Chapter 81: And Time Will Surge Forward

The next few days passed in a haze. The lab, the calculations, the follow-up analysis of the "vessels," collaborating with several scientists gathered from around the world, personal research through the "Empire" diving into mountains of scientific literature. All of that only served to break up the days and nights I spent with the girls, though the daytime was spent with Kushina, given that things between us were still technically "on pause."

Kushina had been unusually quiet these past few days. Not shut down exactly, more focused. Through our bond, I could feel her emotional state churning, slowly shifting color. Anxiety was giving way to resolve, and shame was being crushed by something stubborn, each wave lasting a little longer than the last.

It seemed she was finally putting an end to the war inside herself. Seeing that kind of progress, I made a point not to crowd her.

Which left me with a lot of free time.

My study of dojutsu, real study, not the slapped-together patchwork I'd built before, had reached the end of its foundational stage. I was finally at the point where I could see exactly what I wanted to get out of all this. The Rinne Sharingan had been dissected down to its last energetic thread. Every variation of the Sharingan, including Obito's collection and the unique Mangekyo forms, had been fused into a single concept. Isshiki's Kokugan and the Tenseigan had been integrated as well. That was the first stage of Project: God's Eye.

And I was doing all of this while searching for other paths of growth beyond just stacking more chakra power. Because something troubling had started to reveal itself.

Increasing my fundamental power was getting harder. Not impossible, but the rate of growth kept dropping while the effort required kept climbing.

My energy had long since become too dense for the upper layers of reality, the ones where most living beings exist. Even a fraction of my power caused disasters, so the bulk of it stayed anchored in the deeper layers of existence. At first, my chakra found its own way downward. Recently, I'd learned to direct that process consciously. But the deeper it went, the stronger the resistance.

Growing outward instead of downward wasn't working either. Space and dimensionality were a complete mess. In the upper layers of reality, sure, I might've been physically smaller than Kurama, but that depended entirely on how you looked at it. From an energetic standpoint, it was a totally different story. It was as if energetic growth only had one direction. Why? How was I supposed to "turn" it? I hadn't found even the slightest lead. It felt like I'd slammed headfirst into some fundamental principle of creation, one whose logic still lay somewhere beyond my comprehension.

My soul showed the exact same trend.

The prospect of hitting a final ceiling pissed me off. It was what forced me to calculate my development years in advance, squeezing every last drop out of whatever potential I had left. And it added one more argument in favor of meeting the Otsutsuki, especially their Progenitor, Daidare. Maybe this clash wasn't just inevitable because of the parasitic, conquest-driven nature of those creatures. Maybe it was necessary. Maybe they held the keys to what I still didn't understand.

Either way, I'd have to be careful with them. But getting back to the God's Eye.

What I had created was an energy matrix, located naturally in the eyes. Essentially a blueprint for future abilities. The dojutsu could already reproduce everything its base components could do: the Rinne Sharingan, the Byakugan, and so on. But their true value lay in the six new jutsu whose foundations I had already laid.

Factoring in the slowing rate of my energy growth, I'd calculated that fully developing all six would take about fifteen years of continuous feeding from the "Empire," along with my own generation, assuming a portion of that energy would also go toward developing my SCCs, my soul, and other necessities. And that timeframe wasn't random; that was roughly when the Otsutsuki were scheduled to arrive. So for now, sitting at home, I was preparing for a new milestone in my life.

Three jutsu were devoted to understanding. Three to combat.

The first of these "jutsu-seeds," you could say, was the Eye of Absolute Perception and Projection, born from the Sharingan and reinforced with the Byakugan and Kokugan. In its current form, it allowed for insanely fast analysis of energy structures, even by my standards, modeling the immediate outcomes of actions and projecting energy constructs. In the future, it was meant to evolve into the ability to "crack open" any system down to its fundamental principles, copy the properties of matter, and project fields capable of distorting even the deepest layers of reality.

The second "blueprint" was the Hand of Spatial Transformation, based on the Kokugan with integrated Mangekyo and Byakugan/Tenseigan traits. At this stage, it gave me improved control over my personal dimension and the ability to locally manipulate the metric of space, my own metric, and that of inanimate objects. Over time, that ability was meant to develop into even deeper spatial control, allowing for the transformation of the tiniest particles into other forms, and things along those lines.

The third "matrix" was the Gaze of Harmony and Dissonance, an evolution of the Byakugan and Tenseigan combined with the analytical capabilities of the Sharingan and the entropy perception of the Kokugan. Right now, it let me see chakra flows and their components, life force, Yin, and so on, with unprecedented clarity. Eventually, it was meant to become a tool for perceiving the subtlest energy interactions, identifying vulnerabilities, and finely "correcting" those flows.

Those were the three facets of understanding. But understanding alone wasn't enough to keep me alive.

I designed the combat aspects more directly, though like everything else, with constant refinement in mind.

Vector of Absolute Annihilation. A narrowly focused beam whose penetrative power far surpassed a Tailed Beast Bomb. Its essence wasn't variety of effects but their extreme concentration, a principle related to the Bijudama but pushed to the point where matter in the beam's path was almost denied outright. In the future, it would ignore even powerful spatial distortions, punching through everything no matter how space twisted itself into knots.

Phase Shift of Reality. An advancement of teleportation based on the Kokugan and Rinne Sharingan. Right now, it allowed for instant movement anywhere within my passive sensory range, about a hundred thousand kilometers, with minimal cost and no visible distortion. It also enabled long-distance teleportation and simplified transitions between layers of reality and dimensions in general. In the future, this would grow into a kind of smearing across layers of reality, capable of creating multiple quantum projections at once. If an attack hit only part of such a projection, it would deal proportionally less damage: clip ten percent of my "reflections," and it would feel like the blow landed at one-tenth strength. The degree to which I occupied the space between layers could be changed dynamically too, forcing an opponent to constantly scan for the true location of my essence.

And the third combat jutsu, no less important for being third, was the Dynamic Aegis Shell. An improved version of the ordinary chakra barriers that had become my "second skin." Sort of like the toads' senjutsu chakra, only far more advanced. It could alter its density, structure, and properties at extreme speed, absorbing, reflecting, or dispersing any known type of attack, from physical to energetic to mental. In the future, I envisioned it as a self-learning defensive system capable of anticipating threats and preemptively changing its characteristics, based on analysis from the Eye of Absolute Perception and the Gaze of Harmony and Dissonance.

Each of those six "blueprints" already gave me advantages no one else alive on Earth could touch. Though, honestly, that had been true before, too. The point was the progress itself.

Combined with my personal energy control, the dojutsu raised me another step higher, focusing power into specific techniques or even into individual properties pushed to their absolute limits. Only now, using both my personal control and the dojutsu at full capacity, had I finally come close to the ceiling of my current potential for creating techniques.

Of course, there was a side effect. Under full dojutsu load, all my other fuinjutsu, the ones not based on Earth symbols, stopped functioning. My energy was basically being redlined. That was one of the reasons the "Empire" had been designed as an artificial construct dependent on the planet, not on me.

The last distinct feature of the eyes was their appearance.

Still standing in that same laboratory, I activated the dojutsu and looked at my reflection in a full-length mirror.

An absolutely black pupil, like a black hole, but one that radiated yellow light from its edges. A kind of symbolism: power both emitted and contained, damn near infinite, refusing to obey the laws of physics. Around it loomed spikes that enclosed the void without touching it, a symbol of control even over that which shouldn't be controllable. And all of it lay over a gray iris, the color of my soul.

When I focused the eye on its research capabilities, the spikes tightened around the pupil, making it smaller. But when I used the beam or something else destructive, the spikes drew back slightly, even fading, letting the "black hole" expand a little and radiate an even stronger light.

I stared at the reflection for a couple of seconds, then deactivated the eyes.

The true potential of the "God's Eye" belonged to the future. Fifteen years of feeding, growth, and refinement. Preparing my main line of defense against the Otsutsuki demanded nothing less.

For now, though, I needed to rest and spend more time with the people close to me. Especially since a certain red-haired girl whose name started with a "K" had invited me to help cook, with a TV marathon to follow.

As I walked through the house, I took stock of what had been done. The Ten-Tails from Isshiki's dimension had been dismantled long ago and sorted into storage for future experiments in the labs. Zetsu and Hidan were still on ice. I didn't particularly give a damn about either of them, so apparently they could stay there for years to come. The Avatar was still flying, though our connection kept slowly draining away. That made me uneasy, because it could keep flying for years, even decades. If things kept going like that, the tether might not be long enough, and my Avatar could simply get lost in the vastness of the universes. As for more grounded matters, or rather, people: Toneri had found a friend at his institution. Just one. Another Emperor. Not me, of course, but someone absolutely convinced that he was me. Well. They had their own vibe going on over there.

But all of that was either not especially important or barely dependent on my efforts anyway. In my own life, another moment was about to reach its climax.

When I walked into the kitchen, I found Kushina holding a whisk, beating some white icing.

We'd already spent a few evenings preparing snacks together before our TV marathons. Except the last time, Kushina had spent more time watching me than the screen, and every time I asked if everything was okay, she'd just start blushing furiously and refuse to answer. Judging by what she was wearing today, this round of "preparation" was going to be different.

Because all she had on was an apron.

"That's... a pretty aggressive move," I commented with a pleased grin, leaning against the doorframe.

She looked up at me, and her cheeks went red fast. It was obvious that if I said anything too embarrassing right now, she'd die of shame on the spot. The situation we were already in had pushed her just about to her limit.

"I..." she trailed off, unable to find the words.

"Decided to do it all at once before your courage ran out? Smart. But you know, you really are a brave woman."

I stepped closer, cutting off any chance for her to turn away, and dipped my head to catch her lips with mine.

The whisk slipped from her fingers and clinked against the bowl. But Kushina didn't pull back. With trembling hands, she slowly reached out toward me instead.

At once, my mind filled with the taste of ripe, almost tart cherry, a light hint of cinnamon, and the faintest aftertaste of sea salt.

The salt, like in caramel, didn't ruin the sweetness at all. It sharpened it.

Mixed with my own, it turned into something that sent electric shivers from my mouth all the way down to my stomach, the taste of a warm, spiced cherry pie with citrus zest.

Like coming home after being gone too long. It hit somewhere deep.

A little later we finally broke apart and exhaled.

Using a jutsu, I passed straight through the counter and loomed over Kushina. She braced her hands somewhere behind her, having let go of me.

Beneath her now-hazy eyes, a smile appeared, one that was trying very hard to look confident.

"You came very well prepared today. That deserves a reward..." I said.

"And... what kind?"

My family had fully crossed over and settled into a new stage in our relationships. At last, all of us had found the wholeness we'd each been moving toward, each by our own road.

Things had settled down. The Empire ran like a fine-tuned machine, and I no longer had to hand out beatdowns to subordinates or worry about large-scale problems. The girls were busy with their own things; Kushina had found herself in her new life and was simply enjoying it. And I could finally devote most of my attention to what mattered most: understanding.

Days turned into months, months into years. Each one brought discoveries, projects, journeys, and stupid arguments over dinner, the kind that somehow only left things warmer afterward. Children were born and grew, though no, not mine. The world around us changed. But the rhythm of our life never slipped.

More than fifteen years passed.

And they brought far more than anyone had expected.