Chapter 400: Kaguya, the Sustainable Crop
The Infinite Tsukuyomi was still running.
Which meant the chakra it had been drawing from every cocooned body across the shinobi world was still feeding into Kaguya, and the body she no longer had was growing back.
The severed neck began to move. New tissue pushed downward from the edge of the casing, vertebrae forming one by one, muscle threading around them, pale skin following close behind. The regeneration was unhurried and completely indifferent to what had just happened. Energy from the Infinite Tsukuyomi arrived as faint white points of light, flowing into the wound and converting immediately into mass.
Yasushi watched it for a moment.
Then he brought the sword down.
The newly formed neck bones snapped. The tissue that had not fully connected yet tore apart, energy and blood scattering outward together. He picked up the severed piece by reflex and tossed it sideways without looking.
The White Snake Sage caught it before it finished its arc. Her amber eyes had not moved from Kaguya since the moment she arrived, and the moment the piece left Yasushi's hand she snapped it out of the air, swallowed it in one smooth motion, and the shape of it traveled visibly down the length of her body before disappearing. She exhaled a long breath through her nose. The blood-warm air from it drifted across the space between them.
She was already watching for the next one.
Yasushi laughed and reached over to take the containment sphere with Black Zetsu inside it from Neji. He held it up next to Kaguya's head.
Mother and son, reunited at close range in the worst possible configuration.
"Black Zetsu." He kept his voice conversational. "I've been thinking. Your mother regenerates very quickly. And she's going to keep regenerating as long as the Infinite Tsukuyomi is running." He tilted Kaguya's head slightly, indicating the fresh tissue already beginning to push out from the bottom of the casing again. "She grows back fast enough that I could harvest her several times a day without any real effort."
Black Zetsu went completely still inside the sphere.
"You understand what I'm saying. I'm saying I could farm her."
The darkness inside the sphere detonated.
Black Zetsu threw himself at the walls with everything he had, the form cycling wildly, spines and claws and flat spreading sheets of black matter slamming against the containment surface one after another. The prison pulsed with each impact, the light running through it in waves, and held. His voice had lost all of its characteristic register. The low, cold intelligence that had spent a thousand years running patient schemes across the shinobi world was simply gone, replaced with something raw and animal and completely without strategy.
He screamed. He kept screaming.
Yasushi cut the new growth away again as it appeared and tossed it to the White Snake Sage, who caught it and swallowed it with the efficient satisfaction of something doing exactly what it was built to do.
The cycle repeated.
Grow. Cut. Catch. Swallow.
It had taken on the quality of a ritual. The timing was almost regular.
"Hokage-sama." Neji's voice came in measured and clear. He had been watching without comment, but he had reached the point where comment was necessary. "The Infinite Tsukuyomi is still drawing chakra from everyone it captured. If we don't end this soon, people are going to start running out."
Yasushi's expression shifted. A flicker of genuine annoyance crossed his face, the kind produced by being reminded of an obligation when you were in the middle of enjoying yourself.
He looked at Kaguya.
He looked at the still-screaming Black Zetsu.
He made a sound of mild regret.
Hiruko, for his part, was resigned rather than disappointed. The half-body already stored in his Daikokuten was sufficient material. Intact samples were useful but completeness was not strictly necessary for what he intended. He had what he needed.
The White Snake Sage was a different matter.
She had no research capability. Her method of acquisition was singular: consumption. The Bloodline Encompassing was something she wanted to absorb through eating, and Neji had just informed her that the supply was being cut off. The dissatisfaction on her face was not subtle. The killing intent that came off her was not subtle either, dense enough that the air around her developed a faint charge.
"Such a kind heart, little one." She looked at Neji. The forked tongue moved behind her teeth. "How have you survived this long?"
Neji's Reincarnation Eye chakra stirred. The giant Tenseigan rested in the crook of his arm. He looked at her sideways with the calm of someone who had earned the right not to be threatened by this, and said nothing.
Which annoyed her more.
Before it could develop further, Yasushi's gaze moved to her. One look. The White Snake Sage read what was in it, and the killing intent retracted. She folded it back inside herself, resumed her pleasant elderly expression, and became very interested in the middle distance.
The situation had changed since the days when he came to her cave asking for something. That was a different Yasushi than the one standing here now. The war he had just finished conducting had put him at the top of every hierarchy the shinobi world had, and the power he had assembled in the process was sufficient to remove her from her underground home in its entirety if he decided to. She was aware of this. She did not like it. She accepted it anyway.
Yasushi turned back to Kaguya.
He extended the casing that covered her head, letting the material grow downward, wrapping each new segment of cervical bone as it formed and immediately locking it in place, the energy hardening around each vertebra before the next one could develop properly. He worked his way down methodically, sealing the spine, sealing the connection points, building a structure that turned the regeneration itself into a component of the trap. Every new piece that grew went immediately into a fixed, immovable configuration. The body could form. It simply could not function.
When the casing had extended far enough downward, he let it spread outward and close over the rest of her skull. The material covered her face completely, leaving only three openings. The two white eyes. The Rinne Sharingan.
What remained visible of Kaguya was those three eyes set into a smooth, cold, featureless surface. No expression available. No face. Just the eyes, watching from inside, carrying whatever was left of a being who had eaten the fruit of a Divine Tree and called herself a goddess and been reduced to an ornamental object held at arm's length by someone who found her amusing.
Yasushi reached in through the openings and removed all three eyes carefully, one by one, and placed each one into the prepared culture dish he had ready for exactly this purpose.
Without the eyes, she had nothing. The dimensional techniques lived in the Rinne Sharingan. The visual range and precision of the Byakugan lived in the white eyes. The ability to reconnect to the Infinite Tsukuyomi, the ability to sense anything around her, the ability to initiate any technique at all â€" all of it resided in those three organs and all three of those organs were now sitting in a dish.
The casing remained. The body inside it would keep trying to grow, sealed into its fixed architecture, going nowhere.
Kaguya was contained.
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