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