Chapter 262: Tokoyo Insect and the Timeless Fruit
The Three-Tails, which genuinely resembled a great turtle in both shape and temperament, was also one of the least aggressive of the nine Tailed Beasts. But a Tailed Beast was still a Tailed Beast, and even a turtle could bite when provoked. Having been yanked forcibly out of Nohara Rin's body, the Three-Tails was furious. It thrashed its bulk and whipped its three tails, fully intending to teach the surrounding humans a lesson they wouldn't forget.
It tried.
It found it couldn't.
Gold chains wrapped its body completely, fixing all three tails in place mid-air in a posture that might have looked impressive under other circumstances. The chains didn't just restrain its body — they suppressed its chakra as well. It couldn't gather enough to fire even a single Tailed Beast Ball.
The only thing it could do was roar.
That alone was enough. The thunder of it made a noticeable portion of both the Konoha and Mist ninja take an instinctive step back. Quite a few of them retreated several steps further than that, putting real distance between themselves and the creature.
Any future those individuals had as elite ninja quietly diminished with each step.
The ones who stayed where they were — those were the people both Kage privately marked as worth investing in.
Neither of the Kage was paying much attention to their subordinates' reactions, however. Yagura's focus was entirely on the Three-Tails, with one hand already prepared to act if Hyuga Ritsu's restraint showed any sign of failing.
It didn't appear to be failing.
The Three-Tails was being held with complete, effortless control.
Ritsu himself wasn't even looking at it. His eyes were on Nohara Rin, who was already barely clinging to consciousness. With the Three-Tails extracted, her life force was draining like a pond with a trench dug through its banks — the water rushing out all at once.
"Lord Hokage, I feel... really terrible."
Rin sat down heavily on the ground, her face bloodless, her voice almost nothing.
"Of course you do. You're dying."
Rin stared at him in silent disbelief. Somehow, despite everything, she felt remarkably little fear. She simply looked at him and waited.
Then Ritsu extended his right hand.
His palm was smooth and pale, with no calluses. The Hyuga clan trained in Gentle Fist — the force behind their strikes came from chakra rather than raw impact, so Hyuga clan members generally didn't develop the kind of hardened hands that came with most taijutsu styles.
Rin looked at the open palm in front of her with slight confusion. Was he asking her for money?
She instinctively reached for her coin pouch.
Then a warm orange-yellow light began to gather in his palm, soft and steady, drawing her full attention. She didn't blink. She watched the glow condense, taking shape — a small fruit, round and amber, like a tangerine.
A faint fragrance drifted into the air.
A single breath of it was enough to make the body feel clean and refreshed, as though a warm light rain had just passed. Every trace of exhaustion lifted.
"What... is that?"
Yagura's eyes were fixed on the fruit in Ritsu's hand.
He wasn't alone. Every person present — Konoha ninja included — had their gaze locked on that palm. Something in the eyes of each of them went bright with an involuntary, almost desperate wanting.
"Open your mouth."
Ritsu said it simply.
"Ah?"
Rin opened her mouth without thinking.
Ritsu placed the fruit between her lips before she could process what was happening. It dissolved the moment it touched her tongue — no chewing required, gone in an instant, absorbed entirely.
The effect was immediate.
Like the first warmth of spring reaching dead earth. Like a withered branch putting out leaves.
The gap torn in Rin's life force sealed itself closed. Then something more — cool, clear vitality poured in to fill what had been empty, and in moments she had more than she'd had before the extraction began. More, in fact, than she'd had in years, back when the Three-Tails' chakra had been slowly eating away at her from the inside. A jinchuriki's body was a prison for a Tailed Beast, and the constant friction of housing that chakra left its marks on the host's lifespan and health over time. Every bit of that accumulated erosion was gone.
Rin stared at her own hands.
"Lord Hokage... this is..."
"I told you I would keep you alive." Ritsu smiled. "I don't go back on my word."
Yagura stepped closer, his expression one of open astonishment. He looked at Rin, who showed no trace whatsoever of someone who had just had a Tailed Beast torn out of them. "You actually saved a jinchuriki after extraction. Remarkable. May I ask what that fruit was?"
Ritsu glanced at him with the mild expression of someone sharing a minor curiosity. "Its name is the Timeless Fruit. A technique I've developed — it condenses life force into physical form. You saw what it does. It revives the dying."
That was true.
It was also only part of the truth.
The Timeless Fruit was real, but it was not a standalone technique. It was the product of Ritsu's unique Rinnegan ocular technique — the Tokoyo Insect — which plundered life force and vitality from its target. The two were cause and effect: the Tokoyo Insect was the taking, and the Timeless Fruit was what was made from what was taken. Life force harvested from one person, condensed and transferred to another.
It was not an offensive technique in the way that Limbo: Border Jail was. But Ritsu regarded it as something that far surpassed Madara's Limbo in terms of what it could ultimately accomplish.
Over the past six years he had used the Tokoyo Insect on many people — people whose deaths were not losses to the world — and the life force he had gathered had been condensed into Timeless Fruits. Consuming them had caused his own life force to grow further still, and his Physical Regeneration superpower had continued grinding down the barrier between Level 5 and Level 6. The wall between them had become thinner with each passing month.
It was precisely after awakening this technique that Ritsu's thinking had shifted toward advancing the Moon's Eye Plan himself.
Ordinary ninja provided ordinary life force. Every fruit he consumed chipped a little more away at the barrier, but slowly. If he could use the Tokoyo Insect on Black Zetsu — on Otsutsuki Kaguya herself — what would that harvest produce? Enough, perhaps, to shatter the barrier in a single moment and ascend to Level 6, to that state of "one who, without divine form, hears the will of the divine."
That was why, over these six years, he had not thrown everything into hunting Uchiha Madara down. Why he had allowed the Shukaku pot to be stolen. Why he had proposed and executed the arrangement with Kirigakure.
All of it carried the name of protecting the village. The underlying purpose was to help Madara collect the Tailed Beasts, to drive the Moon's Eye Plan forward, and ultimately to free Otsutsuki Kaguya from her lunar prison so that Ritsu could face her.
Which was also why, right now, his Byakugan — an instrument of perception that might have exceeded even Kaguya's own in its purity — was showing him the White Zetsu buried in the earth nearby, and the reanimated Uchiha Madara wearing one of them as a suit, watching from underground.
He let them look. He let them wait. He gave no sign that he saw anything at all.
"The Timeless Fruit. What a name."
Yagura didn't bother concealing either the envy or the disappointment on his face.
He was young — not yet thirty — nowhere near the age where death or aging was something to fear directly. But he could see exactly what Ritsu's technique represented. This was the ultimate form of medical ninjutsu. The absolute endpoint.
With this technique available to him, what force in the ninja world could kill the Fifth Hokage?
Maybe, as Terumī Mei had said, the ninja world was going to spend a very long time as a world that belonged to Konoha. Whether Kirigakure had one Tailed Beast or two was beside the point.
The evidence was right in front of him. The Three-Tails was being held like a pet on a leash, with complete overwhelming force. The gap between this man and a Tailed Beast was visible and humiliating.
This was not a fair world.
Whatever divine force had made it had shown obvious favoritism. Why was a monster like this produced by Konoha? Why couldn't Kirigakure have had someone like this?
"Lord Mizukage. Still with us?"
Ritsu waved a hand in front of Yagura's face, pulling him back from wherever his thoughts had taken him. "Don't waste time. However you plan to handle the Three-Tails, get on with it. I'm not obligated to hold this overgrown turtle down indefinitely."
Yagura's mouth curved into a tired, helpless smile.
Then he straightened and said, evenly: "Lord Hokage, ease the restraints slightly. I need to have my people seal the Three-Tails into my body."
The silence that followed was total.
Not just the Konoha ninja — the Mist ninja standing nearby were equally stunned. None of them had known that their Mizukage intended to make himself the new jinchuriki.
It was unthinkable.
Ritsu was still for two seconds, then looked at Yagura with an expression that was difficult to read. Even with Uchiha Obito long gone from the story — having exited the stage far too early to play the role history had originally written for him — this Fourth Mizukage apparently couldn't escape the fate of becoming the Three-Tails' jinchuriki.
The golden chains loosened their full-body grip by a fraction. Yagura directed his sealing team to begin, preparing to take the Three-Tails into himself.
At that moment, the attack came.
Something burst from the earth.
Reanimated Uchiha Madara moved with lethal precision. A single technique — Wood Style: Advent of a World of Flowering Trees — detonated outward with the Three-Tails at its center in an indiscriminate assault.
Against Hyuga Ritsu at his current level, this was not a serious threat.
But now was not the time to put Madara down. He still needed the man to go on collecting Tailed Beasts. The plan required it.
So Ritsu didn't hold his ground the way he could have. He grabbed Rin and pulled back with her, putting on the expression of someone caught off-guard and concerned about getting hurt.
The Adamantine Sealing Chains collapsed.
The Three-Tails let out a roar of unrestrained satisfaction.
The freedom lasted a few seconds. Before it could fire a Tailed Beast Ball at Ritsu — that particular annoyance it had been wanting to address — it found a pair of crimson eyes looking up at it from below.
Their gaze met.
The Three-Tails' will shattered like glass. Its enormous pupils flooded with red, and in that red, black tomoe began to turn. The Tailed Beast fell completely under Uchiha Madara's control.
"Come then, Hyuga boy. Let's see what you're truly capable of now—"
Madara never finished the sentence.
Ritsu was already in front of him.
The Heavenly Transfer Technique moved like that. Faster than the eye could register, faster than the brain could process even with Sharingan-level dynamic vision. Reanimated Madara's eyes were among the finest that had ever existed, and he still couldn't fully track how Ritsu had arrived.
What he could see was a dense sphere of compressed chakra coming directly at his face.
Wind Style: Rasenshuriken.
Ritsu knew one Rasenshuriken probably wasn't going to be enough to finish a reanimated Madara. He launched it anyway — to open the engagement, to set the tempo.
What he didn't expect was what stopped it.
A pale blue Susanoo materialized around Madara, intercepting the Rasenshuriken. The shattered bones of the Susanoo framework began regenerating immediately as chakra flowed back into the gaps.
Madara leaped and landed on top of the Three-Tails. The pale blue Susanoo flowed around the massive creature like water, wrapping it completely.
Complete Body — Susanoo.
This was how he had ridden the Nine-Tails into battle against Senju Hashirama in ages past — though Hashirama had proven to be something beyond even that, and his Sage Art: Wood Style: True Several Thousand Hands had sent both Madara and the Nine-Tails reeling. That memory was not a comfortable one.
"Show me what you've become."
Madara's eyes burned as he fixed them on Hyuga Ritsu.
Ritsu felt something that wasn't quite amusement. He could read the battle-hunger in Madara's eyes plainly. The Susanoo was a surprise — he hadn't expected the transplanted eyes to be capable of that. But it changed nothing in terms of the outcome. If anything, it was convenient. It gave Madara a better reason to escape when the time came.
And so the performance began.
Ritsu kept it simple. No new techniques, no demonstrations of anything he hadn't already shown. He used Sage Art: Nine Aspects Rotation Kill, over and over, attacking and defending with it, and the technique proved as mercilessly effective as it always was. Madara's expression went progressively darker.
Yasaka Magatama.
Wood Style: Wood Dragon Technique.
Tailed Beast Ball.
Madara used everything available to him. Every technique he could currently deploy. It made no difference. The Nine Aspects Rotation Kill was too destructive, too fast, too relentless — no hand seals required, usable in continuous succession. Every effort Madara made was dismantled.
Through all of it, Madara was arriving at a recognition he found deeply unpleasant.
Hyuga Ritsu had reached the same level he and Senju Hashirama had once occupied. The Mangekyō Sharingan alone — even with the Susanoo it enabled — was not enough to finish this boy.