Above the sun-scorched fields in the southern reaches of one of the Domains, where the Land of Fire had once stood, reality cracked open.
Two figures stepped through a rift that warped space itself, hovering several meters above the ground.
The first was short and aristocratic in bearing, with skin as pale as porcelain, white hair pulled back in a long braid, and two small horns protruding from his head. He wore white robes, immaculate and unmistakably expensive, the kind that announced status before the wearer ever opened his mouth, while crimson Rinnegans marked his palms. His name was Momoshiki, something I gleaned from their minds the moment I drew close enough.
The second was a giant: massive and hulking, with that same ashen skin stretched over brutish features. His enormous frame, draped in plain clothing, radiated raw physical power the way a boulder radiates weight. His name was Kinshiki.
They exchanged a glance as their sensory abilities registered the single living presence within a radius of many kilometers, and then, directly ahead of them, a portal opened. It looked identical to the rift they had just stepped through.
I stood facing them and met each of their gazes in turn, unhurried, completely relaxed. But before they could do anything about my presence, I decided to take the initiative.
I stripped down to nothing but my boxers, produced a small bottle of olive oil seemingly from thin air, and began working it slowly, with visible, deliberate enjoyment, into the contours of my muscular frame. In the sunlight, every ridge and line of muscle caught the light like a sculpture.
"My lord Momoshiki..." the larger Otsutsuki rumbled, watching this display with open revulsion. "This mortal... He's doing something obscene."
"Wait, Kinshiki," Momoshiki said. He tilted his head with genuine curiosity. "There's... something to this, I think. Perhaps some manner of ritual preparation?"
I continued. With a flourish, I briefly obscured my boxers, and where they had been, a pair of properly dungeon-master-worthy leather briefs materialized in their place. Ritual complete, I still paid my guests no attention. I reached into the air again and produced a leather half-mask, fitting it over my face up to the bridge of my nose, leaving only my eyes exposed.
Momoshiki, clearly intrigued by the strange creature before him, decided to analyze it. He activated his Byakugan and turned it on me, reaching out to read my fate.
And froze.
His aristocratic composure shattered. His face twisted into a mask of sheer horror. His barely visible pupils contracted to pinpoints. His body began to tremble.
"My lord Momoshiki! What's wrong?!" Kinshiki seized his master by the shoulder, alarmed.
"You, the Otsutsuki," I finally spoke. My voice came out cold, cold enough that both of them flinched. "You walked into the wrong gym. I'm the boss here. And you're going to work off the entry fee."
"I... I cannot see his fate..." Momoshiki rasped, shock and disbelief stripping his voice down to a wheeze. His Byakugan hadn't moved from me. "Or rather... I can. But it isn't a thread. It's an endless, blinding ocean of probability streams... They have no limit. No shore."
A quiet sound escaped me. Something between a hum and a laugh.
"Funny. When I look at your fate, I see exactly one thread of events. And unlike you, I don't need eyes to do it."
They looked at each other again. This time, the anxiety was unmistakable.
"Alright, playtime's over," I said, raising one hand.
Momoshiki reacted instantly. Reality for several kilometers in every direction around me went rigid, froze, but then simply fractured into hairline cracks before knitting itself back together as though nothing had happened.
"Trying to lock me in time?" I raised an eyebrow. I hadn't felt so much as a tug. "And with a technique that resonates with the fabric of existence, no less. Heavy on exactly the right properties. Ah, so this is what you call Shinjutsu. I've heard of it. Impressive, genuinely. But I could have done this better, in my sleep, fifteen years ago. Right now? We're not even playing in the same league."
A snap of my fingers. Two immensely powerful beings dropped bonelessly to the ground, paralyzed, stripped of any control over their chakra.
Everything after that was a matter of procedure.
I pulled every piece of information from their minds, down to the last fragment. Every scrap of Shinjutsu knowledge the clan possessed, and everything Momoshiki held personally. By his own reckoning, he possessed the full catalog of Otsutsuki Shinjutsu.
These two were weaker than Isshiki, broadly speaking. But Momoshiki's particular Shinjutsu, the one that let him peer into the currents of fate, was interesting. It was a sophisticated technique requiring a precise resonance with the fabric of reality itself in order to read the probability vectors of lesser beings. Functionally useless against me, but the underlying concept was worth examining. In essence, he was investing a negligible amount of energy to ask the universe to calculate probabilities associated with a chosen target, and the universe, remarkably, responded with something to the effect of "sure, no problem" and complied. The wrinkle, of course, was that any such prophecy involving me also involved my energy in the present moment, which meant I could feel when someone was looking. And through that formed connection, I could project such acute displeasure back along the link that the prophet would need to be roughly in my tier just to survive the experience.
In principle, I could have arrived at this technique on my own, assembled the right combination of properties through experimentation. It wasn't quite analogous to the Sharingan or my own Eyes of God, which operate through independent analysis and probability calculation. But I'd had other areas of study to attend to.
The rest of the Shinjutsu carried interesting ideas as well: various interactions with space-time, the reflection of all things, the absorption of all things. Nothing I couldn't reproduce or surpass.
There was one other notable detail: only these two had shown up. According to my meta-knowledge of Boruto, three members of the Otsutsuki clan should have come. And that third one had been the most interesting, possessing an outrageously broken ability to travel into the past. Even I can't do that, and I'd been genuinely curious to study him up close. But it turned out he simply didn't exist in my version of this universe.
Not that this surprised me much anymore. I'd long since accepted that I was living in some kind of patchwork blend of manga and anime continuities. That third figure, as I recalled, hadn't appeared in the manga at all.
And finally, the most important piece of information. Daidare.
She almost never involved herself in clan affairs, save for the fact that the main branch of the Otsutsuki periodically surrendered a portion of their harvested chakra fruits to her. The last time she'd made her presence known was when Shibai, another Otsutsuki, had ascended, becoming a "true God" by crossing into a deeper layer of reality.
As it turned out, becoming a god wasn't merely the pinnacle of development for an Otsutsuki. It was also an exceedingly rare opportunity for an audience with Daidare. The Great Progenitor. Most newly ascended gods left the clan afterward, setting out in search of further power, because consuming ordinary chakra fruits had ceased to hold any meaning for them. But the meeting with the Goddess was something that even immortals found deeply unsettling.
Daidare was regarded as something like a Goddess of gods. A category unto herself.
By some accounts, she was over a billion years old. Her logic was impenetrable, her intentions so layered and recursive that even her own "children" couldn't begin to fathom them.
Legends were passed down of three incidents in which newly ascended gods, after accumulating strength across countless millennia, had arrived for their audience and found themselves in battle instead.
The consequences of those clashes had been catastrophic. Entire planetary systems and worlds had detonated in cascades of destruction. Even stars hadn't been spared when the power of "true gods" was truly unleashed.
After each such event, the clan's cartographers had been forced to redraw entire sections of their cosmic maps.
Impressive, but I had to admit, not outside the realm of plausibility. With my current capabilities, I could replicate something on that scale. The legends placed hundreds of millions of years between each battle, and the outcomes were consistently comparable: an Armageddon by clan standards, and yet Daidare had never obliterated entire star clusters. Either she chose not to show that she could. Or she simply couldn't.
For now, I decided to study what was in front of me. And, as it turned out, buried in Momoshiki's memories were the coordinates of a dimension where Shibai's remains were stored: the nominally "mortal" body he'd shed at the moment of ascension. I probably wouldn't learn anything truly groundbreaking from it, but dissecting it was absolutely worth the trip.
After that, a reconnaissance run into the Otsutsuki clan proper. The enemy appeared surmountable at first glance. But there was always the chance of uncovering some weakness in Daidare, or at the very least picking up something useful. And the surrounding territory needed checking. What if she had a hundred of her ascended "gods" tucked away somewhere, each of them having spent hundreds of millions of years grinding to the point of being able to ignite stars?
Unlikely. But caution never hurt anyone.
With my plans laid out, I set about executing them.
Some time passed after Momoshiki and Kinshiki's neutralization before the two of them were examined again, this time more thoroughly, in the company of the sharpest minds I had available. After that, we turned our full attention to a deep-dive analysis of their knowledge and legacy.
Working through the full spectrum of Otsutsuki Shinjutsu, which Momoshiki had believed to be his complete and exclusive inheritance, went quickly. Most of it consisted of variations on the manipulation of space, energy, and matter. Interesting, but not revelatory for me. The real prize, however, was waiting in the cache where Isshiki had stored Shibai's remains, a location known only to Momoshiki.
His nominally "mortal" body, shed at the moment of ascension, was an absolute treasure trove, and I sank my hands into it with considerable enthusiasm. Using his genetic material, I had no difficulty modeling and reproducing all of his known techniques, Shinjutsu, and even the abilities tied to his eyes. Of the entire arsenal, only two things genuinely merited attention.
The first was the Senrigan, a dojutsu that allowed the user to launch their consciousness to any point along their own personal timeline, from birth to the present moment, in order to relive and analyze any event from the perspective of a detached outside observer. As expected, this didn't work without resonance with the fabric of reality. And it had limitations, naturally, namely the inability to perceive spiritual or mental imprints, meaning you couldn't rifle through the thoughts of people from your past. But as an instrument for historical analysis, it was genuinely elegant. I reproduced it without difficulty.
The second technique worth noting was a Shinjutsu that reflected any incoming force at a cost lower than the energy originally invested in the attack. Momoshiki had known a version of it, but in Shibai's genetics it was far more precisely encoded. Again, elegance: it didn't construct a barrier. Instead, it subtly distorted the laws of conservation of energy at a localized point, causing the attack to "reflect" back onto its originator. With my own capabilities, I could achieve this anyway, but studying these jutsu gave me a slightly expanded understanding and added a few fractional increments to the potency of my own techniques.
Beyond those two, there were other Shinjutsu worth noting, if somewhat less so. Take "Omnipotence," for instance: a technique operating on principles by which a relatively small investment of energy could exert a very significant influence over a very large territory. A planet, say.
Studied. Reproduced. Cataloged.
The same went for "Ten Directions," in essence a Shinjutsu along the same lines as Momoshiki's fate-reading, but specifically focused on ten probability lines, assuming that many even existed and the user had sufficient chakra to sustain it. Momoshiki had perceived an enormous number of future directions tied to me, but if his genetics had been crudely spliced into some ordinary person who then used the technique on me subconsciously, say, that person would have been lucky to glimpse two. A fraction of a fraction of the total.
Working alongside scientists and some of the most powerful computational systems available, we modeled hundreds of scenarios, probing for potential vulnerabilities in Daidare.
Nothing conclusive.
Which was frustrating, but not unexpected. Every Otsutsuki absorbed different worlds and frequently came away with a different spread of abilities as a result. Whatever Daidare had accumulated over a billion years was anyone's guess.
But the effort hadn't been wasted. My beam, the Eye of God technique, was updated with new anti-reflection principles, its structure woven through with properties that made it effectively immune to that class of defensive Shinjutsu. And having absorbed the full catalog of available Shinjutsu, I now had additional means of projecting my techniques on a considerably larger scale. Not that "larger scale" had seemed particularly necessary before, but here we were.
On balance, the study had been well worth the time. Daidare's own techniques, if they followed any precedent, would likely be either the same or structurally similar, which meant I was now substantially more confident in my ability to counter her. Though again, nothing resembling a silver bullet had materialized. No single trick that would let me erase all the Otsutsuki with one well-aimed poke.
Having studied everything that could be studied at a distance, I moved on to the next phase. Caution is never wasted, especially when the subject in question is capable of redrawing stellar cartography, however modestly by galactic standards.
I created several clones and equipped them with only minimal knowledge, so that if Daidare captured one, she'd come away knowing as little about me as possible. Then, possessed of their own souls and no connection to me, they departed through wormholes into deep space. Their task was straightforward: passive observation of the Otsutsuki clan, gradually closing the distance, no interference. I needed to know not only whether Daidare was preparing any surprises, but whether obtaining that kind of information was even feasible.
While the scouts made their way to the relevant worlds, I occupied myself with more local matters. Imperial matters, to be precise, the scale of my state having long since exceeded the merely planetary. My ongoing research never stopped, of course. And neither did the rest of my life.
More than a year passed.
By the end of it, I was certain: the Otsutsuki situation needed resolving. Sooner or later, they'd find their way back to my world and try to devour it again. And frankly, "sooner" was looking more probable than "later." The disappearance of the envoys sent to investigate what had happened to Isshiki and Kaguya had been noticed. Slowly, as was fitting for beings who measured time in millennia, but the aliens would act.
Ordinary Otsutsuki, of course, would simply die the moment they arrived on Earth. The Empire would crush them with relative ease, to say nothing of the girls, to say nothing of me. But Daidare was a different conversation entirely. Though, judging by her established behavioral patterns, she was unlikely to pay the slightest attention to ordinary clan members running into trouble for quite some time. She barely seemed to register even the main branch of the clan's existence, let alone treat them as anything other than a resource. Going by Momoshiki's personality, he would have consumed Kinshiki without a second thought the moment it became convenient, and felt absolutely nothing about it afterward.
The real danger wasn't ordinary Otsutsuki. It was what Daidare was doing.
My clones had confirmed the worst of my concerns. She wasn't just sitting somewhere in her domain. She was preparing something.
To be specific:
The Otsutsuki were, in truth, few in number, deeply inert, and hopelessly entrenched in their traditions. Their entire developmental model, consuming chakra fruits, struck me as spectacularly inefficient. But given their lifespans, this method of cultivation suited them perfectly well. As a clan, both now and for the foreseeable future, they posed no direct military threat to my world.
Daidare resided in what the Otsutsuki called the "Core," their central world. She almost never emerged and made contact with virtually no one, save for the rare ascended god who crossed her threshold. The planet itself, and the power emanating from it, registered as a constant, oppressive pressure, and this world was a manifestation of a deeper layer of reality. Daidare didn't invite the ascended gods. She didn't determine who was worthy. The principle was different: if an Otsutsuki could exist in proximity to the Great Progenitor, if they could even approach her, that in itself was sufficient to merit an audience.
The clones had studied the Otsutsuki comprehensively. Some were dissected. Others had their memories extracted. This allowed me to update and expand my knowledge, particularly regarding the concealment principles the clan employed. And it was precisely this, in synergy with my existing abilities and my analysis of the Goddess's energy emissions, that allowed me to locate four concealed points beyond the Core itself.
The points were exceptionally well-hidden. But not well enough to escape my clones. This meant one of two things: either these points weren't particularly important to Daidare, or she didn't outclass me by enough of a margin to hide them more effectively. And given what the clones found there, the first option seemed highly unlikely.
These points were something like planets, but situated in a "deeper" layer of reality. On each one, following Otsutsuki tradition, a chakra tree grew and bore a fruit. One tree per location, and the fruit was powerful on a level that made ordinary ones look like table scraps. For Otsutsuki who had ascended to godhood, the chakra fruits from ordinary worlds like mine held no value whatsoever. What grew in this particular orchard was something else entirely.
At the roots of one tree lay thousands of smaller fruits, feeding it. These were the fruits surrendered by the main Otsutsuki branch.
The three other trees had no such fruits at their roots. Instead, threads of energy stretched toward them, placed there by Daidare herself. These threads led back to the Otsutsuki gods. The Progenitor was collecting her fee for the audiences she granted, and afterward she fitted them with a permanent yoke. A tribute arrangement, according to the clones' data. The gods received a collar, and fed their energy into the trees in perpetuity.
Daidare had her own method of growing stronger, because otherwise she would never have advanced beyond the planetary-level ceiling of an ordinary Otsutsuki god. And that method was rooted precisely in these fruits and these trees.
The clones had studied the fruit, cautiously and from a safe distance. They were going to ripen in just a couple of years.
My paranoia had been right.
The obvious inference, that once this landmark event occurred Daidare would proceed to whatever came next, was exactly that: obvious. As was the fact that the plans of an ancient being whose entire lineage had built itself around the consumption of worlds were extremely unlikely to leave me in a dancing mood.
And then there was my meta-universal gut feeling, which habitually wore a tinfoil hat and kept trying to put one on me as well.
It was whispering that the culmination of Daidare's plan might arrive very soon. The same way it would have in some story, something like Naruto, where some sufficiently powered-up protagonist, N... B... Viruto? No. Judging by what the clones had uncovered, probably Boruto, would come along and beat the evil Goddess, because if he didn't, obviously everyone was going to die.
I'd had this instinct before. It was partly what had driven the clones to take risks and confirm whether things were actually as bad as I imagined. And no, optimism had not been rewarded. Everything was, in fact, terrible. The tinfoil hat wouldn't save anyone, but wearing it still seemed advisable.
Which meant it was time to act.
Having thoroughly absorbed every piece of information available, I began to prepare. Not only for what would almost certainly be a spectacular fight, but for negotiations as well.
Staying true to my paranoia, and maintaining a clear-eyed awareness that I inhabited a world governed by the storytelling conventions of people best described as deranged screenwriters, I made a reasonable assessment: what if killing Daidare turned out to be the thing that released the seal on some Ancient Cosmic Evil? Which, freed through my generosity, would then promptly turn me inside out. It went without saying that this outcome did not appeal to me. So I opted for a more elegant approach.
Specifically: I decided to pay her a visit. A chat. Drop by as a regular, run-of-the-mill Otsutsuki god and see how things went.
Accounting for her power level, which based on the energy radiating from the Core exceeded mine by roughly twenty percent, and at our tier that's a meaningful margin, I already had a reasonable chance at victory if it came to a fight. But there was also the very real possibility that we wouldn't need to fight at all.
If Daidare was rational, and if the scenario involving some ancient supremely unpleasant Evil was actually in play, a perfectly sensible proposal would be: either seal it better, or kill it outright.
...Heh. Listen to me.
My rational side pointed out, loudly and clearly, that given Otsutsuki cultural precedent, the far more probable outcome was the Goddess simply trying to reduce me to fundamental particles and consume the result, rather than sitting down for any kind of productive conversation. Or fitting me with one of those yokes, the same as she'd done to the other ascended gods.
But there was a "but," one significant enough to make a preemptive strike feel reckless. If she genuinely had something to guard, there was a non-trivial probability that simple pragmatism would lead us both to conclude we were better off going our separate ways and not making each other's lives difficult.
So the plan was: talk first. And if the conversation went badly, fight to the finish.
But I had no intention of gambling everything on it.
A lot, yes. That was unavoidable. But I had the means to prevent irreversible losses.
To that end, over the following several months, I refined certain components of the Avatar Project and produced two specific contingencies.
The first was another avatar, the second one. A long-standing project, though this iteration differed from the original in one key respect: an AI chip embedded directly into the soul, inspired by a work from my first life. It was designed to make the avatar's existence in a new world considerably smoother, assuming, of course, Murphy's Law didn't decide to throw a party and put this avatar with his significantly better starting conditions through even more hell than I'd been through. We could only hope. His objective was to find a world that studied the soul, and to figure out that particular innate trump card of mine.
The second contingency was another clone. A special one. I transferred nearly all of my power to him, which meant I no longer had it. The clone was, in every meaningful sense, a complete being: artificial, but fully realized, with his own soul and everything else that entailed. The soul was admittedly somewhat "thinner," and his chakra fell slightly short of mine, since there's only so much that can be transferred. This meant his techniques would be marginally weaker, his reactions a touch slower. But with that chakra reserve, along with the Eyes and Body of God, he had every reason to accomplish great things.
Having sent the clone on his way, I, the original, departed alongside my Sun and a handful of accompanying planets, heading for distant galaxies to disappear among them. This ensured the Otsutsuki would have no direct trail back to me.
The power I'd transferred to the clone, however, would take years to recover. To speed the process along, I left a chain of clones along my route, each one serving as a waypoint toward my location. But if any of them detected anything suspicious, they would self-destruct. As would the clone carrying the bulk of my power, if things went sideways in any significant way: the emergence of some internal parasite courtesy of Daidare, for instance, or anything similar. The whole point was to ensure that the Great Progenitor, in the event of a worst-case scenario, couldn't trace a path back to the original me afterward.
Throughout the preparation, I talked through my plans and reasoning with my family. They were, of course, in favor of taking every precaution. It was genuinely warming to hear their concern and their suggestions for how to avoid this whole mess entirely. I shared their feelings about my own continued well-being, sincerely. But given the precautions I was already taking, our conversations weren't really about talking me out of it. They were about making sure it all went as cleanly as possible.
The clone's eventual conversation with Daidare had also been prepared for carefully. Beyond his considerable store of information, enough that he'd be able to judge in the moment whether the Goddess was being sincere, four additional clones had been dispatched. These four would be ready to arrange what might politely be called a certain inconvenience for the Progenitor of the Otsutsuki, should anything go wrong.
With that, I, the original, set a course deeper into the cosmos, well away from the coming confrontation. And the clone headed for the Core.
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