Chapter 569: Structure
So, Kurama -- do you want to try it?
After finishing what he had done, Naruto let his consciousness sink into his inner world. He stood on that vast, borderless grassland and addressed the enormous shape lying in the middle distance with that question.
"...Hmph."
What answered him was a sound pressed out through the nose -- a cold, stubborn grunt with an unmistakably awkward edge to it.
The great fox was sprawled across the grass, nine tails spread out around it, eyes half-open and half-shut.
"I'm already plenty strong. I have no need for something like that."
Its gaze moved off Naruto and dropped back to the book lying open in front of it, performing complete indifference to everything he had just offered.
The area around where Nine-Tails was lying had accumulated a considerable pile of things.
Books, stacked in no particular order -- thick hardcover volumes and slim manga paperbacks, jutsu theory texts and historical biographies and fantasy novels that seemed to be about something but were difficult to summarize. Headphones, several pairs, over-ear and in-ear, tangled loosely with each other. Electronic devices of various kinds, screens of varying sizes, buttons of varying quantity, some lit up and some dark, scattered near Nine-Tails' paws.
There was even a PS5, its white casing conspicuous among everything else, sitting beside a mountain of game discs.
All of it had been produced by Naruto, piece by piece, as he had gradually mastered the Star Eye's abilities.
No materials required. No tools. No prerequisites of any kind.
He had wanted Nine-Tails to have something to pass the time, so books appeared. He had wanted Nine-Tails to be able to listen to music and shift its mood, so headphones appeared. He had wanted Nine-Tails to find some form of entertainment in a space that had once been completely empty, so the console and the games appeared.
One by one, slowly, without either of them quite noticing, the pile around Nine-Tails had grown into something resembling a small mountain.
It was unfortunate, perhaps, that Nine-Tails was a chakra construct. It had none of the physiological needs that living beings had -- none of that particular longing for companionship or company.
Naruto had briefly considered creating a Daji figure for it.
For him it would have been no effort at all -- a thought, no more. But he had considered it and concluded that Nine-Tails probably wouldn't appreciate that aesthetic. And honestly, he had no clear idea what Nine-Tails' taste actually was. If the result came out wrong, it would just be awkward.
By every measure, Nine-Tails' current life was excellent.
Naruto's inner world had been expanding for some time -- bit by bit, gradually extending outward -- until it had become a territory so vast that Nine-Tails, without making any deliberate effort, simply could not run to the edge of it. Even in the old days, when it had been wild and free, ranging across mountains and rivers and whatever terrain it pleased, this kind of space would have been exceptional.
And more importantly: no humans with hostile intentions to disturb it. None of those people who treated it as a weapon, a tool, a power source, who had never once considered it a living thing.
Nine-Tails had no need to eat. Tailed beasts did not require food or water -- they did not sustain themselves the way ordinary living creatures did.
But Naruto had created something called a Gourmet Tablecloth -- the idea borrowed from a certain blue robotic cat's pocket dimension gadget. Speak the name of any dish and it would appear on the cloth: steaming, fragrant, as though it had just come out of the kitchen.
Any food that could be imagined. Say the name, and there it was.
So Nine-Tails, in the service of its own palate, had developed the habit of producing elaborate spreads for its own enjoyment.
This, then, was Nine-Tails' current existence. It occupied itself with modern entertainment -- novels and manga it had never encountered before, music it had never heard before played through headphones, electronic games that had never existed in the world it remembered. It could indulge in any cuisine in the world, the moment it formed the desire. It had the most expansive living space available to any being that existed. And it was not, particularly, lonely.
Since the Chunin Exam incident, Nine-Tails could visit Gaara's inner world whenever the mood struck -- or rather, visit the One-Tail Shukaku.
"Visit," in Nine-Tails' understanding, meant showing up unannounced, delivering a paw to the face without preamble, and savoring the comprehensive victory that followed. It would materialize inside Shukaku's mental space, open with an immediate strike, laugh loudly through Shukaku's furious howling, pin it down and give it a thorough beating, then leave without a word -- departing to the sound of Shukaku raging alone in its own head.
The next time they met, Shukaku would assume the posture of someone who had resolved to win this time. Then it would lose worse than before.
This was Nine-Tails' social life. It did not find its days lonely, or tedious, or lacking in any meaningful way.
It was fair to say that Nine-Tails was receiving the best treatment Naruto had been capable of imagining. He had given it everything he could think of -- freedom, space, entertainment, food, company.
And Nine-Tails, for its part, was expending genuine effort not to lose itself entirely in the luxury of it. It felt that some dignity appropriate to a Tailed Beast ought to be maintained. That it should occasionally stand up and run a few laps across the grassland. That it should play a little less, read a little less, eat one fewer slice of cake.
That said -- it did not resent Naruto's indulgence.
That particular feeling -- of having someone who thought about what you liked, what you needed, what you might want -- it did not resent that. If anything, it quite liked it.
The one genuinely irritating element of its existence was the consciousness of the Otsutsuki Urashiki, also confined to this space. That entity behaved like a persistent pest, appearing periodically to steal things -- electronic devices and books, primarily. Nine-Tails always caught it and retrieved everything, delivering an additional beating by way of complaint. But Urashiki's consciousness seemed constitutionally incapable of learning its lesson. After a few days it would surface again, apparently incorrigible.
Wherever the heart turns, all things come into being. The will moves freely, bound by nothing.
This was what Naruto could do now. True, complete, fully unrestricted rule-level ability -- with no cost attached.
Think it, and it becomes real. Want it, and it appears. No price to pay. No logic required. No physical law or principle of causality to account for.
Wherever the heart turns, all things come into being.
Those words were the most accurate description of his power that existed.
Though, occasionally, Naruto found it slightly unsettling.
What if -- using this ability, with a single directed thought -- he turned everything into a tomato? Every supercluster of galaxies. The observable universe. The universe beyond the observable. The multiverse. Parallel universes. Every dimensional layer. Every level of narrative structure, all the way up and out.
One tomato.
He had turned this thought over carefully, examined it seriously, and asked the Star Eye exactly what the outcome would be.
Then he received his answer.
Superclusters of galaxies, reduced to dust. The observable universe, a handful of nothing. The universe itself, the multiverse, the parallel worlds stacked one upon another like pages scattered by wind -- each page covered in countless stories, countless lives, countless moments of grief and joy.
The dimensional hierarchy, the narrative framework, every law and concept -- time, space, causality, logic, existence itself, consciousness itself, everything defined and everything undefined, everything that could be imagined and everything that could not -- all of it collapsing inward, condensing, gathering to a single point.
And in the end, there would be nothing but a tomato.
One perfectly ordinary, red, round tomato, hanging quietly in an empty void.
No sound. No light. Nothing else at all.
Naruto wasn't sure whether he should feel awe, or absurdity, or simply that the thought he had just entertained was so alarming that he should erase it from his mind immediately and never revisit it.
What Naruto did with his Star Eye was, in essence, like using a controlled gamma-ray burst to light a cigarette. Like using the merger of two supermassive black holes to bring water to a boil. Like using the expansion of the entire cosmos to blow out a single candle.