—————
The surface of the Moon was not a romantic landscape of soft craters and silver dust. It was a boneyard—ancient, silent, and utterly forsaken by warmth.
Ren Yamanaka materialized on the dark side of the satellite, his body emerging from the final pulse of the Flying Thunder God seal he had inscribed into the old Uzumaki transport scroll. Multiple use of the technique burned through the last of his prepared chakra reserves, leaving him hollow and shaking in the lunar dust.
For a long moment, he simply lay there, staring upward at the infinite tapestry of stars.
They were different here. Brighter. Sharper. Without Earth's atmosphere to soften their edges, they burned like cold needles of light against the absolute darkness. He could see the spiral arm of some distant galaxy—a smear of milk-white luminescence that had traveled millions of years just to die against his retinas.
Beautiful, he thought. And terrible.
The gravity was lighter, pulling at his failing muscles with a strange, buoyant kindness that felt almost like mockery. His body wanted to float, to drift upward into that endless void, but his chakra—what little remained—anchored him to the gray regolith. Each movement felt dreamlike, delayed, as if he were swimming through honey.
But the silence.
Gods, the silence.
It was absolute. No wind stirred the fine powder around him. No birds called from distant trees. No rivers murmured their eternal songs. There was only the crushing, omnipresent vacuum of space pressing against the thin, artificial atmosphere generated by seals so old they predated the Sage of Six Paths himself.
Ren could feel those seals now—a dome of invisible force that extended perhaps half a kilometer in every direction, creating a pocket of breathable air in the void. The Hamura clan's work. Ancient beyond reckoning. And slowly, inevitably, failing.
He noticed the cracks first. Hairline fractures in the seal matrix, visible only to his trained eye, where cosmic radiation had been eating away at the protective barrier for a thousand years. In another century, perhaps two, this pocket would collapse entirely.
We are all dying, Ren thought. Even the gods.
He pushed himself to his feet. The motion made his vision swim, and he tasted copper at the back of his throat. His black robes—the formal attire of the Hokage, worn now out of bitter irony—were stiff with frost. Ice crystals had formed along the seams, in the folds, even in his eyelashes. Each blink felt like scraping sandpaper across his corneas.
He coughed, and his breath froze instantly into glittering crystals that hung suspended in the low gravity before slowly, so slowly, drifting downward like snow that had forgotten how to fall.
"Status," he whispered, and his voice sounded wrong—thin, reedy, robbed of its usual commanding resonance by the strange acoustics of this place.
Inside the Library, the Council answered.
Medic (Tsunade's student): Critical. Cardiac arrhythmia approaching terminal phase. Estimated functional time: eighteen hours. Possibly less if we engage in combat.
Seal Master (Uzumaki specialist): The life-extension arrays are failing faster than projected. The eye energy is incompatible with body's cellular structure. We are literally burning from the inside.
Ryuichi (former Mist hunter-nin): We should have taken Danzo's offer. His Root surgeons could have—
Ren (Chairman): Enough. We knew do not have much time.
He silenced the internal debate with a thought and focused on the task at hand.
Ren activated his Byakugan—his right eye, the gift stolen from a Hyuga.
The gray landscape peeled away like old wallpaper, revealing the truth beneath the surface. Layers upon layers of geological strata, compressed and ancient, stretched downward into the moon's heart. He saw veins of strange minerals that pulsed with faint chakra signatures—the fossilized remains of the Divine Tree's first roots, perhaps, or something older still. He saw the bones of creatures that had no earthly equivalent, their skeletons spiraling in geometric patterns that hurt to contemplate.
But more importantly, he saw what lay five miles below the crust.
A civilization.
Ren's breath caught—or would have, if he'd had breath to spare. Through the Byakugan's penetrating gaze, the hollow interior of the moon unfurled before him like a fever dream made manifest.
Soaring towers of white stone suspended in a massive, hollow cavern, their architecture defying every principle of physics he had learned in a lifetime of study. Some towers spiraled upward in impossible helixes. Others branched and merged, creating organic shapes that were part palace, part tree, part fever dream.
The Hamura clan's crowning achievement, the Seal Master observed with reluctant admiration. They didn't just survive on the moon. They created a world.
And in that world, Ren saw them.
The Otsutsuki.
They were pale, ethereal beings with hair like spun moonlight and eyes that held no pupils, no irises—only the endless, milky white of the Byakugan in its purest form. They moved with a slow, gliding grace that seemed to mock the concept of gravity, their robes trailing behind them like the trains of celestial gowns. Even from this distance, even through miles of stone and metal, Ren could feel their presence pressing against his consciousness.
They were old. Not in the way that the Hokages were old, or even the way that the Tailed Beasts were old. They carried within them the weight of eons, of civilizations risen and fallen, of stars that had burned out before humanity had learned to make fire.
And they radiated a profound, absolute disdain for the "mud-dwellers" of Earth below.
Ren watched them move through their pristine streets, tending to armies of intricate, mechanical puppets that served as their labor force. They did not speak—not aloud, at any rate. Instead, they communicated via chakra resonance, sending complex emotional-informational packets that bypassed language entirely. He could sense those packets now, brief flickers of cold contempt whenever one of them glanced upward toward Earth's distant glow.
They hate us, Ryuichi observed. Genuinely, deeply hate us.
Their perspective can kiss my ass, Goro (the Iwa engineer) growled. We didn't ask to be born. We didn't choose this war.
Ren silenced them again.
He had not come here to debate ancient grievances. He had come here to survive.
Council report, he commanded internally. Isamu. Defensive assessment.
The Kumo sensor-nin responded immediately, his mental voice crisp with professional detachment.
High-level sensory barriers, Isamu reported. Multi-layered detection grid covering all entry points. If we attempt to enter physically, we trigger every alarm in the installation. Response time estimated at fifteen seconds. Combat force estimated at minimum, approximately three thousand combat puppets. Probability of survival: zero.
Ren (Chairman): My body is failing. I cannot fight a clan of demi-gods. I need a new vessel.
Medic: But not just any vessel. An Otsutsuki vessel. Their biology is fundamentally different from human physiology. Chakra density approximately eight hundred percent higher than average Kage-level ninja. Cellular regeneration operates on principles we've never documented. And most importantly—their bodies are compatible with the Tenseigan energy that's currently killing us.
Ren nodded slowly, his frost-stiffened neck cracking with the motion.
This had always been the plan. From the moment he'd first tasted the power of the Tenseigan—that intoxicating, terrible energy that had remade his consciousness—he had known his human form could not contain it forever. The Otsutsuki had evolved over millennia to channel celestial chakra. Humans had not.
He was a cup trying to hold an ocean. Sooner or later, he would crack.
But if he could transfer to an Otsutsuki vessel—
Ren swept his Byakugan across the interior of the moon, searching for an opportunity. He saw the central palace, where the elders gathered in their endless, glacial deliberations. He saw the training grounds, where young warriors practiced techniques that made his finest jutsu look like children's games. He saw the gardens, the libraries, the meditation chambers where ancient monks contemplated the nature of chakra itself.
And then he saw the patrol routes.
The Otsutsuki maintained watchers along the perimeter of their civilization—guardians who monitored the outer shell of the moon for any signs of intrusion. Most were veterans, their chakra signatures burning with the accumulated power of centuries.
But there, near a ventilation shaft on the far side of the installation—
A solitary young Otsutsuki, perhaps twenty years old in appearance, hovering with obvious boredom. His chakra signature was bright but undeveloped, like a candle beside the bonfires of his elders. His attention drifted repeatedly to the distant glow of Earth, visible through a viewport in the shaft's housing.
Lonely, Ren thought. Bored. Assigned to a thankless duty because he lacks the political connections to secure something better. Classic overlooked individual.
He had seen such people a thousand times in his career. In every organization, in every nation, there were always those who slipped between the cracks—too talented to dismiss, too unremarkable to promote. They were invisible, even to their own kin.
Perfect.
"Target acquired," Ren whispered. "Beginning approach."
He used the last dregs of his Dustless Bewildering Cover and felt reality bend around him. Light passed through his body instead of reflecting from it. Sound died against his skin. Even the faint heat of his failing metabolism vanished into the void, replaced by the perfect cold of empty space.
He was, for all practical purposes, invisible.
But he did not approach physically. Physical movement would disturb the dust, create footprints, leave traces that even the dullest sensor could detect. Instead, Ren settled into the shadow of a crater—a perfect bowl of darkness where ancient impacts had carved the moon's face—and lowered himself into a meditative posture.
His knees screamed in protest. His spine, twisted by the Tenseigan's chaotic energy, sent bolts of agony through his nervous system. He ignored the pain, as he had ignored so much pain over the years, and placed his hands in the confrontation seal.
For a long moment, he simply breathed.
In. Out. In. Out.
He felt the Library settle around him, its crystalline corridors growing still as the Council sensed the gravity of what was about to occur.
Are we certain about this? the Medic asked, her voice unusually subdued. This technique… we've never attempted it at this scale. Or this distance. Or against a target this powerful.
The alternative is death, Ren responded calmly. True death. Dissolution. Everything we have worked for, everything we have sacrificed, lost to the void. Is that acceptable?
Silence.
Then we proceed.
Ren closed his eyes—his physical eyes—and reached deep within himself, past the failing organs and the corrupted cells, past the tangled mess of stolen memories and absorbed personalities, to the core of his being.
The technique he was about to perform had no official name in any scroll or forbidden archive. It was his own creation, the culmination of many years of study into the nature of consciousness, the mechanics of the soul, and the hidden potential of the Yamanaka bloodline.
His grandmother had taught him to project his mind into another's body for seconds at a time.
He had learned to project for minutes.
Then hours.
Then days.
But this—
"Forbidden Art: Living Spirit Transmission."
This was not a projection. This was an emigration.
A beam of invisible, concentrated spiritual energy shot from Ren's forehead, crossing the vacuum of space as easily as thought crossed the gap between neurons. It carried within it not just his consciousness, but the entire Library—every absorbed soul, every stolen memory, every fragment of knowledge he had accumulated across a lifetime of hunger.
The beam struck the young Otsutsuki in the back of the neck, just below the base of his skull, and the mental siege began.
—————
The Mental Siege
The young Otsutsuki—his name was Toneri, Ren learned in that first instant of contact—gasped and dropped his staff.
The weapon clattered against the metal grating of the observation platform, the sound ringing through the ventilation shaft like a bell's toll. Toneri clutched his head, his colorless eyes going wide with shock and sudden, primal terror.
Inside Toneri's mindscape, the invasion began.
Ren's avatar materialized in a space unlike any he had encountered before. He had invaded hundreds of minds over the decades—criminals and innocents, monsters and saints, geniuses and fools—and each had presented its own unique landscape of memory and desire.
Some minds were forests, dark and tangled with ancient trauma.
Some were cities, organized and efficient, every thought in its proper place.
Some were wastelands, blasted by grief or madness into howling emptiness.
Toneri's mind was none of these things.
It was a labyrinth of crystalline mirrors.
They stretched in every direction—up, down, left, right, forward, backward—forming a tesseract of reflective surfaces that defied spatial logic. Each mirror was flawless, perfectly transparent from one angle and perfectly reflective from another, and in their depths, Ren saw infinite copies of himself receding into infinity.
The mirrors were not decorative. They were defensive.
Warning! The Tactician screamed, her voice sharp with alarm. Cognitive defense system detected! Classification: Extraterrestrial! Unknown parameters!
Too late.
Ren tried to advance, projecting his intent to dominate, to conquer, to claim this mind as he had claimed so many others—
And the mirrors caught his intent, refracted it, inverted it.
Suddenly, Ren wanted to submit. He wanted to kneel. He wanted to bow before the superior being whose mind he had dared to invade and beg forgiveness for his presumption.
No! He clawed the compulsion away through sheer force of will, but the damage was done. The mirrors had analyzed his attack pattern, and now they were adapting.
"Get out!"
Toneri's mental voice boomed through the crystal labyrinth, echoing from every facet and surface until it became a wall of sound that threatened to shatter Ren's avatar.
"Lower life form! Parasite! You dare to touch the mind of an Otsutsuki? You, who crawl through the dirt like vermin?"
Beams of white light—pure, concentrated Byakugan energy—shot from the mirrors, spearing Ren's avatar from a dozen angles at once. He felt them pierce his mental form, tearing holes in his projected consciousness, and distantly, he sensed his physical body convulsing on the lunar surface.
Pain. Real pain. The kind that transcended the boundary between mind and matter.
"He… he's strong," Ren gritted out, his voice a whisper even in his own thoughts. "Immortal bloodline… mental fortitude beyond anything we've encountered…"
Inside the Vault, the Council was descending into chaos.
Ryuichi: We're being dissected! The mirrors—they're analyzing our soul code! He's learning our weaknesses!
Goro: Forget finesse! Smash the mirrors! Brute force! Overwhelm him with raw psychic power!
Seal Master: No! No, you fool! If you shatter the cognitive matrix, you destroy the vessel's capacity for higher thought! We'd end up trapped in a vegetable!
Isamu: We need to retreat. Abort the transfer. Return to the original body before—
Ren (Chairman): The original body is dead.
Silence.
What? Ryuichi asked, his voice suddenly small.
The original body is dead, Ren repeated calmly, even as another beam of light carved a furrow through his avatar's shoulder. I severed the connection at the moment of transmission. There is no going back. We win here, or we die here.
The Council absorbed this information.
And then, one by one, they set aside their fear and focused.
Ren stabilized his avatar through an act of pure will, drawing on the collected experience of every mind he had ever absorbed. He studied the mirror labyrinth with fresh eyes, searching not for weaknesses but for understanding.
The mirrors weren't random. They formed patterns—geometric progressions that repeated at different scales, like fractals. And the reflections weren't simple inversions; they were translations, converting one form of mental energy into another according to rules he didn't yet comprehend.
"This is a puzzle lock," Ren realized. "Not just a defense. A filter. It's designed to identify the nature of any invading consciousness and respond accordingly."
Calculators! he commanded. I need processing power! Cloud Tactician! Iwa Engineer! Nara Strategist! Merge your capabilities and find the flaw!
Three of the Council's most brilliant analytical minds withdrew from the general consciousness and formed a temporary sub-cluster, pooling their cognitive resources. Ren felt them working in the background—running simulations, testing hypotheses, modeling the mirror system's behavior—while he continued to dodge Toneri's mental attacks.
The young Otsutsuki was growing more confident now. His initial terror had faded, replaced by a cold, predatory focus. He knew he was winning.
"You are impressive, mud-dweller," Toneri admitted, his mental presence manifesting as a towering figure of pure white light. "I have never encountered a human capable of sustaining this level of mental cohesion. But your fate was sealed the moment you entered my domain. These mirrors were designed by Hamura-sama himself, perfected over a thousand years. No lesser being has ever—"
Found it, the Tactician interrupted.
Ren's attention snapped to the analysis results flooding through his consciousness.
The flaw is architectural, the Tactician explained rapidly. The mirrors defend against frontal assault—against direct attempts to dominate or destroy. But they assume attacks only come from within the cognitive space itself. They don't defend the substrate.
Clarify, Ren demanded.
The mirrors are mounted on something, the Iwa Engineer added. The "floor" of this mindscape—the base layer of consciousness that supports the crystal matrix. It's unprotected because the designers never conceived of an attacker who would think to look there. Classic Otsutsuki arrogance. They built a fortress with walls a mile high and forgot to install a basement.
Ren smiled—a cold, predatory expression that had no place on a human face.
"Understood."
He stopped dodging. He stopped defending. Instead, he dropped his avatar to the crystalline floor and placed his palms flat against its surface.
"What are you doing?" Toneri demanded, his confidence flickering. "Stand and face me, coward! Meet your death with dignity!"
Ren ignored him.
He reached deep into his mental reserves and accessed one of the most powerful techniques in his stolen arsenal—a gift from the First Hokage's bloodline, filtered through the unique properties of the Library.
"Wood Style: Deep Forest Emergence (Mental Variant)."
In the physical world, this technique created a forest of living wood that crushed and imprisoned everything in its path.
In the mental world, it created something else entirely.
Roots erupted from Ren's palms—not wooden roots, but conceptual ones. They were made of pure will, of absolute determination, of the hunger that had driven him since childhood to consume and grow and become. They drilled into the floor of Toneri's consciousness, spreading like cracks in ice, finding the substrate beneath the crystal matrix.
The mirrors trembled.
"No!" Toneri screamed, and for the first time, real fear crept into his voice. "No, you can't! The foundation—that's not possible—how are you—"
The roots multiplied. They spread through the underlying cognitive architecture, wrapping around the support structures that held the mirror labyrinth aloft. And then, with a thought, Ren pulled.
The floor shattered.
The mirrors lost their alignment, toppling against each other in a cascade of breaking glass and dying light. The carefully constructed defense system—a thousand years in the making—collapsed in seconds, leaving Toneri's unprotected consciousness exposed to Ren's assault.
The towering white figure wavered, its radiance dimming.
"What… what are you?" Toneri whispered, and now he sounded very young, very frightened, and very, very alone.
Ren rose from the ruins of the crystal labyrinth. Behind him, the Memory Palace manifested in all its terrible glory—a structure of impossible geometry, filled with the preserved souls of a hundred victims, casting a shadow that stretched across the entire mindscape.
"I am the Librarian," Ren said, his voice resonating with the power of a hundred absorbed consciousnesses speaking in unison. "I am the keeper of knowledge. I am the sum of all I have taken."
He stepped forward, and the Palace moved with him—a predator closing in on wounded prey.
"And you, Toneri of the Otsutsuki clan, are overdue."
The struggle that followed lasted a day in real-time.
In mental time, where thought moved faster than light, it was a year of warfare.
Ren peeled back Toneri's defenses layer by layer, methodically, patiently. He encountered childhood memories—a lonely boy raised in the shadow of greater talents, desperate for approval, never receiving it. He encountered training regimens—brutal, grueling, designed to forge weapons rather than people. He encountered secret shames—forbidden trips to the observation deck to gaze at Earth, that blue-green jewel of life, and wonder what it might be like to walk beneath an open sky.
Each memory was a wall. Each trauma was a fortress. And Ren broke through them all.
Not with violence—at least, not primarily. He used understanding as a weapon, empathy as a blade. He showed Toneri visions of Earth—not the idealized fantasy the boy had constructed, but the reality. The wars. The suffering. The beauty.
And he showed Toneri what he could offer.
Companionship, the Medic whispered, her voice gentle, seductive. You've been alone your whole life. We… we are never alone. Join us, and you will have brothers and sisters of the mind, forever.
Purpose, the Tactician added. You've been a maintenance worker, tending to others' creations. With us, you could help build something new. Something meaningful.
Power, Ryuichi concluded. You've been weak, overlooked, dismissed. With us, you could become more than any Otsutsuki has ever been.
Toneri's resistance crumbled, rebuilt, crumbled again.
By the end, Ren stood before the core of the young Otsutsuki's being—a glowing white sphere of pure consciousness, pulsing with the light of an ancient bloodline. It was beautiful, in its way. A newborn star, waiting to be given purpose.
Ren surrounded it with the iron bars of the Vault.
"Submission," he commanded.
The sphere struggled—a final, desperate bid for freedom—but the bars held. The door slammed shut. The lock clicked into place.
And Toneri screamed.
—————
The Rebirth
On the moon's surface, in the shadow of an ancient crater, Ren Yamanaka's original body completed its final breath.
The scarred, twisted vessel—the form that had once been the Fifth Hokage, once been a child of the Yamanaka clan, once been a dreamer who stared at the ceiling and wondered how much he could hold—went still. The heart, overtaxed beyond all medical possibility, finally surrendered its stubborn rhythm. The lungs, scarred by decades of poison and strain, exhaled one last time.
The eyes—those mismatched windows that had stolen so much—glazed over with the film of death.
The body was just meat now. Just organic matter, freezing slowly in the lunar cold, joining the countless other bones scattered across this ancient graveyard. In a thousand years, perhaps, some future explorer would find it—a mummified corpse in Hokage's robes, perfectly preserved by vacuum and ice—and wonder what strange journey had carried it so far from home.
Ren did not mourn.
There was nothing left to mourn.
Miles below, inside the gleaming artificial paradise of the Otsutsuki civilization, a young guardian opened his eyes.
Ren sat up.
The motion was strange—different muscles, different proportions, different everything. He had changed bodies before, briefly, through the standard Yamanaka techniques. But this was permanent. This was real.
He looked at his hands.
They were pale, smooth, entirely without scars or calluses. The fingers were longer than his old ones, more elegant, with nails that gleamed like polished pearl. No age spots. No tremor. No evidence of the decades he had spent fighting, killing, surviving.
A new beginning, written in alien flesh.
He flexed the hands experimentally, feeling the subtle differences in tendon and bone. The joints moved more smoothly than human joints—almost frictionlessly—and there was a faint hum of chakra beneath the skin that never quite faded. The Otsutsuki body was constantly processing energy, constantly regenerating, constantly preparing for battle.
This is what true power feels like, Ren thought. Not borrowed. Not stolen. Inherent.
He took a breath.
The air tasted of ozone and sterile filtration, like a hospital maintained by gods. It was neither warm nor cold—perfectly temperature-controlled to the degree. But it was real air, filling real lungs, and Ren savored it with the appreciation of someone who had been drowning for years.
The pain in his chest was gone.
The tremor was gone.
The constant, grinding agony of the Tenseigan, Sharingan, and First hokages cells' energy eating away at his human cells—gone.
He felt… light. Clean. Unburdened.
And also, terrifyingly, empty.
Ren checked his reserves.
Report, he commanded internally.
The Council responded, their voices subdued by the magnitude of what had just occurred.
Integration successful at 98.7%, the Medic reported. Host body is fully compatible with all acquired Dojutsu data. No rejection. No immune response. The Byakugan is… She paused, awed. Chairman, the Byakugan is native to this form. We don't have to maintain it. It's just… there. Always.
Chakra reserves, Ren pressed.
That's the bad news, the Tactician admitted. The transfer consumed almost everything we had. Our Wood Style, our Kage-level reserves, our physical conditioning—all of it remained in the old body. We are currently operating at approximately Chunin level.
Chunin? Ryuichi sputtered. We went from the most powerful ninja on Earth to—to a Chunin?
Jonin, the Tactician corrected. Low Jonin. But yes. We have lost roughly ninety percent of our combat capability.
Ren absorbed this information without reaction.
It was… disappointing. He had hoped to retain more of his power through the transfer. But the laws of chakra conservation were absolute; the energy had been invested in his physical form, and without the form, the energy dispersed.
Still.
We don't start over, Ren told the Council calmly. We start higher.
He accessed Toneri's memories, carefully sifting through the avalanche of alien experiences for relevant information.
Name: Toneri (Branch House, Third Line).Age: Equivalent to twenty-three human years.Role: Puppet Maintenance, Third Shift.Access Level: 4 (Restricted from Main Archive, Council Chambers, and Tenseigan Vault).Political Standing: Negligible.Known Associates: None (note: subject maintained social isolation by choice).
"Low level," Ren murmured in his new voice—a melodic, harmonic tone that resonated strangely in his new throat. "Invisible. Perfect."
He rose to his feet, and the motion was effortless. No cracking joints. No screaming muscles. The Otsutsuki body moved like water, flowing from position to position with an economy of motion that his human form could never have achieved.
He examined his surroundings with new eyes—literally new, the Byakugan active without any conscious effort, revealing layers of reality that had been hidden before.
He stood in a small maintenance alcove, surrounded by the dormant forms of Hamura's puppets. They were exquisite creations, each one a masterwork of chakra engineering, but to Toneri—to Ren—they were merely tools. Familiar. Unremarkable.
Beyond the alcove stretched a corridor of white stone, lit by soft bioluminescence that seemed to emanate from the walls themselves. Other Otsutsuki moved through the corridor occasionally, their colorless eyes passing over the maintenance area without interest. Why would they look? Nothing important ever happened here.
Ren adjusted his robes—simple garments of gray cloth, the uniform of a worker rather than a warrior—and practiced Toneri's characteristic walk. The boy had moved with a slight hunch, shoulders curved inward as if apologizing for his own existence. Ren mimicked the posture perfectly, adding the subtle downward tilt of the head that marked a Branch House member in the presence of Main House superiors.
Invisible, he reminded himself. Stay invisible. Blend in. Learn.
The Council was already working, analyzing Toneri's memories for useful information about the moon's layout, its power structure, its defenses. There was so much to learn—centuries of accumulated knowledge, just waiting to be extracted and catalogued.
And somewhere in the depths of this gleaming prison was the Tenseigan Vault, where the collected eyes of Hamura's lineage were stored. Where the power to reshape worlds lay dormant, waiting for a hand worthy to wield it.
Ren would find it.
Ren would take it.
And then—
He paused at the threshold of the alcove, looking out at the artificial paradise of the moon. The golden sun blazed at the center of the cavern, casting long shadows across the floating towers. Otsutsuki went about their eternal routines, tending to systems that had functioned for a thousand years. Everything was orderly. Everything was perfect.
Everything was dying.
Ren could see it now, with eyes unclouded by human limitation. The decay was everywhere—in the failing seals, in the diminishing birth rates, in the slow, grinding entropy that consumed all closed systems eventually. The Otsutsuki were not thriving. They were enduring. Preserving. Waiting for… something.
What are they waiting for? Ren wondered.
The question would have to wait. For now, he had more immediate concerns.
"Time to blend in," Ren whispered to the empty air.
He stepped out of the maintenance alcove and joined the flow of traffic, a wolf wrapped in sheep's wool, walking unnoticed through the heart of a dying god's dream.
Behind him, in the depths of his new mind, Toneri's consciousness beat helplessly against the bars of its cage—screaming warnings that no one would ever hear.
—————
End of Chapter 29