Arthur knew that the portal leading to the inner moon was hidden somewhere within the Fire Country. But the Leaf Village's sensory net was currently on high alert. To gain uninterrupted access to the portal, Arthur required a good enough diversion.
So he targeted Kizashi and Mebuki Haruno—Sakura's parents.
The strategy was devastatingly effective. Arthur orchestrated a scam by forging documents that led the couple to believe they had won an all-expenses-paid vacation. It was the perfect bait as he lured them out of the village borders, tracked them to their remote hotel room he had personally set up, and killed them.
There was no grand battle. Just a silent execution since they were just average civilians.
He would finish things off by dumping their bodies in a location where they would easily be found by border patrols.
While Sakura's parents were not shinobi, Sakura herself was a central figure in the village, well-favoured by prominent leaders and the upcoming generation of Genin.
The murder, therefore, shook the entire village to its core.
A deep, paranoid grief settled over the Leaf as they immediately declared a period of mourning and organized a massive funeral. A lot of ninjas, including sensory types, and Jōnin were either attending the procession or securing the village interior against a perceived invisible threat.
While the Leaf wept, Arthur slipped through the cracks and located the portal with the help of his clones.
The spatial transition pulled him from the earth and deposited him on the moon. There, he dismantled Toneri's automated puppet defenses and eventually breached the lunar castle.
Toneri wasted no time greeting Arthur.
Amidst their conversation, Arthur himself had activated Crimson Gaze to rapidly process and record the texts detailing the mechanics of space-time and celestial travel.
Toneri, blind but quite perceptive, felt the grotesque amalgamation of stolen chakra and corrupted genetics inside Arthur's body. And on top of having known who Hamura was, Toneri viewed Arthur as a monstrous threat to the celestial order.
Arthur had to be eliminated at all costs.
A fight almost broke out between them, but Arthur escaped to the safety of the Bird Country, leaving a furious Toneri on the moon.
Back in the depths of the Light Village laboratory, Arthur went to work. He gathered rare metals, condensed chakra crystals, and the temporal theories he had taken from the lunar archives.
By the time he was done hammering the improbable physics into a physical mechanism, a pocket watch was created.
The device was designed with a tactical limit: when activated, it was supposed to allow him to rewind his personal timeline by exactly twenty-four hours.
But his mortal hands were never meant to forge celestial tools. Because when Arthur finally primed the device and activated it, the chronal engine misfired catastrophically and dragged Arthur one thousand years into the past.
In the present day, his sudden disappearance sent shockwaves through the Land of Birds. Word eventually leaked that the ruler of the Light Village was missing.
The heads of the nation, the resurrected clan leaders, and the administrative elite all gathered in a state of quiet panic to determine who would lead the country in his absence.
They turned to the clones. But Arthur's clones operated strictly on their creator's primary directives. Without the original Arthur to anchor them, they flatly refused to take the mantle of leadership.
The throne of the Bird Country, therefore, remained empty. And with Arthur's oppressive presence suddenly wiped from the board, the world began to move again.
The six otherworldly ninjas would eventually be called to the Hokage's office, where they discovered that Jiraiya had gone missing. Now things were drastically wrong with their plot of fixing the universe.
As such, they finally decided it was the perfect time to take out Orochimaru once and for all.
All six agreed to use Margaret's tracking ability on Anko's curse mark. This allowed them to fly straight to the snake Sannin's main underground hideout—without telling anyone about their clandestine mission.
But when they blew the entrance of the hideout, they were met with two massive surprises. First, Sasuke was nowhere to be found, and second, during the initial confrontation, Orochimaru expressed confusion over the recent mass resurrections.
That immediately filled the other with dread upon discovering that an unknown third party had been playing with lives while they were distracted.
But Orochimaru was still a threat, and Jasper took it upon himself to end it by challenging the Sannin to a one-on-one fight. Orochimaru, arrogant and fascinated by Jasper's strange chakra, accepted.
The fight was a display of disproportionate supremacy as Jasper used a collection of his powers: the Byakugan, Purple Lightning, and the Three-Tails. He even went as far as summoning the Truthseeker Orbs.
The black spheres nullified Orochimaru's ninjutsu, tearing through the Sannin's defenses and successfully destroying his main body.
But the group knew Orochimaru's nature: slaying his physical form was only half the battle; the snake would simply revive himself through the cursed marks scattered across his former subjects.
The group, therefore, immediately split up by taking it upon themselves to locate every hidden Sound Village outpost and remove the anchors.
This sweeping purge, of course, meant they would have to raid the holding facilities and liberate Orochimaru's primary experiments: Jugo, Karin, and Suigetsu. Rather than leaving those three to wander, the group decided it best to recruit the three into the Leaf Village, denying Orochimaru any viable vessels for his return.
Jasper was not going to partake in this mission, so he was sent back to the Leaf Village via Jada's Flying raijin technique.
However, Jada did not trust him. Jasper was arrogant, destructive, and constantly up to no good. So she used the physical contact to place a secret, microscopic Flying raijin marker directly onto Jasper's clothes without him knowing.
When Jasper returned to his private quarters in the Leaf Village, he found an anomaly waiting for him: a glowing, distorted portal hovered in the center of his room.
Driven by his usual reckless curiosity and believing himself untouchable after killing a Sannin, he chose to step inside. That act instantly teleported him to the inner moon, where Toneri was waiting for him.
The blind guardian of the moon had been watching the earth closely since Arthur's invasion. That meant he had also been watching the battle in the Sound hideout, in which he saw Jasper summon the Truthseeker Orbs against Orochimaru.
That single act allowed Toneri to understand that Jasper was a distant branch of the Ōtsutsuki clan. More importantly, Toneri sensed the Byakugan residing in Jasper's skull.
Originally, Toneri's grand design required him to wait another two years before descending to earth to steal Hanabi Hyuga's pure eyes. But Arthur's sudden breach of the lunar castle had terrified him.
Such a monster produced to challenge the heavens prompted Toneri to seek out the Tenseigan much earlier in advance. All to destroy that monster, who was Arthur.
And since Toneri decided to skip the wait, he was going to take Jasper's eyes instead.
A high-speed, catastrophic battle erupted across the castle as Jasper desperately fought back. But he was out of his element since he had literally just come back from a fight against a Sannin.
Seeing he was about to lose his eyes and his life, Jasper fled and eventually hid himself inside a cave to let his chakra recover.
Toneri did not worry since he knew Jasper had no means of crossing the void back to earth. All Toneri had to do was completely seal the entrances and settle down to wait. He knew Jasper would eventually run out of air, food, or courage and crawl back into his hands.
"That's how you got your new hairstyle?" Sasori interrupted, his voice dry and entirely unimpressed.
Jasper touched the ragged, overgrown mess of his hair, hacked short with a kunai after weeks in the dark. "Ugh… Yeah, how'd ya guess?"
"It's pretty obvious based on the reports we dug up about you…"
The rain on the earthly trail continued to fall, washing the mud over Sasori's wooden joints as Jasper finished recounting the humiliating end to his adventure.
"Okay, okay…" he said. "Well, that's my story, alright. I laid it all out. Now can you tell me about Arthur's clone?"
Sasori's puppet form continued to give low mechanical hums as he trekked forward. He was considering just how much information he should hand over.
To Sasori, Jasper was no more than an arrogant boy who thought he could get whatever he wanted if he cried loudly enough or hit something hard enough. The boy had power, but no discipline.
"Fine," Sasori finally agreed. "I'll tell you about Kaito. But let's get one thing straight: I've already lost enough partners."
"I know that already. What's that got to do with me?"
"That should be your sign not to try anything reckless… Or you'll end up just like them."
Jasper looked at the hunched, terrifying shell of Sasori. Based on the coldness of his partner's tone, he understood the grim reality of his situation.
The only reason Sasori was willing to share the intelligence was because the Akatsuki veteran fully believed Jasper wasn't going to live long enough to tell the tale to anyone else.