The Ten-Tails Revival Plan.
The people present looked at each other, all seeming hesitant to speak. In the end, Oda Ieyasu was the one who explained,
"Mr. Shikaku, you might not fully understand the growth scale of combat power involving tailed beasts, the Ten-Tails, the Otsutsuki, and Ryosuke. The Ten-Tails is indeed very strong, but…"
Oda Ieyasu did not continue. He believed that with Shikaku's intelligence, he would understand what he meant.
When the Ten-Tails was in Obito's hands, if it were placed on the battlefield where Ryosuke and Isshiki fought, it would only be a lackey doing support work.
Whether it was Ryosuke or an Otsutsuki, as long as either one freed up a hand, the Ten-Tails was something that could be crushed to death with one hand.
On the other hand, DIO was a powerful enemy that even Ryosuke was wary of, to the point where he had to collect Saint's Corpse parts world by world, gather allies, and look for a chance to counterattack.
The Ten-Tails… It was a bit beneath the stage.
Of course, this was not denying Shikaku's tactical ability. This was a gap in information. Not everyone had personally witnessed that battle.
Most people in the ninja world still understood Ryosuke as a fierce general who could fight hundreds alone. Some even regarded the previous universe reset as some kind of special illusion.
Shikaku had spent many years in Konoha and had not had many chances to truly come into contact with top-tier combat power. Just as Oda Ieyasu was considering whether to find time to explain the power scale to Shikaku in detail, he heard Shikaku continue,
"You're right. The Ten-Tails is indeed not enough. I never expected to use a single Ten-Tails to deal with an attack from outside the universe."
"From a certain perspective, DIO, who attacks from outside the universe, and Toneri, who attacked from the moon back then, share something in common..."
Shikaku said, "They both possess 'technology' that surpasses the ninja world by an entire level."
Because they surpassed it by one level, Toneri could strike the ninja world from outer space.
DIO could attack the universe we are in from the sea of fog.
To deal with an enemy that completely outclasses you in technology, one option is to foolishly rely on lives and numbers, but on a universe-level battlefield, that approach has little meaning.
The other option is to "take a shortcut".
When dealing with Toneri, the shortcut they took was developing a small spacecraft, relying on Sasuke and his group to open a portal, thereby achieving a technological counterbalance and giving Ryosuke a chance to kill Toneri face to face.
Everyone understood what Shikaku was trying to say.
He wanted to take the shortcut again.
The question was how.
And what did this have to do with the Ten-Tails?
Shikaku did not wait for someone to prompt him with a question. Seeing that everyone had basically grasped the idea, he continued, "DIO and the Calamity God Tree are both universe-level opponents. To deal with universe-level enemies, we need power of the same level."
That was obvious. No one spoke, waiting for him to go on.
"Otsutsuki Isshiki was killed after Lord Ryosuke extracted his memories and ability data during the reincarnation process, forcibly interrupting the unsealing of the Karma."
"Since Lord Ryosuke set out, I have been coordinating with the Otsutsuki research team at the Institute. From Isshiki's memories, we discovered an extremely special individual."
"Otsutsuki Yamei."
Samui timely took out a stack of briefing documents and handed them to everyone. On them was a brief introduction to Otsutsuki Yamei.
[Otsutsuki Yamei]
[Male (?)]
[Age unknown, no less than 2,000 years old.]
[Possesses many divine techniques such as clairvoyance, reflection, omnipotence, and the Ten Directions.]
The Otsutsuki clan is a standard nomadic race. Their growth process has three steps.
Find a suitable planet.
Plant a tree, eat the fruit.
Pat their butt and leave, then look for another suitable planet.
As long as they keep planting trees and eating fruits, the lifespan and power of Otsutsuki members can increase with almost no upper limit.
That is the theoretical plan. In reality, finding suitable planets with life and energy in the vast universe is very rare.
If they are unlucky along the way and encounter natives who are too strong, abnormalities in the God Tree's growth, or traitors like Kaguya who stab their own people in the back, then failure is inevitable.
For example, Otsutsuki Isshiki was strong, tough, and intelligent, but because his background was slightly worse than Momoshiki's, the teammate he was assigned was Kaguya. As a result, he wasted a thousand years of his life in the ninja world.
Even without Ryosuke's appearance, if he had successfully refined the ninja world into a fruit and eaten it in the future, compared to other Otsutsuki members, he would still have wasted a thousand years of cultivation.
Otsutsuki Yamei was different.
In Isshiki's memories, this person rarely failed. His luck in finding suitable planets was incredibly smooth, granting him unimaginable power and endless lifespan.
Until finally...
"He died?"
Tsunade had been worried because of how powerful Otsutsuki Yamei sounded. She did not expect that when she turned to the next page, this genius who was like a god in Isshiki's memories had already fallen.
Samui, as the head of the Institute, explained this part, "Death is one possibility. Others include fusing with the universe, ascending to another dimension, or being killed by an even more terrifying enemy."
"In short, Otsutsuki Yamei shed his physical body."
"And his corpse, based on Isshiki's memories, was partially located by us. That part is currently being analyzed at the Institute, where we are extracting the corresponding divine technique genes."
The documents described in detail how powerful Otsutsuki Yamei's divine techniques were. Hearing this, Jiraiya's eyes lit up.
"You extracted them?"
Samui nodded slightly.
"There is a scholar who recently joined the Institute, Amado. He is very talented in this area."
Everyone was energized, but soon grew curious.
Extracting Otsutsuki Yamei's divine techniques was good news, but what did that have to do with reviving the Ten-Tails?
Click!
Shikaku took out a disk.
"Otsutsuki members are cosmic beings with 'Karma' as their core."
"For them, what matters most is not the physical body, but the Karma that stores their data."
"So after obtaining information that Otsutsuki Yamei disappeared from the universe, I tried to make a guess..."
Shikaku pointed at the sky.
"Could it be that Otsutsuki Yamei used the universe as a vessel, merging his Karma into it, thereby achieving the same lifespan as the heavens?"
Such a bold guess left everyone at the table, except Samui who already knew, staring with their mouths half open.
Jiraiya took a sip of tea and hurriedly asked, "Th-then what happened?"
Samui pushed her glasses and said, "The Institute extracted Otsutsuki Yamei's DNA, added Sasuke's blood, since he can be considered a direct descendant of the Otsutsuki, then injected Ten-Tails chakra, and finally used the resonance properties of Ripple to broadcast a signal into the universe."
"We received a response from the universe."
"A faint response, from the distant stars…"
Samui's cool voice echoed in the conference room.
"Universe-level power."
This was an experiment.
In the plan jointly conceived by Shikaku and the Institute, Otsutsuki Yamei's DNA would be merged into the Ten-Tails, Sasuke would become the Ten-Tails' jinchūriki, and together with the Sage of Six Paths' yin-yang power and Ripple resonance, they would mobilize Yamei's divine power hidden in the universe.
"This is my plan," Shikaku said.
DIO was indeed powerful, and the Calamity God Tree was located in the unreachable sea of fog. No matter how strong ninjutsu was, it could not strike enemies outside the universe.
But that did not mean they were lambs waiting to be slaughtered.
It was true that the plan carried many risks, but how could taking a shortcut ever be risk-free?
It was simply a matter of which was heavier, the risks or the crisis brought by DIO.
A few minutes later, the group voted to approve the plan. They then passed the operation plan to the small slug, asking it to inform Ryosuke through a Past Projection.
After nearly four hours of waiting, Ryosuke's reply arrived.
The reply was very short, "Plan approved. Thank you all for your hard work."
"Stay safe. I've got this."
The brief exchange made Kamihara Hayato feel like he was back to the first time he worked with Ryosuke. That guy had always been like this. He stood up and slapped his cheeks.
"Then let's get to work. Once this job is done, I'll treat everyone to a foot massage."