Senator Seira Ōtsutsuki had seen countless prisoners dragged before the Tenseigan.
None of them had made it answer.
Yet as the Earth-born boy hung over the shrine dais, bound in pale chakra bands, the Giant Tenseigan thrummed like a plucked string. Every pulse of its light matched the beat of his heart; every flare set the pattern in his left eye blazing brighter in reply.
Around her, the other elders shifted uneasily in their seats.
"Contamination," one hissed.
"Earth filth," another muttered. "Let the eye devour it and be done."
Seira kept her gaze on the boy. The more they called him filth, the more Hamura's chakra in her bones whispered a different word.
Heir.
⸻
Raizen woke to the feeling of someone messing with his chakra system.
Not blocking it—reading it.
He snapped his eyes open—
—and the world was wrong.
His "good" right eye saw nothing but darkness. Instead, vision roared to life through his left. It was like his sight and his web-sense had been forced into the same channel; every line of chakra, every knot, every pathway in the room lit up in brutal detail.
Fifteen figures circled him, all dressed in long, pale robes. Their chakra networks glowed like luminous skeletons wrapped around their bones, Byakugan pathways spidering out behind their blank eyes. Seals crawled across the floor beneath him, and overhead the Giant Tenseigan loomed, its fused eyes staring down in a single, crushing gaze.
The overload hit him a heartbeat later—too much input, too many pathways, the entire chamber a screaming spiderweb of light. Pain spiked behind his left eye, but he forced himself to breathe, to catalog, to look for an exit he couldn't physically reach.
Voices cut through the hum.
"The boy is awake," one elder said, voice cold and precise. "Begin the process."
"How did this surface-born wretch end up with such purity in his left eye?" another demanded.
"It has obviously mutated in the wrong way," a third sniffed. "Only one eye. Imperfect."
A fourth voice, sharper, anxious: "What will we tell Lord Toneri if the extraction fails?"
Silence pressed in for a moment. Then a fifth elder spoke, hesitant where the others were absolute.
"There is another complication," he said. "Our diviners confirm only the boy's soul was transported here. His physical body remains on Earth. What we are probing now is his yin chakra alone. The extraction protocols were designed for a complete vessel. Without his yang, there is… room for error. I recommend we first retrieve the body and only then begin the full process. Otherwise—"
"Enough," the first elder snapped. "You would delay the will of Hamura over your own cowardice? Begin the process. Start extracting the chakra from his eye."
Chakra in the chamber shifted, threads turning toward Raizen like spears.
⸻
Seira's hands tightened on the arms of her seat.
Her people rejected Earthborns by reflex. They were the bottom of existence—short-lived animals who spent their days clawing and tearing at one another's throats. Since childhood she had been taught that mercy toward them was a stain on the bloodline. She had believed, once, that if she ever descended, she would slaughter as many as she could and then end her own life rather than carry the taint of their blood on her hands.
But as the elders moved to obey, her own chakra rebelled.
Every instinct, every scrap of Hamura's legacy inside her bones screamed at her to stop. Her pulse hammered in time with the Tenseigan's thrumming; with each beat, the boy's left eye answered, its pattern flaring brighter, reaching.
This isn't filth, something deep inside her whispered. This is ours.
Seira's jaw clenched. If she spoke now, she would be defying doctrine, council, and centuries of carefully maintained hatred. If she stayed silent, they would strip the boy's eye dry and feed it to the Giant Tenseigan.
She couldn't breathe.
Without a word, Seira rose from her seat. Robes whispering, she turned away from the dais and walked out of the council chamber—before the screaming in her chakra forced her to choose a side.
Seira didn't make it three steps down the corridor.
She stopped dead, teeth grinding, nails digging crescents into her palms until she felt skin break.
Coward, she thought, disgusted with herself. Running, when I know what they're about to do.
The image of the boy flashed in her mind—suspended above the dais, his lone left eye answering the Tenseigan like a heartbeat.
"Dammit," she hissed under her breath. "Dammit."
Her chest ached, as if Hamura's chakra was clawing at her ribs from the inside.
"Dammit, boy," she whispered to the empty hall. "I'm going to put my trust in you. So… save this doomed clan."
She spun on her heel and ran.
⸻
The doors to the extraction hall slammed open hard enough to rattle the frame.
Seira burst through, Byakugan flaring to life. Veins bulged at her temples as the world snapped into ruthless clarity: every seal line on the floor, every chakra thread in the air, every tenketsu in every elder's body.
At the center, Raizen hung limp in the bindings.
His chakra was being flayed off him in shimmering ribbons—drawn from his left eye into the waiting network of the Giant Tenseigan. With each strip torn away, his soul-body flickered. The outline of his form was already going translucent at the edges, his features blurring like ink in water.
"Stop this at once!" Seira's voice cracked across the chamber.
No one listened.
All attention was fixed on the elder leading the rite—a thin, hawk-faced man at the edge of the dais, hands pressed into a seal pattern, chakra pouring from his palms into the extraction array. His name was Elder Kadan, and even without her Byakugan Seira would have known him by the way his chakra felt: sharp, pitiless, burning with hatred for anything that touched Earth.
Kadan had pushed for this more than anyone. He'd argued to feed the boy to the Tenseigan immediately, to strip him and let the eye grow fat on his purity, even if it meant destroying a potential asset.
Now his chakra was the spearpoint driving into Raizen's soul.
Seira saw it all in a single, frozen instant: the main flow of the extraction, the way it hooked into the boy's left eye and spine, the fragile tether of yin still anchoring him to his distant body.
If she didn't cut it right, he'd shatter.
If she did nothing, he'd be devoured.
She moved.
One heartbeat she was at the doorway; the next she was in front of Kadan, the floor cracking under the force of her step. Chakra flooded her arm, condensing around her fist in a dense, invisible sheath—too much for a standard Gentle Fist strike, dangerously close to tearing her own tenketsu.
"Seira—?!"
Kadan's eyes widened, Byakugan bulging as he tried to pull away.
Too late.
Her fist drove into his chest with surgical precision, slamming straight through the chakra gates around his heart.
There was no dramatic spray of blood—her strike sealed as it killed—but the shockwave of chakra was thunderous. Kadan's network imploded, his eyes went blank, and he dropped like a cut puppet, the extraction seals beneath his feet flickering wild.
For a heartbeat, the entire chamber froze.
"Senator Seira?!" someone shouted.
"Treason!" another elder screamed, bolting to his feet. "She's attacked a councilor in the sacred hall!"
"The rite—you've destabilized the rite!" a third cried, terror edging into his voice as the seal matrix on the floor began to twist and distort, lines of light snapping out of their prescribed paths.
Seira ignored them.
Her Byakugan showed her the important thing: Kadan's death had punched a hole through the extraction pattern. The chakra he'd been feeding into the array recoiled violently, rebounding through the lines like a snapped bowstring.
The flow around Raizen stuttered, then reversed.
For an instant, all the stolen yin chakra surged back toward him in a chaotic wave… and along with it, the pull of the Tenseigan's gravity weakened. The delicate tether connecting his soul to his distant body flared bright, suddenly unobstructed, a single shining thread plunging down through the stone, through the moon, toward the blue world below.
Raizen's head snapped up, left eye blazing like a star. His gaze met Seira's across the storm of chakra.
He didn't need words to understand.
This is your one opening, her look said. Take it.
The backlash hit.
Seals shattered into sparks. The Giant Tenseigan flared in fury, its fused eyes spinning as it tried to clamp down on the escaping soul. Chakra winds screamed through the hall, tearing robes and knocking elders from their seats.
"Restrain her!" someone roared. "Lock down the shrine!"
But in that chaos—in the heartbeat where doctrine shattered and fear drowned out order—Raizen's soul slipped.
The bindings of pale light blew apart. His half-transparent form wavered, then was yanked sideways, drawn along that shining tether like water down a drain. As the Tenseigan's grip clawed after him, Seira threw her own chakra into the gap, slamming a hastily-formed barrier between the eye and the escaping thread.
Pain lanced through her arms as the Tenseigan's force crashed against her makeshift shield.
"Go," she whispered through gritted teeth, to a boy already being pulled beyond hearing. "Don't make me regret this."
The last thing Raizen saw of the moon was Seira—veins bulged at her temples, robes whipping in the storm, standing between him and a god's eye with both hands outstretched.
Then the world turned inside out.
The hall, the elders, the Tenseigan—all shattered into blinding light as his soul was flung away, tumbling back along the thin, desperate line that led down… down… toward his waiting body on Earth.
⸻
Raizen's soul tore through the dark like a bright silver shard, racing down the invisible thread that bound him to Earth.
It hit his body like a cannon shot.
His back arched off the bedroll as he snapped awake, sucking in air like he'd been drowning. Sweat slicked his skin, his heart slammed against his ribs, and for a second he couldn't tell if he was still on the moon or back in the forest.
Raizen clutched at his left eye, breath shaking.
"Wh–what the hell… was that…?"
Raizen's vision lurched, then snapped into a new kind of wrong.
His left eye clouded over again—blurry, bleached, like someone had smeared fog over his pupil. But beneath all that fuzz there was a pressure, a hum, something coiled and awake. His right eye, at least, was blessedly normal.
He pressed a palm to his face, fingers trembling.
"Dammit… how did I even get transported to the moon? Is my left eye a Byak—"
BOOM.
The explosion rolled through the trees, a low, ugly thud that shook dust from the tent poles.
Raizen froze. His mind jumped backward in a rush—Karui at the edge of camp, Reina half-sitting against a tree with her ribs taped, Aika passed out cold. They'd only been a few hours away from finishing the third exam.
His stomach dropped.
"My team."
He shot to his feet so fast his bedroll flipped. Chakra flooded to his tenketsu as he snapped his hands together and triggered his web sense.
It hit different.
Instead of the usual soft spread, his awareness snapped outward like thrown wires. Threads of chakra sketched themselves across the forest in his mind's eye—nodes for every living thing, brighter flares for shinobi. His range felt stretched, sharpened; details he'd never picked up before burned clear now. Heart rates. Chakra density. Even the rhythm of people's movements.
This… got stronger.
He shoved the thought aside and swept the area.
A couple hundred meters out, he felt them: six chakra signatures.
Two were dim and barely moving—near empty, sluggish, like guttering candles.
Unconscious, he realized. Or damn close.
The other four were locked in violent flux, crashing against each other in brutal bursts—attack, counter, clash, pullback, repeat. Two of those signatures he recognized instantly: Reina's precise, jagged lightning-thread of chakra and Karui's hotter, more explosive flow.
"That has to be them."
No more thinking.
Raizen bolted, body already moving before the words finished leaving his mouth. He tore through the trees, sandals barely touching bark as he used branches like stepping stones. His web sense stretched ahead of him, updating every heartbeat—the fluctuating four, the two cold candles, the shockwaves of more distant battles he didn't have time to care about.
As he closed in, the fluctuations became patterns. One enemy chakra was heavy and controlled, surging in steady, disciplined bursts. The other was twitchier, darting in and out like a feinting snake.
The tallest signature stood firm in the center of the chaos, never quite overextending, never quite losing balance.
Tall and calm, Raizen thought grimly. Has to be the one leading them.
Another explosion ripped through the night, closer now. The shockwave slapped his face as he landed on a high branch overlooking a narrow ravine that opened into a small clearing.
He saw everything at once.
Reina stood near the center of the clearing, katana in hand, lightning crawling weakly along the blade. Her stance was solid, but Raizen could see the stiffness in her shoulders, the micro-flinch when she breathed—her bandaged ribs were screaming.
Karui was a red blur at Reina's flank, darting in and out with reckless speed. Her fists were wrapped, her kicks sharp and mean, but her chakra was burning low, flaring in short, desperate bursts instead of the clean arcs Raizen was used to.
Facing them was a tall genin with a calm, unreadable face.
He held a massive cleaver-like blade one-handed as if it weighed nothing, the other hand loose at his side. Chakra cords trailed from his gauntlet into the weapon, humming with restrained power. His eyes were steady, detached, watching Reina and Karui the way a teacher might watch students struggling through a test.
Behind him, near the tree line, two bodies lay crumpled on the ground beside a half-burned campfire—Aika and another genin from the exam, both motionless, chakra signatures faint but alive.
Reina lunged, katana flashing in a tight arc.
The tall boy tilted his wrist.
Steel met steel with a ringing crack that echoed through the clearing. The impact shoved Reina back a step; she gritted her teeth and held. Karui used that half-beat to dart in low with a sweeping kick aimed at his ankles.
The boy simply hopped back, blade coming down in a controlled counter that forced Karui to skid away or lose her head. There was no wasted motion, no anger—just smooth, calculated efficiency.
"You're persistent," he said mildly, as if commenting on the weather. "But you're running on fumes. Hand over the scroll and I won't make this ugly."
"Shut up," Karui spat, chest heaving. "You think some discount butcher knife is gonna scare us?"
Reina's eyes flicked, just once, toward the treeline.
Raizen realized she was buying time—searching for him, for anyone.
From his perch in the branches, Raizen tightened his grip on the bark until it cracked under his fingers. His heart was still pounding from the soul-slam return, his left eye throbbed with every beat, and the phantom chill of the moon clung to his skin.
But his team was here. Bleeding. Cornered.
He took a slow breath, let his web sense settle over the battlefield like a net, mapping every chakra thread, every possible angle.
Moon gods and death cults can wait, he thought, lips curling into a humorless smile. Right now, I've got a tall, calm problem to solve.
Raizen dropped from the branch, already shaping chakra in his fingers as he fell toward the clearing.
⸻
Raizen hit the ground in a low crouch, one palm slamming to the dirt.
"Lightning Style: Lightning Web… (雷遁・雷網 Raidon: Raimō)."
The threads he'd scattered through the clearing earlier—thin, nearly invisible lines of chakra clinging to roots, stones, and tree trunks—answered like they'd been waiting for the command. Lightning sparked to life along them, veins of pale blue racing across the battlefield in a jagged spiderweb all converging on the tall, calm genin.
For a split second, the boy didn't react.
Then his eyes widened a fraction.
He shifted his weight and moved, cleaver blurring as he slipped through the gaps with infuriating precision. The first wave of lightning threads slammed into empty earth where he'd just been standing, exploding dirt and splintering bark. One strand grazed his shoulder, making his muscles twitch, but he rolled through it, blade carving aside another line before it could coil around his leg.
"Tch. He read that?" Raizen muttered, already redirecting surplus current along the outer lines, trying to box him in.
"Finally!" Karui barked, using the distraction to leap back out of range. "Raizen, you finally woke up, you lazy bum!"
Her voice was raw but relieved.
Across the clearing, Reina's shoulders sagged the instant her eyes found him. The tight, brittle focus she'd been holding cracked, replaced by something softer.
"Raizen," she said, lightning guttering off her blade. "I leave the rest… to you."
The last word left her mouth as her knees buckled.
Her katana stayed planted in the ground, both hands still wrapped stubbornly around the hilt as her body went limp and slumped forward. Only the sword kept her from completely collapsing face-first into the dirt.
"Reina—!" Karui lunged, catching her under one arm and dragging her back toward the treeline, teeth bared.
For a heartbeat, Raizen's concentration wavered. Reina, who never handed responsibility to anyone, had just dumped the entire fight in his lap without hesitation.
You really are insane, he thought, chest tightening. Putting that much trust in me now of all times.
He straightened, lightning still crawling faintly along the remaining threads, and fixed his gaze on the tall genin as the boy recovered his stance, cleaver coming up between them.
Raizen rolled his shoulders, forcing the last of the moon-chill out of his bones. His right eye narrowed.
"Sorry I'm late," he said, voice low but steady. A thin smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "But let's finally end this damn exam."