Chapter 60: Treasures of Heaven
The Ice Dimension had begun to fracture in ways that felt almost personal, as though the world itself understood that two ancient hungers had collided upon its frozen plains. Jagged mountains groaned and split, glaciers shearing away into the abyss as gravity bent and twisted like a wounded thing. At the center of this silent catastrophe stood Ryu, black sand coiling around him in disciplined spirals, each grain humming with compressed force capable of crushing cities into dust. Across from him, light and shadow warped unnaturally around Isshiki Otsutsuki, whose pale gaze held neither anger nor urgency—only appetite.
Isshiki could see it clearly now. The instinct to kneel. The reflex to obey. The ancient tremor of fear that Juubi creations carried in their very marrow. Ryu had suppressed it. That alone made him worth devouring. It had been more than a thousand years since Isshiki had truly fought. A thousand years of hiding in fragile flesh. Of rationing power. Of watching through shadows while Black Zetsu lingered like a jailor. Now Zetsu was gone. Naruto did not even know he existed. The world had forgotten him. For the first time in centuries, he could feed as he once had—overwhelm his prey, absorb it slowly, savor the return of his peak.
He exhaled lightly, almost nostalgically.
"I have not stretched these limbs in ages," he said, his voice calm and cultured, as though discussing a pleasant walk rather than planetary destruction.
The eight-spoked wheel within his eye began to rotate.
Ryu felt it before he saw it.
The gravity he had woven around himself—his proud dominion—shifted.
Not broken.
Not stolen.
But challenged.
Isshiki lifted one hand lazily, and the Dharmachakra wheel in his eye spun faster. The air thickened. The frozen ground buckled. Gravity reversed direction for a breathless instant, then folded inward. Ryu's black sand faltered, its orbit disrupted as the pull of the world itself became unstable.
Isshiki chuckled softly.
"A hint," he said. "Do not use gravity against me. It is one of the few things I do better than most."
Ryu did not reply, but his expression hardened. Isshiki was stronger. That much was undeniable. But the control was imperfect. Time had dulled him. The gravitational field pressed against Ryu like an enormous hand, yet it did not crush him completely. It held him back, slowed him, forced his sand to strain—but it did not dominate him.
Ryu moved.
He collapsed the sand inward and launched himself forward, closing the distance in a single violent surge. If gravity was contested, then flesh would decide the matter. Apocalypse had reforged him. Elevated him. His body was not merely chakra—it was a weapon of celestial design.
The ice beneath him shattered as he crossed the space between them.
Isshiki did not retreat.
He simply flicked two fingers.
Three enormous black cubes materialized in the air around him—featureless, oppressive, alien. They descended in silence, then fractured mid-fall into thousands upon thousands of smaller blocks. The sky filled with them in an instant, a storm of geometric fragments swirling in impossible patterns. They reflected nothing. They absorbed light. They distorted perception.
Ryu's vision vanished into black angles and shifting planes.
His sand spread outward in a defensive wave—but it struck only blocks. Endless blocks.
Isshiki disappeared.
The first strike came from the left.
A blow so sudden it bypassed sand and gravity alike, slamming into Ryu's ribs with surgical precision. Ryu's body tore through ice and stone, carving a trench across the dimension.
Before he could counter—
A second strike from above.
Isshiki shrank to microscopic size, evading the retaliatory surge of black sand, then expanded behind him mid-motion. A knee drove into Ryu's spine. The impact shattered a glacier.
Laughter echoed across the dimension.
But it came from everywhere.
From behind.
From above.
From beneath the ice.
Ryu's sand erupted in a dome, grinding cubes into powder, but the fragments reassembled. The storm of blocks made it impossible to sense chakra signatures. Isshiki's presence flickered and vanished every time he shrank himself smaller than dust.
Ryu closed his eyes.
He stopped trying to see.
He expanded gravity in pulses instead of fields—short, violent compressions that crushed everything within range.
Blocks imploded.
Ice vaporized.
Isshiki reappeared mid-air, slightly farther this time, eye gleaming with intrigue.
"Adaptable," he murmured.
He raised both hands now.
The cubes condensed into spears.
They fell like black rain.
Ryu roared—not in rage, but in exertion—and his sand spiraled upward, forming a massive vortex that intercepted the barrage. Each impact detonated with the force of a mountain strike. The Ice Dimension trembled. Floating glaciers disintegrated. The sky cracked visibly, fractures spreading like spiderwebs across the firmament.
Isshiki pressed harder.
Gravity intensified.
The wheel in his eye rotated faster.
The very weight of existence bent toward Ryu.
This time, the pressure nearly drove him to his knees.
Nearly.
Ryu slammed his foot down, anchoring himself. The sand beneath him condensed into a black platform that resisted the pull. His hand extended, and the gravity around Isshiki spiked in a focused spear of force.
Isshiki's body slowed.
Just a fraction.
But it was enough.
Ryu reached him.
Their fists collided mid-air.
The shockwave split the dimension like a thunderclap. Entire mountain ranges shattered into crystalline dust. The gravitational field around them rippled violently, two forces grinding against one another in a contest of dominance.
Isshiki smiled.
Not mockingly.
But approvingly.
"Yes," he whispered. "This is what I missed."
He twisted his wrist mid-clash, shrinking instantly to evade the full force of Ryu's strike, then expanded beneath him, launching Ryu upward with a palm strike that ruptured the sky. Ryu crashed through floating glaciers, black sand trailing like a comet's tail.
Yet he rose again.
---------------------------
Isshiki tilted his head slightly.
His physical strikes had landed cleanly. Brutally. Precisely.
And yet—
Ryu was still standing.
The Juubi child's body had endured blow after blow that would have obliterated mountains. His stamina was monstrous. His durability unnatural. Apocalypse's tampering had refined him into something far sturdier than a mere clone.
Isshiki's lips curved.
How delightful.
"Very well," he murmured softly. "Let us make this interesting."
The storm of black cubes still churned in the air, obscuring sight and chakra alike, but Ryu no longer tried to navigate within their maze. Instead, he shot upward—bursting through the geometric storm and into the fractured sky above.
The dimension trembled.
Then—
The heavens darkened.
An ocean of black sand erupted from Ryu's body, expanding outward in a tidal wave that swallowed the cubes whole. The blocks were dragged downward, pulled by crushing gravity and sheer volume, and slammed into the frozen ground with explosive force. The earth split open as thousands of cubes vanished beneath the flood.
The battlefield transformed in seconds.
What had once been ice became a desert of void-colored sand.
It moved.
It breathed.
It devoured.
The black grains shimmered with corrupted chakra, draining the life from the frozen land beneath them. Ice turned brittle and grey. The air itself felt heavier.
Isshiki remained suspended above the spreading sea, watching with visible amusement.
Ryu descended slowly, his eyes calm, focused.
The sand answered him like a legion.
It rose in towering spirals, then lashed outward.
Serpents of black sand shot toward Isshiki, striking with fanged precision. Whips followed, snapping through the air with sonic cracks, seeking to bind. Tendrils erupted from below, clawing upward to seize his limbs.
The battlefield became a writhing nightmare of motion.
Isshiki darted between the attacks, shrinking to microscopic size, expanding again just beyond the bite of a serpent. A whip clipped his shoulder and exploded against him with enough force to pulverize a fortress.
He laughed.
Genuine laughter.
"Yes," he breathed. "Now you fight."
He could end this.
He knew it.
With a mere flick of thought, he could send the sand—every grain of it—into his timeless dimension. Remove it from existence as easily as brushing away dust.
But that would be dull.
He had not tasted battle in a thousand years.
He would savor this.
The wheel in his eye spun once more.
Two dark chakrams materialized in his hands—perfect rings of compressed energy, edged with something that shimmered beyond chakra itself. They hummed softly, vibrating with restrained violence.
Isshiki flung them skyward.
Ryu's eyes narrowed.
The rings soared past him into the broken sky, then—
They expanded.
One grew to one hundred meters in diameter, spinning horizontally like a divine guillotine. The second expanded even larger—two hundred meters across—rotating above the first in a slow, ominous orbit.
They aligned.
One above.
One below.
Ryu felt it instinctively.
This was not good.
He slammed both palms downward.
The black sand surged upward around him, forming a colossal golem—its torso rising like a mountain, arms thicker than cliffs, face carved in jagged angles of obsidian. It wrapped around him protectively, layers upon layers of compressed sand forming an armored titan.
Just in time.
The chakrams began to sing.
Lines of light flickered along their edges.
Then they fired.
Arrows of pure, blinding energy rained downward from the spinning rings. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Each one trailing a streak of white that tore through the distorted sky.
They struck.
The sand golem convulsed as arrow after arrow drilled into it, detonating on impact with violent bursts that shook the dimension. Each arrow carved through meters of compressed sand before exploding outward.
The sky became a storm of light and black debris.
Ryu reinforced the golem with more sand, feeding it continuously, but the bombardment did not relent. The larger upper ring accelerated, its rotation blurring into a continuous halo of destruction.
Ice mountains disintegrated under stray arrows. The fractured horizon glowed with constant impacts.
Within the golem's chest, Ryu clenched his fists.
Gravity pulsed outward from him in waves, disrupting the trajectory of some arrows—but the chakrams compensated, adjusting angles mid-flight as if guided by intelligence.
Isshiki watched from above, arms folded, eyes gleaming.
"Adapt," he whispered.
Ryu roared.
The golem exploded outward, sacrificing its outer layers in a massive shockwave of sand. The blast collided with the falling arrows, disrupting their formation and buying him seconds.
Seconds were enough.
He thrust both hands skyward.
The sea of black sand responded.
A massive spiral column shot upward like a drill, piercing through the barrage and slamming into the lower chakram. The impact staggered its rotation, grinding against its spinning edge in a deafening clash of forces.
Sparks of blinding light erupted.
The upper ring angled sharply and redirected its fire, concentrating arrows into the spiraling sand column in an attempt to sever it.
Ryu's gravity intensified.
The entire battlefield compressed inward.
Sand surged higher, thicker, denser—attempting to drag both chakrams downward into the sea.
Isshiki's smile sharpened.
He flickered.
Appearing mid-air between the rings, he extended one hand.
Gravity inverted.
For a fraction of a second, the sand spiral lost cohesion.
The lower chakram tore free, its edge slicing through the sand column in a radiant arc. The upper ring descended, both now rotating in opposite directions as they moved toward Ryu like grinding celestial saws.
Ryu did not retreat.
He stepped forward.
The black sand around him compressed until it glowed faintly from the pressure. Gravity bent inward toward his body in a tight sphere.
The chakrams closed in.
Light met darkness.
The collision detonated.
The Ice Dimension screamed.
Shockwaves rippled outward in concentric circles, shattering what little remained intact. The sky fractured further, splitting like glass under a hammer.
When the explosion cleared—
Ryu stood, bleeding faintly from his forehead.
The chakrams hovered at Isshiki's sides, still spinning.
Ryu lifted his gaze.
Isshiki's eyes gleamed with something dangerously close to joy.
"Yes," Isshiki said softly.
"This is how a fruit should struggle."
--------------------------
The twin chakrams shrank midair, compressing down to lethal discs no larger than shields. They began to orbit him closely—one near his shoulder, the other circling at waist height—spinning with a low, predatory hum.
Isshiki extended his hand.
A black staff materialized instantly, lengthening with a metallic whisper into a weapon taller than himself. It pulsed faintly with Ōtsutsuki chakra—dense, refined, ancient.
Below him, Ryu stood amidst the ocean of black sand, the darkness coiling tightly around his body now rather than flooding outward. He had learned quickly.
Gravity would not work.
He had felt it—the subtle override each time he tried to intensify it. Isshiki's control was superior there.
So he let gravity go.
Instead, the sand responded like a second nervous system.
Isshiki descended.
They met halfway.
The first exchange was violent enough to fracture space.
Isshiki appeared before Ryu in a blink, staff slashing downward toward his skull. Ryu crossed his forearms, black sand compressing into armor just in time—
CRACK.
The impact blasted him backward through three floating ice slabs.
Before he could stabilize, a chakram sliced across his flank. He twisted midair; it grazed him instead of cleaving him in two, carving a glowing wound across his side.
Ryu retaliated instantly.
The sand surged upward like a cannon blast, propelling him back into close range. He drove a fist wrapped in obsidian-black compression straight at Isshiki's chest.
Isshiki blocked with the staff—but the impact forced him back several meters across the air.
His smile widened.
Ryu pressed.
Sand blades formed along his arms, jagged and humming with destructive chakra. He slashed in rapid succession—horizontal, vertical, diagonal—each strike accompanied by whiplike tendrils lashing outward to limit Isshiki's escape routes.
Isshiki's body flickered in and out of visibility as he shrank and expanded, dodging by millimeters. A blade grazed his shoulder; another clipped his thigh.
He retaliated with a brutal knee to Ryu's ribs, followed by a palm strike that detonated like a bomb against his sternum.
Ryu coughed—but did not fall.
Sand hands erupted from behind Isshiki, attempting to seize his limbs. The lower chakram sliced through them in a perfect arc, severing the constructs instantly. The upper disc darted like a hunting hawk, forcing Ryu to guard high—
Isshiki vanished.
He reappeared behind Ryu and drove the staff across his back with crushing force.
The blow sent Ryu spiraling into the sand sea below, carving a trench kilometers long.
But before Isshiki could capitalize—
The sand swallowed Ryu entirely.
Then it exploded upward.
Ryu erupted from the darkness, eyes calm, expression unchanged. The black sand now formed a sleek mantle around him, flowing along his limbs like living armor rather than massive constructs.
He closed the distance again.
This time their exchange became pure violence.
Staff clashed against sand-forged blades.
Palm met fist.
Knee met elbow.
Chakrams darted unpredictably, forcing Ryu to constantly split his focus between Isshiki's body and the spinning discs that sought his blind spots.
Ryu countered with precision rather than rage. Each time Isshiki shrank to evade, Ryu's sand swept the area preemptively, narrowing safe re-expansion points. Each time Isshiki struck, sand absorbed part of the impact, redistributing force across Ryu's body.
They were close.
Too close for comfort.
Isshiki felt it.
His stamina was not what it once had been. Ryu's endurance, bolstered by Apocalypse's enhancement and Juubi-derived resilience, allowed him to sustain damage that would cripple most beings.
A sand-coated fist slipped past Isshiki's guard and smashed into his jaw.
The dimension quaked.
Isshiki spun midair, blood trailing briefly from his lip before he wiped it away with two fingers.
He laughed softly.
"Excellent."
He surged forward again, staff spinning in a blur. He struck Ryu's knee—Ryu blocked. He feinted high—then drove a kick into Ryu's abdomen that forced him back several steps across solidified sand.
Ryu retaliated with a palm thrust of his own. Sand compressed at the point of contact and detonated outward.
Isshiki blocked—
But the blast forced him down to one knee in midair.
For a heartbeat, neither moved.
Then Isshiki's expression shifted.
The amusement dimmed.
His eyes spun slowly.
"Enough."
Ryu stepped forward—
Isshiki vanished.
He reappeared directly before Ryu, within arm's reach.
No staff.
No chakram.
Just an open palm.
Ryu moved to strike—
Isshiki's hand touched his chest.
Softly.
"Treasures of Heaven."
The words were not shouted.
They did not need to be.
The technique detonated inward, not outward.
Ryu felt it first as a distortion.
Then—
Silence.
Sound vanished.
Sight fractured into shards of white.
His balance disappeared as if the concept had been erased. The sand around him lost cohesion, no longer responding to thought. His sense of up and down dissolved. The taste of iron filled his mouth though he had not been struck.
His hearing returned for a split second—only to collapse again into a high-pitched void.
His vision inverted.
His skin felt simultaneously burning and frozen.
All five senses—shattered.
He tried to move.
His body responded half a second too late.
He attempted to summon sand.
It flowed in the wrong direction.
Isshiki stepped back calmly as Ryu staggered, disoriented, the black sand collapsing uselessly around him.
The chakrams resumed their slow orbit around Isshiki's body.
He watched his prey struggle to understand which way was forward.
"Your body is strong," Isshiki said quietly. "Your will admirable."
Ryu attempted another strike.
It missed by meters.
Isshiki caught his wrist and twisted sharply, snapping the joint before kicking him across the fractured plain.
Ryu crashed into a wall of floating ice and slid downward, senses still scrambled by divine interference.
-------------------------------
At first, Ryu believed it was merely disorientation.
A momentary lapse.
A temporary distortion of perception.
He had endured worse.
He had been born from the Juubi's essence, forged in sand and silence, elevated by Apocalypse's will. He was not a creature prone to panic. He did not rage. He did not tremble.
He adapted.
But this—
This was not something one adapted to.
There was no light.
Not darkness, not shadow—no light at all. No contrast. No edge of form. His eyes were open, he knew they were open, yet there was nothing to see. No horizon. No sky. No ground beneath his feet.
He tried to inhale sharply.
There was no scent.
The crisp bite of ice. The metallic tang of blood. The faint dryness of sand. All gone.
He tried to listen.
Silence did not greet him.
There was simply no sound. No echo of his own breathing. No hum of chakra. No distant cracking of glaciers.
He attempted to move his hand.
He could not feel it.
He could not feel air brushing against his skin. Could not feel the weight of his body. Could not even feel pain where his bones had fractured moments ago.
Taste vanished next. Even the phantom memory of iron on his tongue dissolved.
He existed.
But he did not exist.
It was like being erased without dying.
For the first time since his creation, Ryu did not know where he was.
Or what he was.
He summoned chakra instinctively.
Nothing answered.
He reached for sand—his faithful black tide, his extension, his shield.
It did not respond.
He attempted to activate his Rinnegan.
The eyes that could dominate battlefields and absorb lesser energies felt useless now. He could not sense the flow of power to draw in. Ōtsutsuki chakra did not behave like mortal chakra; it did not bend to his will.
He was cut off.
Alone.
The calm that had defined him—his steady composure in battle, his measured tone before gods—began to fracture.
At first it was a crack.
A subtle tremor beneath the surface.
Then it widened.
He tried to orient himself.
Am I standing?
Am I falling?
Am I already dead?
There was no answer.
The void pressed closer.
A terrible realization bloomed within him:
If he screamed… would he even hear it?
He opened his mouth.
Nothing came back to him.
No vibration in his throat. No echo in his skull.
His thoughts grew louder than the silence.
What is happening?
Where is he?
Where am I?
The darkness was not simply absence.
It was negation.
Identity began to blur. Without sensation, without anchor, without resistance, what was there to confirm he existed at all?
His heartbeat—was it beating?
He could not feel it.
Fear crept in—not the sharp, instinctual fear of physical harm, but something colder.
Existential.
He, who had spoken to Isshiki without trembling, who had dismissed his former master with quiet confidence—
Now could not even be sure he possessed a body.
His calm shattered.
The black sand within him felt distant, unreachable. The earth, once his ally, might as well have belonged to another universe.
For the first time—
Ryu was afraid.
Not of death.
Of nothingness.
Of dissolving into an endless, silent abyss where he could not even perceive his own suffering.
And somewhere beyond that void—
Isshiki watched.
-----------------------------
To Isshiki Otsutsuki, this was the purest form of artistry.
The body broken was ordinary.
The mind broken was divine.
He stood in the fractured Ice Dimension, observing Ryu's physical form stagger blindly, eyes wide yet unfocused, limbs twitching without coordination. The black sand collapsed uselessly around him, reacting to impulses that no longer aligned with reality.
Isshiki inhaled slowly, savoring the moment.
How long had it been?
How many centuries since he had used Treasures of Heaven with full intention?
To strip a being of every sense was not merely disabling them.
It was returning them to their rightful insignificance.
"Look at you," Isshiki murmured softly, circling the stumbling figure. "So composed. So elevated. Speaking to me as an equal."
Ryu swung blindly at empty air.
The strike landed nowhere.
Isshiki smiled.
"These lower beings forget their place. They borrow power and begin to imagine themselves gods."
He stepped closer, watching Ryu's breathing grow erratic—though Ryu himself could not hear it.
"With this," Isshiki continued almost conversationally, "all resistance melts. The truth reveals itself."
He leaned down slightly, voice lowering.
"They beg."
Ryu's lips moved.
Perhaps he was shouting.
Perhaps he was pleading.
He could not hear himself.
And that was the cruelty of it.
Isshiki stopped before him.
"You should be honored," he said calmly. "Not many can claim they touched my body and lived even this long."
His hand rose slowly above Ryu's head.
Isshiki's fingers hovered inches from his crown.
"Now," Isshiki whispered, "it is time to go where you belong."
Dark chakra condensed around his palm.
Ryu's body began to stiffen, its outline warping, compressing inward as if reality itself were folding him.
The transformation began.
Not violently.
But inevitably.
Like a fruit ripening on a branch that had always been destined for harvest.
And in the soundless abyss of his stolen senses—
Ryu died without understanding anything.