As for Matt's miserable situation, President Maya—lying in her warm, cozy bedroom—knew nothing about it.
So, naturally, she was innocent.
Regarding the Shadow Clone's personal conduct, Madam President expressed strong condemnation. Of course, a commander in the field can ignore orders from above. She had no way to control what the clone did (yeah, right), and could only offer Matt her deepest sympathies.
And so, arms folded behind her head, little feet crossed and swaying, Madam President squinted her eyes and mentally tapped the Dead Demon Consuming Seal skill card.
"What? Are you kidding me?!"
After a long, stunned silence, she bolted upright in bed—all trace of her lazy comfort gone.
Because this Dead Demon Consuming Seal was an absolute rip-off. No wonder the price had been so far below expectations.
To be fair, the skill card did live up to its "exclusive" billing. It didn't just contain the complete mechanics of the jutsu; it included the technique's entire origin story.
In the Naruto world, the Uzumaki Clan—Naruto's maternal bloodline—shared a common ancestor with the Senju Clan. Both descended from Asura, the younger son of the Sage of Six Paths, Hagoromo Ōtsutsuki.
The illustrious Uzumaki were known not only for their extraordinary physical vitality and massive Chakra reserves, but for their ancestral Fūinjutsu—sealing arts considered unrivaled across the entire shinobi world.
At some point in the clan's history, a genius-level Uzumaki encountered a powerful enemy. During that battle—whether it originated from the Uzumaki, the enemy, or some entity lurking in an alternate dimension—a bizarre spirit appeared. This entity could devour and absorb the souls of shinobi.
The Uzumaki Clan located a pocket dimension, sealed the spirit inside using their strongest Fūinjutsu, and from that foundation developed a new sealing technique: the Dead Demon Consuming Seal.
The principle was straightforward. The caster summoned the sealed spirit—the "Shinigami"—from its pocket dimension, offered their own soul as sacrifice, and the Shinigami would then consume and seal the enemy's soul into its stomach—that same pocket dimension. The result: mutual destruction, enabling the weak to take down the strong.
Because the Uzumaki had created this jutsu themselves, they naturally retained full control over the pocket dimension. They could not only seal souls but also release them—using a clan artifact known as the Shinigami Mask to open the dimension and undo the seal.
Put simply: to learn the Dead Demon Consuming Seal, even if you weren't afraid to die and were willing to go down with your enemy, you first had to create a "Shinigami."
And the "Shinigami," strictly speaking, wasn't an actual deity. It was a jutsu construct—a mechanism, or perhaps a strange space—capable of devouring and sealing souls.
To master this jutsu, you had to build the "Shinigami" yourself. That required three things:
1. A spirit entity capable of devouring souls.
2. An independent pocket dimension.
3. Mastery of Fūinjutsu at an extremely high level—based on the technique's rating, at minimum Diamond Lv. 1.
This had to be a joke. President Maya didn't have a single genuine Diamond Lv. 1 skill. Her only Diamond-tier technique—the Hansen Three-Body Technique—was still an incomplete prototype.
As for a soul-devouring spirit entity—what even was that? Where was she supposed to find one?
Fine, let's say unlucky-as-hell Maya somehow hit the jackpot and stumbled across such a thing. How was she supposed to capture it? With a Rasengan? Shadow jutsu?
If she actually ran into something that terrifying, escaping with her life intact would be grounds for a pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine to thank God personally.
(P.S.: The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine is a famous Manhattan cathedral, relatively close to her home.)
As for finding a pocket dimension—that was absurd. Even with the detailed sensing instructions laid out for her, how was she supposed to—wait. What the hell?
Madam President leaped out of bed, landed barefoot on the cold floor, closed her eyes, and ran through the sensing process one more time.
Holy shit. She could actually feel something. Faint, hazy—but there. The entire fabric of space around her felt subtly different.
How to describe it? The Dead Demon Consuming Seal's method for sensing pocket dimensions was laughably simple. So simple that when Maya first read it, she'd assumed it was nonsense.
The instructions were exactly one sentence long: A ninja with spatial and sensory aptitude channels their perception, modulates their Chakra frequency through the perceptive field—mentally simulating something rubbing back and forth or bouncing up and down—until resonance occurs with some unknown location. If the ninja can then capture that resonance point through spatial ninjutsu, they will have acquired a pocket dimension.
President Maya hadn't taken it seriously at first. In her mental model, capturing a pocket dimension should have been spectacularly difficult—high-level, complex, requiring years of study. Being told it was this easy was like someone saying the atomic bomb was built by a few illiterate guys on a beach, shaping mud.
Besides, based on past experience, theories from the Naruto world were mostly useless in the Marvel universe.
But when she actually tried the method a few times... it seemed to work. Something was genuinely resonating with the soul in her sea of consciousness.
Now that was interesting.
Madam President wasn't someone who worshipped authority. She didn't believe everything from Naruto was superior to the Marvel world, nor did she dismiss all of it as worthless here.
She believed what she could see, what she could sense, and what she could verify through her own testing.
And this theory? It worked.
After thinking it through carefully, Maya pieced together an explanation. Before the God Tree ever invaded the Naruto world, powerful beings had already existed—the Great Toad Sage, the White Snake Sage, the Slug Sage. These creatures predated Chakra itself, yet they'd been able to sense and capture pocket dimensions to establish their clans' sacred grounds.
Meaning the prerequisite for sensing pocket dimensions wasn't Chakra. Chakra was just the fuel source. The real deciding factors were spatial aptitude and sensory aptitude.
Whether the original Maya had any spatial talent, she didn't know. But the Third Hokage definitely did.
Why couldn't the Third use the Flying Thunder God, then? Simple—old man Hiruzen Sarutobi's talent card was worth only 20,000 Influence Points. Cheap goods, cheap quality. He had a bit of everything, but nothing exceptional.
The Sage of Six Paths, Hagoromo, also had omni-attribute talent. But he became the Six Paths Sage.
In numeric terms, with 100 as the maximum: the Sage of Six Paths averaged 99.5 across all attributes. The Third Hokage averaged 60. His spatial attribute specifically? A measly 30.
With Maya and Sarutobi's talents stacked together, the combined aptitude was likely much higher—evident from how fast Maya's Ninjutsu had been progressing.
In other words, President Maya's spatial talent was at minimum higher than the Third Hokage's own.
As for the other requirement—sensory ability—Maya's was even stronger. Drop her into the Naruto world and she'd rival Karin herself.
And who was Karin? Her Kagura Mind's Eye was one of the strongest sensory abilities in the entire series.
Maya no longer doubted the pocket-dimension theory. What she was puzzling over now was this: that hazy, dreamlike sensation of overlapping space—was it actually a pocket dimension?
In Maya's imagination, sensing a pocket dimension should have been like searching for a glowing star in the pitch-black void of space.
What she actually felt was more like entering a multidimensional labyrinth. Everything seemed to be there, and yet nothing seemed to be there at all.
She seemed to perceive things that were imperceptible.
Confused? Contradictory?
Yes. And that was exactly how Madam President felt right now.