Chapter 305 - 305: Two Monsters Reach the Same Prize

Akira didn't bother dodging.

He raised one hand, fingers spreading slightly as pale particles gathered along his arm.

Tenseigan: Celestial Divide.

A thin horizontal line of compressed repulsion formed in front of his palm, the air bending around it.

Then it fired.

The beam carved straight through Ryusei's layered Erosion and Thunder Releases, splitting both waves cleanly apart as if they were paper.

The same line continued downward, leaving a dead-straight scar across the landscape.

Ryusei felt the wind pressure surge past him, the ground splitting open beneath the path of the beam.

In the same breath, Akira raised his free hand.

A surge of Yang-rich clan chakra mixed with Tenseigan energy poured out of Akira's palm and into the ground.

Dirt and stone heaved upward, reshaping instantly into a massive puppet-like creature, marked with cyan lines and a dark red Yang afterglow.

It launched toward Ryusei at once, its movements unnaturally smooth, almost alive.

Slug nature chakra flared across his skin, and for a moment, his body expanded, duplicating into a larger, heavier version of himself.

Not a clone, but a temporarily enhanced frame. He met the creature head-on, his enlarged arm smashing against it with pure physical force.

At the same time, again, he shifted his density, activating Gravitational Shedding to loosen the Tenseigan particles' grip on his body, and Transcendent Mirage to split his presence into barely visible afterimages. Akira's field couldn't track him cleanly now.

But Akira still had his truth-seeking balls floating around him. At close range, even Ryusei's enhanced physique understood the reality: one clean hit meant erasure.

He kept his distance carefully.

Akira narrowed his eyes.

He couldn't sense Ryusei for a moment, but he knew the clone was close.

So he escalated.

The halos behind his back spun as he summoned a new attack, a vortex of spiraling force that warped the entire valley.

Silver Wheel Reincarnation Explosion.

The vortex swallowed truth-seeking orbs and Tenseigan particles at once, merging them into a spiraling storm of annihilation.

It roared outward toward everything around Akira.

But this was exactly the moment Ryusei had been waiting for.

The attack was vast, destructive, but it wasn't fast enough to catch him.

He unleashed the Bright Day Serpent Dragon in an instant, the spiraling vacuum-dragon erupting from his Seventh Gate spinning back kick and drilling a narrow hole straight through the vortex.

The shockwave carved a clean passage through the chaotic mass.

And because Akira had committed most of his truth-seeking orbs into the vortex, that opening meant one thing:

Akira was more vulnerable.

Ryusei slipped through the hole, accompanied by multiple invisible fragments of himself.

They were his smallest slug-clones, microscopic in shape, each moving fast enough to ride the vortex winds without being seen.

But when Ryusei entered, Akira smirked.

He had planned for this too.

Now that he knew Ryusei had entered the vortex, he had a target.

He swung his remaining truth-seeking orbs into a concentrated Golden Wheel strike, compressing them into a single crushing blade aimed directly through the opening.

Ryusei smirked right back.

He had accounted for that as well.

The real Ryusei had already moved.

Some of his microscopic fragments had slipped deeper into the vortex, bypassing the gaps between the larger chunks of truth-seeking particles.

The Silver Wheel vortex wasn't a perfect fusion. Its destructive medium still had uneven pockets, gaps too small for anything normal to exploit.

But Ryusei was no longer normal.

His slug fragments were microscopic, near invisible, able to dissolve, sense, and reform instantly.

One fragment made it through.

And Ryusei transferred himself to it.

He appeared behind Akira inside the vortex.

One hand was already raised.

Slug Sage Acid Ignition.

The attack wasn't flashy.

It wasn't massive.

It was efficient.

A compact sphere of corrosive, chakra-dissolving pressure detonated directly into Akira's skull from behind.

The burst liquefied his brainstem and temporarily collapsed every active chakra node in his body at once.

No time to react.

No time to counter.

No time to defend.

However, Ryusei's soul slipped into Akira's fading spirit just in time, intercepting it before it could ascend.

He extracted the information he needed: details about Akira's clan, the location of the moon portal, how to reach the lunar temple and seize control of the Giant Tenseigan, how many clansmen remained there, and the basic outlines of Akira's life.

Meanwhile, Akira spasmed a single, last time.

Then went silent.

The vortex collapsed, and the golem fell apart.

The Hyūga vessel remained untouched; both of them had held back just enough to avoid damaging it.

Ryusei exhaled quietly, already reaching forward to extract both Tenseigan eyes before the corpse even finished falling.

The fight was over.

Exactly how he planned.

Fast.

Precise.

And efficient.

Ryusei's clone didn't celebrate.

There was no point.

He moved immediately, weaving seals with practiced precision and locking Akira's corpse into a preserved, half-living stasis.

The technique kept the body's essence intact, perfect for the ritual he planned to perform later when time allowed.

He glanced once last time at the sealed form before he stored it in a special scroll.

So his name was Akira Ōtsutsuki.

Ryusei had taken his Tenseigan, but he wasn't finished.

There was still more to harvest from him.

Cruel or not, Ryusei didn't care.

Power was power, and he intended to use every piece of Akira that could still serve a purpose - literally.

The strong devour the weak to grow even stronger.

Stay still for a moment, and someone else eats you.

That was the nature of this world.

Furthermore, the memories he pulled, Ryusei understood immediately that taking the Giant Tenseigan on the moon also wouldn't be a real obstacle.

The only issue was time.

Doing it fast enough for it to matter in the battle still raging in Konoha was another story.

But even if he won in Konoha, he already knew there would be one more fight waiting afterward, Madara, potentially, somewhere near the Ten Tails' awakening.

That clash could be even worse.

So Ryusei prepared for that as well.

Therefore, he split off another clone, dividing himself like a slug, and sent it straight toward the moon portal hidden location on Earth.

Its mission was simple: break the seal, travel to the moon, easily wipe out the remaining elders, eliminate Akira's wife and others, and seize the Giant Tenseigan.

Once controlled, Ryusei planned to find a way to somehow channel its power to his main body on Earth.

Ryusei's clone didn't linger.

He dissolved the membrane around the Tenseigan eyes and lifted them with a few precise chakra threads.

His Shikkotsu-adapted, slug-like physiology handled the rest.

His current eyes liquefied and retracted without resistance, leaving clean pathways ready to accept the new organs.

The first Tenseigan settled into place.

His chakra network adjusted instantly, widening and weaving around it like it had always belonged there.

The second eye slid in just as smoothly.

A pulse of cyan light burst from him.

Truth-seeking orbs formed behind his back.

Lines of glowing particles ran across his skin.

The air warped slightly with each breath he took.

His vision expanded in every direction, crisp and geometric, picking up even the smallest traces of chakra in the valley.

Tenseigan Chakra Mode stabilized around him as naturally as if he had been born with it.

Ryusei tested a light gravitational pulse; pebbles rose and hovered.

Another pulse sank a patch of earth near his foot.

Everything responded perfectly.

He exhaled once.

"That's more like it."

Ryusei smiled the moment the power settled.

He could feel it immediately.

His strength had risen to a new level entirely.

All that remained was to return, fuse properly with the main body, and share the memories.

The Tenseigan didn't just accept him; it integrated cleanly.

That wasn't only thanks to his 'reconfigurable' physique, but also because he was originally a Sage Body to begin with, Hagoromo's counterpart to Toneri's lineage on Hamura's side.

There was just enough vitality and balance in him to support the Tenseigan's full output.

And in the past months, Ryusei had already theorized several ways to use the Tenseigan better than Akira ever could.

His creativity, his understanding of chakra theory, and his experience with multiple systems meant he could push it even further.

It wouldn't just match what Akira had. It would surpass it.

"So this is the higher, perfected version of the Otsutsuki's ancestral dōjutsu," Ryusei thought, recognizing the Tenseigan as the evolved form of the original Byakugan. "Their first eyes were tools of sight, superior, versatile vision that let them conquer their first worlds. This one keeps that versatility but shifts it from perception to influence. Not vision, but effect. Simple, direct, absolute."

He could feel the microscopic Tenseigan pressure particles radiating outward from his eyes, bending the very air with each pulse. "Efficient," he mused. "No discovery, no fine-tuning, no strategy. Just will… and reality moves."

"Kaguya probably never displayed this because she lacked Hamura's lunar half of the inheritance when she revived", Ryusei thought. "Zetsu must've overlooked it completely for some reason."

He thought deeper, eyes narrowing. If Hamura undeniably possessed the Tenseigan, evident from the vast lunar energy it had catalysed once, then Kaguya had to have wielded it as well.

She was the original Byakugan wielder. Once she devoured the God Tree, her dōjutsu should've naturally evolved into the Tenseigan.

After all, why would she awaken an entirely new eye like the Rinnegan unless her own ancestral Byakugan had also transformed first?

Most likely, the planet's essence had been so dense, so rich and overflowing, that it forced both evolutions to manifest simultaneously then.

Afterward, in the generations that followed, those powers were diluted, the weakened Byakugan emerging as a faint echo of the Tenseigan again, and the Sharingan splitting off as a unique fragment of the Rinnegan's legacy.

Meanwhile, Ryusei spent a few more minutes testing the new abilities and quickly fine-tuning and perfecting the techniques he had in his mind for a long time, while he still had space.

Once everything felt somewhat stable, he turned his attention toward Konoha.

The pivotal fight there wasn't finished.

However, before leaving, he focused on the Hyūga energy vessel as well.

He already knew the ideal solution for that: sealing it inside himself with fuinjutsu.

But for that, he needed far more time than this clone had now.

It wasn't a simple procedure.

After all, you couldn't just wish it into place; there were feasibility steps, chakra logistics, and structural adjustments that had to be handled properly.

So he chose the second-best option.

He left another clone behind to guard and hide the vessel, then used his adaptive slug physiology to siphon a portion of its power directly.

The energy flowed into his chakra network, expanding his reserves to their limit and pushing them as far as this clone could safely hold.

This boost would transfer to the main body once the clone returned.

It would give the main body there the urgent chakra boost he desperately needed for the fight still raging in Konoha, the entire time.

The rest of the vessel's power could be dealt with later, either absorbed, sealed, or restructured, once the battle in Konoha evened out.

Just like the Giant Tenseigan on the moon, he would decide the most efficient way to utilize it for himself later when the time came.

After all, Ryusei's single strongest fuinjutsu and jutsu-shiki specialty he developed eventually since his transmigration a few years back, was precisely the most important sealing of external powers, into his own body, for his own use.

And now, with the Yin–Yang ritual, he could even possibly, more completely convert them into permanent increases to his own 'essence' and body, on a physiological level as well, without needing any understanding of genetics.

He simply hadn't tested it directly yet.

He then sent a signal back toward Konoha through the fragment network he had left on the way here, then waited for the real Ryusei to reverse-summon him.