The rain in Amegakure did not stop. It never did. But in the highest chamber of the hidden tower, a different kind of precipitation was falling—a silent, green-golden light that coalesced around the emaciated form of Nagato. It pulsed from his Rinnegan, from the very core of his ravaged life force, a light that held the opposite meaning of everything he had done for years.
Konan, freed from Indra's spatial bind, did not attack. She fell to her knees beside the grotesque machine, her paper wings dissolving into a shuddering heap of origami around her. Her eyes, wide with a grief too profound for tears, were fixed on Nagato's face.
Naruto Uzumaki watched, Sage Mode gone, his own breath caught in his throat. He understood what was happening on an instinctual level, the way one understands the approach of a tsunami—first the pull, then the impossible wave.
Indra Uzumaki-Uchiha stood by the window, his back to the room, but his Rinnegan's perception took in every quanta of the chakra transformation. He was a scientist observing a rare cosmological event.
Nagato's voice was a threadbare whisper, barely audible over the hum of the light and the drumming rain.
Nagato: "Gedo Rinne Tensei…"
The words were not a shout. They were a key turned in a lock at the center of the world.
________________________________________
KONOHA – THE RUINS – THE SAME MOMENT
The battle was over. The remaining Paths had collapsed into inert puppets the moment Nagato's will broke. Rias Uzumaki stood over the partially-dissolved cocoon of the Deva Path, her spear held loosely, her harmonic field dissipating. She felt the shift in the world's chakra pressure—a sudden, violent suction from a point hundreds of miles away, followed by an imminent, radiant outpouring.
Rias: (Her head snapped eastward, her sensory gifts screaming.) "Incoming wave! Life-signature torrent! Everyone, brace for… for something good!"
No one knew what that meant. Shinobi ducked behind shattered walls. Medics threw themselves over patients.
Then, the green-gold wave hit.
It did not come with sound or force. It washed through the village like a silent sunrise. It passed through stone, through flesh, through sorrow.
Where it touched, miracles happened in reverse.
Shizune, who had been frantically performing CPR on a crushed chuunin whose heart had just stopped, felt the young man's chest rise under her hands with a sudden, strong, independent breath. The terrible concave fracture in his ribcage smoothed out, bones knitting with soft clicks.
A jounin, impaled through the lung by a splintered beam, watched as the wood seamlessly withdrew from his body, the wound closing behind it, leaving only torn fabric and sticky blood.
In the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a young mother, clutching the lifeless, dust-covered form of her small daughter, felt a tiny cough. Then a wail. The child squirmed, alive, confused, but whole.
All across the village, the recently dead drew breath. Those mortally wounded found their injuries reduced to scars, then to pink skin, then to nothing. It was not a healing. It was a rewriting. The narrative of their deaths was being edited out by a pen of pure, sacrificial life force.
On the broken wall, Tsunade Senju, her own chakra exhausted from summoning Katsuyu and fighting, felt the wave pass through her. The deep internal bruises from the Deva Path's repulsions vanished. The chronic ache in her shoulders from a lifetime of combat disappeared. She felt, for a moment, twenty years younger. But all she could do was stare, her medical mind utterly broken by the spectacle.
Tsunade: "This is… this is the pinnacle… the forbidden…"
Jiraiya, leaning on a broken pillar, felt it too. And he knew. He knew the cost. His face, already lined with grief for his village, crumpled with a new, personal agony.
Jiraiya: "Nagato… you idiot… you glorious, tragic idiot…"
The wave receded as quickly as it came. In its wake, Konoha was still a ruin. Buildings were still smashed. Streets were still scoured. But the silence was no longer the silence of a graveyard. It was the stunned, gasping silence of a hospital ward after a mass resurrection. Then, the sounds returned: not screams of pain, but cries of shock, of names being called with renewed hope, of bewildered sobs of joy.
The cost of the village's survival had been paid in full. Just not by them.
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AMEGAKURE – THE TOWER
The light faded from Nagato's body, leaving it grayer, more inert than before. The last spark in his Rinnegan guttered and died, leaving dull, lavender marbles. A final, soft sigh escaped his lips—a sigh of relief, of a burden too long carried finally set down.
He was gone.
Konan reached out a trembling hand, her fingers of folded paper brushing his gaunt cheek. She made no sound. The rain on the tower roof was her only dirge.
Naruto stood frozen. He had wanted Nagato to stop. To help. He hadn't… he hadn't imagined this. The sheer, final magnitude of the sacrifice left him hollow. He'd argued for a harder path, and Nagato had chosen the hardest one imaginable: to give everything to undo what he'd done.
Indra turned from the window. His footsteps were quiet on the damp stone. He walked past Naruto and stopped beside the machine, looking down at the corpse with an expression of… respect? No. Understanding.
Indra: "A flawless execution of the Samsara of Heavenly Life technique. Maximum dispersal efficiency. He channeled nearly one hundred percent of his remaining life force into the revival wave. No waste. A final, precise act of creation from a man who had mastered only destruction. There is a poetic symmetry to it."
His clinical tone was like ice water thrown on Naruto's swirling emotions. Naruto turned on him, his blue eyes blazing.
Naruto: "Poetic?! He's dead! I talked to him and now he's dead! That's not… that's not what I meant!"
Indra: (He looked at Naruto, one eyebrow slightly raised.) "Isn't it? You presented him with an irrefutable logical and moral paradox. His philosophy was built on a lie. His actions were causing the very suffering he claimed to abhor. The only coherent action left for a mind like his—one that valued logical consistency above personal survival—was atonement on a scale equal to his crime. You didn't ask for a ceasefire, Naruto. You asked a deeply principled, profoundly broken man to look into the abyss of his own life and repent. Suicide was the most probable outcome."
The words were brutal in their clarity. They stripped away the sentiment, the hope, the "talk-no-jutsu" magic, and laid bare the cold mechanics of what had just happened.
Naruto: "Shut up! You don't get it! I wanted him to live! To help!"
Indra: "Live with what? The knowledge that he had murdered hundreds, maybe thousands, based on a childish misunderstanding of the world? The agony of knowing he betrayed his master and his best friend's dream? The physical pain of this carcass?" He gestured dismissively at the machine. "You offered him a 'harder path.' Dying was easier. Dying was clean. Dying allowed him to be the hero of his own story one last time, instead of the villain. You gave him that narrative exit. And he took it. You should be pleased. It's the best possible result you could have gotten."
Naruto's fists clenched. He took a step towards Indra, raw, unfocused anger replacing his grief.
Naruto: "You're a damn monster! You talk about him like… like a broken tool you're analyzing! He was a person! He was in pain!"
Indra: (His voice remained infuriatingly calm.) "And now he isn't. And neither are the people in Konoha who were dead because of him. Net reduction of pain in the world: significant. Your method, while emotionally messy, was effective. I'm not criticizing you. I'm explaining to you what you actually did, because you seem confused by your own success."
Naruto: "It's not a success! It's a tragedy!"
Indra: "It's both. Welcome to statecraft. Welcome to leadership. Sometimes the only way to save the village is for someone to die. Sometimes you have to convince that someone to die. You did that today. You did a good job."
The praise was like acid. Naruto felt sick. He wanted to hit something, to scream. He had wanted to save everyone. He had ended up convincing a man to kill himself. Indra was just spelling out the ugly math.
Konan's voice, paper-dry and brittle, cut through their argument.
Konan: "Enough."
She had risen. With gentle, ritualistic movements, she was disconnecting Nagato's frail body from the grotesque machine. The black receivers slid out with wet, sickening sounds, but she handled him with a tenderness that was heartbreaking. She wrapped his body in layers of pure, white origami paper, creating a shroud.
She turned, holding the light bundle in her arms, and faced Naruto. Her violet eyes were red-rimmed but dry, her expression one of infinite weariness.
Konan: "He made his choice. Not because of your words alone. Because you showed him that Jiraiya-sensei's dream… Yahiko's dream… wasn't dead. It was just being carried by someone else. Someone who hadn't broken." She took a step closer, and with her free hand, she plucked a single, complex origami flower—a blue lotus—from her own hair. She held it out to Naruto. "You've changed the rain's direction, Naruto Uzumaki. In this country, it has only ever fallen down. You made it curve, just for a moment. Don't… don't let it fall straight again."
Naruto, his anger at Indra momentarily stunned into silence, took the paper flower. It was delicate, perfect, and cool to the touch.
Konan: "I will take him home. To Yahiko. Leave Amegakure. Your war is not with us anymore."
She didn't wait for a reply. Her body dissolved into a swirling flock of paper sheets, which wrapped around Nagato's shrouded form and streamed out through a broken window, into the eternal rain, becoming one with the gray mist until she vanished.
They were alone in the empty, dripping tower.
The silence was oppressive. Naruto stared at the lotus in his hand.
Indra: "Sentimental, but apt. The rain here is a psychological manifestation of national depression. Breaking the cycle is the first step." He walked towards the center of the room. "We should return. Your Hokage will be disoriented by the revival. Your friend Sasuke will be insufferably smug that he 'handled his assignment.' And my fiancée will be annoyed I took so long."
He began to fold the space again, the geometric pleats of reality appearing before him.
Naruto: (His voice was small, looking at the flower.) "Did I… did I do the right thing?"
Indra paused, his back to Naruto. For a long moment, he didn't answer.
Indra: "There is no 'right thing,' Naruto. There are only choices and consequences. You chose to engage his humanity instead of his god-complex. The consequence was he used the power of a god to perform one final, human act of remorse. You saved Konoha. He saved his soul. I call that an efficient division of labour."
He stepped into the fold.
Indra: "Now come. Your village is alive. Your teacher is waiting. The living are more important than dissecting the motives of the dead."
Naruto took one last look around the empty, rain-echoing chamber—the place where a god had died and a man had been found. He clenched the paper flower in his fist, then turned and followed Indra into the folded space, leaving the rain of Amegakure to fall, forever, on an empty tower.
End of Chapter – 107.