Time was like sand in his hand, quietly slipping away when he wasn't paying attention.
Two years had passed since the God Tree bore fruit.
In those two years, everyone in the shinobi world clearly felt that the world had gone back to "normal."
Those minor disasters every few days and major ones every half month… vanished altogether.
That finally made even the slower people realize those "natural" disasters were very likely man-made.
Putting that together with Izayoi's constant appearances to "rescue" the scene, everyone guessed this God of Shinobi of the new era had been pulling something big behind the curtain all these years. At the same time, they once again tasted the scale of his power.
It was power that could wipe out the entire shinobi world with ease, against which even a fully united shinobi world had no chance.
So the sharp ones and the slow ones both kept the same tacit silence.
As long as nobody died, fine. If some regions got wrecked by "natural" disasters, then so be it.
Over those two years, something else disappeared along with the disasters: Izayoi's family of five.
The graduates of Konoha's Class of Year 60 had, for the most part, already built careers and families, and their kids were about to hit graduation season.
No one could even remember how many Chūnin Exams had been held.
In the past, Izayoi would still show up for those ceremonies.
Even if he himself didn't appear, Hinata or Karin would attend as his stand-ins.
But in these last two years, not only had Izayoi vanished; Hinata and the others—who had already started fading into the background—had become synonymous with "mysterious." Even Konoha's top sensory ninja couldn't detect their chakra.
It was as if… they weren't in Konoha anymore.
And in fact, they weren't.
Ever since the God Tree bore fruit, the now-idle Izayoi had discussed it with Hinata and the others—who had long since toured every last corner of the shinobi world—and moved the entire household to the moon.
Earth, drained of so much life energy, could no longer withstand his "training."
Only on the moon could Izayoi unleash Golden Wheel Reincarnation Explosion and casually cook up all sorts of ultimate techniques without worrying. Meteors and dead stars out in space became his training grounds and target dummies.
And with space-time teleportation formation linking Earth and the Moon, moving house lunar-side barely affected their day-to-day lives.
For these two years, Izayoi had been digesting the Chakra Edible Creation's effects: training while he waited for new abilities to manifest, and roaming the cosmos searching for life-bearing planets that could support a God Tree.
With how violently he'd devoured Earth's life force, the planet was severely weakened; it wouldn't grow a second God Tree Fruit for at least a thousand years. So if he wanted to evolve again in the short term, he needed a new life-bearing world.
If he could find a star with massive life-force, so much the better.
If he ever found a star-level life planet, he didn't dare imagine how big that God Tree Fruit would be. Even if the quality didn't change, the sheer quantity of fruit would be something else.
But life planets in the universe were far too few.
Or rather, in the region of space Earth sat in, their numbers were too few.
Izayoi searched for two years and still couldn't find a second planet fit for planting a God Tree.
On reflection, that made sense: if there had been two life planets in this region, Ōtsutsuki Isshiki—with two Ten-Tails—wouldn't have sat on Earth alone all this time. He could've run two God Trees in parallel.
To find new worlds, Izayoi would have to leave this patch of the universe.
Of course, he wasn't in a hurry.
As someone long-lived, his future would inevitably be lonely. Until then, Earth still held people and things he and the women were attached to.
…
March 20.
To the shinobi world, just another ordinary day.
But for the ninja academies of the great villages, it was graduation season for the sixth-years.
Ever since the Fourth Great Ninja War ended, long-lasting peace had turned ninja into glorified tools; their status and income both dropped sharply. But this was still a world ruled by strength—especially now that the Sixth Hokage had gradually "gone divine" and no longer watched over the entire shinobi world. Friction had once again started to appear in places far from the Land of Fire and Konoha.
So the nations still couldn't give up ninja, nor did they want to.
This year, the villages welcomed another wave of fresh blood.
Parents crowded outside academy gates, waiting for their children to come out with exam results. Soon, those gates would be filled with that familiar mix of joy and sorrow, cries and laughter.
If Izayoi and the women had passed by here—or cast their senses over the world—they would have recognized many faces among the parents: old classmates and friends who had become fathers and good wives.
But no one noticed that a great crisis was quietly approaching—and just as quietly disappeared.
Cut to the depths of space: a thin crack suddenly split open, then slowly widened into a black-hole-like gateway.
Three figures in white robes—with horns on their heads and white hair and eyes—flew out of the portal.
"Found it. What a dazzling planet," said Ōtsutsuki Urashiki, grinning as he hefted the fishing pole on his shoulder.
"I can see a huge amount of chakra on that planet," Ōtsutsuki Kinshiki said. "Something's clearly gone wrong."
"As expected," murmured Momoshiki Ōtsutsuki, standing between them—the strongest of the three. "Otherwise, with their strength, they should have returned to the clan a thousand years ago."
"Let's go see what happened."
With that, they stopped using space-time techniques and simply flew toward Earth, clearly visible to the Byakugan.
Yet just as they neared Earth's orbit, all three abruptly halted mid-flight, faces tightening in wariness.
Ahead of them floated a lone figure, back turned.
He wore the familiar clan white robe; his hair, horns, and unfathomable chakra all matched the Ōtsutsuki mold…
"Isshiki-sama?" blurted Kinshiki, the lower-ranked of the three.
Urashiki's hand tightened slightly on his fishing rod, a bad feeling creeping into his chest.
Only Momoshiki, using a deeper level of Byakugan sight, scrutinized the figure—then his expression changed drastically. "You're not Isshiki. Who are you?!"
At that, the figure finally turned around, nodding in approval. "Good eyes."
As he spoke, his appearance and build—and even the shape of his horns—shifted and rearranged.
Moments later, a "clansman" appeared before the three: not only in the form of a youth, but radiating the life-force and soul-fluctuations of one as well.
And in the next instant, the view in their eyes froze forever.
Izayoi's voice sounded, barely above a whisper.
"Shinjutsu… Mahapadma."
A layer of white frost appeared out of nowhere and spread outward like a spiderweb—but it didn't wrap around the three. It clung to them like stickers, and yet, on closer look, never actually touched them—just hung, frozen, around their bodies.
Unlike the drifting meteors nearby, this frost was suspended in space but truly motionless.
Frozen along with it, within that field of white, were Momoshiki and his two companions.
The scene looked exactly like time itself had stopped.
In reality, the entire region of spacetime had been frozen.
Mahapadma was one of the new abilities Izayoi had waited two years for—his own exclusive shinjutsu.
What is shinjutsu?
It is the special power granted only to true pureblood Ōtsutsuki—those among the purebloods who stand at the very top of the hierarchy. These abilities are like the power of rules themselves—almost impossible to resist, inherently irreversible.
When housed in the eyes, shinjutsu becomes a perfect-form ultimate dōjutsu, with almost negligible weaknesses or costs. If it manifests in the body, it becomes a perfect special nature release or kekkei genkai—sometimes even surpassing kekkei mōra.
Mahapadma was Izayoi's new eye technique. It hadn't originally been called that, but the real name sounded terrible; its effect reminded him of an anime he'd watched in his previous life, so he renamed it.
Shinjutsu are almost perfect, and while they still have weaknesses, those weaknesses are nothing like the obvious flaws of Mangekyō or Rinnegan jutsu. At this tier—high Six Paths level—if you don't know the counter or the weak point, only kekkei mōra and other shinjutsu can stand against it. And even among shinjutsu, there are tiers. In the realm of control-type powers, Izayoi's technique was flat-out broken.
In just an instant, he had seized Momoshiki and the others.
That instant also sealed their fate.
A new crack tore open in space. The three, who had come who-knows-how-far through the cosmos, were tossed by Izayoi into the prison he'd prepared for them many years before.
Their future was to be studied, cloned—and ultimately sacrificed to fuel the Ten-Tails' metamorphosis into another God Tree.
Earth's final crisis was erased without a sound.
...
...
Time was like sand trickling through an hourglass; it looked like single grains falling, yet before you knew it, the upper half was nearly empty.
Konoha Year 116.
More than a century had passed since the one-country–one-village system was created. Even legends like the Valley of the End battle between the God of Shinobi Hashirama and the "Shinobi Shura" Madara had been worn down by time—reduced to a few pages and pictures in history books.
The Great Ninja Wars felt impossibly distant.
Half a century of peace had reshaped the world every ten years. Now the shinobi world was the modern era Izayoi had known in his previous life—only more sci-fi, more fantastical.
The fusion of technology and ninjutsu had, decades ago, made the "shinobi world" a very small place. Even ordinary people could reach any corner of it in a single day.
Decades of peace had sent the population skyrocketing several times over, and resources were becoming scarce. But thanks to the awe-inspiring might of the God of Shinobi, there had been no new wars. Everything still looked thriving and prosperous on the surface.
Beneath that sheen, though, wealth disparity and darkness had long sunk deep roots into the ground, just waiting for a spark to burst through the soil. Under the polished exterior was a decay even Izayoi found hard to fix—and couldn't be bothered to.
Just as he'd only ever wanted to be a Hokage, not a daimyo—what did the lives of this world's humans have to do with him?
Konoha, Izayoi's home.
In front of the towering high-rises, his house now looked tiny; the old-fashioned compound was steeped in the patina of history.
Inside that traditional home, a conversation destined to shape the future of the shinobi world was underway.
"I know this isn't the first time I've asked, but I still want to hear it from you: you really don't plan to leave with us?"
"No. I'm not interested in what's beyond Earth, and I don't crave immortality."
"My thoughts are the same as Sasuke's."
"What a shame. Besides Hinata and the others, you two are the only people in this whole world who could defy fate."
Three male voices sounded in the living room.
Listen closely and you'd hear their weight was different.
One voice already sounded spent. Another still had strength, but clearly belonged to a middle-aged man. The last was the youthful voice of a teenager.
Cut to the three speakers: two old men and one youth.
They were Uzumaki Naruto, Uchiha Sasuke—both sixty-eight this year—and Izayoi.
The weak-sounding voice didn't belong to Sasuke but to Naruto, the man born with the Sage Body. Though he was also an Asura reincarnation, he'd never awakened Wood Release or his full potential. His hair was now snow-white, his face deeply lined, resembling Sarutobi Hiruzen in his later years.
Sasuke, by contrast, had gained Hashirama's cells, awakened Wood Release, and mastered the Yin Seal. His hair was still solid black, his arms folded, expression stern; the quiet authority he'd built up over the years gave him a hint of Madara's bearing.
Izayoi, sitting opposite them, wore a loose white robe, his posture relaxed yet suffused with a transcendent air. No matter how strong the ninja or sages on this planet were, none of them could sense his presence anymore.
Not just his chakra—they couldn't feel his life-force at all.
If he hadn't been sitting there right in front of them, and if they weren't looking straight at him, they wouldn't even know he existed.
In that moment, Izayoi seemed to have merged with nature itself… though that was only the most superficial description. Only those whose strength had scraped the ceiling of this world understood: what separated them from Izayoi wasn't "nature," but… dimension.
If Izayoi wanted, he could stand right in front of them and remain utterly undetectable. His shinjutsu now grasped that level of rule-power.
It was thanks to that power that he'd managed to vanish from public view all these years and live like an ordinary person again.
Looking at Naruto and Sasuke across from him, Izayoi's gaze held genuine regret.
He truly wanted to invite the two of them to leave with him. Besides Hinata and his other partners, they were his only friends—his only "little brothers." Combined with the fondness he'd always had for them from the original story and their potential, Izayoi didn't mind granting them a miraculous chance and raising them as his lower seats.
But peace had worn down their edges. Having never married or had children, they seemed to have lost any desire to chase after the future, wanting only to live out their days quietly.
Izayoi respected that choice.
After this latest refusal, he finally stated his own decision:
"This might be the last time we see each other and talk. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next month, maybe next year—Hinata and the others and I will leave this planet and head into the endless stars."
"From then on, this world is yours to run."
"You both still look pretty healthy to me. If you don't want this world to repeat the same old story, then raise an outstanding successor to manage it."
Before they could answer, he crossed one leg over the other with easy grace and added, half-joking, "Of course, if you're not confident, I can reclaim all the chakra in the shinobi world and leave only yours—let you take my place."
"I'm not interested," Sasuke said quietly. "Anyone with Sharingan will be tempted by the Eternal Mangekyō. To keep another Itachi from appearing, the Uchiha curse ends with me."
"My thoughts are the same as Sasuke's," Naruto said with a smile. "I used to dream of being Hokage and changing Konoha and the shinobi world. Now I just want to be an ordinary teacher and watch my students grow."
"As you wish," Izayoi chuckled.
In his eyes, the Asura chakra inside Naruto and Sasuke had already lost its millennia-old obsession with reincarnating and resolving its feud with Indra. That meant after they died, there would be no more destined Asura–Indra duel. It also meant the next generation of ninja would struggle to produce any super-Kage-level monsters—unless some genius used science to graft Ōtsutsuki relics into human bodies.
Seeing both Naruto and Sasuke growing old—in body, heart, and will—Izayoi said nothing more. After chatting idly for a while, he walked them to the door.
Watching their retreating backs, Izayoi stood there unnoticed, though he was right in the doorway. In his eyes, their silhouettes overlapped with the shadows of their childhood selves. With each step they took, those shadows grew—children into teens, teens into young men, young men into the elderly forms before him—before finally merging into the stooped figures walking away.
That process marked the end of the "Kid Era," of Shippuden—and of Boruto.
Izayoi's lips curved faintly.
"Goodbye… Naruto. Sasuke," he whispered.
As the words fell, his body gradually turned transparent, then faded away entirely.
From that moment on, no one—whether Konoha's elite, the shinobi world's leaders, Izayoi's former classmates, or his old acquaintances—ever saw the Sixth Hokage, the God of Shinobi, Izayoi, or any of his wives again.
Some said they had moved to the moon to rebuild the Ōtsutsuki clan.
Some said they'd become immortal and, bored with this world, gone to explore the endless universe.
Maybe they would never return.
Or maybe, someday far in the future, they would set foot again on this changed planet where everything familiar was already gone.
~~~
Another Story Ended. Thank you for reading till the end