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Somewhere in the human world, tucked into the forgotten corner of a crumbling village, a thatched hut stood on its last legs.
The walls let wind through from every direction. Half the roof straw had fallen away. Inside, there was nothing. A chipped black clay pot. A few piles of dry grass pretending to be beds. That was the full inventory.
Manji figured even a rat would take one look around and leave hungry.
In the center of the room, a child of five or six was standing on tiptoe, struggling to stoke the fire under a cooking pot. The kid was a strange sight. Two small, pale-colored horns jutted from his scalp. His face was sallow from years of not eating enough, but his eyes told a different story. There was a toughness in them that didn't belong on a face that young.
The fire caught properly, and a gust of steam rolled up from the boiling water, thick with the smell of rice. The white cloud engulfed the child completely.
Then the boy's legs buckled. His eyes rolled shut. He dropped straight backward onto the cold dirt floor, out cold.
The steam drifted apart, and two figures stood in the hut where nobody had been a moment before.
Manji, in plain sage robes, expression neutral. And on his shoulder, Shima, the compact little intelligence-division toad.
Manji swept his gaze across the hut, registered the level of poverty with a flicker of surprise, then looked down at the unconscious, two-horned child on the floor.
"Grand Sage, this is the one. Our sensory network doesn't make mistakes."
Shima pointed at the child with one stubby leg, voice certain.
Manji crouched down. A hair-thin thread of Sage chakra slipped from his fingertip and probed the boy's body. Took about two seconds.
He withdrew the chakra and smiled. "Confirmed. Hagoromo's blood."
Diluted. Mixed with ordinary human lineage. Muddied almost beyond recognition. But the Ōtsutsuki signature was there, buried under layers of mortal genetics like a gold coin at the bottom of a muddy river.
Manji had already pieced it together.
In the future, the Gold and Silver Brothers would terrorize the shinobi world, and the records would explicitly state they carried Hagoromo's bloodline. But Hagoromo only had two known sons. Asura's line became the Senju. Indra's line became the Uchiha. The Gold and Silver Brothers had no Senju surname and no Sharingan. They didn't fit into either family tree.
Which left one possibility.
This child was descended from an illegitimate line. A one-night stand during Hagoromo's years of wandering the world, spreading Ninshū. A bloodline the old man probably never even knew he'd left behind.
"I'd bet anything Hagoromo went to his grave without knowing this kid existed." Manji chuckled quietly, glancing at Shima.
"Grand Sage, should we bring the child back to Mount Myōboku?"
Manji shook his head. "No. Let him find his own way. Not everything needs our fingerprints on it."
He paused, then turned to Shima with a different look entirely. The kind of look that meant large-scale plans were about to leave the drawing board.
"Shima. I have a job for you. A big one."
"At your command, Grand Sage!"
"Mobilize every covert asset we have in the human world. Deploy senior toads to coordinate. I want a network of underground exchange houses built across every major territory."
"Staffed by humans. We stay invisible. On the surface, they're currency exchanges and bounty clearinghouses. Underneath, they're our intelligence apparatus."
His voice was calm. His eyes were looking at something decades ahead.
The exchange houses from the Naruto world had always been one of its most mysterious institutions. Powerful enough to put bounties on a Hokage's son. Bold enough to target the Guardian Shinobi of the Fire Nation. Operating beyond the reach of any hidden village, answerable to no government.
They didn't exist yet. So Manji would build them himself.
He wouldn't run them directly, of course. A sage who sat above the clouds didn't get his hands dirty with underworld logistics. This was purely an intelligence investment.
"Grand Sage, you're..."
Shima stared at him with something approaching religious awe. The Grand Sage's vision stretched so far beyond the present that following his thought process felt like trying to read a map drawn for a world that didn't exist yet.
To the toads, Manji gave off one overwhelming impression: everything is under control. Nothing surprised him. Nothing rattled him. He moved through events the way a river moved through a valley, shaping the landscape without ever seeming to exert effort.
They were convinced he was playing chess on a board the size of the planet.
Was he? Manji kept his face blank.
Sort of—
He needed faster, more reliable intelligence. The main storyline was still a thousand years away. Better to lay the groundwork now and let the network mature over centuries.
Step one: shadow control of world information from behind the scenes. Step two: keep training, keep fusing the five Sage Art traditions, keep approaching the theoretical ceiling of his power.
He'd also been thinking about the Dragon Veins. Those were useful. But now wasn't the time. The veins hadn't been activated yet, and messing with them prematurely could rip open time-space rifts and drag random people from random eras into the present.
The last thing Manji wanted was to destabilize this era. He was too early in the timeline. Too far upstream. Every change he made here would ripple forward through a thousand years of history.
If he killed Sarutobi, the entire Sarutobi Clan would never exist. If he'd talked Indra into becoming a monk, the Uchiha vanish. Two-thirds of the Naruto plot, gone.
"I'll back you up. Be bold."
Manji waved his hand, disappeared.
Shima nodded and hopped off to get it done.
..............
Another decade and change rolled by.
Asura led Ninshū forward on a steady, conservative course. Exactly the way Hagoromo would have wanted. No involvement in secular wars. No territorial expansion. Just maintaining their corner of the world and upholding the principles they'd been founded on.
Indra's path couldn't have been more different. Through recruitment, strategic marriages, and aggressive reproduction, he'd built a militant organization that worshipped strength as its highest virtue. He'd forged alliances with national governments, turned his followers into weapons of war for hire, and even installed himself as the power behind a country's military leadership. Money and land flowed in like water.
Then winter came.
Indra and Asura clashed again. Another fated collision. Two armies and two philosophies crashing together across a frozen wasteland. Chakra detonations shattered the falling snow. They fought from dawn to dusk, emptied every technique they'd ever learned, pushed their bodies past every limit they'd ever known.
The result: a dead draw. Neither one could put the other down.
When it was over, the brothers looked at each other across the scorched, steaming battlefield. The fire in their eyes hadn't diminished by a single degree. Without exchanging a word, they turned in the same direction and began walking.
Toward Mount Myōboku.
..............
Inside the Grand Sage Hall. Warm air, golden candlelight, a world away from the blizzard raging outside.
Manji sat on the central throne. Black Zetsu stood at his left. Fukasaku at his right.
Two figures knelt in the center of the hall. Middle-aged now. Weathered by decades of conflict. The boyish softness long gone from both faces, replaced by the sharpened edges of men who'd spent their lives fighting the same war from opposite sides.
"FOUNDING PATRIARCH! PLEASE BEAR WITNESS FOR US!" Indra and Asura spoke in perfect unison. Their voices filled the hall, carrying the weight of something that had been building for a lifetime.
Manji looked down at them. He already knew what they wanted.
"And what exactly am I witnessing?"
"Founding Patriarch! We wish to establish a Thousand-Year Pact!"
Indra went first, eyes blazing. "When we die, we ask that you preserve a fragment of our souls. The rest will enter the cycle of reincarnation. We'll be reborn, generation after generation, and we'll fight in every lifetime. For one thousand years."
Asura picked up seamlessly. "During those thousand years, we ask the three Sages to serve as witnesses. Record every victory. Every defeat. Every outcome across every lifetime."
"When the thousand years are up, release our soul fragments. Whoever has the most wins across all their reincarnations is the true victor. Once and for all."
Manji considered it.
A Thousand-Year Pact. Two souls locked in an endless cycle of death and rebirth, competing across lifetimes, settling a grudge that one mortal existence couldn't contain.
He had the means to preserve their souls. The same technique Hagoromo had tried to use inside the Rinnegan. Spiritual preservation across centuries. Perfectly doable.
Without further deliberation, Manji nodded.
"Black Zetsu. Bring the stone tablet."
"Yes, sir!"
Black Zetsu fetched a massive, ancient slab of stone and set it at the center of the hall.
Manji raised one hand. Sage chakra gathered at his fingertip, and he began carving directly into the stone surface.
Two totems. One for Indra. One for Asura.
When the carvings were complete, Manji spoke.
"Every lifetime, the winner gets a mark under their totem. When the thousand years are up and you both return, one look at this stone will tell you who won."
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