"Thought Or Telepathy"
"Character Communication"
"Loud Speaking"
"Emphasis 'On' A Word."
Madara: A New Journey
Sweat drops from the furrowed brow of Madara as he lets out a breath. The seal is finished. He's eager and not wanting to waste time he slams his hand onto the expansive group of symbols and lines below to activate the sealing array as he pours his chakra into it.
Starting with the construction of the six red yang formation barrier. It springs up instantly in its crimson colour, illuminating the night.
His breathing gets heavy. Chakra flows towards a different area of the seal illuminating it as it travels along with the markings. The seals he used are slightly modified versions of the ones used in his reaper summoning.
Back then, he managed to use the reaper to create a new space-time and separate it from the time of the world with the transdimensional power of the reaper. That was similar to what he needs to do but it was a lot easier then, without the power of the reaper it's completely different. The red barrier is warped around before being absorbed into a new white barrier.
The effects are immediate and Madara can scarcely move. Madara pushes all his chakra to his eyes before his chakra is affected. His eyes glow brighter and change colour from purple to red. It seems Six Path's chakra is protecting him somewhat against time. His truth-seeking orbs can also move freely.
The tomoe around the Rinnegan circles of his eye spin around rapidly. Madara can move freely. His eyes lock onto the barrier as he activates his most powerful Rinnegan ability. Energy - similar to the forces of the universe - release from his eyes to impact the barrier marking the commencement of the second phase.
Separating space from time. Madara's eyes cracked open the secrets of the two forces enough to interact and move within this space, but it isn't enough to tear the two apart. If this ability isn't enough yet, he'll have to use that. His eyes look towards a truth-seeking orb.
Madara grunts as he pushes himself to summon the remaining truth-seeking orbs within him; six take form from nothing and the two that were already out made eight in total.
He casts them to the walls of the barrier and they expand over it with the greatest of ease. He'll use the truth-seeking orbs as a scalpel and his eyes as a telescope to perform a surgery of sorts.
Minutes pass and the truth-seeking orbs have slowly but surely absorbed into the space-time barrier until they were completely gone. It settles quickly as it comes to an end. Madara shuts his eyes only to open them to reveal black. The strain on his Doujutsu was too much to keep the Rinnegan active.
Taking a large breath, he says the final word. "Seal." A white light explodes with the brightness of a million suns. The stars disappear as the light travels over the horizon. The night turns into day for half of the world.
In another area of the world, the light blasts past a massive tree and over mountains into a very secluded monastery, shining into the darkness of the rooms within. At the top is one open room outlooking the giant tree that's much taller than any mountain. Within, a figure laid upon a throne, still covered in shadows.
Three shadowed eyes open and narrow at the light. Confusion, anxiety, and then unnaturally deep hatred all portrayed through these eyes in stages at the sight of this light. The reason for the being's strange emotions is just as much of a mystery as the being itself, shrouded in darkness.
The light clears quickly to reveal a small crater with Madara at the epicentre. Trees stood stripped of bark and leaf, and glass had formed from the sand in the ground. Madara pulls up his hands and looks to see a very faint light all around him as if he was highlighted by a divine essence.
A smile comes to his face as it quickly widens into an almost evil grin. The armour he failed to make so many years ago has just been made successfully! He laughs viscously before yielding to the realization that the excitement has caused him to forget to check his condition immediately.
He lets out a long sigh as he steadies himself into a standing meditative position with his hands around his abdomen. Madara frowns learning that his body is still ravished by the infection, although it has stopped multiplying and his skin, muscles, bones, viscera, and even the marrow in his body has stopped breaking and tearing apart to his relief.
The flow of the energy has no choice but to stop flowing outwards but he cannot grasp it conceptually to tell what has become of it, perhaps it stopped with no escape, otherwise, he could have exploded.
That was a risk he knew and decided to gamble his life on, why? Because he took notice of his rather fortunate luck as of late and predicted that it would continue. Silly as it may seem Madara was and is a firm believer in luck, not as a made-up and fictional concept but as an immaterial force that impacted everything.
From his experience with luck, great luck may come with great misfortune for those that lack true luck. You see true luck may deceive those it effects by presenting something lucky as unlucky, only later will one learn how fortunate they are for having gone through said misfortune. This isn't a universal law or anything in Madara's mind but he's seen it many times.
So the question is if these events that have been happening to Madara are great luck followed by great misfortune or great luck followed by deceptive luck. Only time will tell he supposed, but it didn't change the situation at hand. He must flow with the punches regardless and his path will continue to become clearer.
For now, he still has no idea about how to remove the remaining infection. He can only heal his longevity and body from its corrosive effect. He's weakened by it to a great extent. The infection attacks at his physical energy and eats away at the lifeforce. This alone Madara is not concerned about.
But what truly is the problem is it even seems to be trying to sever what is called the astral thread, something that connects body and soul in the mind, the place where mental energy is created from the connection of the soul. Lately, he's been feeling more and more severed from his body, this had led him to this conclusion.
He can use Six Path's powers to create and repair lifeforce and thus repair his physical energy and body fairly easily although it takes a create deal of chakra in constant use hence his weakness.
The astral thread is a part of the soul and thus the only way to repair it is to repair the soul, but this was beyond the power of Six Path's Sage Mode. You can create mock souls from chakra, like the Tailed Beasts and summonings the Sage made but not create a genuine real soul.
A flash of remembrance washes over Madara as he recalls a technique he learned in the past to visualize one's soul. Although he didn't put much time into training it he did manage to pick it up in his sleep. The original name of the method was lost to him but he did remember that it was deemed the soul-scape.
Soul-scape is the visualization of one's soul. It's very similar to the mindscape which as it sounds is the visualization of the mind and body, one is used to aid in improvement to the body and mind while the other was a technique devised by an ancient shinobi clan known as the Ikiryo clan that specialized in manipulating the soul outside of the body.
This technique came to be known as the spirit transformation technique. The creators of this were long since dead and wiped out according to the records he found - although they were rather lacking - but apparently the technique was stolen and spread to countless clans and has been prevalent ever since however few and far between.
The Yamanaka clan even created a simpler version of this ability that didn't rely upon the soul, it instead converted mental energy and used it to take over someone's mind, a similar effect with fewer negatives and would to most be considered superior by most. But Madara knew how inferior the Yamanaka technique truly was in comparison.
The first step to learning these shinobi arts was visualizing the soul-scape, something very few could manage. Although this didn't stop Madara from learning it a little to prevent his body from being taken over by a proficient user.
It was so deadly that there was no defence once the spirit entered your body and once taken over by the spirit, the body decays in rejection, all the while the spirit will have complete control over the body to kill, steal, and do whatever one can imagine with if they so chose. It was a considerable threat to Madara as it can be done from thousands of miles away.
Unlike the Yamanaka version that can be shrugged off by a strong mind and forcefully removed by those around the victim. Not to mention visual contact was needed. The difference was profound but it was easy to learn in comparison so the Yamanaka grew larger in size.
Madara starts to climb his astral thread to enter the realm of the soul. In the past, when he came to this place ever so often, his soul was visualized as a hand-sized blue orb and according to the records and notes of the many users, the step after visualization was to slowly mould this orb into a transparent replica of yourself.
That was as far as he needed to train to defend himself though so he never bothered to continue because he had no dying interest in taking over someone from miles away and killing people while they sleep without a battle.
Madara did pride himself in learning most jutsu he got his hands on even if he never planned to use them. He even learned the Yamanaka techniques because they were so easy, but to learn the spirit transformation technique would have taken too much time or so he used to think.
He had prevented himself from learning dozens of powerful techniques many a time by convincing himself that it would take up far to much time, then again he had literate decades of sitting on a throne in seclusion to rebut that very idea.
The truth was apparent to him now and he finds it a shame that he wasted his time not learning techniques like the Eight Gates, Elemetal Body Transformation, and so much more, at least he took the steps to memorize the learning process for all these powerful techniques.
He feels a strong erg to learn everything of worth to become stronger and that is something that the old Madara wouldn't have done. A smile came to his face as he's already started to change his outlook on things without his awareness. Maybe this won't be as hard as he imagined it would be.
Madara had trouble centring his thought back to climbing his astral thread. He had let his mind wander which is the bane of this technique as you must forget your state of being, thinking about worldly matters stopped that from happening.
Although climbing the astral thread is something visual in the mind, it is, in fact, infinite, and more a way to imagine pulling yourself out of your body like pulling on a rope; a way to get into the right state of being then it is an actual distance to travel.
Madara manages to leave his mind and forget his body a few moments later as he ascends to his soul-scape. His consciousness blinks awake. In this realm, there is no physical body, only a floating consciousness remains.
Above him are skies of white and below, an ever-expanding lake. Like a dark abyss, the depths of the lake were infinite. Stars, distant galaxies all held within its depths. Madara takes a pause slightly surprised as before he is not the orb that used to be, now there lies a fully formed body.
The naked body's stance was in a slightly bent T shape floating above the surface of the lake with its palms facing the sky. It almost seems symbolic, like a god descending from heaven. It just doesn't make sense. The soul can only be transformed into a transparent body!
This was written in the records as an absolute in every piece of information and document on the subject. Never has anyone made a body like the one before him? If they had it would probably be documented but there's a chance it wasn't, someone hoarding information isn't too uncommon even amongst allies.
But then that guarantees that the number of people that may have achieved this is even less, perhaps countable on one hand. With a technique that is already rare amongst the inhabitance of the world, he is probably the first. Madara narrows his eyes. "Why is it different?" At a second glance, this body differs slightly from his own in a few features.
Unlike his physical body that had two horns covered in scales that formed the outline of a devil, his soul body had many pure black horns protruding all around his head bent and curved into the shape of a widened majestic crown, there must be twelve horns give or take a few.
The hair is a majestic dark black similar to his birth hair if only much darker. It flows into the water below where it spreads out and merges with the depths. He understands why the hair isn't crimson, that was a result of rich outside lifeforce and chakra from his transformation. It makes sense that his soul body would be similar to his natural-born colour.
The soul didn't reflect the outside influence on a body because it came from just that, the outside influence and not the soul itself, only natural-born properties would show on the soul. That was theorized to be because the soul is what determines the look of someone and writes DNA as scientists eventually termed it much later on.
A lot of generations before Madara was born into the Uchiha clan there was a master of the Spirit Transformation Technique from within the Uchiha clan. Madara found the records from that master first and found them the most useful.
This master from the Uchiha clan was revered as the most powerful user of the technique and was so powerful that he changed the current political situation of that era. This user was keen on documenting his discoveries for future generations of Uchiha. The way the man wrote it could be seen that the man was a philosopher and a leader, but also a slight madman.
Madara knew that this man must have been trying to find something greater. In his writings, he wrote many times - almost redundantly so - the phrase. "This technique is the key to unlocking our Uchiha bloodline beyond what we currently know." It had most certainly interested Madara. He read everything from this man.
A whole library deep in an underground Uchiha library, preserved with seals of various kinds and it was open for all Uchiha of noble descent, but the section - separated into another room from the rest - seemed untouched, in fact, Madara may have been the only one to read his work in all the centuries since it's creation.
It didn't look like the man ever found what he was looking for; his coherent and well-written documents became the ramblings of a madman as time went on. He never went anywhere in the clan, never tried to become an elder, never had children, he was solely focused and dedicated to unlocking this mystery he saw. What happened to this man is undocumented.
When the much younger Madara - still in his teen years - had finished reading the whole library, he was disappointed and saddened. He had learned more then he expected but he felt that the mystery this man talked about was still to be discovered. It made him wonder what it was about but he wasn't going to waste his life on the off chance that it wasn't mad.
That is in the past and he may never uncover that mystery, but Madara had looked over the most important piece of information that man had discovered at the time and it changed the way Madara understood how the Uchiha unlock the Sharingan when he relooked over the information in his older years.
It read as follows:
"As I entered into my mind's eye to gaze upon my spirit for what seemed like the hundredth time that day I saw my work paid off in gallant glory, my spirit took shape from that impudent blue ball of resilient energy into the translucent vessel of my desire, it was unmistakenly my form. Countless years all for that moment. My excitement was boundless.
I studied my spirit body. I was lost in the ecstasy of my creation. But I could not open my eyes, they remained closed shut from my own gaze. I had to take control of my spirit body to take sight of myself. Days went by, I had figured that it would be harder to create then control.
I managed to enter my spirit body for the first time. The essence of it cannot be described in words. I thought the Uchiha had good eyesight, I was mistaken. The spirit is like the overseer of all things below. But what shocked me the most that day was in the water below. My master taught me that the eyes of a spirit would always be black like the night sky.
For me, it was different, below in the ever-expansive water that I could now see so clearly reflected my eyes. Bright vibrant red clashed against the blackness and the Sharingan eyes stared back at me with a pattern I didn't recognize as my own."
What he used to believe before was that when a blood descendant of the Uchiha experienced a powerful emotional reaction, this would cause their brain to release a special form of chakra that affects the optic nerves, transforming the eyes into Sharingan; for that reason, the Sharingan is described as an "eye that reflects the heart"
But if it was true that the spirit body has the Sharingan, then it's origins are from the soul and this special chakra and lifeforce that forms into the eyes are just the way it reveals the Sharingan onto a physical body and the heart that was being reflected, the soul; truly bringing meaning to "the windows to the soul".
It was in these man's words that Madara also realized that what the man saw was not just a regular Sharingan but the Mangekyou Sharingan. Due to the phrasing in the writings and cluelessness, it seems that the physical form of the man hadn't unlocked the Mangekyou Sharingan, which made him very curious.
Madara looks up towards the head of his floating form. The head is slightly tilted up to stare to the sky and the white light shines down obscuring any features of the face only leaving the dark hair and horns to breakthrough. What would his eyes reflect in the water? He wants to see for himself if it holds true, and if it does, maybe he'd see the next step in his physical evolution.
So if he wants to do that, he has to take control of his soul body, but how does one do that? He twirls his lips in confusion. He didn't exactly understand how one did that, in all the documentation it simply stated that it was different for each person, so it wouldn't be too helpful. He lets out a sigh as he shrugs. It will take a long time.
And although he's in this soul realm, he is still somewhat aware of what goes on in the physical world and his senses have just picked up on the two boys from the family coming in his general direction, they're excited for some reason and a bit off course from where he is. He closes his eyes and returns to the physical realm as his eyes reopen.
It would probably be wise to see what has the two so excited and not let them wander off into the forest most likely looking for him.
He jumps off into the trees to intercept the two at a speed that isn't too far from normal, taking his time to tweak his new barriers interaction with the outside world, choosing what he wants to pass in and out, like the wind that touches his skin or the tree that he just jumps through and vaporizes.
In the back of his mind, there may be the slightest feeling of enjoyment. "Perhaps, I shouldn't rush things." He thinks for but a small fraction of a second as he takes another step off a branch.
Madara: A New Journey