What is the use of a god if there is no one to believe in him? What is the use of an ear if there is nothing to hear? For Tenzo slept, and slept the dreams of the long-dreaming, the hibernating, slumbering winter, leaves stark off the bone-limbed branch.
Divine calls to divine, which leaves webbing, fly-feet on skin; the prickle as one turns around and sees nothing there. An impression of pain, perhaps, as something beyond mortal ken.
So too did Tenzo's divinity call out into the void. A scream between the stars, dwindling.
Someone - something - answered.
A sleeping tree waits but for the kiss to awaken.
So come, come, dance, dance, with the bumblebees.
Somewhere, among the infinite stars, time-streams over rivers over lakes over ponds, hatching, growing, cocooning, came the priest of a cult for the Little God of Growth.
There was a rumbling in the chakra, as though something had shaken the foundations of the reality itself.
Naruto tensed and clutched the ground, and reinforced everything he had set. He nested Sakura in a net of his own chakra, and physically set her behind him. She was trembling, out of her league and depth.
Something was coming. Vast, brimming with malignant and almost diseased chakra, a being full of mandibles and legs and faceted eyes.
Wings spread out from the rock-tent, stretching from horizon to horizon, a shimmering rainbow construct of dark, inside-out chakra that reached backward and forward and inside and out, a gathering of dimensions.
They twisted.
The wings came into sight. The shaking intensified.
Naruto's nose was hit by a scent of pure sweetness, as though heaven's pollen itself came down from above, musky but gentle, all the good things of nature's bounty itself unleashed. It carried him up and away and brought his head down low and his eyelids sliding shut. He fought it, fought his way back from it.
Behind him Sakura was murmuring the properties of medicines that could be made from this pollen, word tumbling after word, slur after slur.
Naruto's eyes shut. He forced them open, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. Dry, like all the water in him had dropped and was pooling around his feet. He had a sudden, uncomfortable, urge to wander off into the bushes.
As his eyes lingered open, fighting against the weights that slammed across his body, he noticed a crown of leaves spiralling up from the roof of the rock-tent, to where the wings were obscured behind a headband of clouds, up to the sun itself.
Taller and taller it grew, branches sprouting from the tips, dividing and swooping and twirling until it resembled a reverse lightning bolt, come up to reach the heavens.
The pollen intensified, and despite himself, despite everything, Naruto took one step, two, towards the rock-tent. He was vaguely aware of Sakura clinging to his back.
Then -
The barrage stopped.
The wings receded.
"I apologize for the horror, Uzumaki-san," a familiar voice said. The voice echoed with a sepulchre that the familiarity could not quite obscure.
"It was necessary for the travel between voids, and worlds. Eldritch creatures rarely interfere with one another."
The face emerged from the shadow behind the rock, encrusted already with a micro-ecology.
Sunglasses, wrought from chitin. A silk robe, sweeping the ground. Several things moved beneath the robe, more than two arms, and two legs. Yet those levered apart the small gap between rock and wall, and stepped forth.
"...Shino-kun?" Sakura asked.
Shino, High Priest of the Hex Sect of the Canonical Growth Absorptane of the Circadian Church, looked out upon this strange world.
His fingers itched. His god was calling for him, a rare avatar with such youth on his face.
The Bounty must be fresh, for it stretched up to the heavens as per the early holy-books all said, upon arrival of the Circadian Church. But its trunk was thin, thinner than the span of his arm.
His kikaichu buzzed around him, feeding him sensory information that his eyes, attuned to the divine, demonic, and eldritch, could no longer perceive.
Uzumaki Naruto, once-jinchuuriki of the Kyubi. Strange - in his homeline, Naruto was known as the unpredictable container of the Eight-Tailed Hachibi. But the remnants of fox-chakra was unmistakeable.
"-Shino-kun?"
Ah, Haruno Sakura. A fine nun from the Wings Sect, who specialized in both healing and administering the Cut. Except not, surely - this girl had none of the knowledge that surety brought her. Even past thin membranes of professionalism and confidence, he could perceive the turmoil that lay in the spiritual side of her chakra.
"Haruno-san," Shino said.
She hid her eyes from him, looked away as though the sight of him could not be borne. As though she saw into the fifth dimension, or the sixth. She couldn't, not really, although that second personality of hers (oh yes, he knew about it, as he knew all the secrets of the Wings Sect, being a subshoot of the Hex Sect) could sense the fifth, just a little.
Enough to make her dangerous. Enough to have pushed her to become a mere nun, safe in the bosom of her sect. Away from the creatures that crawled between the stars.
But this wasn't that Haruno Sakura, was this? This was a different person, a different world. Different personalities, and experiences.
"My mistake," Shino murmured. "I had not thought that my arrival would cause such deleterious effects on your two personages."
In fact, he hadn't realized that the pollen that his summon had given out (to prevent any potential violence from being spawned) would be magnified to such potential, being in the personal presence of his god. Odd - a note would have to be made.
"Shino," Uzumaki-san said, standing up to his full height. In Shino's perception, this spread apart the webbing of his chakra, even as it continued to protect the withdrawn girl behind him. At his right appendage, chakra began to gather in some concentration. Shino's kikaichu buzzed, worried.
While Shino lived not in fear of death (for who could fear death when its only consequence was rebirth - and was not his god directly behind him, sleeping in a newly-born forest?) his work was not yet done.
"Peace, Uzumaki-san," Shino said. His kikaichu, the ones he had sent out on a preliminary scout, returned to him with a humble bumblebee in tow. She bowed to him, recognizing in some part of her hind-brain his dominion as queen above her queen. Well on her way to becoming a summon for some shinobi on this world, somewhere.
Umikaete, his kikaichu supplied. Thank you, he replied. It was always good to know the names of one's disciples.
The bumblebee went off to inform her nest where the best nectar lay. Shino knew that, after having his kikaichu bless her, she would dance the best dance that bumblebees ever knew, all the steps and more besides.
"I am doing my duty as a priest of the Hex Sect, of the living commandments of growth."
"...The Hex Sect?" Haruno-san asked.
"Yes." Shino made no move forward, nor backward, but spread his arms out to his sides. "My god is the living god, Tenmei no Tenzo. I am one of his high priests."
"...Yamato-sensei?" Uzumaki-san asked.
Shino paused. That fact - that Uzumaki-san, this Uzumaki-san, knew Tenzo-sama's birth name, the one his mother gave him, was something that he hadn't made calculations for. If he knew, then he was much more holy than his own world's Naruto-san was.
And. If Tenzo-sama had /taught/ this man, then he was someone to watch out for.
"Yes. Tenzo-sama taught us by walking with the living, and encouraging us to grow further. To compete but not to capture, to work with rather than against. As I am an adept of the Hex Sect, I work with insects."
He remembered, still, his birth colony, where kikaichu buzzed through the green-dark burrows, the moss growing along the walls, the brighter fungi where tourists came to gawk and peek.
Among the inner tunnels, as kikaichu (dry and light, unlike what the bedtime boogeymen stories painted them to be) tunneled or crept, parting around his person like they would to any other Aburame. The heart of the colonies, where the breeding grounds lay, where omega queens in untold number pleaded to be chosen by a Hexer, wished that they could be chosen by a priest, and but dreamed that they would be succession-picked by an Aburame queen.
The light and heavy scents of fruits and nectar from the honey-bee strains of the breeders, ever-thinking, ever-calculating. A constant hum as familiar and as underlying as his heartbeat. Where he slept and his kikaichu mingled with the others in the communion of the hive, where he was more than queen and more than Shino, more than Aburame, the line which went all the way back to when Tenzo-sama was born, running around like any other child of the Sects.
Some said the Aburame line was even older than Tenzo-sama's; but, like other heretics, they had little proof. The Aburame themself simply had faith, and that the faith would come true.
Shino himself was named after a clan heir that came just after Tenzo-sama fought in the war, just after He was wounded by a goddess of vengeance from Iwa.
Naruto-san, his world's Naruto-san, followed in the tradition of the jinchuriki and had picked out the name that felt the closest to his, after the Hachibi was sealed into him. He belonged to the scholarly section of the Horn Sect, a prestigious subshoot of the Oct Sect, prestigious because it took care of the Hachibi jinchuuriki. Although, Shino laughed quietly to himself (his kikaichu buzzing in amused agreement) he regularly drove his family crazy by being physically and mentally unpredictable. In time, the Hachibi would settle him down.
Or perhaps drive him nutty in trying to find a rhyme to 'orange'. Then again - that being his favorite color - the end result might be that they drove each other insane. It was an ancient mystery that the Hachibi would never answer. Such a mystery that it became one of those riddles, those koans. 'Why does the Hachibi love to rap?'
But now was not the time to think of Naruto-san, who lived sprawled out over white-marble cushions in the heart of the Horn Sect, whose buildings lay under the lapping waves. White marble, gleaming purely, even in waters colored green or red or even blue by the algae in the water, by the split of the planet's sky under the sunlight of the system's red sun.
This Uzumaki-san extinguished the power in his appendage. His presence came one foot-length closer. Then another.
"Shino," he said. The feeling in the air changed, as though a storm hovering at the edge of realization had changed its mind and moved away.
Shino started as one of his eldest kikaichu, a queen who had come to him from his mother, stung him at the base of his neck.
What - there had been a storm? In the seventh dimension? Chitin.
The kikaichu stung him again for bad language. For even trying to disguise bad language.
Uzumaki-san stopped, then started again. Stopped again. Took in a breath.
"Welcome to Sekai no Owarigakure," he said. Smiled. Kikaichu formed the smile on the back of Shino's left knee. It was much too satisfied to be anything but utterly confident.
Shino found his right wrist quivering a little. Perhaps he wasn't as ready for dealing with eldritch creatures of other universes as he had thought?
None of his experiences compared to this level of killer intent. Still, the presence of his god, sleeping (so near, so near to him) reassured him, let him stand strong.
"I am pleased to be here."
"I have but one rule, Shino," Uzumaki-san said.
"Please go on."
"Leave this place better than you found it."
Shino found a human smile creeping up on his lips before he could stop it.
"Is that all, Uzumaki-san? Is there truly nothing else that you wish to add?"
"No."
"Done."
Behind him a flight of bumblebees was already pollinating the large flowers hanging from the Bounty. In less than a day, Shino knew, they would begin fruiting, and by his word as a high priest of the living god, they would never go hungry again.
There was an interesting seal by where his deity slept. Shino wanted to have a look. It looked almost as intricate as the Whirlpool sect's seals, and he had studied under the Kushina School, once, in a colony a long way away and a long time ago.
"Uzumaki-san...if you are this village's Kage, then...tomorrow, you will have your first resident. My word upon it."
"What about you, Shino-kun? Aren't you planning to be a resident?" Haruno-san asked.
"No," Shino flashed her a smile. She returned it shyly. "Because..."
"I am a priest."
