Hagoromo Ōtsutsuki, later known as the Sage of Six Paths, was never born into an ordinary world.
He was born into a cage made of divine fear.
His mother, Kaguya Ōtsutsuki, was the first being on Earth to wield chakra as a system rather than a natural force.
She had come from beyond the stars, an emissary of her clan, sent to cultivate the God Tree, an organism designed to drain a planet's life and condense it into a chakra fruit.
When the fruit matured, one of the two Ōtsutsuki who planted it would be sacrificed to nourish it, while the survivor would harvest the fruit and return home with godlike power.
That was the cycle.
Kaguya broke it.
Rather than offering herself or her partner, she consumed the fruit alone.
Overnight, she became something beyond mortal or alien, a living convergence of chakra and nature's will, an unbalanced god.
Her purpose shifted from service to control.
Looking upon humanity, she saw chaos, violence, and waste, and decided to save them by ruling them.
With the power of the Ten Tails, the living core of the God Tree, she eventually brought every land, every tribe, and every living thing under her dominion.
The people worshipped her as the Rabbit Goddess, a savior who ended war and famine. In truth, her peace was nothing but fear frozen into law.
It was under this enforced stillness that Hagoromo and his twin brother, Hamura, were born, children of both human and Ōtsutsuki blood.
They inherited their mother's vast potential, but also the planet's natural soul, a contradiction that made them something new.
They could sense both chakra and nature.
From birth, they were watched by Kaguya's eyes, the Byakugan, which saw all, and the Rinne Sharingan, which bent reality.
But as they grew, so did their awareness.
That was when Gamamaru reached them.
At the time, the Great Toad Sage was still young, no larger than a hill, yet already ancient beyond human reckoning.
Through dreams, whispers, and subtle disturbances of natural energy, he showed the brothers the truth, that their mother's rule was enslavement, and that her power came from a stolen fruit meant to devour the world itself.
It was Gamamaru who taught Hagoromo the difference between chakra and natural energy. Chakra was an artificial system, born from the God Tree's corruption. Natural energy was the planet's own essence, older and purer.
Under that guidance, Hagoromo awakened Sage Mode, not by borrowing power, but by reconnecting with what already existed within his half-Ōtsutsuki blood. He became the first true 'Human Sage'.
When Kaguya finally lost control, consumed by paranoia and fear of rebellion, she merged with the God Tree itself, becoming the Ten Tails incarnate.
The brothers faced her in the first true war between gods and men.
They prevailed.
The Ten Tails' body was sealed into the moon, and Hagoromo divided its chakra into nine separate entities, the tailed beasts, to prevent its resurrection.
Afterward, Hagoromo traveled the world, preaching understanding and connection, founding what would later be called ninshū, the spiritual precursor to all modern ninjutsu.
He became legend, then myth, then religion.
The Sage of Six Paths.
Yet long before his death, he knew it would not endure.
He watched humanity twist connection into competition, and ninshū into ninjutsu.
He foresaw the coming conflict between his sons, Ashura and Indra, a fracture mirroring the one that had consumed his mother.
So he made a choice.
Rather than pass fully into the Pure Land, Hagoromo tethered his spirit to the Purgatory, bound to the space between life and death.
There, he could still observe, still guide, still influence the cycle of reincarnation and the flow of the Pure Land itself.
Chakra had always existed. Every living thing carried it in some measure, linking body and soul. Hagoromo had not created it.
He had merely been the first to teach humanity how to mold it.
He could do so because his birth granted him a reservoir beyond any other being, and because the Ōtsutsuki had long mastered chakra as second nature.
He passed that knowledge down, fully aware of what it would become.
He saw the wars. The bloodshed. The centuries of suffering.
And still, he acted.
Why?
Because he trusted Gamamaru's vision.
The Great Toad Sage had shown him fragments of a future where humanity's endless conflict, terrible as it was, still led toward the best possible outcome.
A road soaked in blood, at the end of which flickered a fragile hope.
The hope that this chaotic species might one day stand against what was coming, the inevitable return of the Ōtsutsuki.
Could Hagoromo have controlled his sons more tightly, prevented the reincarnated hatred that followed?
Probably.
But he did not.
Because all of it, the wars, the tragedies, the cycles of hatred, were part of the design.
This world's history was a stage.
A long, continuous play guided by two ancient beings, a half-human ghost and an old frog, both steering the same story toward its least disastrous ending.
A world built on pain, in the hope that one day, that pain would finally mean something.
Gamamaru had no intention of ever sharing the world's natural energy with the Ōtsutsuki. To him, that was the ultimate betrayal, giving the planet's lifeblood back to its invaders.
Hagoromo, for his part, understood that if the balance collapsed again, even his lingering existence could fade.
After all, beings like the Otsutsuki, or anyone even close to them like him, were never easy to kill or for them to die.
Their souls could still linger, no matter how their bodies ended.
Not to mention, even his sons' souls, each only a quarter Otsutsuki by nature, were still too powerful to enter the Pure Land after death.
They lingered instead, caught between endless reincarnations and the edges of Purgatory.
Though this cycle was also partly orchestrated and constantly manipulated by Hagoromo himself, as one of the central acts in the grand play he and Gamamaru had built, it still proved the point.
Their souls were simply too immense, their existence too unnatural, to ever truly rest inside the Pure Land easily.
That was exactly what had happened to Hagoromo as well, but in a way more clear sense.
After his physical death, his soul didn't vanish; it stayed behind.
Slowly, it spread through the Purgatory until he made that entire realm his domain.
Over time, he became intimately familiar with the flow of the Pure Land itself, how souls entered it, how they moved within it, and what they carried within them.
He had long since learned how to control that realm to an extent as the strongest soul and force there.
In the process, he gained new spiritual powers, things no mortal could even describe.
Even before his death, he had prepared contingencies in the physical world, fragments of his will and essence hidden across generations.
Through them, he remained aware of how far their plans had progressed.
Gamamaru, meanwhile, could reach him freely.
The two of them were strong enough to communicate across dimensions at will, their coordination unhindered by distance or realm.
Hagoromo could have returned to the living world already.
But that had never been the goal.
He understood the requirement clearly.
He needed a body capable of accepting him.
Without one, his return would be incomplete, unstable.
Worse, returning too early would weaken the planet's own defensive cycles, a result both he and Gamamaru had calculated and rejected.
Paradoxically, his presence would make the world more vulnerable.
So he waited.
The optimal path required patience.
His very return could weaken the natural defense cycle of this world.
That was why he chose to wait.
He intended to act only after the blond lineage destined to repel the Ōtsutsuki had completed its role.
Once their bodies and powers had matured enough, once the external threat was nearly defeated and victory within reach, Hagoromo would make a move.
At the precise moment, Gamamaru helped calculate, using his unique foresight to peer across countless distant possibilities under certain limitations.
He would take one of their bodies, rise again, and claim the outcome of more than a thousand years of preparation.
Only then would the true plan begin.
The two of them would suppress the other Sage regions entirely, Snake and Slug alike, and bring all natural energy under a single authority, forging an absolute order, the balance Gamamaru sought by the very nature of his existence, and the one Hagoromo desired out of mortal greed, control, and a god's impulse to rule everything beneath him.
Gamamaru would shape the world from within nature itself, while Hagoromo would rule over humanity, souls, reincarnation, and spiritual law.
They would become the planet's true gods.
Nature and will combined.
This had always been Hagoromo's true nature.
Ambitious. Calculating. Unwilling to serve anything, or anyone, forever.
In truth, he and Gamamaru had reached this understanding long ago, more than a thousand years in the past, even before they confronted Kaguya.
Back then, they were still young in spirit, one a curious toad, the other already learning to think like a god.
The world never realized that Hagoromo had deceived even his own twin.
Near the end of his life, he had instructed Hamura to pour nearly all his essence into the Giant Tenseigan on the moon.
Ostensibly, this was to ensure his descendants could survive in that barren place, guarding the Ten-Tails husk and watching for invaders from beyond the stars. In truth, that was all a part of the performance.
Hagoromo only wanted to remove his greatest rival that way.
There had never been a true need for that vigilance.
Gamamaru could already sense any Ōtsutsuki descendant.
And the Ten-Tails husk itself had been bound to the Rinnegan, meaning it could be summoned to Earth at will by any chosen successor at any time.
So, there was no real reason to guard something that was no longer sealed.
Nothing needed guarding.
Hamura had been removed.
The entire "Moon Clan" narrative, the duty, the sacrifice, all of it had been a clean way to drain his brother's power and eliminate his greatest logical rival.
Hamura surrendered most of his soul to sustain the Tenseigan, leaving behind only a fragment, which he needed.
That fragment would eventually be drawn into the woman destined to stand beside the next "main character."
Every step was calculated.
Every bloodline, every prophecy, every so-called chosen hero was nothing more than stagecraft, a world-spanning theater built to prepare for Hagoromo's return.
The story had never truly been about peace.
It had always been about control.
For around a thousand years, their control had held.
From the very beginning, when the world was still raw and history had not yet learned to lie to itself, Gamamaru had calculated the path.
Not a single future, never something so crude, but countless possibilities, scattered like grains of sand.
From those, he selected trajectories.
From trajectories, sequences.
From sequences, steps.
Small ones. Slow ones. Global ones.
Wars allowed here. Peace enforced there.
Bloodlines preserved, others culled.
Ideals seeded, then shattered, then reforged.
All of it nudged, never forced, so that the world would eventually arrive at one particular convergence point, the highest-probability outcome where humanity could repel the Ōtsutsuki, and where Hagoromo would be offered the most compatible, powerful vessel imaginable.
The blond lineage.
Children of destiny, heroes, anchors, whatever name the age chose to give them. Naruto Uzumaki was not an accident.
Neither was what would come after him. He was the product of a thousand years of correction, pruning, and patience.
Gamamaru did not see the future as a line.
He saw it as a storm of branching outcomes, endlessly shifting.
His gift was not prophecy, but filtration.
Given enough time and distance, he could determine which actions increased the density of favorable paths and which thinned them out.
And, at long intervals, constrained by heavy cooldowns and natural limits, he could check their progress.
Confirm whether the world was still drifting toward the chosen convergence, or whether adjustments were needed.
For centuries, it worked.
The path bent, but it held.
Then, a few years ago, something changed.
At first it was subtle. Gamamaru noticed delays.
Blind spots. Futures that should have been visible becoming indistinct.
His foresight still functioned, but the effort required increased, as if he were trying to see through water slowly turning to mud.
Natural energy itself felt different.
Not hostile. Not chaotic.
Disturbed.
The flow of the world's essence, once clear and responsive, began to resist prediction. Possibilities collapsed prematurely. Causal chains blurred.
Outcomes that should have followed clean logic began to branch unpredictably.
The fate of the world was being muddied.
At first, they assumed it was noise. Random deviation.
The aftershocks of accumulated interference.
But the effect worsened. In recent months, it accelerated.
Gamamaru found himself unable to fully deploy his sight at all.
That had never happened before.
Something was interfering with the world at a foundational level, not acting against fate directly, but contaminating the medium through which fate could be read.
It was as if natural energy itself, the collective will of the world, was being distorted, slowly bent away from its usual equilibrium.
Whatever it was, it had the potential to collapse the entire trajectory they had cultivated for so long.
If left unchecked, it could invalidate centuries of preparation.
Worse, it could make the future permanently opaque, severing Gamamaru's ability to guide the world at all.
They needed to act.
The problem was, the anomaly could not be clearly seen.
Only fragments emerged when Gamamaru strained his sight to its limits.
Impressions, not answers.
A figure with pale hair.
A presence that felt disciplined rather than chaotic.
A cluster of followers, each carrying rare, unusually refined bloodlines.
And again and again, one fixed point.
Konoha.
Always Konoha.
Not as a cause, but as an impact zone.
A place where too many threads converged, where the anomaly's interference would ripple outward and contaminate everything else.
That was when Gamamaru made his decision.
Jiraiya was recalled.
Not as a messenger. Not as a tool. But as a stabilizer.
Someone close enough to the convergence to act, yet flexible enough not to collapse under new variables.
Gamamaru taught him personally, bypassing older restrictions, accelerating his Sage training beyond what had ever been intended for him.
At the same time, Hagoromo began activating contingencies.
Fragments he had left behind.
Dormant mechanisms.
Sealed assets prepared precisely for a scenario like this.
Measures never used in the canon path, because they had never been needed before.
Until now.
The grand play was no longer progressing cleanly toward its ending.
Something was pushing back.
And for the first time, control itself was being questioned.
Fortunately, Hagoromo had prepared contingencies long before that question ever arose.