Chapter 404: The Uchiha Divine Nation (End of Volume Three)
With the Bloodline Encompassing complete, the Divine Tree finished what it had come to do and stopped.
The radiance at the crown dimmed gradually, the column of energy that had connected the tree to the sky dissipating without drama. The trunk ceased its expansion. Something like withdrawal began at the edges of the tree's mass, a slow contraction, the bark losing its vitality, the outer wood going gray. The tree had spent everything it had on producing the fruit. What remained was the structure without the substance.
The planet's distress signals fell from their peak but did not end. The energy extraction had stopped, but the forces it had set in motion had their own momentum. The fault lines that had opened were not going to close. The mountains that had collapsed were not going to reassemble. The atmospheric disruption that had been building since the first volcanic eruptions would continue expressing itself for months, maybe longer. The aftershocks rolled through the ground in continuous low waves, the planet adjusting to a new internal configuration it had not chosen.
The tsunamis had lost their initial height but kept moving, each successive wave lower than the last and still sufficient to reshape whatever coastline it encountered. The ash in the upper atmosphere would affect the climate in ways that would not be fully understood for years.
Yasushi looked at all of it through his new Rinne Sharingan and saw the detail clearly. The ley lines running through the planet's crust were depleted unevenly across the affected regions, the life energy that had sustained those areas of land drawn out permanently, leaving invisible damage that would manifest as reduced agricultural yield, slowed forest recovery, species loss among organisms that depended on specific environmental conditions. The scars would be geological in their permanence.
He thought about Hagoromo Otsutsuki moving through the aftermath of a similar event a thousand years ago.
The title of Six Paths Sage had not been given in recognition of power alone. Power was easy to recognize and did not require sustained effort to demonstrate. Earning the kind of name that outlasted a person's lifetime by a millennium required something different. It required being present in the wreckage, repeatedly, in person, doing the slow and unglamorous work of helping individual survivors recover across a span of years.
The founding of the ninshu probably had begun as disaster relief infrastructure. A method for coordinating recovery operations across a fragmented, traumatized population that had just watched its world come apart.
Yasushi considered this without judgment. The Six Paths Sage had been a genuinely benevolent person who had earned his reputation honestly. None of that changed the fact that his legacy had been built on institutions that Yasushi had found useful to dismantle, or that his spiritual presence had apparently decided Yasushi was not a worthy recipient of his gifts.
The man had probably developed a strong opinion about Yasushi by this point. Strong enough that he would eventually arrange someone to deal with the situation.
Yin-yang power could seal anyone. Not just Kaguya.
Yasushi turned the thought over once, then dismissed it.
Every tailed beast in the world was going to belong to the Uchiha. The Divine Tree was under his personal control. Whatever quality of savior Hagoromo chose to cultivate and send, the gap between that person's starting point and Yasushi's current position was not a gap that a speech and some inherited power could reliably close. He was not Kaguya, who had never developed real combat instincts and relied entirely on her natural advantages. Whoever came would face something different.
He snapped his fingers in the direction of the tree.
The branches extended downward and the cocoons came loose, the white organic material unwrapping and releasing the people inside one by one, thousands and then millions of them descending to the broken ground below. Most of them were disoriented and unsteady, the transition from the dream world back to physical reality taking time to process. But they were intact. The Infinite Tsukuyomi had held them suspended and fed on their chakra gradually. None of them had been drained to the point of permanent harm.
There was a particular irony in the fact that the cocoons had saved them. The natural disasters that Yasushi's Divine Tree sacrifice had triggered would have caught most of these people directly if they had been standing on the ground when it happened. Being suspended from a Divine Tree root network several meters in the air had, by accident, placed them above the worst of the flooding and debris.
Cause and effect in the shinobi world rarely operated in straight lines.
He opened a large Yomotsu Hirasaka portal in front of the tree. On the other side was the Primordiosphere, one of the sealed dimensional spaces within Amenotejikara, a void of appropriate size and stability to serve as a permanent home for something of the Divine Tree's scale. He guided the tree through the portal, directing it to root itself at the dimension's center. The tree complied with the unhurried compliance of something that no longer needed to grow and was content to simply exist. He sealed the portal after it and moved the access point to a location only he knew.
The Divine Tree and its White Zetsu network were now his personal resource.
He opened a second portal and stepped through into the ruins of Konoha.
The village he emerged into was unrecognizable compared to what it had been before the war. What Obito's Susanoo battle with Madara had not leveled, the earthquakes had rearranged. But the people were there. His people, along with the released cocoon survivors and the remaining forces from every faction that had fought in the final battle, all of them present in various states of exhaustion and injury and confusion.
He raised one hand. His Rinne Sharingan and both Rinnegan blazed simultaneously, and the Yang Release came down across the entire area in a wave of green light, washing over every person in range. Anyone who was not already dead felt it hit them. The wounds closed. The chakra exhaustion lifted. The bodies that had been running past their limits for hours reset to something functional.
The response was immediate and unanimous.
Hands went up everywhere. The shouting started before the healing light had even fully faded. Former enemies, surrendered alliance soldiers, Konoha's own forces, all of them calling out at once with the specific energy of people who have just been through something that reordered their understanding of what was possible.
"Praise Hokage-sama!"
"Long live Hokage-sama!"
The alliance had lost the will to fight before the Chibaku Tensei hit. The Infinite Tsukuyomi had finished the job of breaking down whatever conviction remained. And now this, a mass healing on a scale that had no precedent, delivered without conditions or requirements. There was no strategic framework remaining inside which continued resistance made sense.
The Five Great Nations ceased to exist as political entities in the weeks that followed.
Yasushi dispatched shinobi forces to every remaining country under the banner of disaster relief assistance, providing support with the flood recovery, the volcanic aftermath, the supply disruptions. The assistance was genuine. It was also not optional. Each country that received help was simultaneously incorporated into the new order, the governing structures of the old system replaced with the administrative frameworks that Konoha had already developed through the unification process.
Most of them accepted without significant resistance. The ones that tried to resist encountered the same mathematical reality that the shinobi alliance had encountered at the border: the gap in capability was simply too large for resistance to be a rational choice.
It took slightly over a year for the last of the active conflicts to resolve and the disaster recovery to stabilize enough that normal governance could resume.
At the end of that process, with the entire shinobi world organized under a single administrative structure for the first time in its history, the various clans and factions that now operated within that structure convened and did what organizations do when they need to formalize a power arrangement that everyone already understands.
They made it official.
Yasushi accepted the position with the particular expression of someone who had never needed external validation for what they were but was willing to acknowledge the ceremony for the sake of everyone else.
The nation was named the Uchiha Divine Nation. The capital was established at the site of the old Konoha village, rebuilt from the destruction with a new design, renamed Konoha Divine City. The Uchiha clan held the position of the Divine Nation's priestly lineage in perpetuity, the bloodline that maintained the connection between the nation and its deity, the role passing by inheritance through every generation forward.
Yasushi was the deity.
When all of it was settled and the administrative work was done and the world had resumed the basic functions of being a world, he went to the storage scroll he had been carrying since before the war and unrolled it carefully on the floor of a quiet room.
He had kept the three bodies in perfect condition. The same attention he had given to every other element of his plan, he had given to this. No decomposition. The faces were exactly as they had been. His father's face with the warrior's habitual composure. His mother's face, softer. His younger brother Sachi, who had been too young for any of this and had died for it anyway.
The only marks of what had happened were the wounds on their chests, long since dried and bloodless, the damage that had ended them preserved exactly as it had been.
He was not going to use the Edo Tensei for this. He could have. The Edo Tensei would have given him back their chakra signatures, their personalities as he remembered them, functional continuity with the people they had been. But the bodies would remain corpses underneath, and the technique was a form of compulsion, an imposition on souls that had not asked to return. For everyone else he had revived that way, the utility of the tool outweighed those considerations.
Not for this.
He settled onto his knees in front of them, brought both hands together, and let all three of his eyes open at full capacity, the light from the Rinne Sharingan and both Rinnegan filling the room.
"Outer Path: Samsara of Heavenly Life Technique."
The chakra and life force went out of him in a sustained pour, more expensive than anything else the Six Paths level offered, the cost coming from deep reserves that were not meant for this kind of sustained withdrawal. He did not ration it. He sent what was needed until the technique told him it had what it needed.
The wounds on their chests closed.
He watched it happen. The tissue drawing together, the damage reversing, the color returning to the skin as circulation resumed beneath it. The process moved from the wounds outward, the body systems coming back online in sequence.
The warmth returned. He could feel it from where he was kneeling.
Then the heartbeats.
Three of them, offset slightly from each other, starting faint and unsteady and strengthening over the course of the next minute into something regular and confident.
Yasushi's hands were shaking slightly. He noticed this and did not try to stop it.
His father's eyes opened first. The focus took a moment to arrive, the awareness assembling itself from a long distance. When it landed, the first thing in it was the trained alertness of a shinobi trying to understand his situation.
His mother's eyes came next, soft and searching, finding the room and then finding him.
His brother blinked several times with the uncomplicated expression of someone who does not yet know what they have missed.
Yasushi looked at all three of them.
The expression that crossed his face was one that would have been unrecognizable to anyone who had only known him during the war. No calculation in it. No performance. Nothing cold or amused or tactical. Just the unguarded relief of someone who had been carrying something very heavy for a very long time and had finally been allowed to put it down.
He opened his arms.
"Father, mother, and Sachi. Welcome back."
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U can end it here, if u feel like the story is dragging it(which it is)...but the next volume gets interesting,
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