"Yoru, you're back!"
Gojo Yoru had just stepped out of the Hokage Tower when a graceful figure rushed straight at him.
Uzumaki Kushina practically launched herself into his arms, clinging to him without caring about the looks from passersby. Yoru caught her, a little surprised. "Kushina… how'd you know I was back?"
"Heh heh—guess."
With her arms looped around his neck and her legs cinched around his waist, Kushina wore a smug, mysterious grin—so pleased with herself it was obvious.
Yoru knew Kushina wasn't the type who could keep a secret.
And since he'd gone straight to see Hiruzen to trade for the Spirit Transformation Technique, he hadn't run into her on the way. Sure, it was possible she'd spotted him in the street by chance… but that wouldn't make her look this triumphant.
If it wasn't that, then there was only one explanation:
She had sensed his chakra.
Sensing—
Yoru's eyes lit up. He wrapped his arms around her slim waist and asked, "You awakened the Mind's Eye of the Kagura?"
"Bingo! Isn't it amazing?!"
Kushina lifted her chin, totally showing off. "Our Uzumaki clan has three unique abilities—awakening even one makes you a genius. And me—hmph hmph!"
Right now, she looked exactly like a kid who'd aced a test and suddenly decided she was the greatest person alive.
And honestly? She had every right to be proud.
Yoru didn't hold back. "That's insane. Of course it's you."
"Heehee—!"
Finally getting the praise she wanted, Kushina beamed.
Too bad her chubby baby face had already lost most of its childish roundness and was refining into a pretty, delicate oval—otherwise that slightly goofy grin would've been even cuter.
People nearby watched the two of them and smiled with genuine warmth.
Yoru didn't like being stared at, so he scooped Kushina up and shun—a single teleport later, they were back home.
"Yoru, you ungrateful jerk—!"
The moment they got inside, Kushina flipped like a switch.
She dropped off him and immediately tried to pinch his waist.
With his ridiculous reflexes, Yoru caught her hands as easily as snatching a fly with chopsticks. Then he smacked her head, annoyed. "When did you pick up that habit? Trying to kill me?"
Kushina clutched her head, puffing her cheeks. "You've bitten me a million times lately and I didn't complain! But I pinch you once and you hit me?!"
"Bite me back is fine," Yoru said. "Pinching isn't."
He pinched her cheeks instead, gently tugging them with a grin. "Only I'm allowed to pinch you. You don't get to pinch me."
That direct hit made her cheeks flush instantly.
To hide her embarrassment, Kushina put on a mischievous smile. "Fine. Then let me bite you back."
"No problem," Yoru said, and immediately reached for his belt like he was about to undo it.
Kushina froze. "Y-you—what are you doing?!"
"Letting you bite my butt," Yoru said like it was the most natural thing in the world. "You're always baring your teeth. There's no better place for you to bite."
"…Go die."
Kushina's hair shot up like it was fighting gravity. Furious, she threw a punch at him.
Yoru dodged easily. And like always, the two of them started roughhousing around the house.
From the way they talked, it wasn't hard to tell what had been happening lately: Yoru had been coming back often to bite Kushina and restore his chakra.
After grinding for just over a month and developing the entire Chidori line—each an A-rank—plus rapidly advancing his shape transformation enough to turn his "space-time bomb" into derivative techniques… Kushina deserved a huge share of the credit, right behind the talent boost from his second evolution.
Every time Yoru ran his normal chakra dry, he'd use Flying Thunder God to return to Konoha, use Kushina's Vitality Healing to refill, and then go right back to training.
Otherwise, with Yoru's tiny reserves, even with his talent, there was no way he could've pushed Lightning nature and form transformation that far in a single month, and successfully developed new space-time techniques.
He kept wearing that infuriating grin, using his reflexes to "walk the dog" and toy with her as they moved from bedroom to living room, then living room to kitchen—
—but his mind suddenly tightened.
Kushina's anger was stacking. Her punches kept missing. Her "rage meter" climbed higher and higher.
And without him noticing exactly when, her deep navy eyes had changed—
into red, slit-pupil eyes.
Paired with her bared teeth and blazing red hair… she looked like a fox that had taken human form.
It was the first time he'd seen her like this, but Yoru wasn't unfamiliar with it at all.
This was the warning sign: Nine-Tails chakra beginning to leak.
In canon, Naruto's transformation had multiple stages even with a powerful seal—first the slit pupils and uncontrolled leakage, then conscious borrowing of chakra, then emotionally triggered partial tailed-beast states, then Nine-Tails Chakra Mode, and finally Kurama Mode after mutual acceptance.
But Kushina didn't have an Eight Trigrams Seal made from two Four Symbols Seals—she had only half of that structure, and she housed a complete Nine-Tails.
She wouldn't go through every stage like Naruto did.
When Mito's chakra protection was still strong, Kushina was basically just an exceptionally gifted Uzumaki—only with a Jinchūriki's recovery and a terrifying chakra pool under the fox's influence.
Now that her eyes had become the Nine-Tails' eyes, it meant the chakra seal left behind by Uzumaki Mito was weakening.
If Kurama broke through and Kushina still had no way to suppress it, she could slip into partial tailed-beast form at any moment—straight into a multi-tail state, the kind that could fire a "Tailed Beast Bomb."
Without Sharingan suppression or heavy sealing, Kushina alone could level Konoha.
Looks like this "vacation" wasn't just going to be about studying Spirit Transformation—he'd need to spend time on sealing practice too.
Yoru thought it silently.
Time flowed like sand through an hourglass—each grain a past scene: civilians' lives, nobles' excess, shinobi slaughter, major incidents, someone's personal story…
Before he knew it, Konoha Year 36 had reached its end, about to turn the page into a new chapter.
Meanwhile, the Sand front (between the Land of Wind and the Land of Rivers) and the Stone front (between the Land of Rain and the Land of Grass) still hadn't withdrawn. They were still bashing heads with the White Fang front and Danzo front.
But the situation was a lot better than before.
Amegakure's withdrawal—and the Demigod's "protection"—brought refugees back to the Land of Rain.
Nearby small nations dared to trade there again, or pass through Rain to do business with the Land of Fire and others.
That was the Land of Rain's importance: a three-great-nation crossroads. When war erupted, it inevitably became the main battlefield. Surrounding small countries could only trade within tiny safe zones unless they took absurd detours—through Wind and Rivers, through Grass/Waterfall and Earth, or by sea around half the continent.
The time and money required were astronomical, and bandits and rogue shinobi were always a risk. Sometimes merchants had to hire shinobi both ways, and villages would hike prices based on distance and time.
The four-nation war of the last two years didn't just hit the big countries' economies—it shook the entire shinobi world's economy.
Only now were things starting to recover.
…
Southern Land of Rain.
A small river babbled along.
On the river's surface stood a short figure, hands flashing through seals.
"Water Style: Water Dragon Bullet!"
A massive water dragon formed from tons of water, surged up from the river, flew an unknown distance, then crashed back down, blasting a towering splash.
The small figure didn't smile first—he immediately looked to the bank.
Only after seeing someone there clap for him did he break into a delighted grin and run over.
"Konan-sama! How was that?!"
"It was amazing. Seriously."
Konan gave Nagato a thumbs-up and praised him from the heart. "You've been a shinobi for less than three months, and your chakra already far surpasses mine. You built Water nature from scratch, learned a B-rank Water Dragon in under a week, and cut forty-four hand seals down to seven."
"Nagato, you're absolutely a super-genius."
Nagato flushed shyly. "Konan-sama, you're exaggerating… Compared to you—someone already developing a secret technique—my talent is nothing."
Konan's smile twitched, then she used her height advantage to bonk him lightly on the head.
Nagato clutched his head, confused.
Konan lectured him like an older sister. "That's not how you compliment people. You don't know how long I struggled to develop this, or how long I've been stuck. Saying that will just get you hated, got it?"
"S-sorry!" Nagato apologized immediately.
"Hmph. I'll forgive you."
Watching this soft, almost girlish Nagato, Konan finally understood what it felt like to be "the big sister."
Raising a little brother really was like raising a pet—kind of fun.
…Except this "little brother" was absurdly overpowered.
Yoru had warned her ahead of time, but seeing Nagato surpass nearly two years of her work in less than three months still left Konan dazed and under pressure.
She needed to hurry and develop Paper Release, learn Amegakure's Exploding Flame Formation, use Paper Release and that formation to cover Mutually Multiplying Explosive Tags, and then combine it with the sealing techniques Yoru had taught her.
Otherwise she'd lose her "Konan-sama" authority in front of Nagato.
"Come on," Konan said, copying Yoru with hands in her pockets as she walked off. "We're going corpse-hunting again. We're finding a way to get stronger."
Nagato hurried after her, eyes full of worship.
Before his corruption, Nagato really was "male Konan"—or more accurately, he belonged to the same category as Konan, Haku, Kimimaro, and others.
Their parents died to Konoha shinobi, yet they didn't immediately hate Konoha or seek revenge. They just became lost.
Once "saved" and given a path, they latched on to their rescuer completely. Their motivation to grow strong wasn't revenge—it was devotion, repayment, and the desire to help achieve the rescuer's "important goal."
Konan, Haku, Kimimaro… even Kushina, in her own way.
It was almost like a disease common to war orphans.
By contrast, Yahiko's early ideal wasn't peaceful reform through nonviolence—he wanted to become a god. His death later pushed Nagato into darkness, and he turned Yahiko's corpse into the Deva Path to fulfill that first dream.
Speaking of Yahiko—
Amegakure, the tower.
With a White Zetsu clone helping from the shadows, Hanzō—now fully healed—looked down at an orange-haired boy kneeling bare-chested before him, eyes full of admiration.
"To rise through death… I didn't expect a child who isn't even a shinobi yet to have such will. You survived what's killed who knows how many people. Perhaps… this is fate."
Then Hanzō's expression turned serious.
"Yahiko—will you become my student?"
"I will!"
Yahiko snapped his head up, ecstatic, and answered loudly.
Look closely and you'd see a stitched scar on his lower left back, like he'd undergone some kind of procedure.
And that was true.
Hanzō had no idea someone helped him behind the scenes.
He believed his survival was thanks to Yahiko's timely signal—letting Sakawa find him and bring him back for treatment.
In the rocky mountains there were countless caves, yet he just happened to pick the cave where Yahiko lived—Yahiko happened to be a Rain war orphan—and on top of that, his "savior."
That coincidence, that "fate," and that debt pushed Hanzō to repay the boy.
When he asked what Yahiko wanted, the boy answered the same way he had in canon when meeting Jiraiya: he wanted Hanzō to take him as a student.
Hanzō hesitated.
Not because he didn't want students—if anything, he'd always wanted someone who could inherit his legacy.
But to become his student, you had to pass a test:
have a poison sac implanted in your body—and survive.
Over the years, many talented Rain shinobi had died at that threshold.
Eventually Hanzō assumed he was a singular case, and stopped trying to take students.
Yet now, a child who wasn't even a shinobi had passed the trial that crushed countless prodigies.
Between the "fate" of meeting and the life-saving debt, plus Rain's withdrawal and Hanzō abandoning his impossible dream… a successor had fallen into his lap.
He took it as heaven refusing to let Rain be carved up by the three great nations and erased from the map after his death.
So the "Deva Path" who once ruled Rain in canon began walking a different path.
…
"Rasengan!"
Konoha—some training ground in the woods.
A blond boy slammed a blue-white sphere into a tree.
BOOM! The trunk was blasted out in a spiral-patterned crater, then snapped and crashed down in a cloud of dust.
Leaping back out of the dust, Minato Namikaze smiled to himself. "Finally… I've got it."
Clap clap clap.
Jiraiya walked over, gave him a thumbs-up, and grinned. "Less than five days to learn Rasengan. I knew it—your chakra control talent is on the same level as your insane reflexes."
"I'm more convinced than ever you'll become Konoha's third Flying Thunder God user."
He looked fired up. "Once you learn Flying Thunder God, I'm going to rub it in Orochimaru's face. My eye for talent is unbeatable!"
Minato's smile turned a little awkward. "Jiraiya-sensei… I'm still a long way from mastering Flying Thunder God."
He said that, but those blue eyes burned with pure determination.
Even if he was still behind… like back in the Academy…
He still had the right to chase.
…
Over the last two years, who took the biggest mental hit from Yoru's rise?
Not the older students, who was a few years older and had watched Yoru from afar.
It was Yoru's old classmates—people who graduated and, not strong enough for the front, got assigned to support units, mostly stayed in the village, and only occasionally escorted supplies to the three major lines.
While they were still stuck in low-risk support duty…
One of their own had gone to the front, climbed from genin to trump-card combatant in under two years, became one of the border commanders, and stacked up impossible feats—beating even the Shinobi Demigod.
Every time they went to the front and heard more stories about Yoru, it felt unreal.
Some classmates he'd once "bullied" even felt a weird pride from the instinct to admire strength.
Even Minato—whose speed and assassination talent didn't match his official rank and could easily defeat and kill high-level shinobi—couldn't see a path to catch up.
Jiraiya praised his talent constantly.
But compared to Yoru, it felt like they lived in different dimensions.
Just what Minato had heard alone included: the super S-rank Flying Thunder God; the S-rank Yin Seal; the no-handseal Rasengan Yoru invented before graduation; the powerful Black Lightning arts; and a suspected fused bloodline limit—Storm Release.
In many people's eyes, Yoru was a once-in-decades super genius with real potential to reach the "top of the Five Kage."
That kind of aura made the name Gojo Yoru itself heavy—just hearing it could make younger shinobi feel weak and afraid, let alone trying to compete.
But the independent scroll Jiraiya had recently given Minato reignited his hope.
The core of Flying Thunder God wasn't "space-time talent"—it was abnormal reflexes, then sealing talent—more precisely, chakra control—on the same abnormal level.
Minato had both.
Other than Yoru, Minato was Konoha's most likely candidate to master the technique.
If he succeeded, he'd become Konoha's third Flying Thunder God user.
Even if Yoru had many techniques, his two titles—"Black Flash" and "Fastest Shinobi"—were both built on Flying Thunder God.
That was his biggest pillar.
If Minato mastered it too, expanded his arsenal, he might not be unable to catch up.
And that thought fueled him.
Two years had passed; Minato had long since abandoned any childish fantasy.
That old crush on the red-haired girl had faded too.
His desire to chase Yoru was simply a genius's pride—he wanted to beat Yoru once, and refused to be second forever.
Jiraiya had no idea his student had started treating Yoru—the monster—as the target.
If he did, he'd probably try to talk him out of it.
Even Hanzō only managed to force out that absurd laser move from Yoru—Jiraiya still didn't know the real secret Orochimaru guarded, the secret that made him so certain Yoru would become the next "Shinobi God," the secret even the Slug Sage called a "new miracle."
No way that secret was "just" Black Lightning and a fused Storm Release, or some bloodline elimination like Dust Release.
And it definitely wasn't Flying Thunder God—because Tobirama, its inventor, wasn't even a "Demigod."
Yoru didn't realize his butterfly effect was reshaping key characters' fates, steering them onto paths that never existed in canon, and possibly producing more "new era wave-makers."
Even if he knew, he wouldn't care.
It was inevitable.
From the moment he "stole" Kushina's bond, he'd already caused the biggest butterfly effect of all.
That ripple meant Naruto—the protagonist—very likely would never exist.
Even if he did, he wouldn't be the Nine-Tails' Jinchūriki, and he wouldn't be an Uzumaki.
Yoru could practically quote it decades early:
"I didn't kill Boruto… but Boruto died because of me."
Compared to that, Orochimaru's shift, Konan's altered fate, Nagato no longer being Yahiko's shadow, Yahiko becoming Hanzō's student, Minato learning Rasengan early, and the Reaper Death Seal never being used… were small things.
Because once the butterfly spreads its wings—
the "plot" will become unrecognizable.
~~~
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