In the first second of activating the newly born dojutsu within his Byakugan, under this "all-knowing and all-seeing" perspective, Hyuga Yu felt as if he had become...
A god who controlled the life and death of everything within his domain!
But immediately after, Yu felt a violent headache that far surpassed the side effects of the Caged Bird Curse Seal. Nosebleeds erupted uncontrollably from his nostrils, and everything before his eyes began to blur.
In the second second, Yu's brain completely crashed under the impact of the massive torrent of information gained from his precognition. His vision suddenly went pitch black; the real world, distinct from the "cyan future world," vanished from his sight, leaving him temporarily blind.
His eardrums began to vibrate frantically. Gradually, Yu could actually hear every sound from the future within a seven-kilometer radius!
But just one second after hearing these sounds stacked on top of one another—sounding like a hundred million flies buzzing chaotically in his ears—Bang!
His eardrums ruptured, and blood splattered out from his ear canals!
Hyuga Yu was deafened.
The only thing he could hear was a sharp, piercing tinnitus, as if ten thousand loudspeakers were piled around him, blasting a grating noise that made him want to claw at glass in madness.
The cyan world, the only thing left visible to him, began to sway violently from side to side and turn upside down. Clutching his head as blood leaked from his seven facial orifices, Yu trembled and swayed on the spot. The core stability and balance he had forged through his ninja training vanished completely. Slowly, without even realizing it, Yu fell to his knees and crawled on the ground. As the cyan world in his eyes began to twist, he seemed to see "countless versions of himself."
From a God's-eye view, he looked down upon the world within a seven-kilometer radius. As the "Hyuga Yu" crawling on the ground at the epicenter of this world made different choices, the cyan world began to splinter into countless fragments at this very moment.
The first Hyuga Yu stood up, lines of clear tears falling from his eyes. Seemingly unable to endure the agony any longer, he swung a fist and blew his own head apart.
The first world shuddered, collapsed, and violently exploded!
The second Hyuga Yu snapped out of it, realized something was wrong, and instinctively unleashed Wind Style: Chakra Scalpels, directly severing his own brain's neural pathways. He became a vegetable.
The second world was permanently frozen at that exact second, all possibilities completely wiped out.
The third Hyuga Yu seemed to learn from the previous two. Instead of cutting his brain's neural connections, he tremblingly forced himself to deactivate the Byakugan.
The moment it closed, the Byakugan inside his sockets violently exploded, detonating along with his head. A cyan-tinted mixture of "red and white matter" splattered across the ground. He collapsed heavily like a headless horseman.
The third world crumbled.
Then came the fourth Hyuga Yu... He tried to reverse the process by redirecting the cyan blood away from his cranial region. His brain suffered immediate ischemia, resulting in instant death.
The fifth, the sixth, the seventh...
Countless versions of Hyuga Yu instinctively began executing self-rescue measures at this very second. The concept of time seemed to have lost its meaning; though their actions commenced at the exact same moment, it felt like a relay race. They continuously absorbed the lessons from the failures of their previous selves, embarking on a new round of self-preservation.
Countless cyan worlds flickered into existence and vanished.
Countless versions of Hyuga Yu began a race against death at this moment.
They simultaneously foresaw that by the seventh second after this state began, the real Hyuga Yu's brain would suffer organic damage, permanently losing portions of his memories and emotions, resulting in a personality shift.
By the tenth second, brain death would occur. His consciousness would be exiled into some crevice of the future, leaving his physical body a permanent vegetable.
Finally, through the instinctive actions of the 142,567th Hyuga Yu—
Relying on the blurry fragments of memory from having stubbornly endured the Caged Bird Curse Seal no less than two thousand times, he instantaneously reverse-engineered the application of the Caged Bird. He attempted to activate the Caged Bird just like a member of the Main House—prior to this, the exact same approach had already failed 22,569 times.
He successfully reverse-engineered the hand signs and theory of the Caged Bird, and using the experience gained from over twenty thousand failures, he completed a modification of the technique—
Correcting the bug that prevented members of the Branch House from using the Caged Bird to kill themselves.
He activated the Caged Bird Curse Seal, launching a fierce assault upon himself!
The pure, cyan Caged Bird chakra surging from the curse seal slammed into Yu's Byakugan. The cyan chakra—which fused three elemental attributes and possessed a nature infinitely close to Tenseigan chakra—clashed violently with the highly refined Caged Bird chakra!
Countless cyan worlds began to converge at this very instant!
This wasn't a guaranteed success; rather, Hyuga Yu had no other choice but to stake everything on this single gamble—
In the outside world, time reached the sixth second.
Without a moment's hesitation, the real Hyuga Yu stood up exactly as rehearsed in the cyan worlds. Slamming his hands together, he formed the Ram sign and bared his teeth in a savage grimace!
"Caged Bird—Bind!"
The pure, cyan Caged Bird chakra surging from the curse seal slammed into Yu's Byakugan. The cyan chakra—which fused three elemental attributes and possessed a nature infinitely close to Tenseigan chakra—clashed violently with the highly refined Caged Bird chakra!
A silent war erupted within Hyuga Yu's body!
A cataclysmic process of disintegration began. The brilliant glow within his cyan Byakugan gradually faded, and an indescribable "visual prowess" decomposed at this instant into a massive amount of cyan chakra. Under the threat of death, it spontaneously rushed to the front lines to resist the onslaught of the Caged Bird!
The Caged Bird Curse Seal continuously absorbed Yu's own chakra, generating highly refined Caged Bird chakra to collide, tear, and devour the cyan chakra!
The chakra within Yu's body burned to absolute depletion within a single second!
Immediately after, the Caged Bird Curse Seal began decomposing Yu's physical energy, and the cyan Byakugan also began competing for this same physical energy, continuing to pour it into this war without gunsmoke!
Yu's originally healthy and robust physique began to shrivel at a pace visible to the naked eye. Complications such as muscle atrophy, bone calcium loss, fractures, aspiration pneumonia, and severe malnutrition erupted all at once!
Thud!
Losing the support of his arm strength, Yu's kneeling body collapsed flat onto the ground.
His cheeks felt the raw chill of the muddy earth, his nostrils could clearly smell the slightly metallic scent of muddy water, and the cyan world he had been looking down upon from a God's-eye view began to disintegrate, turning back into countless cyan points of light like "fireflies," vanishing inch by inch.
Everything within his field of vision turned pitch black.
At this moment, even an ordinary person could easily kill Hyuga Yu in this state with a single, gentle stomp.
But fortunately—
This newly awakened dojutsu had been forcibly halted under the deadly coercion of the Caged Bird.
Hyuga Yu had successfully averted the worst-case scenario!
Though his current state could hardly be considered much better. "Cough, cough... Blegh!"
He coughed up a large mouthful of blood. His cheeks were deeply sunken, his complexion was as pale and sickly as paper, and he lay helplessly on the ground, his stark white eyes glazed over like those of a dead fish.
Yet, a gleam of utter ecstasy ignited within Yu's eyes!
"Byakugan Dojutsu: Ten Directions!"
Gasping for breath, unable to see or hear a thing, he nonetheless accurately uttered the name of this dojutsu.
This was a rule-breaking, borderline illegal dojutsu—
It could instantly detect everything within the Byakugan's field of observation. With himself as the epicenter, and based on the information already gathered, it could deduce countless possibilities for the very next second for everything within a seven-kilometer radius, calculating an established future from those infinite variables.
It was the most direct form of "Future Sight."
But the price of using it was equally harrowing—
The massive torrent of information would instantly assault the brain, damaging the amygdala, hippocampus, cerebral cortex, cerebellum, and other memory-storing organs. Within seconds, symptoms would manifest, including but not limited to violent headaches, nosebleeds, temporary blurred vision, brief blindness, tinnitus, loss of balance, and hallucinations.
If the intensity increased by just one level—meaning past the seventh second—it would cause permanent organic brain damage.
After the tenth second concluded, it would lead directly to brain death, turning him into a permanent vegetable, while his body, under the influence of this dojutsu, would morph into some sort of conceptual, bizarre entity until its chakra was entirely depleted and life came to an end.
This was absolutely not a realm that "humans" could touch. More accurately, this was a dojutsu derived from the Shinjutsu "Ten Directions" possessed by the Progenitor God of the Otsutsuki from beyond the starry sky, Shibai Otsutsuki.
When a mortal attempts to wield the authority of a god, the price is to completely lose oneself within that power...
In fact, acquiring this dojutsu was not a mere coincidence for Hyuga Yu. It was more like an underlying logic rooted within the Otsutsuki bloodline—akin to the punishment inflicted upon the fire-stealer Prometheus, it was a pre-programmed "divine punishment" for a mortal attempting to overstep the boundaries of a Kekkei Genkai!
Fortunately, relying on the possibilities granted by the [Dojutsu: Ten Directions], Hyuga Yu had used the Caged Bird to fight poison with poison. In the process, he chanced upon a bug that even the original designer had never anticipated, forcing his way through this round of divine retribution.
As a result, he had stolen... the power of a god!
"I... can control this dojutsu now. However, I must absolutely never use the Byakugan's God's-eye view while the dojutsu is active. That... all-encompassing, top-down perspective—no, that won't work either... I can only rely on pure observation with the naked eye."
"Even with naked-eye observation, I must set constraints beforehand, limiting the number of times and the focus of my gaze. Otherwise, the moment the dojutsu is activated, my brain will crash from the sheer volume of information blasted into it, let alone applying this dojutsu to reality."
Yu quickly formulated the technique for utilizing [Byakugan Dojutsu: Ten Directions]—
Activate the Byakugan, but do not utilize any of its inherent observational capabilities. Instead, pair the field of vision perceived by the naked eye with the dojutsu to observe a limited "thousand possibilities," thereby deducing the established future within this extremely narrow scope.
It was like secretly boring a small hole right next to the "all-knowing and all-seeing" realm of a god, using a mortal's eye to peek at a mere corner of the divine vision.
Aside from the massive chakra consumption required to maintain the dojutsu, there were no direct side effects.
But even so, the demands this dojutsu placed on the user's information analysis and computational capacities were thoroughly insane.
Having finished his summary, Yu immediately wanted to test this possibility again. However, he quickly became aware of his current plight—bleeding from his seven facial orifices, a splitting headache, blindness, deafness, completely drained physical energy, and non-existent chakra.
By all logical standards, if he hadn't already completed the initial passive transformation of his body's Yang Release nature, the fact that he was still alive would be nothing short of an absolute miracle!
Hyuga Yu: "..."
Yu calmed down from his state of high excitement. This situation was not unmanageable for him—
First, he waited twenty minutes. Once the cells within his body completed a new round of proliferation, he extracted a sliver of chakra and reconnected the severed optic nerves and blood vessels. Soon, light returned to his eyes.
Next, forcing his emaciated body up, Yu set his broken bones one by one and sat cross-legged. He painstakingly squeezed out fresh chakra from his utterly exhausted body, then manipulated it to form Wind Style: Chakra Scalpels within himself. With a level of chakra control that was nothing short of breathtaking, he temporarily severed the functions of his various bodily tissues that regulated and restricted spontaneous proliferation and self-healing.
Consequently, before the naked eye, Yu's body began to puff back up like a balloon, and his complexion shifted from a deathly, ghastly pale to a healthy flush.
In this manner, a subjective amount of time passed—
Hiss!
"Hey, hey—are you still alive? Tenjin, Hyuga Yu? Wake up! What on earth happened? We've only been apart for one night, how did you end up like this?!"
Yu was awakened by a thick, somewhat anxious voice. Reopening his Byakugan, the figures of Yahiko, Nagato, and Konan appeared before him. The three of them were staring at him with a mix of shock and worry. Yahiko went ahead and grabbed Yu directly by the shoulders, shaking his body.
The sky had shifted from a pitch-black night to a high, blazing midday sun. Exceptionally, it wasn't raining in the Land of Rain today.
Crack!
Just as Yu regained his bearings, a crisp snap echoed from his left shoulder, followed by a sharp wave of pain!
His left collarbone had actually been snapped by Yahiko.
"Ah... this, I didn't even use that much strength?! I'm sorry, I'm sorry... Yu-kun, I really didn't mean to..."
Yahiko was completely dazed. He stared blankly at the ghastly white bone that had been snapped by his grip, piercing through the flesh near the side of Yu's neck. A chill ran down Yahiko's spine.
Yu tilted his head down slightly to look at the injury, his brow furrowing slightly. The severe calcium depletion was still an issue, and it would take about half a day to fully address, but it no longer impeded his movement.
Expressionless, Yu slapped Yahiko's hands away. Reaching up, he pressed down on the white bone piercing his skin, nonchalantly shoving it back into where the left clavicle belonged. Then, swaying slightly, he stood up and looked at the trio before him.
Yu quickly recalled why the three of them had come—
Yesterday, he had agreed to go with them to test the waters of this "Madara Uchiha" who had suddenly appeared. "Right, that was yesterday. I remember now. Let's go—"
Yu lifted his head to look at Yahiko, a cyan light flashing within his stark white eyes. At that moment, bizarrely, a version of Yahiko composed of countless cyan points of light spoke ahead of the real-world Yahiko: "But are you really okay like this?"
Then, a second Yahiko scratched his head, asking with concern: "Compared to that, your problem is much bigger, isn't it?"
A third Yahiko followed: "How about you see a doctor first?"
A fourth Yahiko's lips twitched slightly as he handed over a small, cyan mirror: "I know you're a medical ninja yourself, but... just look at yourself, your condition is—"
A fifth Yahiko said: "See, what you need right now is rest! Don't worry too much. If what that guy said is true, going tomorrow will be the same."
By the fifth second, a burning sensation flared in Yu's eyes, and the cyan points of light in his vision abruptly dissolved.
At this point, Yu snapped back to reality, only to see a trace of confusion on the real Yahiko's face as he spoke: "Why did you suddenly daze out? Tenjin, what are you thinking about?"
Hearing this, Yu's brow furrowed slightly.
The predicted imagery was distorted compared to what actually transpired in reality. A total of five Yahikos had popped up, saying things completely different from reality that hadn't happened at all.
This was bizarre. Yu immediately channeled his chakra once more, dyeing his white pupils cyan. This time, he first observed the real Yahiko—studying his movements, muscle play, emotional shifts, and the subtle twitches of his lips.
The cyan Yahiko materialized once again. Bolstered by the gathered data, ten cyan Yahikos simultaneously appeared before Yu's eyes, executing actions that were both identical yet slightly varied—he raised different hands from different angles, waving them in front of Yu before speaking with a face full of worry: "Hyuga Yu, are you really alright?"
Once those words were spoken, the ten Yahikos unified at that exact moment, solidifying into the "established future." He raised his right hand at a 73-degree upward angle, waving his palm to the right just in front of the right side of Yu's nose.
In the very next second, the real-world Yahiko performed the exact same motion without a millimeter of deviation, using a flawless tone to utter the identical words: "Hyuga Yu, are you really alright?"
Witnessing this, Yu nodded inwardly, a look of realization flashing across his eyes. His cyan pupils faded back into pristine white. He shook his head. "I'm fine. Let's go."
Right then, Yahiko frowned, looking at Yu. Taking up the conversation, he naturally asked with a hint of surprise—striking a pose that looked intensely familiar to Yu, as if he had already witnessed it happen once before: "But are you really okay like this?"
Yu snapped his head up, his pupils shrinking slightly. An uncontrollable look of... utter bewilderment washed over his face.
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