Soon, the air grew heavier, the ground softer, and that deep pulse underfoot louder.
Ryusei slowed his pace. The mist ahead thinned just enough for him to see it, dark, quiet, and alive.
The Black Pools.
From a distance, they almost looked still, but up close the surface moved in slow patterns, as if breathing.
Each ripple carried faint reflections that weren't reflections at all, just fragments of distant faces that were long gone, shifting and melting back into the liquid.
The scent was sharp and metallic, almost like blood mixed with something chemical.
He could feel the pull already, the energy rising through the soles of his feet. It wasn't an ordinary chakra.
It felt old. Dense. Too alive.
The pools weren't just water; they were everything this place had eaten.
The most condensed natural energy, organic acid, and the liquefied remains of those who failed before him.
Every drop here was heavy with all the forest had ever claimed and refused to release, everything drawn inward and concentrated, as if this place was the true heart where this entire unique Sage Region breathed.
Each particle was so heavy that it even carried faint echoes of memory, the flash of pain, fear, or desperation that marked a life's final moment.
The forest didn't bury anyone. It recycled them as a part of a new self.
Even thoughts didn't vanish here.
The water remembered every moment from desperation to surrender.
Over time, everything fused into one continuous thing, most of it ending up there, and the forest itself, alive and self-feeding, pulsing like one massive organism that had decided to stop dying.
Ryusei watched the slow movement of the black surface, quiet for once.
He could almost feel it staring back. "Everything here wants to keep you," he thought. "Maybe that's the real trial, not escaping it, but returning while carrying a piece of it with you forever."
Katsuyu watched him quietly for a moment, her massive eyes unblinking as the mist swirled between them. When she finally spoke, her tone was slower than usual, patient but carrying that rare edge of seriousness she reserved for moments like this.
"Ryusei, listen to me for once. The red-haired one was two years older than you, and if he hadn't awakened those strange golden eyes midway, he would have been erased like the rest. Don't assume you'll succeed just because he did. He barely survived—and he's not you."
Ryusei only smiled faintly, his expression unreadable. "I already made my own plans for this. I'm ready."
"You little humans always say that right before I have to regrow you from the ground," she muttered dryly.
But Ryusei didn't respond to the jab. His gaze stayed fixed on the black pools ahead, calm yet burning with quiet anticipation. "I can't wait any longer. The things I'm about to face for a while won't give me that luxury."
Katsuyu's massive eye narrowed slightly. "Enemies again?" she said, her tone dipping into weary amusement. "If it's those Leaf ones, you've already handled them easily enough countless times, including the latest two attacks. In my experience, there's no one left there who can really threaten you anymore, in the so-called 'shinobi world', trust me. So, it's not worth risking so much so quickly."
Ryusei shook his head slowly, his tone dropping to a low murmur. "Not them. And not anyone bound to this world in the usual sense, either."
Katsuyu's feelers stirred uneasily as she sensed the shift in his tone.
"Then who?"
Ryusei exhaled slowly, his tone calm, almost distant. "Let's just say… something far older, and higher than hidden villages. The ones who think they wrote the rules themselves. The kind who stare down from above and call it guidance."
Katsuyu's body shifted, a faint ripple moving through her translucent mass. "You mean the ones who sit outside this world and whisper about fate," she said, her voice quieter now, almost thoughtful.
Ryusei's faint grin returned, sharper this time. "Exactly. And one of them has a very talkative pet who's been meddling for far too long with its convenient "prophecies". I intend to pay them both a visit someday."
The forest pulsed once, deep and slow, as if it gradually understood but heavily disapproved.
So, Katsuyu's tone changed in a way Ryusei had never heard before.
The humor drained out of her voice completely, leaving only stillness.
Her vast form stopped shifting, and for a moment, even the forest seemed to hold its breath.
"Are you completely sure about this, Ryusei?" she asked quietly. "Do you really understand who you're challenging?"
It was the first time she had sounded genuinely concerned since the day they met. Because, unlike the other humans, Katsuyu already knew such matters directly, thanks to her own nature.
Among the three great sage domains, she was the most neutral, the one that kept to herself, observing in silence while the others meddled.
Mount Myōboku and its so-called Great Elder were another story entirely.
For all his talk about peace and patience, that ancient toad had never stopped moving pieces across the board.
'Sleepy', perhaps, in body, but never in mind, so very different from her.
In truth, he was even more active than the snakes when it came to shaping the world from the shadows over time.
They were the same kind of primordial beings, nature's only 'chosen creations' in a sense, so if anyone understood him, it was her, perhaps second only to that rival serpent great elder.
And together with Gamamaru always loomed that so-called savior of the human world, the one who couldn't stop clinging to the world he claimed to have saved, even centuries after his death.
Ryusei met her gaze without flinching, his tone steady but sharp. "If not him, then who else? What else explains the impossible tricks Konoha used during those recent Edo Tensei attacks on us? You saw them too. Some of it ignored not only the previous mechanics of that same jutsu but even many dimensional laws themselves. Someone had to have interfered from above. Someone beyond this world."
A low vibration rolled through the ground beneath her.
For the first time, her voice lost that lazy calm; it carried a tired edge that almost passed for anger.
"So the old toad dreamer and his little prophet are stirring again, but this time, against you..." she said quietly.
Ryusei's reply was flat. "Not stirring, interfering. Multiple times. I've seen it." For a moment, she didn't answer.
The mist thickened, and her vast body pulsed faintly, reflecting the tension she rarely allowed herself to feel.
Internally, she pieced the fragments together, things she had ignored for centuries because they didn't concern her.
Now that he had said it aloud, it all fit too neatly.
The strange ripples in natural energy whenever he fought.
The way space itself reacted to his chakra.
The constant, subtle resistance of the world's flow whenever his name reached too far.
She had sensed it long ago, that Ryusei wasn't fully of this world.
Something in him didn't belong to the natural order, not tied to the same spiritual current that ran through every living thing.
But she had brushed it aside, assuming it was simply what made him interesting.
A strange, unpredictable child tied to Tsunade, bound by contract, full of defiance yet oddly familiar.
Now, she realized what that difference meant, and why the others might see it as a threat.
Those self-appointed "guardians" of the world, Hagoromo Otsutsuki in his lingering spectral form, inside the Pure Land, and the old toad, had always viewed themselves as custodians of fate.
They guided the chosen, erased the deviants, and kept the balance tidy.
And Ryusei… was a disruption they couldn't predict.
Her tone dropped to a low murmur, thoughtful but laced with something like quiet resentment. "So that's it. You don't follow their pattern. You were never marked by their little game of destiny. You don't belong to the same current that they call balance."
Ryusei gave a faint smile, one that didn't reach his eyes. "Exactly, perhaps. And they know it. That's why they keep trying to erase me."
The forest pulsed faintly beneath their feet again, slower this time, almost sympathetic.
Katsuyu didn't speak for a while after that.
But her thoughts were clear: for the first time in a very long existence, she found herself quietly agreeing with someone who wanted to break the rules those two had written.
She didn't ask how Ryusei even knew about those two or those things beyond his 'mortal', shinobi world. It wasn't worth questioning anymore.
After all, hadn't he grown hundreds of times stronger in just a few short years? Nothing about him followed normal patterns.
She chalked it up, as always, to that strange, foreign nature of his, something not entirely born of this world, something even she couldn't define, only sense.
Ryusei wasn't surprised by her intense reaction and subsequent silence.
He knew her nature too well by now. Katsuyu was neutrality made flesh, shut-in, detached, always going with the flow instead of fighting it.
Even with their growing bond, he never expected her to take sides.
Not his, not Gamamaru's, not anyone's.
And yet, her brief reaction had confirmed something he'd only suspected before: she knew.
She had sensed something off about him long ago, something that didn't quite belong to this world, likely tied to whatever brought him here, but she'd never brought it up.
She understood, at least vaguely, that he wasn't from this world, or from what she called the same "current," probably meaning the natural flow of this planet's energy or even fate.
She wouldn't fight for him, but she wouldn't turn on him either, not even though she, too, was a being born of the same natural energy that had rejected him to extent, just like Gamamaru. For Ryusei, that was enough.
That, Ryusei figured, was exactly why Hagoromo and Gamamaru had also left her alone all this time.
They likely knew she wouldn't interfere. She just wanted peace, quiet, and her small circle of tolerable company, Tsunade, and by accident, him.
There was no way she'd ever openly challenge beings like that for the sake of a human; she wasn't the type to invite endless chaos or risk her entire quiet existence for anyone.
Simply choosing not to see him as an intruder, and even helping him in her indirect ways, was already far more than he could have expected.