Chapter 401: Planting a Tree
Before the eyes could regenerate inside the empty sockets, Yasushi was already preparing the next step.
Concentrated yin chakra condensed in his hand, forming a set of nail-like spikes, each one dense and dark purple-black. He pressed them one by one into the depths of the empty eye cavities, driving them through the orbital bone, anchoring them deep into the skull.
Then the remaining energy of the casing moved. The three openings drew closed from the edges inward, the material flowing together and sealing until the surface was smooth and unbroken. What remained was a featureless dark sphere, perfectly round, with nothing visible except two barely perceptible shallow depressions where the spike heads sat embedded beneath the sealed surface.
No openings. No eyes. No way in or out.
"Mother."
Black Zetsu's voice had lost everything that made it recognizable. The low intelligence, the centuries of patient scheming, the composed register it had maintained through every setback — all of it gone. What came out of the containment sphere now was just a sound.
Then he detonated.
Not literally. But the darkness inside the sphere went critical all at once, the form abandoning any attempt at shape, the black matter filling every cubic centimeter of the interior and hammering outward against the walls in a continuous, formless wave. The green light of the Reincarnation Eye chakra prison was swallowed from the inside out, the sphere turning fully black, the surface trembling with the force of what was trapped within it.
Yasushi weighed the sphere in his hand for a moment, listening to it vibrate.
Then one of his Truth-Seeking Orbs drifted forward and wrapped itself around the outside of the containment sphere, spreading evenly across the surface and hardening into a second shell. He adjusted the chakra composition deliberately, tuning the outer layer to block both sound and light completely.
Inside that construction, Black Zetsu now existed in total sensory nothing. No sound. No light. No information of any kind. An eternal dark with no edges and no reference points.
There was nowhere more appropriate for him to be.
The transition back was quiet.
Without the Rinne Sharingan sustaining it, Amenotejikara simply ended. Everyone was just somewhere else instead, standing on cracked earth under an open sky, the air dry and cold after the heat of the dimensional space.
The blood moon still hung overhead, but its light had changed. The Rinne Sharingan pattern was fading from its surface without Kaguya to maintain it. The red was becoming something closer to normal, gradual and incomplete.
The Divine Tree filled the horizon. Its trunk rose like a gray pillar connecting earth and sky, the bark surface moving faintly in patterns that looked uncomfortably like faces pressed from the inside. The upper branches had long since disappeared into the cloud layer. Hanging from its root networks, the white cocoons swayed in their millions. The Infinite Tsukuyomi had been cut off mid-process, leaving its harvest suspended in place. Sunlight struggling through the dust and cloud cover hit the pale shapes in scattered patches. The entire world looked like a silent graveyard hung with its own population.
The White Snake Sage announced that she was full and wanted to go home. She said a brief farewell and released the summoning, departing with the unhurried ease of something that had eaten well and wanted to lie down.
Hiruko was already thinking about the half-body waiting in his Daikokuten storage. Yasushi grabbed his arm before he could leave.
"The Karma seal is still in you. Do not fuse Kaguya's body into yourself until Shin removes it. If you absorb that material while Isshiki's mark is still active, you risk waking it up. I can't come back to find a different person wearing your face."
Hiruko stopped. The greed receded and the intelligence behind it reasserted itself. He cold-snorted with the particular dignity of someone caught making an obvious mistake.
"I was going back to do research. Material of this quality is a once-in-a-thousand-years find. Every moment wasted is a loss."
Yasushi let go of his arm and said nothing further. Hiruko left.
Neji was thinking about his clan. He handed the giant Tenseigan back to Yasushi, said his farewell, and departed. One by one the others followed until Yasushi was alone at the base of the Divine Tree.
The wind moved through the root networks and the millions of suspended cocoons and produced a low continuous sound that was not quite moaning and not quite anything else. The cracked earth stretched away in every direction.
He detached the ornament from his waist and turned it slowly in his fingers, feeling the cold of the sealed surface.
The Otsutsuki clan had many methods for surviving death. Those who traveled between stars had developed ways to persist across timescales that ordinary existence could not accommodate. Soul-level preservation. Latent reconstruction. Patterns impressed so deeply into the fabric of existence that ordinary destruction could not fully erase them.
Kaguya in particular had crossed a threshold through the Bloodline Encompassing where the soul itself became genuinely difficult to end. Physical destruction was not enough. Complete obliteration of the body might only produce a long dormancy, the essential pattern waiting in some corner of the world for the right circumstances to reconstitute itself.
And whenever it needed someone to provide those circumstances, the shinobi world had a reliable supply of candidates.
Yasushi thought about his own future descendants. Uchiha who would inherit the bloodline, the eyes, and inevitably some share of the clan's particular relationship with obsession and extremity. The Sharingan awakened through emotional trauma. The distance between the power it offered and the stability required to use it wisely had never been wide. It had produced plenty of broken people already without anyone having access to instructions for reviving an ancient goddess.
He was not going to spend his remaining years managing this risk, and he was absolutely not going to trust his successors to handle it after he was gone.
Which meant one thing.
He needed to sacrifice her to the Divine Tree.
The Divine Tree was the Otsutsuki clan's ultimate harvest instrument, and by that same design it was the ultimate terminus for anything fed into it. Sacrifice meant complete dissolution — not death in any conventional sense, but the systematic breakdown of every element constituting an existence. The soul's pattern. The chakra signature. The life energy. A thousand years of accumulated individuality. All of it broken down into raw planetary energy and returned to the planet's fundamental cycle.
Nothing fed to the tree could be revived by any method. There was no resurrection technique that applied to something fully converted into base energy. It was not destruction. It was erasure.
And sacrificing an Otsutsuki clan member would additionally accelerate the tree's growth, producing a Chakra Fruit far sooner than it otherwise would.
This intelligence had come from Isshiki directly. Given the depth of Isshiki's hatred for Kaguya, Yasushi was confident it was accurate. The one thing Isshiki would never do was give him false information that might result in her surviving.
He stood at the base of the tree for a moment longer, still turning the ornament in his fingers.
The ornament idea had genuine appeal. Kaguya and Black Zetsu side by side on his desk, available for occasional inspection of whatever remained of the awareness still trapped inside. The specific pleasure of keeping the most powerful being in the world's history as a decorative curiosity was not nothing.
But a Chakra Fruit was something else entirely.
****
70+advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces