I stared at the fruit in front of me, the subtle, ephemeral glow emanating from it understating the power contained within.

"Well, I guess this is it."

Over a hundred years in time compression being pumped full of Biotic energy and as many different sub sapient life-forms as we could get away with resulted in this. Even for us, this represented a truly fantastical amount of effort, I'd burned funds across an entire galaxy after we had detected measurable changes in the mystical properties of chakra before and after introducing new and unique life forms to the flood of life-energy being fed to the tree.

According to Hinata, the chakra was 'healthier' after the additions, so we did our best to ensure that the chakra was of the best quality possible, even adding in a variety of engineered life forms to spice things up.

You guys sure that you don't want this? I asked, looking up at the distant observation deck where the rest of the Planar Pact were watching over this.

As expensive as this thing is, we can't afford to accidentally destroy the fruit attempting to spread out the powers between different people. And if this works out well, it's a valid investment to start diverting resources to ensure that we produce more of the things down the line.

I steadied myself and reached out, taking a bite out of the fruit.

I almost immediately collapsed as the fruit disintegrated, exploding outwards into a glowing sphere, enveloping me and forcing me to my knees.

I felt it press against me for a moment, and I felt pain that came a close second to when I was transformed for my "control method"

I felt fire racing through my bones, my body being ripped apart as lines of POWER etched themselves into existence. I felt something attempt to change within, me, bumps forming on my forehead before something deeper within me rebel, etching the information elsewhere. I learned how the protrusions of bone-like wood would carry certain properties of the Shinju, as well as the strange multitude of mutated eyes that were attempting to sprout all over my body and how to create them all, or even adapt them for my own purposes.

As the power collapsed into me and my vision cleared up, I saw Raven tear a hole into the space next to me, transporting all the ladies over.

I looked up at them weakly, "I think it worked."

And then, I passed out.

[hr][/hr]

I woke up a few minutes later, with power coursing through my body.

Next to me, Hinata was sitting there, her hands glowing with medical chakra as she examined my system.

"So, what's the prognosis?"

Hinata looked up at me and shrugged, "Everything seems to be in order, though your chakra is far more dense than even Naruto's. We weren't expecting the pain, from our talks with Hagaromo, his mother didn't experience that when she ascended, but our information suggests that she already had a chakra network before eating the fruit, and we know that any modification to the chakra network hurts like a bitch."

"Yeah, on a future note, everyone undertaking this should be capable of shapeshifting. That fruit tried to turn me into this monstrous looking horned thing with hundreds of eyes all over my body." I grimaced.

Still, the information I had gained from the influx of energy was quite interesting. With a blink, I transformed my eyes into Byakugan - or at least my variant. The white spheres glowed lightly as I turned the new senses towards myself. I could see the thick glowing cords that had worked their way through me, responding eagerly to every attempt I made to experiment with them.

Absently, I reached for the energy and pushed it out of me, a near physical glob coalesced into my hand. I could feel my psychic energy in the mix, directing it to follow my commands eagerly.

Hinata looked at me, "Well, that's terrifying."

"This?" I asked.

"That's more power than most ninjas have in their entire bodies and you are just playing with it." She pointed out.

I cock an eyebrow, "Really?"

She nodded, "I mean, I do have barely more than that, but the only ninja I know that could reasonably produce something like that are Naruto-kun and Jiraya-sama."

I stared at here before dissipating the orb, "Well, I'm probably going to need a bit of help figuring out how to use this. Mind teaching me some jutsu?"

Hinata shook her head, "I'm afraid that goes against my oath. You could probably speak to Tsunade-sama or Nagato-sama about it."

I shrug, "Well, it was worth a shot. I suppose I'll take some time to experiment with it first and let's go from there."

[hr][/hr]

It turned out that I didn't need to worry about seeing Nagato. It took me a while to find a Sharingan equivalent among the eyes that the Fruit granted me, but I was able to find one and from there, it was merely a matter of hunting down and fighting enough missing-nin to get a solid handle on my powers.

Breaking down the various jutsu that I learned into a more fundamental understanding of chakra and extrapolating from there was a little more difficult, but ultimately not a problem, not with the degree of control I had over my chakra.

I wouldn't be on the level of the Ootsuki, what with their ability to carve passageways between dimensions, not without studying under one of them first, but I was getting there in terms of more conventional attacks. Between my version of the Bijudama and Rasengan, I was capable of a lot of damage and my elemental manipulation was nothing to sneeze at.

And that didn't take into account the ability to augment my abilities with magic.

Sort of.

Magic and chakra are… related, in a way. They aren't the same thing, and each has their strengths and weaknesses (in a straight fight, chakra wins against magic every time, but magic scales with prep-time in a way that chakra just doesn't) but they do work together beautifully. And learning how to get them to work together wasn't hard.

Because magic is known to the Naruto universe. They just call it sage energy.

They're entirely terrible at using it, but even the crude augmentations that they have figured out from merging sage mode and chakra are enough to make sages monsters on the battlefield, and once I figured that out, I was able to seriously upskill, to the point that I was much more dangerous than my training in chakra suggested.

I was still looking for Orochimaru and Obito, but the two bastards had completely gone to ground after Nagato summoned away the Ten-Tails and we worked out the right way to seal that thing away and prevent Emo boi from getting his hands on it again.

I did get some practice when I took Hinata and Naruto up to the moon, to bring that branch of the Hyuuga family back in line. Between the three of us, the genocidal maniacs were properly cowed, and were brought down to Earth and properly integrated into plans against the Ootsuki somewhere where we could keep an eye on them.

It helped that Hagaromo fragged his brother over from the Pure World to set the record straight, though the less famous twin was utterly confused at how his clear instructions to "prepare this world for when my mother's people reach here" had been transformed into "drop the moon on everyone".

However, the greatest success, surprisingly enough, came in the form of the Creation of All Things technique. Hagoromo was surprisingly okay with teaching me that technique. Apparently, the big secret was that it involved a bit of magic to crystalise the product, but the result was a conjuration that was real in a way that purely mystical conjurations just weren't and could maintain metaphysical effects without external support.

Funnily enough, my draconic form was surprisingly well suited to my new state. Replacing some of the normal horns with the shinju-protrusions and altering my eyes sockets so I had a few eyeballs in there with a variety of different abilities meant that my draconic form was able to grant me a serious increase in combat capability.

That's not to say that I spent all my time working on my newfound chakra-based abilities. With the latest advancements to temporal manipulation technology, I was able to spend plenty of time working on a number of different tasks, mainly in the different universes I had access to.

Defusing the possibility of a Civil War by ensuring that Bucky gets put into the custody of some experts in the deprogramming of brainwashed individuals and that Tony was pointed towards the individuals behind the creation of the Winter Soldier in order to get his own catharsis was a simple enough task, and a side trip over to Raven's Earth in order to make sure that some of the rebel forces within the Thangarian, Reach and Gondorian protectorates got their hands on some basic magic that would let them stand a chance at freeing themselves from their unwanted rulers was a valid enough use of my time.

I was still having trouble with the Loki issue though.

Ultimately, we still didn't know of any safe way of removing the Mind Stone from his possession. That and our lack of knowledge of his current base of operations was all that was stopping us from being able to dump a galaxy's worth of armies and private security firms on the bastard.

Apparently, the various civilizations that he had 'balanced' in the past had come together to put a frankly obscene bounty on his head, and more than a few governments wanted to ensure that the maniac wasn't going to come for them next.

Until now.

"Jon! We figured something out!" Gwen cried.