"Uchiha... Yue..."
Not a scream, but a strangled, gurgling wheeze escaped Ōtsutsuki Isshiki's lips as his mangled body tumbled out of the rift in space. He collapsed onto the dead ground, and the Karma seal on Jigen's body began to rapidly melt, crumbling to dust. In an instant, the mighty Ōtsutsuki was reduced to a pitiful simulacrum of himself: a cripple with a severed arm, a emaciated human shell, his strength nearly drained.
A mortal. A pathetic mortal from the shinobi world.
In that moment, Isshiki was overcome by an all-consuming feeling of helplessness. It was deeper and blacker than the abyss into which Kaguya had once pushed him. This was a traitor's blow. This... this was more than just helplessness. This was despair. The cosmic, absolute despair of a being confronted with the incomprehensible.
His mind, steeped in the wisdom of millennia, refused to accept reality. How? How could this speck of dust, this aborigine, possess a power that violated all known laws of the universe?
Just recently, he had coldly planned the murder of this insignificant being, to take his eyes before he could gain power. The result? He, Isshiki, had put his own life on the line—and lost.
Worse, at the last moment of his retreat, this upstart had caught him. Isshiki had no doubt: had he not sacrificed Jigen's hand, those ghostly chains would have pierced his true essence, destroying him on the spot.
The entire fight had been a show. A mask. A ruse to lure him into a trap.
A monster. Not just a warrior, but a phenomenon that shatters the very fabric of existence. Isshiki realized with chilling horror that he hadn't had a single chance. Even with all his former might, he couldn't kill this creature. Much less seal it.
Even the Divine Tree, the crown of their creation, capable of sucking the life out of entire worlds, could be captured. But this... this bastard, with a drop of the Tree's blood coursing through his veins, had awakened its primordial essence and surpassed it many times over. His absorption capacity was orders of magnitude more terrifying. Any sealing technique woven from energy would become nothing more than food for him. Trying to seal him would be like throwing a starving rat into a vat of oil. Feeding the monster yourself!
Give this monster time, and it would suck the Divine Tree dry. After all, it absorbed even kinetic energy! The tree fed on chakra and life force, but it was incapable of such a thing. If it could feed on any energy, the Ōtsutsuki clan wouldn't have to scour space in search of habitable planets. They could simply plant a sapling near the nearest star and harvest the fruits, containing the energy of trillions of worlds.
— Uchiha Yue... Damn it...
Isshiki slowly rose, trying to regenerate his torn flesh. He had lost. Completely. Absolutely. And now he was trapped on this doomed planet.
He could almost see its future: darkness and cold enveloping this world, and Uchiha Yue standing at the center, absorbing everything—chakra, warmth, light, life itself. Plants, animals, people—everything would become part of his power. The final apocalypse. They, the Ōtsutsuki, had done exactly the same to other worlds. Only this time, he himself was the victim.
And the cause of this cosmic nightmare... was the desire of one Shimura Danzo to exterminate a single clan.
Isshiki was overcome with insane, hysterical laughter, turning into coughing fits. What on earth did he have to do with this?! He'd never heard of any Danzo! And now he, the great Ōtsutsuki, would perish on this planet because of the small-town massacre of some savages! Absurd! Unimaginable, laughable absurdity!
"Shimura Danzo!!!" he howled silently, and this silent scream was more terrifying than any other. "I will remember that name! If I get out, I will find your rotten soul in the Pure World and torment it for eternity!"
He'd always cared nothing for these mortals. Dust. But this... this one made him laugh through tears of despair.
"Why the hell couldn't you sit still?!" his mind raged. "Your village forbids attacking each other! Why did you touch the Uchiha?! Weren't the other clans enough for you?! Attack the Sarutobi, the Hyuga, your own Shimura clan, you idiot!!!"
If he could go back in time, he would personally go to Konoha and beat that old bastard to death. Just to save himself.
After all, he was supposed to destroy this world.
And not be destroyed along with it.
The worst part was that his killer wouldn't be a deity, not an Ōtsutsuki equal to him, but the product of a pathetic plot by a mortal whose name he had just learned.