Chapter 403: Bloodline Encompassing
Maybe the laws governing life and death were stricter than he had assumed.
Without descendants carrying his bloodline as vessels, crossing the boundary between the spiritual and physical worlds might have been genuinely beyond Hagoromo's reach. The constraints of being dead perhaps ran deeper than they appeared from the outside.
Yasushi waited until the top of the Divine Tree began to emit light in every color at once, a sacred bloom unfolding in slow motion at the crown of something that had just consumed a goddess. Hagoromo did not appear.
He stopped waiting and looked up.
The energy that had accumulated at the tree's summit represented the concentrated essence of a planet's worth of fundamental power, processed and refined through the Divine Tree's biological machinery over the course of the entire battle. It had reached the point where that energy could no longer remain energy. It needed to become something else.
The multicolored radiance burned through the ash and dust still hanging in the atmosphere above the disaster zone, the light too concentrated to be blocked by ordinary particulate. Layer after layer of tightly packed luminescence unfurled from the crown of the tree like a flower that had been waiting its entire existence for this moment. The fragrance that came off it reached Yasushi even at his altitude, and the part of his nervous system responsible for recognizing dangerous things registered it as something that was not exactly danger but was equally not safe to dismiss.
At the center of the bloom, where the light reached maximum density, a fruit was forming.
At first it was a crystalline structure, geometry shifting continuously, containing something that felt like concentrated cosmic principle rather than matter. Then, over the span of a few breaths, the crystalline structure completed its transition and became solid. A fruit, roughly the size of both fists combined, purple in color, hanging at the center of the light like something that had always been there waiting to be claimed.
The Chakra Fruit.
Even Yasushi, who had spent years pursuing this outcome with cold calculation, felt something he did not usually feel when he reached for it.
This was the highest resource the Otsutsuki clan had ever identified. The material basis for the Bloodline Encompassing. The key to everything that came after everything else.
It was sitting right in front of him with nothing between him and it.
He breathed in and out a few times. Steadied himself. Then rose slowly toward the crown and reached out with careful hands.
No reaction from the tree. No intervention from any direction. The fruit settled into his grip with the weight of something that knew where it was supposed to end up.
He brought it close and inhaled. The scent that came off it bypassed his nose entirely and went straight to whatever part of him was made of chakra, and that part responded immediately, stirring with recognition, reaching toward it.
"Incredible," he said quietly. Then he put it in his mouth.
The volume was deceptive. It dissolved the instant it touched his tongue, and what replaced it was not taste but a river.
The energy hit the back of his throat and kept going, pouring down into his body with the force and volume of something that had been held behind a dam for a very long time. Cold and burning simultaneously. Both sensations total, neither canceling the other. It spread through his meridians in the first second and reached the extremities in the second, and by the third second it was operating on a level below the meridian network entirely.
His chakra ignited.
Not figuratively. The reaction inside his body had the quality of combustion, the existing chakra responding to the introduced energy like fuel meeting a source of ignition, the whole system surging into activity at once. His blood vessels and chakra pathways became visible beneath his skin, light pushing outward through the tissue from inside. Every cell in his body woke up simultaneously and began consuming the incoming energy at maximum speed.
The Divine Tree had processed the raw planetary energy into something the body could metabolize. It was doing exactly what it was designed to do.
But the design had been built for Otsutsuki physiology.
With the metabolization came the memories.
Not memories in any ordinary sense. The planet's memories. Four billion years of geological process, atmospheric change, biological emergence, mass extinction, continental drift, ocean formation and evaporation and reformation, the gradual accumulation of every event that had ever occurred anywhere on this world's surface, all of it encoded into the energy that the planet had generated and stored in its core and that the Divine Tree had now extracted and processed and was currently distributing through Yasushi's nervous system.
The information volume was not something a human mind had ever been designed to receive.
It arrived as a wave that had no consideration for the thing it was hitting. The sense of self that Yasushi had built across decades of living, the individual's boundary between inside and outside, the subjective location from which a person experiences their own existence, all of it was simply overwhelmed by the scale of what was incoming. He was being erased by information the way a small boat gets erased by a tidal wave.
He felt it happening. He could feel his own edges dissolving.
He swore internally at Isshiki with genuine feeling. The intelligence about the fruit had been accurate as far as it went, but there was clearly something about the consumption process that had not been included. Whether deliberately or through assumption that Yasushi would already know, the result was the same.
He needed to do something now or there would not be a him left to do anything.
His hand moved on pure instinct. He brought his fingers together and drove them across his own forehead, splitting the skin down to bone in a single motion. The wound opened in the center of his brow, blood and scattered energy mixing and spilling outward.
He reached into his storage and brought out the Rinne Sharingan he had taken from Kaguya.
It was the only thing he possessed that had any connection to the Bloodline Encompassing. He had nothing else and no time to think of anything better. He pressed the eye into the wound.
The moment the Rinne Sharingan contacted his blood, and the Chakra Fruit's energy reached it from the inside, it activated.
Neural tissue extended from the back of the eye in dense branching networks, growing fast, driving through his orbital bone, pressing into brain tissue, reaching the chakra system and making connections with a speed that suggested the eye had been waiting for exactly this kind of available host. The Naruto world's eyes were truly plug-and-play in the most extreme possible sense.
The effect was immediate.
The Rinne Sharingan intercepted the planetary memory flood before it could continue dissolving what remained of his sense of self. The eye processed what his human brain could not directly accommodate, absorbing the information stream, organizing and storing it in a format that could be accessed rather than experienced continuously. The ancient geological record, the atmospheric history, the biological epochs, all of it was still present but it had been moved from the foreground to a background layer, available as information rather than overwhelming as direct experience.
What he felt in its place was access. The stored planetary memory translating into an intuitive understanding of how to move energy at a planetary scale.
His body completed its reconfiguration without the interference of the memory flood. The process was rapid once the obstruction was cleared, the energy having already done most of the fundamental work at the cellular level.
He came down slowly from altitude and landed on the broken ground.
From the outside, he looked much as he had at the end of the fight with Kaguya. The visible changes were minimal. The sage markings were gone. His proportions were unchanged.
The only new element was the vertical line at the center of his forehead, a thin scar that parted and opened as he landed, revealing the Rinne Sharingan settled in the new socket above his natural eyes. Nine tomoe turning slowly in crimson and pale violet, the pattern continuous and unhurried.
Yasushi knew what had happened inside him without needing to verify it externally.
The Bloodline Encompassing had taken hold.
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