Ao thrashed on the ground for a long time before finally breathing his last.
Thanks to him, the Sand and Stone ninja became exceptionally cooperative during Konoha's inspection.
Under Baki and the others' worried gazes, Gaara spread his arms for inspection with rare rationality. The Shukaku chakra that had been leaking from his belly retreated back into the seal, motionless, as if dead.
So even you have something you fear.
Looking at the figure standing in the sky, Gaara closed his eyes and savored the intoxicating calm.
In the end, the Stone and Mist ninja also passed inspection one after another. Seeing how even these foreign troublemakers had become obedient, Konoha's shinobi like Aoba all looked up at Konome Taketori with naked admiration. Even Sarutobi Asuma could only sigh.
Doves and hawks each had their strengths, but as a young man, he had to admit this kind of hardline style suited his taste better.
Konome Taketori did not personally escort them into the village afterward.
If she had to handle everything herself, then what was the point of keeping all these Konoha ninja around?
She took Ao's corpse away and destroyed it, just in case he somehow managed to win a resurrection rematch through Orochimaru.
And while destroying the body, she discovered a brand new ability of her gray eyes.
The evening wind whistled past her ears. Konome Taketori flew above Konoha, her black cloak dancing in the wind and covering the moonlight. She spread her arms and looked down over the kingdom beneath her feet.
The streets ran across the village like a grid, crisscrossing in all directions. Countless tiny black squares glowed with lamplight like stars scattered across the earth. The central avenue, brightest of all, blazed with color as ant-like little people moved through it in lively streams.
Then she looked farther out.
The foreign ninja at Konoha's gate were lining up and entering the village in an orderly fashion. They looked around curiously, while only the Mist ninja trudged forward with their heads hanging low.
The Root operatives she had deployed were hidden in the shadows of pavilions, rooftops, and eaves, watching every movement the foreign ninja made.
This was the first time she had ever looked at Konoha from this angle after fully breaking free of gravity.
In her previous life, she had flown on airplanes a few times, but those trips had always been rushed business travel, often on red-eye flights.
A red-eye flight meant the earliest or latest departures of the day. Since check-in in a big city was a nightmare, a seven o'clock flight meant getting up at three in the morning. She would be dead tired and still have to keep working. No matter how beautiful the scenery was, with her state of mind back then, she could never have appreciated it.
But now, crossing the sky with her own flesh and blood, everything she could see was her territory. Konoha's streets were nowhere near as bright and bustling as a modern city, but her current state of mind more than made up for that.
The earthquake that had once destroyed her family and shaped the course of her whole life was now nothing more than a minor nuisance to her.
Within Takamagahara, she could casually command earthquakes, call wind and rain, and suppress disasters no human effort could ever control.
She had risen above mortality and stepped into divinity.
A glint of gray flashed in her eyes like two eerie flames. In her vision, the miniature illusion of Konoha slowly rotated.
From the perspective of her gray eyes, a shadow was floating behind her, drifting with the wind.
The figure had gray-blue hair, and two sealing talismans hung from an earring. His face was serene and peaceful.
It was Ao, who had only just died.
After her eye technique evolved and released the gray light, she had first calmed Root, then discovered Ao and the others had arrived, then gone to contend with Sarutobi Hiruzen for authority over Konoha's future, then split the forest and the earth before killing her enemy. She had not had time to investigate the mysterious and powerful gray eyes at all.
Only after killing Ao did she discover that she could directly see souls.
At the time, when Ao's flesh died, his soul and chakra did not vanish. They drifted outward instead, then began to sink into the earth, as though something below were pulling them in.
Konome Taketori knew that an underworld existed in the Naruto world. She guessed he was about to pass into that gap between life and death.
This was her first time seeing a soul with her own eyes. There was no way she was going to let Ao leave so easily. But since she had no method yet to manipulate another person's soul, she could only form a cage out of yin-nature chakra and try to trap him.
To her surprise, it worked extremely well.
Perhaps because it no longer had the protection of flesh, Ao's soul had almost no resistance to yin chakra at all. He had been sealed beside her with ease.
The wild wind howled past. At this altitude, the temperature was extremely low, but neither Konome Taketori nor Ao was the type to fear cold, so they could make do for now.
As she observed Ao's translucent soul, she discovered he no longer had any consciousness. His face was calm and peaceful, as if he had merely fallen asleep.
At the center of his chest floated something like a phantom chakra seed, shining faintly, as though it had taken the place of the flesh and become the anchor that prevented the soul from dispersing.
No wonder Chihaya Tooru had said a chakra seed could never be cloned successfully.
A chakra seed did not exist only within the heart of the flesh. It also existed within the soul.
A clone made from genes and flesh alone could never reproduce that.
Shinobi really were not the same species as ordinary humans.
Ao's existence proved Konome Taketori's guess.
Compared to normal humans, shinobi possessed an additional energy circulation system. Spirit, body, and chakra were three in one, all interlinked and mutually transmutable. They still looked human on the outside, but in truth they had already become chakra lifeforms. The chakra core within the soul could even replace the body as the anchor of existence.
That meant that as long as a shinobi's chakra core and soul remained, they had not truly died.
That was why resurrection techniques in the Naruto world worked so easily.
Impure World Reincarnation summoned the dead and their chakra out of the underworld, then housed them in a false body. The technique of rebirth through one's own life force poured vitality into a corpse and called the soul back. Rinne Rebirth was probably much the same.
Maybe I could try creating an underworld of my own.
As she played with Ao's soul, that thought suddenly surfaced in Konome Taketori's mind.
If she was right, then the underworld was essentially an alternate space that drew souls into itself. In the end, all those undying souls and their chakra gathered there. Maybe the infinite chakra of the Impure World Reincarnation came from the power accumulated by countless dead across the Naruto world.
Takamagahara was deeply tied to chakra and souls. Every time she used it, it automatically consumed ninety percent of her chakra and turned it into gray light, permanently transforming whatever it enveloped into part of her body.
It sounded tyrannical, as if given enough time she really could cover the entire planet with Takamagahara. That was also the path she had envisioned to surpass Kaguya Otsutsuki.
But the truth was much more complicated.
Takamagahara had a theoretical upper limit to its volume, one tied directly to her maximum chakra reserves.
Enveloping Konoha and its surrounding regions had already pushed her eye technique to its limit. If she wanted to expand further, she would either have to become Six Paths and elevate her own nature, or devour the tailed beasts and try to fuse with the planet.
Now Ao's soul had shown her a new path.
If she could build a second underworld and collect the souls of the dead throughout the world, then she would gain a constant source of chakra.
Turning Ao's soul over in her hand, Konome Taketori thought about it for a while before ultimately discarding the tempting idea.
Building an underworld for steady long-term growth was indeed appealing, but there was still that old ghost, Hagoromo Otsutsuki, hidden in the gap between life and death. For all she knew, the existing underworld was already his method of storing chakra.
Do not be fooled by the fact that all her abilities had evolved and that she was now invincible among super-kage. She still had no chance at all against the Sage of Six Paths brothers.
If she could beat Hagoromo, then there would be no need to build a second underworld at all. She could just steal the original one.
Crackle.
The yin chakra cage around Ao quickly transformed into Black Lightning. Watching as Ao slowly disappeared inside it, Konome Taketori decided it was better to hold the Chunin Exams first and lure the Five Kage over.
Her bloodline limits and bloodline elimination would be settled there.
After that she would synthesize a bloodline expansion, step into Six Paths, then go to the moon and activate the Ten-Tails juvenile body. Any trip into the underworld would have to wait until after the moon.
As she organized the plans ahead, Konome Taketori looked up at the round moon in the sky and felt that the goal she had chased for so long was finally within reach.
The next day, Lady Yoru-watari returned once more to her loyal Root.
"Why can't I use Shadow Clones?"
Her yang-style split body had already taken on an adult form. Dressed in a white lab coat, it jotted things into a notebook like some evil scientist.
It wore no mask, nor was there any black cloth covering its eyes. Its gray pupils had already become ordinary black.
"My body, my eye techniques, and the essence of my soul have all surpassed the limit of what a Shadow Clone can reproduce. If a clone can't be constructed, then naturally it just collapses."
Konome Taketori stood before a mirror, altering her appearance back into her former self.
Her sharp, beautiful features turned youthful again. Her height quickly shrank down, as if she had swallowed some de-aging medicine. In the end, other than the disappearance of the key at her brow that had once controlled Reverse Eight Gates, everything else looked exactly the same as before.
Once Takamagahara awakened, she no longer needed a cursed seal to control the Eight Gates within her. Her flesh could now edit itself freely. She could alter the number and placement of the gates, or open and close them at will. Takamagahara could even directly manipulate life force itself.
At this point, opening the Eight Gates was redundant.
"I think it's because Shadow Clones can't replicate higher-level dojutsu."
The yang split body continued writing in the notebook. Her soul had evolved together with her Sage Body. Perfect recall was child's play now, but like the original body, she still preserved many of her former habits. She did not want herself to completely shed the identity of being human.
"Shadow Clones can be discarded for now. Prioritize researching Flying Thunder God."
Unable to perfectly recreate her old appearance, Konome Taketori gave up and took out the Byakugan that had belonged to Aoi.
Squish.
The skin at the center of her forehead wriggled and caved inward into a round socket. She embedded the damp Byakugan into it. Blood vessels and nerves connected automatically, and bone membrane grew over the crystalline sphere until it became a gray pearl.
The Byakugan was the source of all her future eye techniques.
If she wanted to awaken new dojutsu later, then she would need the Byakugan's ocular power as the foundation.
Aoi's blood was connected to her own. Not only did this Byakugan show no rejection, it fit her perfectly, as though it had always been her own eye.
Looking at the girl in the mirror with a pearl at her brow, like some divine being, Konome Taketori lightly pressed her lips together and tried to imitate the smile she remembered from Aoi.
Hmm. Not quite.
"All right..."
The yang split body reluctantly put down its work. Flesh cells began dividing wildly. One tiny Konome Taketori after another crawled out from its back.
Chakra rushed through them, stimulating cellular division. The tiny, figurine-like Konome Taketori bodies grew taller and taller until they were identical to the yang split body.
Flesh Fission.
This was achieved by using Takamagahara's control to separate and stimulate cells.
This technique could not reproduce her dojutsu. It could copy her gray bones, but that required a massive chakra cost. After all, even Kaguya in canon had not looked particularly relaxed when she used All-Killing Ash Bones.
Konome Taketori did not plan to let these split bodies fight, so she did not waste chakra on that.
Because her cells could now automatically condense a chakra core just like Hashirama's, these bodies could not only exist for long periods, they could also think and cultivate. They were no different from real people.
The yang split body itself had been created this way after Konome Taketori realized Shadow Clones no longer worked.
Though they were called split bodies, carrying her genes and chakra, in essence they were still part of the original self, similar to the relation between a Sage and its clone entities.
"I feel like we could go act in a Tomie adaptation."
One of the newly formed split bodies walked to the mirror, looked around at all the other Konome Taketori bodies that were still growing, then covered the left side of its face and tilted its head with a disturbingly alluring smile. If not for the silver hair, it really would have looked like Tomie.
No one paid attention to the lunatic born first. The other split bodies naturally fell into their roles and returned to developing the Flying Thunder God technique.
Taijutsu, senjutsu, and space-time ninjutsu were all things that could still affect Six Paths level enemies. Kakashi had used Kamui to play a meaningful role even in the battle against Kaguya.
Taijutsu went without saying. Eighty percent of Konome Taketori's current strength came from it. If she fully activated Takamagahara, even she could not predict how much power she might unleash.
And now, senjutsu finally seemed to be within reach as well.
"Since you can manipulate natural energy now, why not try entering Sage Mode directly?"
The yang split body looked curiously at the original. It could not experience Takamagahara's power itself, nor test it, and could only theorize based on reason.
Canon had explained Sage Mode's method very clearly. First one entered a state of unity with heaven and earth to sense and absorb natural energy. Then one mixed that energy with spiritual and bodily energy in a one-to-one-to-one ratio to refine senjutsu chakra.
The difficult parts were sensing natural energy and maintaining the ratio.
In theory, since the original had already merged with heaven and earth through Takamagahara, entering Sage Mode should have come very naturally.
"I'll try."
Changing out of the black robe and back into the white kimono she usually wore, Konome Taketori excitedly closed her eyes and began sensing the natural energy around her.
A breeze moved softly through the chamber.
The natural energy floating in the air shimmered with colored halos like mist, rising and drifting. Tiny particles of it slipped into the split bodies every now and then with each breath.
She herself no longer needed breathing to maintain her life functions, but the split bodies clearly had not inherited that advantage.
Gray light flickered in her eyes again and again. Chakra in her body was consumed in quantities too small to measure. The natural energy scattered through the air gathered into a stream and began to move like a wandering serpent.
Everything within Takamagahara had to obey her will.
Natural energy was no exception.
When she split the forest and the earth, it was precisely this high-level energy source that she had been relying on.
Though she had not yet truly begun training in senjutsu, she already possessed the ability to control natural energy.
The Sage Mode she had dreamed of for so long now seemed within arm's reach.
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