The Great Toad Sage pain-filled account sounded like a grotesque puzzle—one in which a bizarre, ill-fitting piece had been forcibly shoved into place.
Jiraiya felt as though his ability to comprehend reality itself was being challenged.
"It was… a young man… whose face I could not see…" the Great Toad Sage spoke haltingly, lingering terror still in his voice. "He… seemed… very angry… by a… lakeside…"
A lakeside?
Angry?
What did that have to do with the end of the world, the disappearance of chakra, or the rise of countless monsters?
Jiraiya's brow knotted.
"…And then… he… flicked a fishing rod at me…" the Great Toad Sage voice suddenly sharpened, as if reliving the moment. "He… hooked… my eyes… and reeled them away…"
Hooked them away?
With a fishing rod?
Jiraiya was completely stunned.
For a moment, he even wondered whether exhaustion and shock had caused him to hallucinate.
A fishing rod? Reeling away eyes?
What kind of absurdity was this?
What troubled him even more was the logical contradiction.
"Great Toad Sage," Jiraiya said urgently, "weren't you asleep—foreseeing the future through dreams? That means you were merely observing a future scene! How could a 'future' young man use a 'future' fishing rod to steal the eyes of your present self?! That… that makes no sense!"
Time and causality seemed hopelessly entangled.
Precognition should be one-way observation. How could the future strike back?
It overturned everything Jiraiya thought he understood about time—and prophecy.
The Great Toad Sage writhed faintly in pain. Around the empty sockets where his eyes had once been, flesh twitched slowly, trying to regenerate. The process was agonizingly slow.
Fukasaku had already attempted numerous senjutsu-based healing techniques—even Mount Myōboku's sacred toad oil.
All had failed.
A strange residual power lingered within the wounds, rejecting and even erasing senjutsu chakra. External healing was useless.
Only the Sage's own ancient vitality allowed the faintest progress.
That alone proved the attacker's power transcended senjutsu itself.
Hearing Jiraiya's confusion, the Great Toad Sage shook his massive head weakly.
"No… it was not… mere foresight… When I saw him… he… seemed to… sense… my gaze…"
"It was… contact… across… time… and dream…"
"His anger… his rod… carried… something… I cannot… comprehend…"
Jiraiya felt his head spin—but the chill in his heart deepened.
To retaliate across time and dreams—and to wield a power beyond senjutsu's framework—this bordered on myth. The domain of gods.
"Why was he angry?" Jiraiya pressed. "Did you accidentally do something while observing him?"
It was the simplest explanation. Like being caught spying.
Fukasaku, who had been thinking deeply, suddenly spoke.
"Could it be… that when the Great Lord was watching… he disturbed the fish in the lake? Maybe the fish fled, and the young man blamed him for ruining his catch?"
The hypothesis sounded ridiculous.
Yet bizarrely consistent with the idea of fishing.
Jiraiya's mouth twitched.
"So because he couldn't catch fish… he lashed out across time and dreams to steal the Sage's eyes?"
It sounded like childish petulance—yet carried an unnerving sense of arbitrary tyranny.
"That's absurd," Jiraiya objected. "Even if he was angered, why target the Great Toad Sage? The fish couldn't see someone inside a prophetic dream!"
"It doesn't follow."
"Jiraiya," Fukasaku said gravely, "sometimes logic simply doesn't apply."
Before Jiraiya could respond, the Great Toad Sage stirred again.
"No… not… the fish…"
"Perhaps… he wasn't angry… about failing to catch fish…"
"Perhaps… he was angry… that I… saw… him… fishing…"
"Or… perhaps… he wasn't fishing at all…"
"Perhaps… what he was reeling in… was something else… and I… interfered…"
His voice faded, confusion and terror entwined.
"Those eyes… made me… unable… to resist…"
"Everything… we know… everything… we do… may be… meaningless…"
With that final murmur, the Great Toad Sage fell into deep unconsciousness. His breathing was so faint it was barely perceptible.
Silence filled the chamber.
Jiraiya and Fukasaku stared at one another, shock and dread carved into their faces.
A faceless young man at a lakeside.
A fishing rod that crossed time and dreams.
Eyes hooked and stolen from a millennia-old sage.
Everything pointed to a being beyond the shinobi world's comprehension—a power that defied chakra, ninjutsu, senjutsu, Tailed Beasts, even the revelations of Demon Gods and Seven Warlords.
Before such an existence…
Were chakra, Sage Mode, the tailed beasts, Indra and Asura's legacy—even the so-called Demon God—nothing more than trivialities?
Standing within Mount Myōboku's ancient stone chamber, Jiraiya felt, for the first time, how small—and how ignorant—the shinobi world truly was.
Like ants wandering blind through a dark forest.
And above them—
Something unfathomable was watching.
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