Time flew by; in a blink, several more years had passed.
Konoha Year 79.
Without anyone noticing, "Shippuden" had been over for fifteen years. Hanabi's coming-of-age had been eight years ago.
In these fifteen years the shinobi world had known unbroken peace—no quarrels among great or small nations, a rarity in history.
Even when the First Hokage created the one-country-one-village system and used the power of the God of Shinobi to suppress the Warring States era, that peace was brief.
After his death the First Shinobi World War came swiftly. Even while he still lived, conflict and strife simmered in backward and far-flung places. A super-Kage-class "God of Shinobi" was, in the end, not a literal god.
Izayoi, by contrast, used the farsight and x-ray gaze of his Tenseigan like a divine eye watching the entire shinobi world. With space-time at his command, he could arrive anywhere in an instant. Because the God Tree was drawing on the planet's energy, Izayoi had to monitor the world constantly; his Wood Clones took shifts keeping watch everywhere.
Whether natural disaster or human conflict—once an uncontrollable factor appeared, a Wood Clone would arrive immediately and resolve it.
Over time, under the might of the new era's God of Shinobi, ninja and civilians alike became exceedingly well-behaved and compliant.
And throughout these fifteen years, across the continents and the seas, the God Tree's ravenous siphoning of planetary energy meant minor disasters almost monthly and major ones nearly every year.
Although Izayoi neutralized them all—and ruined buildings and power grids were restored to their original state by Yin–Yang Release and Wood Release—some places still withered into uninhabitable dead zones.
Not a few islands sank as well. Those who lost their homelands were relocated to the ninja continent.
Little by little, the small countries and minor villages vanished from the map, folded into the Five Great Nations, swelling their territories. Technology bound the Five together. The ability to reach any nation in days or a week at full speed was no longer a ninja's exclusive privilege.
Whenever night fell, swaths of this world's Earth shone with bright light. The world was becoming the way Izayoi remembered. Konoha was no longer merely a village. After multiple expansions it had become the shinobi world's most prosperous techno-metropolis, home to hundreds of thousands—dubbed the Dream City and the City of Gods.
With Konoha's expansion—and with power increasingly delegated—the Sixth Hokage became an almost legendary figure, rarely seen.
Especially after Year 71, Hinata and the other three began training trusted aides and forming a secretariat; with further delegation, they gradually moved behind the scenes.
Because… they were all married women now.
In Konoha Year 73, the shinobi world witnessed a wedding of the century. The leads were not one groom and one bride, but one groom and… four brides. The groom was Izayoi; the identities of the heroines needed no explanation.
While ninja and civilians generally practiced monogamy, in the old noble order polygamy was the tradition. Izayoi's choice was surprising, but not shocking. It was a "wedding of the century" because it was the God of Shinobi's wedding.
On that same day, the family residence that had stood for years without a nameplate finally received one—Ōtsutsuki.
Those three characters stunned the many dignitaries in attendance and made them realize, all at once, the source of Izayoi's power. This world was one big makeshift troupe—so it had all been Ōtsutsuki infighting!
Though they understood the truth, no one dared voice a complaint; they tacitly chose to play blind. Izayoi was no longer a nameless orphan, but Ōtsutsuki Izayoi, bearer of the supreme bloodline.
The sisters Hinata and Hanabi formally became Ōtsutsuki Hinata and Ōtsutsuki Hanabi; Shion and Karin, who'd had no surnames, also gained the Ōtsutsuki prefix.
The vanished clan resurfaced in the shinobi world after a millennium—no hybrids, but an orthodox pureblood Ōtsutsuki and his lower seats.
…
Konoha Year 79, October 25.
The day was preternaturally calm. Every region—even the open sea—saw no minor or major disasters.
In fact, had someone's perspective covered the entire shinobi world, they would have noticed it had been uniformly tranquil for days. For a world scarred by years of cataclysms, riddled with dead zones, even pocket dimensions collapsing under the strain, such peace was astounding.
Had someone been able to see the planet's life-force, they would have seen those years' worth of terrestrial energy—like pipelines—converging from all directions upon a certain desert.
Where energy had been abundant, life was waning and mountains cracked; where energy had been weak, regions turned directly into deadlands where nothing could grow.
Every faction and every major figure had watched these changes. Coupled with the fact that whenever disaster struck, that unfathomable God of Shinobi appeared in time, the clever ones saw through it: Izayoi was behind the disasters.
But given the gulf in power—and since he always intervened promptly and compensated those who lost their homes—everyone sensibly kept silent.
With the disappearance of disasters of late, those same people arrived at the obvious conclusion:
Izayoi had succeeded.
To cause years of harm to the world, he had surely been doing something momentous in secret. Only the sages of the Three Great Sacred Lands truly understood: a God Tree Fruit had been born again. Before long, a new Progenitor of Chakra would appear.
"…Hm?"
That day, Izayoi—who had tricked the Hyūga sisters into putting on gym outfits to play ball with him—suddenly paused and glanced in a certain direction, the corners of his mouth lifting.
"Onii-chan, are you surrendering?" Hanabi panted, face ablaze, still unable to keep from goading him. "Heh… bold of you," Izayoi snorted, tightening his grip on the "twin-tail steering wheel" in his hands.
Soon, pleas for mercy rang out again. Hinata, sitting off to the side with a drink, hunched her shoulders to lower her presence.
Only in the small hours of the next morning did Izayoi appear in a desert warded by layers of barrier. Within, a tree like a sky-piercing pillar stood upon life-drained earth—a jarring contrast.
Judging by its appearance it wasn't a fruit tree, yet hanging from the crown was a fruit no bigger than two fists, smaller than a football. Its peel couldn't be seen, wrapped as it was in white radiance, like a shining orb.
Seeing it, Izayoi's eyes filled with satisfaction—not at the fruit, but at his own capability. Isshiki and Kaguya had spent a thousand years to harvest a single God Tree Fruit. Izayoi had matched their millennium in a little over a decade. The fast-tracked fruit proved a suspicion of his.
"Ōtsutsuki Shiba definitely had an ability like Miketsu," he murmured. Only with a power that accelerated the God Tree's fruition could someone stand out among so many purebloods and become a being capable of transcending the world.
Otherwise, if every fruit required a thousand years, then even if Shiba lived tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, he couldn't have become the Ōtsutsuki God.
The high elders would have consumed more fruits and edibles than him, what with field teams planting trees, harvesting fruit, and paying tribute back to the main family.
Unless Shiba had been born the Ōtsutsuki God, the entire clan planting trees just to feed him, there was no way he could have risen above all others to a possibly world-transcending height.
So beyond potential, one needed a special gift—riding the right time, place, and people—to challenge or achieve a miracle like transcending the world. Whether Shiba actually transcended or not, Izayoi now unquestionably had the chance.
If he could coax a fruit in just over a decade, then given enough life-bearing planets, he would need only a few centuries—at most a bit over a thousand years—to reach Shiba's tier.
"Next up—the domain of shinjutsu."
With that, he flew toward the fruit. In the next instant, the God Tree Fruit detached of its own accord and floated to him. Catching it, Izayoi didn't bite into it but landed and refined it into a Chakra Edible Creation.
As in cultivation tales: only by refining heaven-sent treasures into pills can you draw out their full effect and trigger the greatest potential with the least amount. Kaguya's method—eating the fruit whole—was sheer waste. If she could have, she surely wouldn't have eaten it raw; but as a lower pureblood, she had no method for refining a Chakra Edible Creation.
Izayoi was different. Armed with that method, he could squeeze every drop of value from the fruit. With Miketsu's aid, in under half an hour he turned the pure-white, softly pulsing God Tree Fruit into a baby-head-sized, blood-red Chakra Edible Creation.
Dark pill-veins crisscrossed its surface; it radiated an uncanny aura, utterly unlike the fruit's former holiness.
Staring at it, Izayoi murmured with bright expectation, "Show me what a complete God Tree Fruit can really do."
He opened his mouth and bit in, finishing it in just a few bites.
He didn't share this one with the women. With a way to fast-track fruits now, all he needed was to find life-bearing planets on Earth's level—or much weaker—and a God Tree Fruit could be ready in a dozen years.
The women had already taken edibles and now had centuries ahead of them. For them another edible would mainly purify their bloodline and nudge their strength a bit. Sharing it was worse than using it alone.
Izayoi's strength had reached a plateau—roughly a souped-up Kaguya—still straddling the line between lower and upper. Because… he lacked shinjutsu. Not Isshiki's ordinary kind, but the sort of vast-range, even causality-level super-shinjutsu associated with Shiba.
That was why he could sense the gap between himself and the Ōtsutsuki God—there was still a long road to transcend this world. He needed one more step to become a true upper seat.
The moment the edible went down, a powerful warmth surged through him, racing across his body. Hundreds of trillions of cells suddenly turned hyperactive, as if both absorbing and releasing some energy—remodeling his body and even his… soul.
It wasn't his first time feeling this: when his Ōtsutsuki lineage upgraded to a rainbow-tier tag, he'd felt something similar. But that time and this one were on completely different scales.
The warmth kept pouring through him for a full half hour before it eased, and only vanished after about an hour. Yet when it was gone, he found no change in his body; even when he summoned the system panel, he saw no new tags. His chakra hadn't increased by much either—or perhaps it had, but compared to his oceanic reserves the gain was negligible.
He felt no disappointment—only delight. He'd felt this, too, once before. Gaining godlike power on the spot isn't necessarily good. Kaguya had hit a dead end; only by eating another fruit could she molt again. Otherwise, even a thousand or several thousand years wouldn't move the needle. That kind of power-up was no different from yanking seedlings to make them grow.
By contrast, Izayoi's "no change"—no obvious new powers—is the truly terrifying kind. As with the birth of his Tenseigan, something special was gestating within him; even his eyes were deriving new techniques. When the new abilities finally surfaced, it would mean he had evolved once more.
All he needed now was to wait.
~~~
If this can be finished surely the Fairy Tail has the chance right? 😢
And yeah, he's back uploading though I'm not gonna celebrate too early.