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Mount Myōboku was shrouded in thick fog, with frogs calling out from all sides.
Manji received the message from the courier toad. He was hit with two pieces of news, each serious enough to shake the shinobi world on its own—
Senju Uzuki was dead.
Uchiha Kitsune had crossed the river in funeral whites and thrown the full weight of his clan at the Senju.
Even Manji's fingers twitched. He looked at the crystal ball floating beside him, channeled his Sage energy, and spoke.
"Sage Art: Telescope Technique."
The crystal ball lit up. Images unfolded across its surface.
Inside a Senju funeral hall, a black coffin rested in the middle of the room. Uzuki was inside, eyes shut, face pale and lifeless. No pulse. No chakra. She was gone.
Manji's brow creased. He shifted the image.
The crystal ball revealed everything, showing the full sequence of events as if unrolling a scroll.
Kitsune had somehow uncovered the secret of the Mangekyō Sharingan's awakening. And to reach that next level of power, he'd killed Uzuki without hesitation.
"Willing to go that far for strength. Ruthless doesn't begin to cover it."
The image shifted again—
Kitsune, dressed in white mourning clothes, led his best fighters across the river in a surprise attack on both Naka and Kita River territories. The Senju border erupted in fire and chaos.
Manji watched the carnage play out inside the crystal ball.
"Strange..."
"I expected some kind of epic final showdown between those two. Never thought it would end like this."
"Uzuki was too careless. And her strength... honestly, she wasn't even on Shūichi's level." He paused, then suddenly understood.
No wonder Black Zetsu had only found his opening with Madara and Hashirama in the original timeline. Those two were the pinnacle. The strongest, sharpest, most complete reincarnations Indra and Asura had ever produced across all the centuries. Nobody else came close.
"I'll handle this myself."
The Sage light around him tightened, and he disappeared from Mount Myōboku.
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An instant later, he was standing inside the Uchiha funeral hall.
Uzuki's body rested in the coffin, lifeless. The last traces of her soul's energy had nearly vanished.
"She's really dead." A brief look of surprise appeared in his eyes.
He acted quickly. With a sweep of his hand, a gentle wave of Sage energy wrapped around Uzuki's body and her fading soul, sealing them in perfect preservation.
Then he shaped a flawless replica of her corpse from condensed Sage chakra and placed it back in the coffin. Identical down to the last detail. No one would notice the switch.
The fake body rested peacefully in the casket.
"What to do about this..." Manji stood with his hands clasped behind his back, frowning hard.
With Uzuki dead—Kitsune was the undisputed strongest fighter in the shinobi world—and the way he was pressing the offensive, Manji had to wonder if he intended to wipe the Senju out entirely.
Indra's reincarnation could only truly be countered by Asura's reincarnation. That was the fundamental rule. The two existed in balance.
But the balance was shattered. Uzuki was gone. The Senju had no leader and no one capable of standing against the Uchiha war machine that Kitsune had spent a decade building in secret.
If the Senju were destroyed, what then? What happened to the Thousand-Year Pact??
The outcome of this cycle was already set. Indra's side had won. But the Pact was never about a single victory—it was a contest lasting a thousand years. Kitsune wasn't just winning—he was trying to overturn the whole system, to destroy the checks and balances that had existed since Indra and Asura first asked Manji to judge their feud.
"If the Senju are annihilated... where does Asura's reincarnation power go?"
Manji muttered to himself, then realized something and relaxed a little. "Right. Naruto set the precedent in canon. The power would flow to a bloodline relative. The Uzumaki, most likely."
But the unease didn't go away.
"Losing the Senju entirely would be catastrophic."
The Senju were one of the main pillars supporting the shinobi world's power structure. If they fell, the resulting power vacuum could pull every other group into a war that might last for generations.
He paused for a long moment, then sighed. "Time to step in and set things right."
He was the referee, the judge Indra and Asura had once begged for. He couldn't just stay on the mountain and watch everything fall apart.
He saw two options, but both had problems.
Option 1: appear in person and eliminate Kitsune quickly and decisively. The problem is resolved.
But that violated his role as referee. The last time he'd personally confronted the reincarnations, he'd been dealing with both Indra and Asura's vessels at once. That was defensible. Singling out one side for execution? That crossed the line.
Option 2: pull the strings from the shadows. Rally the other clans into a coalition against the Uchiha, just as he once united the shinobi world to protect the Tailed Beasts. This united front could hold back Kitsune's advance.
But the variables were impossible to control. If the coalition grew too powerful, the Uchiha could end up on the receiving end of the same fate they were inflicting on the Senju. A genocide in reverse. That wasn't the goal either.
Both paths led somewhere bad. Manji fell into a long silence.
He stayed silent for a very long time...
Then he suddenly looked up. "The one who tied the knot has to be the one to untie it. Fine. Then I'll go with option three."
He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, the Rinnegan shone in both.
The decision was made.
Kitsune was still young and in his prime, with decades of fighting ahead of him.
So Manji decided to speed up the cycle, forcing the next Asura reincarnation to appear early. He would give Kitsune a new opponent before the Senju were completely destroyed. "Sorry about this, Indra's vessel. You're going to have to deal with a second Asura in your lifetime."
"And Kitsune... It's not me that's doing this to you. It's the world you were born into."
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