Chapter 265: The Half-Immortal Body
After the upgrade of Kenbunshoku Haki and the cascade of transformations that followed, Ragnar finally stirred from his trance-like state.
He felt... extraordinary.
Every inch of his body hummed with a deep, resonant comfort. It was not merely physical relaxation—it was a sublimation that reached down into the very core of his soul. An elevation of life itself. Irreplaceable. Irreversible.
He raised his palm before his eyes. It looked no different from usual. The same skin. The same calluses. The same faint scars from battles long past.
Without ceremony, he formed a thin blade of chakra in his right hand—a pale, flickering edge similar to a medical ninja's scalpel. He was no medic, but the principles of chakra nature and shape transformation were second nature to him now. He drew the edge lightly across his left forearm.
Shhk.
A thin wound opened. Blood welled and began to trickle downward.
"Ah!"
The sharp cry came from behind him. Konan had gone pale, her face drained of color. She, Nagato, and Yahiko had been approaching after seeing their teacher stir from his meditation. They had arrived just in time to witness what looked disturbingly like self-harm.
Blood had always frightened her. It was a girl's instinct, perhaps, or simply the accumulated trauma of watching too many people she loved bleed.
"Teacher! What are you doing?!" Yahiko's voice pitched high with alarm. The teacher had always been intense, but this? This was terrifying.
Nagato said nothing. His Rinnegan studied the scene with quiet intensity. The teacher was no ordinary man. An action that appeared senseless on the surface... there had to be a deeper meaning.
Even Kokuō padded closer, her round eyes fixed on her future contractor with undisguised curiosity. What was the human playing at now?
"Watch," Ragnar said calmly.
He raised his left arm and held it steady before the three children.
They leaned in.
The thin wound—still glistening with fresh blood—was closing. Not slowly. Not gradually. The flesh knitted itself together with visible speed, the skin sealing as though an invisible needle were stitching it shut from within. Within several breaths, the cut had vanished entirely. Only the smeared blood around it remained as evidence it had ever existed.
"Healed on its own...?"
"That's incredible!"
Yahiko's pupils shone with wonder, his face lit by a fierce, infectious excitement. In his eyes, this was nothing short of a miracle. The teacher was already a god to him—this only confirmed it. Self-healing? Without any jutsu? Without any seal? It was beyond human.
"Wah..."
Konan's lips parted in a soft gasp. Her small, pale hands flew up to cover her mouth, but her wide, luminous eyes betrayed her awe. She looked impossibly cute in that moment, frozen between shock and delight.
This ability...
Nagato was shaken, but he did not give in to blind worship. He was not Yahiko. He was not Konan. His mind worked differently. He remembered.
When he had been young—very young, still living among the scattered remnants of his clan—the Uzumaki's self-healing ability had been treated as something normal. Unremarkable. Ordinary, even. The clan elders lived well past a hundred years without showing their age. Wounds closed on their own. Sickness rarely touched them. It was simply the way things were.
Only after leaving the clan, after wandering into the Rain Country as a starving orphan, did Nagato understand the truth. Not everyone in this world possessed such gifts. The Uzumaki had been special. And their specialness had killed them.
A talent that invites the jealousy of heaven.
That was what his mother had said once, her voice sad and distant. The Uzumaki's gifts—their longevity, their vitality, their sealing arts—had made them targets. When the nations grew fearful, they had banded together and wiped the clan from the earth. Genocide, dressed up as strategy.
Nagato's parents had possessed some foresight. Before the fall, they had relocated to the Land of Rain—a buffer state too chaotic for the great powers to bother with. They had escaped annihilation. But they had not escaped the war. In the end, they had died anyway. Not by design, but by the random, senseless brutality of a world that did not care.
Nagato's chest tightened.
He had once possessed that healing ability himself. The Uzumaki blood ran thick in his veins. But since the Rinnegan had awoken... his original gifts had faded. Weakened. Some had vanished entirely. His self-healing was a shadow of what it had been—still faster than an ordinary shinobi's, but nowhere near the miracle it once was.
Perhaps this is the price of the Rinnegan.
Divine power was not meant to be carried by ordinary flesh. The Rinnegan demanded a vessel worthy of it. His Uzumaki blood made it possible, but it did not make it effortless. The eyes consumed him. Drained him. Left his body perpetually teetering on the edge of frailty and sickness.
It was, he understood now, the same principle as the Wood Release experiments he had heard whispers of. Konoha had tried to recreate Hashirama's power by transplanting his cells into volunteers. The Senju clan had been the primary subjects. One after another, they had perished—bodies exploding from the overwhelming force, or transforming into trees, their minds lost to vegetative oblivion. The experiments had decimated the Senju bloodline. Only a handful of successes had ever emerged, and most of those required... compromises.
Later generations would see Uchiha Obito—a man who had taken one of Nagato's Rinnegan after his death—dare to implant only a single eye. And even that single eye was only bearable because his body had been reinforced with Hashirama's cells.
Gain and loss. Always a trade. A balance.
When Nagato had gained the Rinnegan's power, the eyes had slowly consumed his Uzumaki vitality. His body had become the price.
This was why Ragnar's training, from the very beginning, had focused on one thing above all else: physique. Not ninjutsu. Not flashy techniques. Raw, physical conditioning. The body as a foundation. Because no matter how powerful the eye, if the vessel was cracked, it would eventually shatter.
In the original timeline, Nagato had summoned the Gedo Statue at far too young an age. He had wielded its power before his body could bear it. The result had been catastrophic—a life spent in a mechanical walker, a god-like will trapped in a skeletal, crippled frame.
Ragnar would not allow that to happen.
"It's almost a half-immortal body," Kokuō remarked, her voice breaking the silence.
"Immortal body? What's that?" Yahiko immediately pounced on the term. "And teacher—what kind of powerful jutsu were you practicing just now? It felt so strong!"
"An immortal body," Kokuō said, speaking with the casual authority of a creature who had witnessed millennia, "is exactly what it sounds like. A body that transcends mortality. Wounds heal on their own. Lifespan extends far beyond normal limits. Chakra reserves multiply many times over." She flicked her tails. "Though it sounds simple when I say it, the immortal body is not something easily obtained. Aside from the blood descendants of the Sage of Six Paths, ordinary shinobi who wish to attain it are dreaming.
"Those who possess the immortal body stand at the pinnacle of the ninja world. It cannot be acquired through mere Sage Mode training. It is determined by chance... and bloodline." She paused, her eyes sliding toward Ragnar. "Mostly bloodline."
Which made the human before her all the more extraordinary. No Six Paths blood. No divine inheritance. And yet—a half-immortal body, blooming into existence through sheer, inexplicable fortune. And if it continued to develop...
He might one day transform into a true immortal body.
Ragnar regarded his students for a moment, then spoke plainly.
"In truth, what I was refining just now... was Senjutsu chakra."
End of Chapter
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