Chapter 402: Six Paths Sage, Will You Come?
Against a Chakra Fruit there was no comparison worth making.
One ornament versus the material key to godhood. The choice took a few seconds at most, which was longer than it deserved.
He set up a simple altar at the base of the tree using Isshiki's method, placed the sealed sphere on it, and began the sacrifice.
The sphere dissolved without sound. No final statement from whatever awareness remained inside it. Just the most refined material the world contained becoming energy, the tree's root network receiving it with immediate and total efficiency.
Something shifted in the tree the moment the absorption completed.
The trunk began to resonate, a deep vibration that bypassed hearing and arrived directly as physical sensation. Then the roots moved. They accelerated downward through rock layer after rock layer, past the geological formations that had defined the planet's underground structure for millions of years, driving for the core with the focused urgency of something that had finally located its food source.
What the Divine Tree fed on was never human chakra. Human chakra was a byproduct, a secondary leak from the planet's true energy reserves that the tree had inadvertently catalyzed over millennia of slow digestion. What the tree actually consumed was the planet itself — the foundational energy stored in the core since formation, the source from which all chakra had originally derived. Against that scale, human chakra was not even worth the comparison.
The ground responded immediately.
It started as fine tremors at the altar's perimeter, the kind that send small stones rolling. Then the radius expanded outward as though something beneath the surface was broadcasting distress in all directions simultaneously. Within moments it was not the altar shaking but every piece of rock and soil connected to the same planetary crust, which was everything, everywhere, all at once.
Cracks split the earth in lines that ran for dozens of kilometers before they exhausted themselves, their interiors glowing dark red, venting pressurized heat in jets that became fire columns where they reached the open air. The edges were raw and jagged, nothing like the weathered geometry of natural formation. These wounds were new.
Mountain ranges that had stood for geological epochs lost their foundations and came apart from the middle, the collapse dropping entire masses of rock in minutes rather than centuries, raising dust clouds that spread across whole regions of sky and did not come down.
Rivers met new elevated terrain and stopped being rivers. The water backed up, spread, found lower ground in directions it had never flowed before, drowned terrain that had no history of flooding.
Volcanoes that had been dormant since before recorded history received the energy their magma chambers had been accumulating for centuries and expressed it all simultaneously. The ash output from dozens of eruptions compounding in the upper atmosphere began reducing sunlight across entire continents.
The ocean floor shifted. The water above it had no choice but to move with it, and the displacement propagated outward in every direction at the same speed, reaching coastlines as walls of water that encountered geography with complete indifference.
The atmosphere, disturbed by the energy displacement occurring beneath it, generated weather at a scale that had no precedent. The conditions for every category of severe storm existed everywhere at once.
The entire shinobi world, in the same moment, became the site of every known category of natural disaster occurring simultaneously.
The Divine Tree stood in the center of all of it, growing visibly, its crown pushing higher through the disturbed atmosphere, the trunk thickening as the planetary energy poured into it, the bark patterns moving with increasing animation.
Yasushi floated above the altar and watched.
He was waiting for one specific thing.
In the version of events he had carried from his previous life, there was a moment during the confrontation with Kaguya when Hagoromo Otsutsuki appeared. Not physically — the Six Paths Sage had been dead for centuries. But he appeared as something. A presence, a voice, a transmission of yin-yang power extended to the people trying to seal his mother. He had been watching and he chose to intervene when the moment demanded it.
Yasushi had wanted that power. Throughout the war he had deliberately arranged situations that should have qualified as extreme enough to warrant the same response. Genuine crises. Real stakes. The kind of circumstances that should have prompted a spiritual intervention from someone who cared about whether the world survived.
Nothing had come.
No figure in white appearing in a mindscape to deliver the sage's inheritance. No orbs of light. No quiet guidance from beyond death extending gifts to the right recipient at the right moment. He had received none of it, not once, across the entire war.
The most direct explanation was that Hagoromo had looked at the situation and made a different assessment than he had made for Naruto and Sasuke. Those two had carried the right bloodlines and more importantly the right orientation. They had wanted to save the world in ways that resembled what Hagoromo had valued when he was alive. The gifts went to the inheritors of the spirit, not just the chakra.
Yasushi had spent years methodically destroying every institution Hagoromo's teachings had produced. He had no illusions about how that registered from the perspective of the man who built them.
The planet split open in every direction below him. The world expressed its distress in every language it had.
Nobody came.
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