SUMMARY: Souls only meet repeatedly at the behest of the Kami. There are an awful lot of souls that Dekuyume has been seeing frequently and in multiple dimensions no less. The question remains. Are they blessings... or lessons.
From here on out: If you see anything familiar in here, then it probably isn't mine, because if it was mine, then it would have gone like this instead, now wouldn't it? Also, I apologize. I read a lot and don't necessarily remember where all of my inspirations come from, so if you write, thank you for feeding my addiction for that nebulous intoxicating phrase,What if?..
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-O-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
The Prologue: The Trouble with Dimension Creation*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-O-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Book 4 of Dekuyume
Dekuyume was excited. She was a schemer, a planner, a tangled web weaver. For all of her experience, there was one thing that she had never done with a plan, and if anything was going to be powerful enough to help her shake off the burn out and ennui that resulted from her last lifetime long plan... it was this.
Not once had she ever sat down and created a plan of this magnitude with others. It had always just been her stringing people along, leading them to their fates, blessed or cursed depending only on how valuable she found them. And now... she was going to change all of that.
Dekuyume's red eyes glitter as she pulls her hair back up into a high pony tail with a length of ribbon, weaving the trailing ends into a braid before securing it to the top of her head with a pair of back curved horns shape shifted out of her temples. The kotatsu in the center of the Higurashi Sanctuary had changed size and shape yet again, morphing into a bizarre creation that could only exist as a consequence of magic. The head of the table remained the same, Dekuyume's back against the Sakura tree, and her immediate family seated at each side, the other end however widened, arching into a series of U shaped arms that wrapped around the main part of the table, branching out multiple times to accommodate all of the extended members of the Higurashi who wanted to participate.
With a wicked grin she places her hand on top of the kotatsu and changes the tabletop to a visual display, revealing the contents of the file that had been delivered to the Higurashi after Sōsuke was released Trial passed and completed. "Well now my fellow Higurashi, what do you say we get started?"
In front of every one, the view screen brightens to make it easier to follow along, as Dekuyume settles back into her easiest social mask, that of Sensei.
"As I mentioned earlier when I first took a look at the delivered information, the reason that I was called to Trial was because I was being considered for a promotion, my en-souling procedure considered novel enough to qualify me for a special position in the celestial ocean. They're calling it Conflict Resolution Specialist and I've already been placed under the authority of the Major Soul Kami, The Turning of The Wheel of Reincarnation. What it basically amounts to is that I am being asked to become a Greater Kami and use my domain over battlefields and well conflict to resolve critical errors without trespassing into other Kami's domains and taking them over. A great deal of my trial was to simply a check to see if I was power hungry enough to steal power and domain when I was at my most powerful and the local Kami was helpless against me. Then another check again after I had fallen so far in power. The Trial could have been anything, however, when The Shinigami of The Sacrificial Death, whom has the most stake, made such a fuss at my interview, they also used my Trial to verify that my problem solving abilities were what they were looking for."
Dekuyume huffs, rolling her shoulders to release some tension, "Pity now that I am officially a Greater Kami, I am no longer allowed to do domain takeovers of simple Kami, after that jerk pushed me into the Genesis Pod, I seem to recall having threatened to validate his fears." Unaware of several of the Higurashi giving each other significant looks, Dekuyume scrolls down a little bit and continues. "My first task is also one that will grant me the power I need to back up my new rank. Our problem begins in Dimension: 42, it is one of the oldest dimensions in the celestial ocean and as such it has a great deal of power of existence. Unlike several other high energy dimensions that have their excess manifest as wild magic, this one has it's excess siphoned out by the Dimension Propagation Engine (DPE). The people of this dimension have brought the art of fan-fiction writing and world expansion to such a refined level that they have their own DPE server dedicated solely to harvesting the stories they create."
Dekuyume pauses to pour herself some tea and take a lengthy sip, "While all original stories excite the Creation Kami and inspire them to create new and novel dimensions, the same cannot be said for fan-fiction, after all, if over 400 thousand fan-fiction stories can be written for Naruto alone in our dimension, consider just how many stories would exist across the section of the celestial ocean where his story manifests. Numbers uncountable, all with enough similarity to drive a Kami mad. As a result, the Creation Kami use the DPE to do most of the work, wouldn't want to just have dimensions that are only the original, the more dimensions we have in the celestial ocean, the more soul echoes we have, the more lessons they learn, the more prayers they give and consequently, the more power is available to the Kami to maintain the dimensions and propagate more."
"Our issue arises because of an inter-dimensional crossover story between the Naruto and Puella Magi Madoka Magica dimensions. The dimension author decided that they wanted to switch out the Naruto dimension's 9 tailed chakra beast, Kyuubi with the Madoka dimension's, Incubator, Kyubey. The basic premise is that once upon a time, before everyone in the world had the active physical magic ability called chakra, an alien woman named Kaguya, traveling across the stars searching through the planets for a Divine Tree, found one upon the planet. The Divine Tree was a type of gigantic tree that grew by absorbing blood soaked into the ground from countless battles over a millennia. These aliens coveted the chakra fruit that it could be enticed to grow, to further increase their own nearly godlike powers in the never ending wars on their home planet."
"Kaguya, however had a problem, she was just a low-ranking member of the clan... and to entice the Divine Tree to bear fruit, one had to feed the last drop of blood from the body of a person who shared the same blood as the one who wanted to eat the fruit. She did not want to die, and so instead she sacrificed the clansman who was supposed to carry the fruits of her sacrifice back to the clan. He may have been stronger than her, but she was far smarter, defeating him through trickery where she would not have been able to with a direct challenge. When the fruits formed, she ate them herself, and instead of returning home to the place where she would surely be punished, she instead chose to remain and settle there. Using her chakra she fooled the natives into believing that she had always been there. Keeping her cover and blending in, she also wed the emperor and had two twin sons."
"However, absolute power corrupts a soul absolutely, and as the only person with chakra, she was a god among ants... and the Divine Tree still had the blood of her clansman, all it needed to bear more fruit... was more blood. In secret she began sacrificing people to the tree, hiding them down in the roots in a chakra induced sleep from which they would not awaken not even when the taproots pierced their bodies and began to drink their blood."
"Hagoromo and Hamura, her two twin sons were born with chakra, not that they nor she were aware. Not until the boys were grown and something served to push Hagoromo over the edge. One of the people that his mother chose to sacrifice, was none other than the woman he was in love with. Upon discovering what his mother had been up to, he actively started to use his chakra, teaching his twin and the two of them training in secret until the day that he knew they were strong enough. He may not have been quick enough to save his beloved, but he could at least could stop her from destroying the lives of anyone else."
Preparing another pot of tea while she finishes the last cup, Dekuyume continues. "Discovering that her sons had also gained the power of chakra, furious that unlike her humble beginnings, her two sons had been born high-ranking chakra users, she went mad. She sealed the Divine Tree inside of her body becoming the first Jinchūriki. The strain of pulling such a massive chakra heavy being inside, caused both her and the Divine Tree to mutate and change. They became a massive wooden beast with ten tails. One who's only thought was to devour the last two remaining sources of chakra."
"The twins and the ten-tailed beast fought. They fought so long and so fiercely in fact, that by the time the two boys defeated the ten -tails, the entire world, and everyone in it had become a battlefield." Dekuyume grins mischievously looking over at all of her kin, "Just showing up in that dimension is going to give me such a large power boost that it's no wonder The Shinigami has gone through such effort to keep me away. I'm about to become his superior, snatching from his hands what he likely sees as rightfully his. I'll explain a bit more about that in a second." She smirks and winks at her kaasan, "Best keep this chronological." Kānēshon laughs at her daughter's antics. "Yes dear. That would be lovely."
Dekuyume pours a cup from the new pot of tea, "The story is a bit more complicated in the background, but we'll be succinct for clarity's sake. During their fight, the twins had realized that there was little they could do to kill the ten-tails, it's regeneration powers were simply too much, so they did the next best thing, they took their mother's sealing research and studied it until they found a way to modify it so that the ten-tails would be properly sealed separating it's essence, it's chakra from it's body. The elder twin Hagoromo sealed the chakra inside of his body, while the younger twin took the immortal corpse and carried it as far away from the planet as possible, creating the moon."
"Hagoromo then went on to travel the world, making right all the chaos and destruction that the three of them had caused during their battle. While doing so, he siphoned off the power of the chakra beast, granting chakra to all, not just humans, but animals and nature as well. At the time that the main story line for Naruto begins, he is long dead and known only as the Father of Chakra, the Sage of Six paths... and as the creator of the chakra beasts. You see, his lifespan had been drastically shortened from the millennia that his alien kin experienced down to just a single century, worn and corroded away by the corrosive chakra of the ten-tailed chakra beast sealed inside of him. Near the end of his life, not wanting to release such a devastating power on the world, he portioned the chakra out, splitting it into nine parts. He gave them form, flights of fancy shaping them into mythical creatures and strange constructs, each with a different increasing number of tails. He gave them self awareness so that they would not choose to die, combining back into the ten-tailed chakra beast. He then gave them freedom, to roam and hopefully love as he did, the world that they had inherited."
Dekuyume sighs as she refills her cup, "We fast forward through time now. Over the ages that passed, people discovered that they could use chakra for new and interesting things. Just like with anything else, these people were fundamentally human, and if there is one thing that humans are good at, it's taking a perfectly brilliant invention and figuring a way to either weaponize it, or use it for sexual gratification. It should come to no surprise that the people who were the best at this, were also the ones who had carried so much chakra in their DNA, direct descendants of Hagoromo that they had strange biological functions fueled by chakra. Nor should it surprise that these clans of people called their differences their bloodline limit and claimed that their special trick of DNA made them better than everyone else. Some clans became samurai, some became ninja and everyone else just tried to survive the constant strife."
"At one point, a ninja got it into his head that the best way to stop all of the small wars, would be to bring individual clans together to form Ninja villages and to those villages they would distribute captured, sealed chakra beasts. Not unlike the nuclear armament prevents people from firing nuclear weapons theory. It never really worked, all it did was bring a halt to all the small conflicts and ensure that there would really only be a handful of powerful Ninja villages. You have to pity them, by the time the main character, Naruto is born, they've already had three world wars just between the ninja alone. They don't even have the decency to cherish the Jinchūriki, the people they call: the power of human sacrifice. From the name alone you can tell that they don't even consider them human, merely tools."
"To put it into perspective, at this point in time, very, very few people in the world don't have chakra. To the best of my knowledge, there's actually only a single person who doesn't that is mentioned in cannon, and everyone around him behaves as if they are surprised to see such a strange thing. So everyone has chakra, but it's a bit like a magic muscle, and if you don't exercise it, not only will it not be very agile or recover quickly if strained, it also won't be very strong. The next step up would be Ninja Academy Students who have just started to utilize their chakra and are like infant yōkai just starting to figure out how to make it do what they want."
"Those that manage to graduate from the academy at about 12 years old, they become apprentice ninja, Genin, who have a decent grounding in the Ninja Arts and in teams of three they are assigned to their Jōnin-Sensei to begin specialist training. When they are not training, they are allowed to take D and C rank missions, and when their Sensei considers them ready, they are given a chance to participate in the Chūnin Selection Exams. Those that pass become Chūnin, who are about on par with the average C class yōkai. These Chūnin make up the bulk of the work force of a Ninja Village taking C, B and A rank missions either solo or in groups depending on the rank."
"After gaining enough experience, those in specialist positions can be internally promoted to Specialist Jōnin and those who acquit themselves in multiple Ninja Arts can be promoted to that of an elite Ninja, a Jōnin. These ninja are on par with B and A Rank yōkai respectively and they often take A and even S Rank Missions depending on what their Kage feels that they can do. This brings us to the Kage ranked ninja, while there is only one officially holding the title per village given that they are the highest authority in a Ninja village, a Kage level Ninja would be on par with an S Rank yōkai and as we all know, title and authority are not necessarily equivalent so there could be any number of Kage level Ninja in a village with a lesser rank because they don't want the job of head honcho. Most if not all of them will be ANBU, the Special Assassination and Tactical Squad, basically Ninja Black Ops. When they're on duty they wear white chakra infused masks painted with red and black animal markings, off duty they're indistinguishable from any other Ninja in the Village."
"Coming back around to the Jinchūriki then, we have a person with a chakra beast sealed inside of them. This makes a person with at least as much chakra as a Kage, a specialist ability like a Specialist Jōnin, and depending where they were at when they received the chakra beast, they could have anywhere from less than an academy student to a Kage level ability to control and utilize what they have added to their own. All that, and the cherry on top is the potential to manifest the corrosive chakra of the beast inside of them, using the chakra beasts powers on top of what was mixed into their own, more points to those who can use the most tails of power."
Dekuyume finishes her cup and pours another, "Personally, no matter the gains I find it utterly foolish, trapping beings whom they cannot kill, driving mad the ones who carry the purest teachings of their Sage of Six paths and torturing the children that they use to contain the enraged chakra beasts." Kānēshon gasps, "What! Children? Why?" Dekuyume grimaces, "Over time, it was discovered that while it was possible to seal a chakra beast inside of an adult, their lifespan shrunk to anywhere between a year and a decade depending on their compatibility. However, children are resilient, and their chakra networks are just developing, so if you seal a chakra beast inside of them, they wind up able to carry it inside of them for their whole lifetime, provided they manage to survive long enough to have one."
"In the fan-fiction written by the Author in Dimension:42, Kyubey enters into the mix the night that Naruto is born. As in cannon, a masked figure pulls the nine-tailed chakra beast, Kyuubi, out of the seal on Naruto's mother, the seal weakened while she gives birth. The Kyuubi then goes on a rampage tearing through the ninja village that had held it hostage for the past two mortal lifetimes. Personally I understand. I'd be pissed too."
"Unable to do anything to halt the powerful chakra beast, the Hokage, Minato Namikaze the leader of Konoha, the ninja village hidden in the leaves, uses a powerful seal that splits the Kyuubi's chakra in half, separating it's yin (mind chakra) from it's yang(body chakra). But the seal comes at great cost, it is a sacred rite of The Shinigami of The Sacrificial Death; though they only know him as their god of death. The Shinigami's domain is the sacrifice of a life exchanged for a person's desire. In every other dimension but this one, the exchange is made without issue and in exchange for the life of Naruto's father, who is also Minato, and the yin half of the chakra The Shinigami seals the Yang half inside of Naruto in such a way that when Naruto dies, Kyuubi will die as well. Due to fighting the chakra beast just moments after giving birth, Naruto's mother dies, leaving him an orphan and a Jinchūriki."
Dekuyume sighs, playing with the teacup in her hand, explaining more from what she's extrapolated from the data than directly reading it to the Higurashi. "In this particular Fan-fiction spawned dimension, through no fault of his own, The Shinigami was unable to complete the exchange properly. The Author chose that exact moment to instead have Kyubey enter the dimension. Quick as the ninja that served as his primary worshipers, The Shinigami snatched Kyubey instead of Kyuubi and sealed the incubator inside of Naruto and swallowed both Minato's soul and Kyuubi whole. The moment he was back inside of his domain ship he sent an emergency stop signal to the GFM-DCOM and the DPE. In Dimension:42 the Author suddenly caught an insurmountable case of writers block and the issue was forwarded on to the Greater and subsequently Major Kami that directly supervise the dimension."
Sōta frowns, "What exactly is the problem? Puella Magi Madoka Magica was a magical girl anime, so I never really paid it much attention. All I know is that Kyubey is the one who finds these middle school girls and makes a contract with them giving them magical girl powers so that they can fight witches for Kyubey in exchange for a wish. That and Kyubey is a small pink and white cat like critter and Kyuubi is a giant orange nine tailed fox."
Dekuyume lets them all giggle at the images that appear on their viewing screens, taking the time to prepare another pot of tea before explaining the actual problem. "In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Kyubey is an incubator, and what you don't know is that the actual exchange it conducts is all behind the scenes hidden away behind the sparkling trinkets it gives out when a contract is made. For being a magical girl show it's actually quite dark. These poor girls are unwittingly giving away their souls, and when their souls are collected they leave behind witches."
Dekuyume clears her throat, taking another sip of tea. She can't even remember the last time she had spoken so much. "Here let me read you an excerpt from the Kyubey's information page: [The Incubators are an emotionless race, but seek to exploit the thermodynamics-violating emotions of the human race to produce energy and prevent the Heat Death of the Universe, the ultimate end of the universe itself. The fact that the system they use to harvest this power- Magical girls and Witches- would be considered horrendously evil by humans is inconsequential to the Incubators. They choose this method because it is the most expedient to their goals.] Now tell me, what exactly does that sound like to you?"
From one of the outer rings of kotatsu someone cusses under their breath, the sensitive hearing of those who are more yōkai than human picking up the words clearly. Sōta rubs his hand down his face, "Kyubey is a derived Kami isn't it." Dekuyume nods, "Yes, to make matters worse, Kyubey isn't one of our Kami. It doesn't even belong to the same Absolute. In short, it's an energy thief snuck into The Celestial Ocean by an Absolute Kami that is hostile to our own. The Arbitrator and several affiliated domain ships are investigating the Dimension Propagation Engine to see how an infection that was considered contained managed to keep spreading. Our job is to neutralize what is already in this crossover fan-fiction dimension. Lucky for us, the Author specified that there was only ONE Kyubey so we don't have a whole nest of incubators to deal with."
Dekuyume grimaces and pours herself another cup of tea, "Unfortunately for us, we have several large constraints that we cannot ignore. Firstly, our starting point. Any changes we make to the story must be so insignificant that there is no reason for our interference to have been written about. This means that up until the dawn of the day AFTER the Kyuubi attack the story is fixed and at least on the surface, everything must appear exactly as is mentioned both in cannon and by the Author. We are free to move about as we will after that point, however there are further constraints that we will have to deal with due to Kyubey's nature."
"Kyubey is a microscopic demigod replicate of a far more powerful foreign Greater Kami of Wishes and Female Power. Feel free to think of him as a very cute and deceptively friendly Wishmaster. While it is true that Naruto is a boy, while a young boy in cannon he still manages to create a Jutsu, that is a special technique that may or may not use chakra, to shape shift from male to female. Furthermore his primary weapon in cannon is also problematic. The Jutsu is called Shadow Clone which makes solid Clones, as what it sounds like, this Jutsu creates one or more clones of a person using their shadow. Unlike standard clones which are primarily illusions, shadow clones are physically real. A person quite literally splits their chakra into equal portions when creating them, and consequently each shadow clone has the same personality of the original. Given my earlier statements and the fact that we very much do not want to give Kyubey any opportunity to spread you may extrapolate out why allowing Naruto to use the Shadow Clone Jutsu is a very bad idea."
Emptying the tea pot yet again, Dekuyume prepares another pot. "So if our first objective is to prevent the Kyubey incubator infection from spreading, our second is to eradicate the bit that is already there. Fortuitously, the Author has at least made this bit easy for us. All we have to do is ensure that Naruto still becomes a ninja, thus expending Kyubey's power of existence as if it were the Kyuubi's chakra. However there is one critical thing which we must prevent at all costs, Naruto must not ever make a wish. Right now, Kyubey is asleep, unconscious or otherwise inactive, after being thrown inside of the seal, however the moment that Naruto truly wishes for something the Kyubey will wake up, at which point our job becomes an absolute nightmare."
Dekuyume looks around intently at all of the Higurashi, "The life of a ninja is not a gentle one, not even in a world meant for entertaining pre-teen boys. In order to prevent such a thing, we are going to have to completely destroy the sections of the local GFM-DCOM that pertain to the fate of Naruto and we are going to have to manually, in concurrent time, adjust all of the variables to ensure that Naruto lives a Kami blessed life without a single wish for more. All while the GFM-DCOM back calculates individual fates based off of our new specified ending."
Sōta practically squeals for joy like a little girl, "This is going to be so cool!"
Dekuyume snorts into her tea, well, there was at least one Higurashi who was definitely on the Going to Help list.