Suguru's vision spread throughout a vast radius, encompassing everything around him. From the rampaging Nibi far off in the distance to the cursing squads who had dared to chase after him...
He saw it all.
Even a certain disguised old man who was blessed by coincidence.
"Sigh,"
Feeling the weakness caused by the dissipating adrenaline, Suguru heaved a breath of exhaustion. His vision, previously spanning the entire area shrunk in an instant. His eyes bled, forcing themselves back together.
Deactivating everything but the bare minimum of his vision.
A searing pain assaulted his head as if it was being cut open. The strain on his mind was exceptional — something he realized belatedly. It was an overdose of sensory input.
An overflowing amount of visual information.
"Hm,"
However, his mind was still calm, swamped with analyzing the subsequent side effects of his expansive vision. It was an odd sense of coldness.
As if...
—Grumble.
As if it was leaving room for a more dangerous emotion to fill the void of his thoughts.
Hunger.
A hunger so irrational it dwarfed his calm façade. In his reddening vision, Suguru struggled to maintain his control.
"Urk..."
A low growl escaped him. However, he could still push it all down.
The threat of death was an ice bath that fought all the irrationality back.
There was a reason he did not ravenously attack those four squads — he knew, by instinct, that death would have been there to fetch him had he done so.
Now, as his body had lost much of its life force, he could feel that he had one foot in the grave.
Luckily...
"That... seems viable..."
He had come up with a plan after an excruciating few minutes of pondering.
Taking out a scroll, he unfurled it and summoned a pouch of seeds. Gingerly taking out a single seed, Suguru placed it inside a teapot. With a hand sign, he then poured water into the pot and lit a fire underneath it.
Then, he began setting up.
With Earth Release, he created a place for him to sit and take in his surroundings. Since he felt at peace despite his slow descent to death, Suguru knew he was on the right path.
"Hah," Taking deep breaths, he continued.
The tea ceremony was integral to his continued life here in the land of the living. Thus, he calmed himself down and allowed himself to become rooted in the present.
As he had once learned under Senju Kisouma, he distinctly felt the flow of life.
It swirled through the air, pouring into the teapot. With the billowing steam exiting the pot, streams of green life force poured into it, completing the balance.
A perfect conversion of energies from one form into another.
This was the magic of the Senju Clan's Tea Ceremony.
***
Senju Kisouma was sitting at the center of the clan compound, watching as a steady stream of water poured into the pond before him. The gentle forest breeze bore with it the scent of hardwood bark, rustling the branches to create a rhythmic buzz.
Feeling the swirling life force around him, Kisouma felt a disturbance. A sudden incoherence of the lay of the land's vitality.
Someone was performing their clan's tea ceremony, and from what he could tell, it seemed to be one performed on the brink of death.
"So... which old bastard is trying to lengthen their lives? Have I not told them that such a thing is impossible?"
Grumbling, Kisouma closed his eyes and tried to locate the source of the disturbance.
A frown crumpled his features. The swirling life force was...
"...Disappearing?"
The world's vitality never converged like this. It was always free-flowing, moving throughout all living things. It was, in a way, an exchange conducted like breathing.
'For something to be... consuming life force like this...'
A dangerous glint formed in his eyes. Leaving his garden, he walked over to the small library he had in his hut. From the dusty old scrolls, he pulled out a particularly old one.
It was a scroll from the Warring States Period.
A time long past.
"..."
Scanning through the scroll's contents, Kisouma's gaze lingered upon two Kanji characters.
[Meiton].
"Dark Release..."
Kisouma's eyes flashed as his thoughts swirled. Looking at the following text, a chill coursed through his bones.
The feverish descriptions of a ghastly being that consumed everything around it.
"Has another monster been born?"
Kisouma wearily placed the scroll back in its place. The world's turmoil seemed to be deepening.
***
At the center of the converging life force...
Suguru's aged appearance regained its previous, youthful vitality. The usually intangible life force poured into his body, drawn in by his breath and never allowed to escape.
With every sip of tea, his body absorbed even more life force. It healed his burns and even made his skin glow in the setting sun.
However...
Chakra flowed into Suguru's eyes, bringing them a red glow.
'Shinrakugan!'
Observing his own body, he realized that his process was not without complications. The tinge that his body was dyed in, was different from what it used to be.
"The energy within me..."
His voice was nearly a whisper.
"It's no longer... human..."
Something had gone wrong somewhere, somehow. However, it wasn't beyond complications.
His mind, spurred by the uncanny changes his body was undergoing, comprehended the minute subtleties of it all. He compared his body to the world around him. The free-flowing nature of the world's vitality caught his eye.
He saw how the forest breathed.
He saw how he breathed.
Observing the developing microcosm in his own body.
'I've become a reflection of the outside world.'
A short gasp escaped Suguru's lips. Humans, through the Shinrakugan, appeared isolated from the world. They were like a torch of life force, slowly burning through their supplies until they reached an inevitable death.
Given this, Suguru hypothesized that the Senju were living bonfires of life with an uncanny amount of fuel waiting to be burned. They would be similar to the Uzumaki.
Everyone else, him included, were little torches. They would burn out even before those two clans, and they never shone as bright.
'Now, however...'
His body had its own... system of vitality.
Like the world that breathed around him, so did his cells. He was no longer a burning torch.
'My body has mutated.'
Suguru's eyes flashed as he grabbed his notebook.
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