so, barely ten minutes later, I found myself watching Karin melt into a puddle of adoration over a miniature, heterochromic blue fire cat lapping from a little bowl.

I had made the cat genuinely the size of a normal house cat. For authenticity.

As for Yugito, once Karin had gotten her full fix of cute, she scooped the woman up by the arms and hauled her off with a brisk, "Right, you're my lackey now. You're doing my missions and keeping an eye on the animal."

And just like that, the Lightning Country episode was wrapped up.

The execution, in the end, really was only for A, which honestly surprised me. To my genuine astonishment, the others, persuaded by their own advisors and jōnin, managed to find enough common sense to submit to me rather than put up some pointless show of defiance. But then, it wasn't so surprising really. The Raikage's gambit had been risky and, for the most part, pointless, because the standard of living in the nations that had joined the Empire hadn't fallen. It had risen, quite noticeably. And so the shinobi of Kumo, as guardians of their citizens first and foremost, were able to swallow the bitter pill, acknowledge their error, and accept it. Their people would genuinely live better for it.

With authority now established in the last of the Great Villages, I turned back to my own work.

Lately, inspired by ideas I'd drawn from the Jūbi, I had developed a specialized ultra-dense material, synthesized from my chakra and an excellent conductor of it. My plan was to wrap the entire Earth in this material so I could manage all of the planet's chakra at will.

The project would take a great deal of time to realize, of course. But time was something I had plenty of. There was also the next stage of physical enhancement to consider, possibly the eyes as well, and I hadn't forgotten the soul-fortification project either.

With all of that in motion, time moved at a startling pace. Fast enough that I didn't even notice when my eighteenth birthday came and went.


In a space of pure darkness, a sphere of blue chakra pushed back the void. It wasn't enormous, barely ten meters across, but it was dense in a way that had nothing to do with size. Here, in an artificial dimension, the laws of ordinary space held no sway. That was precisely why this place could exist at all; sunken deep into the strata of dimensions, it exceeded what reality "up above" could contain. That upper world simply lacked the capacity to hold this much energy concentrated in a single point.

I was the energy. I was the chakra, and it was me. In this place, I stood one step closer to the concept of a Creator than anywhere else. A space perfectly suited for experiments upon oneself: it was within a shell of one's own chakra that will became its most encompassing.

There was no conventional physical body here. It too had dissolved into energy, ready to re-manifest according to a pre-formed template whenever I chose. Only the soul itself remained as it had always been: grey, untouched, unchanged.

My soul. Until now, it had done nothing but grow more powerful. Today, it would undergo its first serious intervention.

To begin with, I had no reference point for how to divide a soul, and that was precisely my goal. The tailed beasts had no souls, properly speaking; they were constructs, animated by the world's chakra, just as the Jūbi was. Zetsu, a fragment of Kaguya's chakra, had no soul either; he existed only because of his connection to his progenitor.

All I had was experimentation. And eventually, a solution emerged.

The concept of soul-division arose from the success of my technique for complete spiritual healing, the ability to nourish and stimulate the regeneration of all layers of a soul, not just its outer aura.

Without getting too deep into the theory, I had achieved this through a kind of genjutsu-virus. My energy would convince a foreign soul that my energy was its own native component. By doing this, the recipient soul would not deploy its "antivirus" against the intrusion and wouldn't tear its own shell apart in the struggle.

The technique had limitations, naturally. It only functioned under controlled conditions, once I had already fully "broken open" every layer of the subject. I could not apply such a suggestion to living, resisting opponents. But it did make something else possible: I could now pump energy into an external soul and briefly simulate the effect of an Awakened Soul, my term for the state in which a carrier becomes consciously aware of themselves as a soul and gains the ability to direct its energy.

Through experimentation on those I felt no particular attachment to, I learned not only to strengthen souls, but to regenerate the damage caused by that strengthening, to heal the cracks. And yet the instrument opened far wider doors than that. There was a great deal one could make a soul do.

It was in this way, having confirmed the method's safety for myself through a considerable number of subjects, that I gained access to the technique of Avatar Creation. In other words: the ability to divide a single soul into several discrete parts.

I needed an Avatar for two reasons.

The first was simple insurance. If someone managed to kill me and consume my soul, I would still exist.

The second was a path toward greater power. Living in this world of chakra, I had never managed to "awaken" a soul in anyone else. Which meant the only way I could study my own soul in any depth was by doing it myself; others simply weren't capable of wielding soul energy.

But it was a reasonable assumption: if it had worked for me, then somewhere in the boundless multiverse there was another practitioner. Two researchers are generally better than one. A billion are almost always better than one, and my modest self, with proper organization of that billion, was unlikely to be the exception.

Which meant I needed to find a world where an Awakened Soul was a matter of course. Not to experiment alone, extracting knowledge in fragments, but to draw it out in volumes from whoever the local experts happened to be.

But the Avatar currently taking shape wasn't meant for a world of souls.

No, its purpose might seem less dramatic, but it was no less promising. Given that other forms of energy exist beyond chakra, there must be analogous systems out there as well. The aim of this Avatar was to reach a world with a different energy system, study it, and grow stronger. And, if possible, to focus on mastering whatever spatial arts that world had developed. That domain, the one that enabled travel between worlds and through that travel made everything else possible, interested me most of all.

Still within the artificial dimension, I ran through the algorithm one final time in my mind, then turned my focus inward toward the soul's deepest layers. The grey, humanoid silhouette of my aura raised its hands. Time to begin.

Beneath the steady glow of blue chakra, spiritual energy began to concentrate inside my "chest," gathering at the outer shell of the soul's core. It took the shape of a sphere, similar to the inner core but transparent. It held still. Then it began to fill with color, not as an approximation but as a genuine copy, mirroring the exact structure of my own soul. Next, I built the outer core layer by layer along the same template, and then the thin membrane of the aura.

And there it was: a new soul, formed entirely from my energy, assembled whole within me. A moment later it passed through my aura and unfolded into its own shape, humanoid, identical to mine.

"Should I call you Father?" it addressed me, not in words but through the qualities of the soul-energy it radiated.

"Given where you came from, Mother might be more accurate," I replied, struck by an odd feeling I couldn't quite name. Something like oneness in two forms. Far deeper than any bond I'd ever felt with a Shadow Clone.

My new interlocutor reached out, pressed its fingertips to my chest, drew a drop of energy from the aura, and began stretching it between its fingers like pulling at something impossibly elastic.

"This brings back memories..."

"Back to communicating with just one voice, though at least an intelligent one. And as for how we perceive each other..."

"The closest word is 'I'," we said simultaneously, acknowledging that regarding ourselves as a single whole was the most accurate framing. In essence, it was.

My "Avatar" was a fully realized soul; it generated its own energy for its continued existence. But because we were literally identical, it had no difficulty establishing a connection between us, and then even extending influence over my energy. In a sense, we were unified, despite occupying different points in space.

"Well. Let's not go developing a personality disorder," I said.

Through our connection, thoughts could be shared seamlessly. The "Avatar," already knowing everything, "gathered" itself, condensing into a small sphere wrapped in its aura.

The rest of the work fell to me. Hovering over the "Avatar," I poured an ocean of my own soul-energy into it, fortifying the bond between us so it might survive across any distance, even if it could only transmit vague impressions, so that it would have the means to return and fulfill its purpose. And then I sealed memories of the people closest to me in this world inside it, ensuring that loneliness wouldn't hollow it out.

Finally, I opened a portal to the Void, that dark space from which my soul had once entered this world.

The "Avatar" slipped through and went silent, its energy emissions ceasing. I watched as the space around it began to distort, and then the universal mechanism drew it through the dimensions.

Our connection began slowly thinning.

The Avatar, drawing on knowledge inherited from the Ōtsutsuki, was to orient itself there and locate a world that matched its criteria.

Safe travels, the thought crossed my mind as I felt my second self exert its will and then, gradually, drift into sleep.

I still had work to do in this world.

---

Author's Note: The Avatar's story will be explored in a separate book, Fairy Tail, which I've already started posting on my page. This book will continue to follow the reincarnator in the world of Naruto.

This fanfic is now complete. You can already read the entire story on my Patreon

 

[Spearow]

oh wow, fairy tail? thats like, one of the worst types of worlds for him to go, right? their energy is completely ambient, the moment someone from earthland leaves their dimension or planet, their magic stops working, the people from that world can't produce their own ethernano, like, once natsu and friends went to Edolas, they lost all their magic and became normal people, i think dragons and demons can generate their own draconic mana and cursed energy, but any and all human magic is useless outside of the fairytail world.

He really had terrible luck to end up there.

 

[Lillie Jones]

thanks for the chapter

 

[Welydora]

Done sending off the "avatar," I stood before the mirror, studying myself with mild contemplation. A certain someone's newfound hobby had done a number on my look. Well, mostly just my hair, which had graduated from "grew however it wanted" to "a barber spent ten seconds running a comb through it." Now I had a center part, and a few strands fell across my face just below the eyes, lending me something of an air of mystery.

Narcissism session concluded, I made my way through the house. Soon enough I was out on the balcony of my Konoha residence, scanning the cityscape of hundreds of high-rises, and connected to the Empire to check on the latest developments.

The Empire: my depersonalized, unconditionally loyal mind, existing as a controlling construct woven through a web of thick chakra lines that carried, well, chakra. The Empire had effectively brought the planet's entire natural energy under my domain, filtering it much like the Juubi once did. It supplied me with enough chakra for my experiments and, by now, left me orders of magnitude stronger in raw energy than I'd been during the clash with Isshiki.

Beyond that, the Empire also served as an intelligence network, limited as it was. But it was precisely thanks to it that the phrase "the Empire is watching you" was entirely literal.

Finding nothing that demanded my attention, I gave a satisfied grunt. Then I turned around and headed back inside. I had something else coming up soon.

As I walked the corridors, brief flashes of recent events drifted unbidden through my mind. Compared to my own expansion, relatively little had happened.

The fate of the Uchiha had been settled, and rather tragically. Itachi never shared his reasons for wiping out his own clan, and when he finally faced his brother in battle, I suspect he let himself lose. It gave Sasuke the chance to live in a new world without the weight of the past dragging him down, just another combat shinobi serving the Empire now.

Pain had put in enough work to earn his healing. Nagato, restored to his true body, now handles the occasional flare-up of rogue shinobi considerably better. Or summons rain where it's needed. After I finished studying the Rinnegan, I returned it to him.

Kisame had been kicked out of prison and put to work.

Zetsu remained sealed, while the Otsutsuki bodies hadn't been put to work either; they stayed with me as valuable subjects for various experiments.

That was only a fraction of what had transpired. But I wasn't left alone with my thoughts for long.

"You're back!" Karin launched herself from behind a door with a wide grin and immediately hooked her arm through mine. Right, we had a date planned. "Okay, let's go, let's go. You've been in there all night…"

As she dragged me down the corridor, I found myself admiring her without really meaning to. After her physical enhancement, Karin had truly come into her own. Her curves were fuller, firmer, and in some respects had surpassed what nature originally provided. But it had only truly started to pull at me now that she'd grown up in more than just the physical sense.

"What?" she asked, catching me looking.

"Just admiring. You get more captivating with every passing year."

"Hmph! Well, obviously!" She arched her back and continued down the hall with a thoroughly self-satisfied strut.

"So… did it work? Did everything go alright?" she asked, her tone shifting to something more serious.

Karin could sense my emotions clearly and almost certainly already knew the answer, but worry still slipped through her voice. As my assistant, she was deeply embedded in my affairs and understood what the completed Avatar experiment meant.

"It all went smoothly."

She gave a nod, and we carried on.

Over the years, Karin's personality had changed little, same as Hinata's and Sakura's. But each of them had found their calling, and that had transformed them in its own way. Our lives didn't revolve entirely around one another. Pursuing our own ambitions, building something of our own, that's what made us happier.

Sakura had been the catalyst, the moment she decided to prove something to herself and to the world. That fire spread to the rest of them.

Karin had inherited her mother's perceptiveness, and from me she'd picked up a certain ruthlessness. She had grown far beyond a mere lab assistant. Trained under my supervision by Danzo and Orochimaru, she had taken on a role not unlike the head of Root, but on a global scale: intelligence, information gathering, and control. Under her command ran a network of operatives spanning institutions and laboratories the world over, all in service of my long-standing goal to consolidate humanity's achievements into a single pair of hands.

Intelligence work had suited her perfectly from the start. Since childhood, Karin had perceived people through their chakra. She was used to watching, tracking reactions, anticipating. Now it was her vocation.

The door before us swung open, revealing my wardrobe.

"Drop your pants, heh-heh…" she snickered with deliberate ambiguity.

Right, another one of Karin's passions: fashion. She now curated outfits for our whole, well, you could call it a family.

Before long, the four of us were strolling down a paved road, dry despite the snow blanketing the rooftops all around. December had come in cold, but the ground beneath our feet was warm. Heated roads had become one of the new innovations of Konoha's reconstruction, and for that, credit went to the pink-haired girl walking beside me. Sakura headed something resembling a Ministry of Innovation, where they were marrying electrical engineering with fuinjutsu.

"Mm-mm-mm…" Karin eyed our group with visible displeasure, her nose scrunched up.

"What's wrong?" Hinata asked, speaking far more freely than she might have four years ago.

"I spent an hour putting together our outfits, and then this stupid winter forced everyone to throw a coat over everything!"

None of us saw fit to point out that she could have simply looked out the window before we got dressed.

"The scarves look great, though," I noted.

Hinata went just slightly pink. She'd knitted those herself.

"And the perfume is perfectly chosen," Sakura added, eyes half-closing. "Freshness, warm smoke, something sweetly astringent… Very harmonious."

Karin had been into perfumery long before we met; she's a remarkably layered person. We suspected that was probably where her suddenly acquired obsession with style had its roots.

As we walked down the street, nobody bothered us. Leveraging my authority and absolutely zero shame when it came to protecting my private life, I had issued a decree: hefty fines and even a couple of weeks in a holding cell for anyone who dared disturb the Emperor and his Heralds outside of official audiences. Generous, I know.

At the restaurant, our reserved table was already waiting. Beige walls, framed winter landscapes, spruce branches in vases, and the soft notes of a piano drifting from somewhere in the depths of the dining room. The food arrived immediately; we'd ordered in advance.

"A genuinely brilliant invention, Sakura," I said between courses.

"You're exaggerating…"

I wasn't in the least. In three years, her brainchild had grown to such a scale that I suspected a minor cult had formed in her honor. The idea had come to her by accident: Sakura once asked about my network, the one distinguished by obelisks scattered across the entire globe. I explained that I used them to transmit natural energy chakra. She had been looking for something she could make her own at the time, something where she wouldn't be lost in my shadow. The thought struck her like lightning: what if you built something similar, a network, but tied it to electronics?

The concept wasn't entirely new. Electronic communication had existed here before. It just wasn't anywhere near global, otherwise people wouldn't still be using hawks to deliver messages.

A year of experiments later, with my help, a network running on neutral chakra had spread across the entire planet. In essence, Sakura had invented the local internet. And I got a rather pleasant bonus on top: control over the network and access to all data passing through it, both directly and through the Empire's oversight, within the bounds of its very real, if rarely acknowledged, limitations.

"What should we talk about?" Karin suggested once we'd finished the first course.

"Something stupid?" Sakura mused, pressing her chopsticks thoughtfully to her lips.

"So… work, then…" The redhead smiled like a predator. "Remember the look I gave my Scarlet Shadows?"

I recalled the Fire Country intelligence operatives under her command: black pants, and everything else a deep blood-red. Vests, cloaks with high collars, masks…

"Poor people," I sighed. "What did they ever do to you?"

"Karin, red is known to heighten irritability," Hinata began. "It has a measurably negative effect on—"

"But it looks amazing!" she cut in. "Anyway, they were complaining about how hard it was to blend in. So I added more red! That way they'll have to sharpen their skills and come out better for it!"

A pause settled over the table.

"…Not funny, right?"

"Sadist," Sakura stated without blinking, poking her in the ribs with a chopstick.

"Hey!"

"Learn to value your people," Hinata added gently.

"Hmph. Look who's talking."

And on that point, Karin wasn't wrong. Hinata oversaw all of pedagogy, from the shinobi academies to general public education. She'd taken it on for reasons that were almost heartbreakingly earnest. "I-I want to be a good mother," she had confessed at the time, turning crimson.

But the "good mother" had since revealed herself to be a merciless administrator. Sometimes I think my presence just gradually turns everyone around me a little bit evil.

That quality in Hinata had fallen hardest on her own father. Hiashi, whom the boredom of old age had bitten hard enough to push into a teaching position at the academy.

As it turned out later, Hiashi had only overhauled his attitude toward the clan and a handful of close family members. In general, he remained every bit the difficult man he'd always been. Working with children, the most psychologically wearing demographic there is, had only worsened his condition.

Operating in a way that was distinctly not by the book, Hiashi managed to clash badly with some elderly but surprisingly formidable Academy instructor. The academy director, thoroughly terrified, somehow managed to discover that we happened to be in Konoha, and set off in search of the ultimate solution to what rumor had it was the Emperor's father-in-law: namely, the Emperor himself and his Heralds. He barged into the building and interrupted my private date with Hinata.

That day, despite her usual gentle disposition, Hinata revealed that somewhere inside her lurked a dark, ruthless entity: the administrator. She threw the director out of the building and sent him straight to Kakashi so he could deal with his own unruly shinobi himself.

I could have burst with pride when I saw that.

Her father, though, got the full brunt of what came next. His "professional development program" had already stretched over a year: twenty-six countries and regions, over a hundred educational institutions. He made it home once every couple of months, for a week at most. Old childhood wounds, it seemed, hadn't healed. Hinata had developed a taste for it and seemed not to even notice that it had become a matter of principle: see it through to the bitter end. Fortunately for Hiashi, there weren't many regions left.

Hinata, incidentally, hadn't stayed confined to pedagogy for long. Far from it. She was a chakra wielder, and she had developed a hunger to understand the human mind. She took up psychology, and somewhere down the line it just happened that she brought the Yamanaka clan under her wing. Or rather, they brought themselves under it once she asked to borrow some of their more interesting reading material.

"It didn't exactly work out with the outfits this time," I said, steering the conversation back. "But there's always next time. Maybe we'll make up for it in Keishi?"

"The capital of the Fire Region?" Sakura asked, her tone half-statement, half-question.

"It's been a while since we've gone anywhere together. Just a couple of days? Clear our heads, hit some shops…" I glanced at Karin. "I'm sure you need some… things? For your work?"

It was a weak excuse, and I knew it.

"Things?" She arched an eyebrow, but her eyes were already lighting up. "Well… actually, yes. There's a new shop in the capital that carries rare incense ingredients. It's a great reason to have some fun after…"

From there, the mood lifted considerably. We talked through our plans for the trip. Though once Karin's double entendres started flying, the girls began exchanging glances: Karin with mischief, Hinata with a blush, Sakura somewhere in between but keeping a studiously neutral expression.

Look, I understood the jokes. Almost everyone was nearly eighteen by now, except Hinata. But the details… I knew the girls had been having their little "councils" without me lately. Through the Empire, finding out what was discussed would have been trivially easy. But I'd decided to leave them their right to secrets. I'd only ever received a single mental image from the Chakra Network of a meaningfully nodding head, pointing in the general direction of those "councils."

The trip happened soon after, and we came back loaded with new souvenirs and buzzing with a kind of energy we'd all needed.

Then came a very particular day.

In this world, birthdays are a family affair, and we were no exception. Our unusual little family, me and my girls, had honored that tradition ever since we all moved under one roof. Now that each of us had found our place in something larger and was so often busy, moments like these mattered all the more.

Today was December twenty-seventh, the day Hinata turned eighteen.

We celebrated the way we always did: in stages.

Morning was just us, the inner circle, wallowing in good food and each other's company.

Then we moved to Hinata's parents' home. A proper family table waited for us there, her relatives, endless dishes, the same indulgent excess, just in a more formal setting.

And in the evening we came back to ours and welcomed guests: old acquaintances, mostly former classmates. Guy's team had worked their way in too, and broadly speaking, that was the full list.

The conversation was easy: who'd served where, who'd accomplished what, who was living how. Truthfully, the lives of most of my peers had turned out far more ordinary than the stories of my girls. Nearly all of them had followed the standard shinobi track. Everyone had made chunin; jonin was a much shorter list, Neji, Lee, and somehow Shikamaru.

Lee had opened his own martial arts school, where he taught people how to properly punch their neighbors in the face.

Shikamaru had followed in his father's footsteps. Well, his mother had made him follow in his father's footsteps, straight into the analytics division. He'd actually taken to it, since there were no major conflicts in the world at the moment, meaning he could spend a lot of time at work doing absolutely noth… resting.

Ino had become, hmm, Hinata's dedicated flatterer, which left my sweet Hyuga with genuinely mixed feelings. Hard not to, when someone was constantly trailing you to ask if they could fetch something, bring something, or maybe offer a shoulder massage. Though it was clearly more of a bit they were both in on, and neither girl minded the strange dynamic one bit. They hadn't spent much time together back in the day, but that had changed. They'd found meaningful common ground in psychology and the workings of the human mind, building a solid friendship on it over time. Both girls also shared a fondness for flowers. Yamanaka just expressed her genuine care in this particular theatrical way. It was honestly amusing sometimes to watch Ino playfully "groveling" in a mock attempt to quietly edge her father out of his position, since Hinata had, after all, absorbed their clan into her sphere of work. The blonde still knew exactly what she was worth, just like back in the Academy.

When the guests finally trickled out and the house fell quiet, Hinata and I stepped onto the balcony. We stood together, arms around each other, looking up at the night sky in silence. I was in simple trousers and a shirt; Hinata wore a shirt too, along with a skirt and those charming suspenders.

Midnight had already passed. Technically, her birthday was over. But for us, it lasted until we closed our eyes to sleep.

The stars reflected in Hinata's eyes.

"The stars… What do you think about when you look at them?" she asked softly, her voice coming from just beneath my chin. I turned and rested my cheek gently against her blue-black hair.

"Nothing," I answered quietly. "I just enjoy being here with you."

"Is that so…" Her voice dropped even softer.

She went quiet, but I felt a tension gather in her posture, as though several feelings were locked in combat inside her all at once. Mostly shyness and resolve.

"Hinata, is everything alright?" I asked.

"Y-yes… it's just…" She shifted slightly to look up at me.

A second passed. Then another. The hesitation in her was building, but I wasn't so oblivious that I couldn't read what was happening inside a girl's head.

My face began to move closer, slowly, deliberately: a provocation. And it worked. Hinata, looking for all the world like someone who'd decided to dive headfirst into an ice-cold river, let out a sharp exhale, squeezed her eyes shut, took my face in both hands, and pressed her lips to mine.

In our unusual arrangement, where I was the only man, certain questions had resolved themselves quietly, without words. The question of jealousy, for one, born from the understanding that I was perfectly capable of giving my full attention to each of them. And the question of turns had resolved itself the same way. It would have been too cruel to leave Hinata on the outside looking in while the rest of us moved on, especially given that my bond with her was the oldest of all. So we had all been waiting for this moment.

---

This fanfic is now complete. You can already read the entire story on my Patreon

 

[Lillie Jones]

thanks for the chapter

 

[Welydora]

Bedroom.

A soft ray of sunlight slipped through the window and nudged my eyes open.

I wanted to groan and stretch. Couldn't, though.

Hinata, sleeping soundly in a small puddle of her own drool on my collarbone, was reason enough not to do something that tactless to the little sweetheart.

A whisper of a technique, and the excess moisture simply ceased to exist.

As cute as the whole picture was to watch, waking up that way wouldn't have been particularly pleasant for her.

The night had been wonderful. Even if we didn't get much actual sleep.

And what can I say about Hinata's initiative? A decisive kiss, and what followed, something we'd apparently been craving far more than either of us had realized.

It had been very bold of her, especially given her temperament.

Soon my attention shifted to my little sunshine as she woke up, her eyes swimming with emotion, everything from mortification to deep, quiet satisfaction, until they found mine.

"Good morning," I said softly, pressing my lips to her already-reddening forehead.

Hinata, acting entirely on reflex, grabbed the blanket and tried to bury her head in it, simultaneously pressing herself deeper into my chest.

"G-good... morning..." came the muffled reply from somewhere beneath the fabric. Her long hair, still spread out over the outside of the blanket, made for a pretty funny picture.

"Yesterday you were so much braver. Where did that decisive Hinata go?" I asked warmly, beginning to stroke the blanket where her back would be.

No answer.

Deciding not to push, I changed the subject.

"Breakfast in bed?"

After a beat of silence, a timid nod came from under the covers.

This time I materialized the food from chakra.

After that, Hinata managed, still under the blanket, to get her bra back on, because showing herself like that was, well, embarrassing, and we settled into our meal.

We weren't tired or hungry, exactly, but food made for a good decompressor. By the end of it, Hinata had reclaimed enough composure to be herself again.

I kept things easy and natural, the two of us trading awkward little remarks back and forth. Even while still tangled up in each other's arms, it worked, grounding us, helping us settle into each other. And before long, the feeling crept in that we hadn't quite said everything we'd wanted to the night before. Which meant we ended up staying in the bedroom for another hour or so.

Afterward, still wearing matching traces of bashfulness, we got dressed and headed out to the garden. Tending to it was one of Hinata's hobbies.

The winter look of all those plants had its own quiet beauty.

We sat there, wrapped up in each other again, enjoying the closeness, more innocent this time, just talking.

Between that and a few other small things, the whole day slipped by, until the four of us finally gathered for dinner.

"Oh, mmm!" Karin spotted us the moment we walked in, eyes practically sparkling with barely contained excitement, and tried to say something. Sakura's hand over her mouth cut her off.

"You did promise not to embarrass Hinata about this, remember?" the pink-haired girl reminded her, at which point Hinata began turning several shades of red. The muzzled Karin deflated visibly, nodded, and was released.

"How was your day?" I asked pleasantly, as if absolutely nothing had happened.

We settled at the table. Hinata sat beside me, still flushed, her gaze drifting anywhere that wasn't the redhead across from her.

"Productive," Hinata replied primly. "On the project issue..."

"How are you two just talking like nothing happened?!" Karin cut in without ceremony.

She was more than capable of being serious when she needed to be. Right now, she was simply indulging the sin of her own personality.

"You'll understand when you're older." Sakura patted her on the shoulder.

"Hey! You're only three months older than me!"

"Exactly." Sakura nodded at Karin with the patient air of someone explaining something to a child who just doesn't get it, and continued her story.

The other Uzumaki, and I don't mean myself, sat there visibly simmering, wrestling with her promise. But anyone watching could see the questions straining at the leash behind her eyes. Something along the lines of "How was the sex?!" and approximately a thousand follow-ups on the same theme.

Dinner wrapped up, a quieter affair than usual, for a couple of reasons: Hinata was still embarrassed, and nothing appropriately on-topic was managing to squeeze its way into Karin's otherwise very creative brain. Afterward, I kept Hinata company. She needed time to settle into everything. And a temporary shield from a certain red-haired individual who could, on occasion, be deeply, deeply persistent. So yes, I kept watch.

A couple of days later, because turning every day into an unbroken string of dates with an obvious conclusion would have been excessive, and this needed to happen naturally, I turned to a project I'd been putting off for a long time.

I stood in the lab, facing an empty body capsule, looking straight through it.

Kushina. So much time had passed, and yet the day I was born still followed me.

In the shinobi world, death is, in a certain sense, considered a grace. And summoning the dead, something unholy.

I didn't share that view. I'd simply been too buried in experiments and in building this world, making it safe, making it stop being a problem, to get around to this. Always put it off.

And now, at last, it would be done. Something I'd wanted for a very long time.

Over my raised palm, I began forming a small crimson cluster: life energy with a trace of Yin, given shape as genetic material through the Creation of All Things technique.

"I don't have her body. That doesn't matter." I began shaping the small red cluster above my upraised hand. "Life energy with a fraction of Yin, expressed as genetic material from blood..." Enormous amounts of energy began condensing within the fluid. "Adjust a portion to set a female baseline..." Reality began to tremble from the sheer volume of it. And still I pushed the concentration higher, wanting it done right.

When the Empire joined the process, channeling the energy of the Earth itself—

Crack.

An invisible fracture ran through the world, as if space along its length had simply slipped.

Crack.

Crack.

The world was breaking under it, and I stopped. Even my chakra alone was too much: only a small fraction of it existed within this reality at any given moment, the rest perpetually distributed across nearby dimensions and parallel worlds. That had always been the architecture of a Supreme Chakra Holder.

But by bringing the Empire into it, the new body had been given an affinity not only for my energy, but for the energy of the Earth itself, though far less of that would remain after Kushina's soul returned from the Pure Land and settled into her own SCH.

The energy expended exceeded what was needed to build a body by orders of magnitude. A normal body, at any rate.

Dispersing the chakra, I stilled the trembling of space, and brought into being something greater than merely a human form.

Several minutes later, the body of a beautiful red-haired girl floated in the liquid of the sarcophagus. The finer details of her appearance still needed finishing, but for those I would draw from Kushina's own chakra, which preserved an exact impression of her face.

Behind the capsule, a rift opened in space, and soft pink light poured through.

I could have resurrected Kushina in an instant the moment I'd retrieved her soul along with her chakra, simply reconstructed the old body from its imprint. But I'd built a new one deliberately. It would not be my mother by birth. Nor a twin. But our higher form would be alike, and so we'd encounter no complications of any kind. Not even if we wanted children.

A pulse of chakra into the Pure Land, and it returned to me with the soul I needed.

Shortly after, body settled in the capsule, an hour to refine the remaining details, and once I was satisfied that the soul had taken hold perfectly, I lifted Kushina in my arms. Her eyes were closed, her body unconscious.

Once, Tobirama had noticed, while resurrecting enemies with his forbidden technique, that they never remembered their time in the Pure Land. The reason is simple. They sleep there.

We moved from the lab to a proper bedroom, a far more welcoming place to wake up in than cylinders and machinery.

"My world..." Seated at the edge of the bed, I touched her face with my fingertips. "Time to wake up, Mom..."

Her eyelids trembled, and a moment later, bright violet eyes opened. The gaze was empty at first, as if she hadn't fully come back yet. Then her pupils focused and slowly rose to me.

"Welcome to the future, Mom," I said quietly, and smiled.

She went still. Then, still uncertain, she raised a hand and touched my cheek with her fingertips, as if testing whether I was real.

"...Naruto," she breathed. For a moment, she was clearly trying to fit what she was seeing into her head, and then realization hit her like a second wave. "You... you just called me Mom..."

Her voice broke, almost cracking into a squeak.

Kushina's eyes filled quickly. She blinked, and tears spilled down her cheeks.

"We're not inside the seal, my clone is there... This must be an illusion..." She squeezed her eyes shut and buried her face in my chest. "But such a wonderful one."

"You're wrong. In an illusion, I'd be shorter."

"Heh, how would you know what I was actually imagining?" She lifted her head, eyes wide. "Although... well, fair point."

Kushina had wanted to walk with me through every step of motherhood. But...

"The real world doesn't always go the way you want it to. But I'm glad I found you again."

"Wait... That can't be possible."

"It is."

"...Dattebane."

"Cute word," I said softly, stroking her hair.

With her beside me, something warm spread through me, as if something long absent had finally settled back into place. I had almost let myself believe in that rare, quiet stillness. But then Kushina said the thing that made something tighten unpleasantly inside me.

"So that means... Minato too?"

I exhaled.

"No. I'm not going anywhere near the Shinigami for him. That seal could have been done differently..."

Kushina went rigid.

"He had no choice. There was no other way."

"For him, maybe." I couldn't quite hold back a bitter smile. "But with a fūinjutsu team and the Third's help, there absolutely was. And that barrier... it was unnecessary."

Without really thinking, I cupped her face in my hands and tugged her cheeks lightly. Her eyes flashed with hurt, and the tears came harder. I let go immediately.

"But I don't blame you. Hours of stress and a flood of postpartum hormones, there's no way you were thinking clearly at the time."

"He wanted me to... when the time came... to do what only a mother could," Kushina spoke slowly, her face still pressed to my chest. "To tell you the things only I could tell you. And he wanted to say the things only a father could. Our chakra remained in your seal."

"But the moment never came. I'm not exactly the type to let Kurama break loose." I said nothing further for a moment. "Better to leave it in the past. Minato... I'm sorry, but I don't think I'll ever be able to love him. What he did might earn respect from a lot of people. From me, it only leaves pain. He wasn't caught in the grip of emotion the way you were. And his choices took my parents from me for eighteen years. Left me alone in the village, with no home, carrying the burden of a jinchūriki."

"...Forgive me."

"Though it wasn't all bad. Hiruzen knew how to keep his word. As a guardian figure, by the standards of the time, I'd give him a solid seventy-five out of a hundred." I pulled her back into my arms. "And I did say I don't blame you. Maybe I'm piling too much on you right now... Let's change the subject."

She pressed into me harder.

"Let's... just be here together."

"Nope, you little fool. If I go quiet now, you'll spiral straight into the dark."

"You... Is that any way to talk to your mother?" She pulled back just enough to look up at me with an expression caught somewhere between baffled and very mildly offended.

"Better you take that as a scolding than drown in guilt," I said with an easy laugh. Kushina turned the words over in her head, then let out a sad little sigh. "The modest individual you happen to be sitting on, by the way, that's the Emperor of Humanity. And then some, really. Want to hear how my life got to be like this?"

My words had clearly snagged her attention, shifting it, at least partly, away from wherever it had been drifting, even as they added a note of genuine bewilderment. And so I launched into the story, holding onto Kushina, metaphorically speaking, with everything I had, not giving her a single crack to fall into.

My account, with all its digressions and details, stretched until deep into the night. And as it happened, without either of us separating, we fell asleep in the same bed.


Interlude. Uzumaki Kushina

Kushina woke in the dark, with no idea where she was. There was warmth nearby, at her head and under her palm. She eased back and saw Naruto's face.

Her mind stopped. And then everything crashed in at once: fear, disbelief, joy, grief, gratitude... Her fingers reflexively curled into the fabric of his shirt, as if letting go would make him vanish.

For a full minute she stared at him without blinking. The blond hair, tousled by sleep. A clean jawline, high cheekbones, flawless skin, a face beautiful to the point of something almost otherworldly, and yet not theatrical, just natural. Beneath those closed eyelids, she remembered, were deep sapphire eyes.

The world around her dissolved. She didn't notice when her palms came to rest on his face. She leaned closer, without thinking, on instinct, until their lips were centimeters apart.

And then she wrenched back. Only now did she register what she'd been about to do. And the fact that her entire body was burning.

Arousal?...

Pregnancy rewires a woman: it amplifies the need to protect and care, and suppresses everything else in relation to the child. Years of raising one cement that further. But Kushina had never raised Naruto. Her mind, her chakra, they knew this was her son, and what she felt for him was the purest thing she had. But her body was responding the way it was built to respond to an attractive man. And he was attractive. Very. And those two layers, the maternal tenderness and the physical, didn't cancel each other out. They settled on top of each other.

No. This isn't right.

With every ounce of will she had, she turned away and stared up at the ceiling.

Minato surfaced in her thoughts. Then Naruto's words about him.

Pain needled her heart.

Eighteen years had passed. Kushina didn't know what might have happened to Minato inside the Shinigami's stomach in that time. Maybe his soul no longer existed at all. Or maybe whatever remained wouldn't be enough to resurrect him properly.

She didn't know much about the God of Death. Only that he was an extraordinarily dangerous entity, and that any interaction with him was dangerous and always demanded a price.

Technically, Kushina knew the method: summon the Shinigami, tear open one's own stomach, release the souls sealed within. But whether the god would demand payment, unknown. Shinobi had given their souls to him so rarely that Minato's case was the only one she'd ever heard of outside vague mythology. Which meant the terms were a complete mystery. Could it be a soul-for-soul exchange? What if he wanted a soul with powerful chakra, hers, or Naruto's? And even that wouldn't guarantee success. The possibility that the summoner would simply be consumed, freeing no one, couldn't be dismissed.

And then there was Naruto's feelings about it. He clearly resented his father deeply for what he'd done. Kushina understood that, even though it twisted something inside her.

Naruto would never let me take that risk, she thought, with grief and warmth in equal measure. Grief for the past that seemed beyond recovery. Warmth for the son she had only just found.

Definitely not right after bringing me back.

Even in the best case, Minato returned, but at the cost of Kushina's soul, then what? For Naruto, it would be a second loss. He might end up hating his father even more. He might refuse to accept him at all. And without his son's help, the ritual, and the resurrection itself, would likely be impossible anyway.

So the choice was simple. Try to free Minato, and possibly die, leaving Naruto alone. Or stay, and carry the grief of losing a husband. In the first case, that same grief would fall on Minato instead, and probably far heavier.

Lost in her thoughts, she didn't notice half an hour pass. But the answer came.

Kushina would not try to resurrect Minato.

Eighteen years ago they had already run, and it had given them nothing. She would not run again. She was a mother. Her debt to her son had only grown over those years. And she was going to give everything she had to make up for it, and then some.

With new resolution in her eyes, Kushina turned and pressed her lips gently to Naruto's forehead. She lingered a moment, looking at his sleeping face, then quietly slipped out of bed and padded soundlessly into the hallway.

"Empire... are you there?" she whispered, calling up what she'd heard in yesterday's stories.

Her son, singular tyrant, and god, and emperor of this world... Kushina had listened to him laughing as he told her about how slow, dense, and incompetent some of his subordinates could occasionally be, and trying to picture him in that role had been genuinely difficult. When the very same Naruto had assured her she didn't need to, she'd been relieved to take him at his word.

She already knew about the network that cloaked the world and the intelligence that governed it. So she called out to it now, hoping to ask directions for her usual morning bath.

As if reading her thoughts, a smooth black panel, something like a door, silently opened before her. Beyond it was a spacious bathroom: high ceilings, darkened glass looking out over the garden, minimalist finishes. A large tub at the center was already filling with hot water, carrying the calm scent of lavender.

Kushina stepped inside, as if guided.

"Technology these days..."

She grinned, feeling suddenly ancient. Then she turned, and instead of a doorway found only a large mirror, behind which there appeared to be a door and tall cabinets.

She returned to the mirror, shrugged off her robe, and looked at herself.

"Oh, no, not ancient."

Exactly how they'd brought her back remained a mystery, but the body was if not identical to her old one then very close, only more toned. She had never in her life been in this kind of shape, this aesthetically put-together. Her face was a touch less round, the features somehow sharper. Despite the change being striking but not radical, she felt power inside herself that she'd never known before. But the most striking thing was the chakra. Her reserves were considerably larger than they'd been in life, and the control over them felt almost effortless by comparison. When she channeled chakra into her eyes, she stumbled back, the pattern in her irises had shifted into concentric rings bearing tomoe.

Kushina froze. She didn't know the details of how the resurrection had been done. But if the body wasn't simply restored but actually improved... he had worked on it. And if he'd worked on it... he might have seen her undressed.

Her face went scarlet, all the way to the tips of her ears.

W-what am I thinking?! He's my son!

She shook her head sharply and threw the thought out. The water in the tub had stopped running, time.

Kushina lowered herself into the hot water and finally let herself relax. No new thoughts came. Twenty minutes later she climbed out, dried off, and found two small wheeled stands beside her, which had definitely not been there before, holding neatly folded clothes: a soft, floor-length dress in white, the familiar kind she liked. While she was getting dressed, the stands disappeared without a trace.

"I've never been a guest at a daimyo's before. But this is probably a lot fancier than that," Kushina mused, considering that she currently had a supremely powerful artificial intelligence as her attendant, one that could, with its equally formidable reserves of energy, produce for her just about anything she wanted.

But instead of indulging that, she thought. She wanted to explore the mysterious house, but more than that, she wanted to do something for Naruto. And breakfast in bed, made by her own hands, seemed like exactly the right idea.

Kushina pressed two fingers to each temple with theatrical flair, squeezed her eyes shut, and wished herself to the kitchen.

The passage opened.

A bright room unfolded before her, full of unfamiliar metal objects: gleaming surfaces, panels with buttons, tall silver cabinets. All of it felt alien, but approaching what looked like a stove, she managed to switch it on with a thought. The cabinets held ingredients. The wooden shelves held familiar dishes.

Kushina lost herself in it. Cooking had always been one of her favorite things.

But soon there was a knock at the door.

She smiled, expecting Naruto. Instead, three girls stood in the doorway.

Blue-black hair, pale skin, and a face so red with embarrassment she looked like she might pass out, that one was barely holding it together. The redhead beside her was no less flustered, which, for anyone who knew her, was deeply out of character. The third, pink hair, was working hard to hold herself together and stepped forward to take the lead.

"Good morning, mother-in-law-sama."

"...Huh?" was all Kushina managed. Then the recent memories surfaced, followed immediately by the realization. "So there are seriously three of you?!"

"Our paths with Naruto converged, and became permanently intertwined," the leader confirmed with great seriousness. Though the phrasing, perhaps not the best she could have chosen, gave her nerves away.

"...Dattebane."

She continued.

"I'm Sakura. This is Hinata," she said, as the blue-black-haired girl gave a ceremonial bow. "And this is Karin." The redhead still hadn't come back online.

The words reached her consciousness with a delay. And then Kushina was hit by several waves in fast succession: joy, because her son actually had people close to him in this world... followed by suspicion, were their feelings genuine? And then, swiftly after, jealousy.

For a moment, the three girls seemed to shrink. Kushina's chakra surged outward, not hostile, but balanced right on the edge. The light in the room dimmed. The air began to warp.

Then, a second later, the chakra receded. Kushina gave an apologetic smile.

"Sorry, girls, lost in thought for a second. Come on, let's get to know each other properly."


Uzumaki Naruto's POV

Waking up to something resembling bloodlust in one's own home was unexpected. As was the fact that Kushina had run into the girls this fast, we'd had a proper introduction planned, with me present. It came out awkward.

To my relief and quiet satisfaction, Kushina didn't take my girls as a threat. Setting aside, of course, those first flickers of intent that had jolted me awake.

After the meeting, when we'd all settled around the table and were working through the food, which was excellent, I sat and listened to a gentle, borderline interrogation: the girls walking Kushina through our history from the very beginning. She'd already heard it from me, but this was Kushina's way of showing she cared, she wanted to verify everything herself, wanted to make sure it was all really okay. Whatever that meant to her.

We talked for around two hours, maybe a little more. By the end, the atmosphere had loosened considerably. There was still plenty of adjusting ahead for all of us, but there was no rush.

Once that was done, and I'd confirmed that the girls were fine and no one had hit their limit, I took Kushina to Konoha.

She wanted to see how the village had changed over the years, and giving her a tour was easy enough. Besides, I understood that right now I was the only fixed point she had in this world. Being there wasn't optional.

"The buildings weren't this tall before..." Kushina breathed, staring up at the nearest fifty-story tower as we materialized on the wide boulevard. "And these people... they're staring at us."

"Yeah," I shrugged as the people around us began parting in a wide arc and looking my way as if a god had just stepped down from somewhere. "This is nothing. Used to be they'd rush me, ask for autographs on... sometimes not the most dignified locations, or just decide they absolutely had to touch me. Why, I still haven't worked out."

She looked at me thoughtfully. Then swept her gaze over the drifting crowd and shuddered.

"How do you stand those looks?"

"You get used to it." I took her hand, which seemed to make some of the onlookers' eyes positively shine. "Let's keep moving... I'm pretty sure there were a couple of reporters back there."

We wrinkled our noses in unison and moved on down the street.

She kept turning her head the whole time, like a tourist who'd never seen anything like this in her life.

"I can't believe Konoha changed this much."

"After I became Emperor, the city's population jumped tenfold. Had to build somewhere for all the newcomers."

Soon a familiar stone face came into view above the towers and we drifted toward it. It turned out to be a modest half-kilometer statue of me on a plinth. On the plinth, inscriptions:

Six months since the founding of the Great Empire — hunger defeated.
Ten months... — cancer defeated.
One year, seven months... — the last war on Earth concluded.
One year, eight months... — old age declared a treatable illness. Mortality fell by more than one hundredfold.
Two years... — poverty abolished.
Two years, three months... — the unified Network, the Empire, connected every home...
...
...

"Is this all real?" Kushina whispered, staring at it.

"Yeah," I confirmed easily.

"'Yeah'?! Naruto, this is... this is—!" She couldn't find the words to contain the full scale of what had happened to the world since the Empire's founding.

"These aren't even the most impressive things I've done. Remember the story about the Otsutsuki battle? And none of it was only me anyway."

"I'm so proud of you..." She pulled me into a tight hug.

"I know... it's a little awkward," I laughed softly and patted her on the back.

Shortly after, we continued on. And a couple of blocks further, my sphere-vision caught Kakashi bounding across the rooftops. He was just scanning around when his gaze snagged on the red head beside me. Not quite the red head you usually see around here.

The sight hit him hard enough that he completely lost track of where he was in space-time. Specifically: he kept moving, flew straight into a shop sign, and then fell from about the height of a fifteen-story building. Quite neatly, thanks to a small nudge of my chakra, he landed splat in front of us.

"Kakashi, you really ought to work on your situational awareness. Not great for someone who doesn't look where he's flying," I remarked with a snort.

"Kakashi?!"

At my mother's exclamation, the man snapped upright and yanked the cloth from his second eye. The Mangekyo was already spinning.

He froze. His expression was pure speechless shock with a silent question riding behind it.

We stared at him.

"Kai!" Apparently deciding to cover his bases, he tried dispelling a genjutsu. The scene didn't change.

After another second of drilling us with that mismatched gaze, he landed on a conclusion, the wrong one. "Naruto, this is obviously some kind of terrible joke. My ANBU reported that—"

He was winding up for a full lecture. I cut him off.

"Would be a terrible joke if I'd pulled it. But this is real."

"You got big, Kakashi-chan..." Kushina's expression grew complicated. Up until this moment her resurrection had felt somehow not entirely real, as if she'd stepped into a different world, one that belonged to Naruto and his girls. But here was someone from the old world. And he looked exactly like eighteen years had actually passed.

"Kushina-sama... is it really you?" His gaze kept snapping between the two of us.

"Yes..." There wasn't much more to say in that moment, so she shifted to something lighter. "How's life been, Kakashi-chan? Find yourself a girl yet?"

"..." Kakashi looked down.

"Heh, we can skip that one. I'm busy right now, but we'll talk sometime, okay?"

A jerky nod.

"Good. Now go on, you need to pull yourself together."

Another jerky nod, and he turned and walked away on legs that were mostly air.

"So much has changed..." Kushina said quietly, watching him go. "You grew up... A moody teenager became Hokage..."

"But that only means a lot of things can start fresh." I stepped closer and put an arm around her. "And I'll be right here with you."

In answer, she silently pressed her face into the space just below my collarbone.

We stood like that for a while, then moved on toward the mountain of faces.

Talking through one subject and then another, we walked the streets of Konoha, and Kushina kept finding old buildings, pointing at them very directly and asking if yes, that is actually that place, right?

Eventually, when we reached a large obelisk about a hundred meters tall, a node in the chakra network, the topic between us started to sharpen.

"The Empire... You said it can read the surface thoughts of thousands of people at once. And that you don't usually process all that yourself?"

"Usually not," I confirmed. "I can read minds on my own too. But I don't use that on people close to me. What are you getting at?"

"No, just... wondering."

"..." I said nothing. But when Kushina began to turn red, the expression that appeared on my face said everything without a word.

"No! Don't you think I'm some kind of pervert, dattebane! And, oh!" She caught herself when the people who had been walking past us stopped, when usually they kept moving and stared less.

"That's nor—" I had been about to make a joke about self-gratification, but Kushina kept going.

"I just love you very much. As a mother," she swallowed. "I just... don't know what came over me back there."

I stopped and looked at her.

"Did you do something while I was asleep?"

"What?! No!"

"Then... do you mind if I take a look anyway?"

No answer. Just a face the color of a tomato and a gaze that was simultaneously pleading and resigned.

"Go ahead... Maybe you made an error somewhere when you were bringing me back," she finally said, grabbing onto that thought like a lifeline.

I connected my chakra to the Empire and looked. And... I was surprised. I glanced at Kushina, which made her shrink about two sizes, like a bedridden patient watching a psychiatrist and bracing for the diagnosis. I didn't like that look on her, and kept my own face carefully neutral so as not to make things worse.

"No, I'm fairly certain I... put you together correctly," I said, choosing my words with care. "The thing is, you brought me into this world, and we shared a great deal of time together back then, early on, and yet apart. Between us, there never formed the kind of bond that develops between parents and a child they actually raised. I grew up too far from you." I paused, weighing the decision. "So if feelings have taken this particular shape... I don't think we need to hold them back."

"N-Naruto..."

"And yes, you're very beautiful, and more importantly, you're kind and caring. I love you, and I'm not opposed to making what we have fuller, if that would make us both happier..."

After those words, a wave of emotion so powerful hit Kushina that I positioned myself to catch her if she started to go down.

"I think that's enough for today. Shall we put a pin in this?" I offered.

A quick nod.

"You look incredibly cute when you blush."

"..."

Afterward, in a silence that was equal parts charged and awkward, we continued our walk through Konoha. Topics didn't exactly come easily, so before long we found ourselves back home. And only there did something finally give us something to hold onto.

Kushina noticed a small blue fiery cat in Karin's arms and, with clear surprise, asked whether that was, by any chance, the Two-Tails bijuu. She got a yes, went briefly blank, then simply nodded.

She was clearly starting to get accustomed to the kind of supernatural that surrounds me on a regular basis.

Riding the wave of tailed beasts, Kushina asked how a certain flea-ridden fox was doing. She was told: no longer inside me, moved out to a nature reserve. When she asked why, I explained that I had originally planned to let him live at home as a pet. A form of ongoing punishment, in a sense... But after a year, when he'd given up entirely and was begging me to end the humiliation and swearing on everything he had never to go near humans again, I released him into the wild. The Two-Tails, Matatabi, on the other hand, had taken quite a liking to things here, regular meals, the pets from her former jinchuriki, and the other residents of the house.

The One-Tail and the Three-Tails had been released as well.

Kushina listened to all of this and nodded, as if it were perfectly within the bounds of normal.

After that, I showed her one of the home theaters. And this landed. A natural homemaker at heart, even if life hadn't let her be one for long, she discovered that the shows that had come out while she was away, and above all the ability to watch them at home, from the very first episode, all in a row, without leaving, pulled her in completely. I didn't fight it. She had taken in a great deal already. What was still coming could wait. Better she rest now and let herself breathe.

As for me, I turned to Empire business and a few ongoing projects. Not for long, though. With all processes running smoothly, I could free up as much time as I wanted these days. And this well-earned break, I wasn't stingy with it when it came to the people who mattered.

---

This fanfic is now complete. You can already read the entire story on my Patreon

 

[Lillie Jones]

thanks for the chapter