Whoooosh!
A fierce wind howled through the room, whipping hair into the air.
The pitch-black Root cloak and the Third Hokage's white ceremonial robes flared violently in the gale. Doors and windows rattled as if struck by electricity, while the mountain of documents on the desk scattered like snowflakes in a storm.
Creak... crack...
The reinforced concrete pedestal split apart bit by bit. The thick steel mesh inside, strong enough to bear several tons of weight, began to twist and deform, letting out shrill cries of protest.
Hiruzen Sarutobi stared at Konome Taketori, who still looked almost completely unaffected, and the veins along his neck bulged violently. His face had already turned as red as a ripe jujube. His thick, powerful fingers, strong enough to crush raw carbon into diamonds, clamped hard around her hand, yet he could not force it down even the slightest amount.
Impossible!
The ever-smiling old man who usually looked like a gentle village elder now showed the whites of his eyes. The wrinkles at the corners had flattened from sheer shock, and beneath that fierce look lay a thread of fear.
Because he had mastered all five elemental transformations of Konoha, along with genjutsu and every taijutsu style in the village, the outside world had given him elegant titles like "The Professor of Ninjutsu."
But his strongest ability had always been his taijutsu.
Especially his raw physical strength.
Thanks to his summoning contract with Enma, he had once trained in Mount Hanagata's fire arts and even consumed a mystical fruit called the Sage Peach.
After eating it, he trained alongside the monkey clan in their indestructible body technique. Though he ultimately failed because his body could not fully endure it, his physical strength still rose beyond human limits.
In his youth, he could wrestle tailed beasts barehanded without relying on ninjutsu at all.
That strength had been the foundation of his supremacy on the battlefields of the Second Shinobi War. It was also the power he had always been most proud of.
Even if the First Hokage himself were alive, there was no way he should have been able to suppress him so completely in a contest of pure strength.
And yet Konome Taketori did not even seem to be exerting herself. Her hand simply stood there on the table, upright and unmoving, as if she were casually toying with him like an adult humoring Konohamaru during a family game.
His upper and lower teeth ground together so hard they began to ache. Hiruzen drove both feet into the ground hard enough to leave craters in the floor.
A mountain-like force poured out of him in waves. Even the Nine-Tails would have been overturned by such strength. Yet the hand before him remained fixed in place, as if it had been forged into the pedestal itself.
How could the gap be this wide?
He had imagined being narrowly defeated by her. He had even imagined her using some trick or sneaky method to win.
But he had never imagined this. Never imagined being crushed so thoroughly in such a straightforward and merciless fashion.
She had not used the Eight Gates. She had not used Lightning Release Chakra Mode. She had not used a tailed beast cloak.
None of the countless methods of enhancement he could think of had appeared.
She had simply used her bare body and overwhelmed him.
Am I really old?
For the first time in years, doubt crept into his heart.
Crrk!
By now, the flat stone pedestal had been gouged into deep pits and grooves beneath their elbows. Crushed bits of rock had already turned into fine powder.
Konome Taketori quietly studied the limits of Hiruzen's strength while simultaneously absorbing and guiding every ounce of that immense force into Takamagahara.
Since this arm-wrestling match was meant to decide who would truly steer Konoha's future, she intended to make the gap between them absolutely undeniable.
Only then would the balance of power remain stable in the future.
As for the mental damage this might inflict on Hiruzen, that could not be helped.
A human being using their full strength could not speak, but she could see the emotion sparks pouring from above his head.
Confusion and frustration danced wildly, like scraps of ash rising into the air from burning funeral paper.
As an ordinary shinobi without a bloodline limit, Hiruzen Sarutobi had undoubtedly already stood at the peak of humanity. Excluding Might Guy, who burned his life away for temporary strength, no one else compared.
But now, she had completely surpassed the human body and entered an entirely different realm.
The gray light in her eyes reflected a miniature Konoha.
She was currently using the ultimate dojutsu born after five years of transformation, after absorbing chakra on the level of a tailed beast and then nurturing it through Reverse Eight Gates, the Sage Body, and the stimulation of the Shikotsumyaku.
Takamagahara.
Its name came from the legendary realm where the primordial gods were born, the divine plain said to be the dwelling place of heaven's deities.
The ability of her left eye was the absolute and exquisitely precise control of her own body.
Not the crude manipulation of muscle, bone, fascia, or hormones, but control down to the level of cells, genes, and neural signals, the underlying logic of biological life itself.
Combined with the partial immortality she had inherited from Kaguya, her flesh could transform endlessly.
She had actually predicted this ability long ago. Even before Takamagahara fully awakened, its signs had already been present.
The true terror of this dojutsu, however, lay in the right eye.
Takamagahara, right eye.
Its effect was to consume ninety percent of her chakra in a single burst and convert it into endless rays of dojutsu light, the same gray light that had flooded the world when the ability first awakened.
That light existed between illusion and reality, in a superimposed state of both. Nothing in the material world could block it.
It was similar to the red moonlight Kaguya used when casting Infinite Tsukuyomi.
But unlike Infinite Tsukuyomi, Takamagahara did not target lifeforms or minds.
It targeted lifeless things.
Everything without will that the gray light touched would become one with Konome Taketori completely and forever.
Just moments ago, when Takamagahara was released, the gray light had already encompassed the whole of Konoha and spread outward for dozens of kilometers.
From that instant onward, the rivers had become her veins. The earth had become her muscles. Even the natural energy of heaven and earth had become hers to command.
Konoha itself had become part of her body.
Nothing that happened within it could escape her sight.
No wonder Jiraiya could no longer sense natural energy. Within Takamagahara, the natural energy had already become her possession. Even entering the state of unity with the world now required her permission.
No one could borrow the power of heaven and earth inside her Takamagahara. Even elemental techniques could no longer draw any passive support from the environment. One could only fight using their own chakra.
And once that chakra escaped into the surroundings, it too would become part of her.
Her chakra would grow endlessly through the battles of others.
And that was not all.
The ability of her left eye was to control everything of her own body, and since Konoha had already fused into that body, it too now fell under that authority.
With both eyes combined, she had become the god of this land.
Heaven and earth were born alongside me, and all things were one with me.
The state that Zhuangzi had once spoken of in legend had now become reality.
Hiruzen Sarutobi was not arm-wrestling a young woman standing before him.
He was trying to overpower Takamagahara itself, a body measured in square kilometers.
No one could defeat Konome Taketori in a contest of brute force anymore.
Compared to Jiraiya's state of emptying the mind and merging with nature, hers was the true union of heaven and man.
Watching old Hiruzen stubbornly continue to pour on more strength even after he should have understood the gap, Konome Taketori decided she had bullied the elderly man long enough.
Within the virtual landscape reflected in her gray eyes, one flat stretch of land around twenty kilometers outside Konoha trembled with the roar of an earthquake.
The yellow-green hill buried beneath rotting leaves and forest debris bulged upward like the biceps of a giant arm. Deep grooves appeared across the earth in sharp, exaggerated lines, as if the land itself had become straining muscle.
Creeeeak!
Countless steel bars wailed and snapped.
The terrifying force of moving earth gathered in Konome Taketori's hand. Hiruzen's eyes suddenly widened. He felt as though his entire hand were about to be crushed into a lump of flesh.
Boom!
The pedestal exploded into powder. The reinforcing steel bars cracked into pieces and scattered across the office floor.
Her jade-white arm, heavier than a mountain, pinned Hiruzen's twisted hand immovably in midair, like the Five Fingers Mountain suppressing the Monkey King.
The match was over.
Whoosh.
The violent wind caused by erupting chakra gradually faded.
Papers lay strewn across the floor like snow, mixed with broken steel and dust.
Jiraiya stared blankly as the mysterious woman held Hiruzen Sarutobi down with ease. He could hardly believe what he was seeing.
"The match is over. The winner of this arm-wrestling contest is..."
Though still stunned, the absurdly serious Jiraiya did not forget he was the referee. He opened his mouth to declare the result, only to realize he still did not know the woman's name.
Neither of them paid him any attention.
Konome Taketori used medical ninjutsu to heal the cracks that had formed in Hiruzen's arm bones, then released his hand.
"Teacher, I yield."
Hiruzen finally seemed to wake from a daze. His arm trembled weakly in the air, and his powerful body, flushed red from overexertion, sagged back into its old, stooped posture.
He looked her up and down as if he were staring at some kind of monster.
"You have already stepped into that realm?"
The Warring States era had once been dominated by Hashirama Senju and Madara Uchiha, who towered above their generation. The current Kage, no matter how powerful, would have been toys before those two. Even the tailed beasts, walking calamities to every great village, had been little more than oversized pets in their presence.
Hiruzen and Danzo had studied Hashirama's cells and the Sharingan not because they were obsessed with bloodline limits like Orochimaru was, but because they sought the supreme power of the God of Shinobi and the Asura of the Ninja World.
Now, seeing that Konome Taketori had also reached that level, he understood at once that she had most likely entered that legendary realm.
"It is hard to describe, but yes."
Konome Taketori answered calmly.
In the virtual Konoha reflected in her eyes, the land twenty kilometers away that had briefly lent her its strength was already quietly smoothing itself back to normal.
Thanks to the fine control of Takamagahara's left eye, the deep grooves in the ground were being filled in at once. Even the yellow-green layer of rotting leaf mold and humus returned to its original state.
In her hands, the earth was no different than a lump of soft clay.
Strictly speaking, anything within the region illuminated by Takamagahara's light had become part of her body. She could manipulate matter within that domain almost at will, for the cost of only a negligible amount of chakra.
As for why moving such a vast stretch of land cost so little chakra, she still did not fully understand. She only suspected it had something to do with natural energy.
She had only just awakened the dojutsu, and the moment she discovered Ao outside the village, she had not had time to fully master Takamagahara. She had probably not yet developed even one percent of its full potential.
"Amazing... truly amazing."
Hiruzen shook his head in amazement. As he looked at the new God of Shinobi standing before him, a complicated light flickered in his eyes.
Konome Taketori recognized that look.
In her previous life, she had seen the same expression on people's faces at zoos when they stared at giant pandas.
It was only natural.
Across a thousand years of shinobi history, only three people had ever reached the level of beyond Kage.
And two of them had done so by relying on the powers of Asura and Indra.
She should be the only one who had clawed her way there through the Byakugan and the Shikotsumyaku alone.
The Byakugan offered little in the way of raw chakra enhancement, and its dojutsu abilities were relatively basic. The Shikotsumyaku was agonizingly hard to awaken, and once it did, the user was often wracked by disease and pain.
She had overcome all of that by developing Reverse Eight Gates, breaking through the limits of flesh, bloodline, and age, and finally climbing to the summit.
In some sense, she was rarer than a giant panda.
Looking at the mask on her face, Hiruzen Sarutobi finally understood that not only could he no longer stop her, but likely no one in the ninja world could stop her anymore.
After a moment of silence, he spoke in a complicated tone.
"Do as you wish. I will not stop you again. I only hope you will protect Konoha and keep this place from falling into the suffering of war."
"Thank you for your support, teacher. I will remember it."
To deal with outside forces, one first had to settle matters within.
With Hiruzen's support, Root in her hands, and the network of power she had built over the years, only one final step remained before she could fully unify Konoha's power structure without bloodshed.
Becoming Hokage.
Next, it was time to deal with the geniuses gathered outside.
Rustle...
Bent over the desk, Hiruzen quickly wrote out an official order, stamped it with the Hokage seal, and handed it to her.
"You will have full authority over all matters related to this exam. If anyone refuses to obey, show them this."
Konome Taketori tucked the scroll into her clothes, nodded to Hiruzen, and turned to leave.
Whoosh.
An invisible breeze swept through the room.
The pits in the floor smoothed themselves flat. The twisted and broken steel bars wriggled and fused together like earthworms, while the shattered concrete seemed to flow backward in time, reforming around them and sinking back into the floorboards.
Even the documents that had been torn apart by the wind pieced themselves back together and returned neatly to Hiruzen's desk.
Everything in the office restored itself to its original state.
Only Hiruzen and his disciple remained motionless, staring at the miracle before them, unable to react for several seconds.
"This... this looks like senjutsu."
Though he could no longer enter the state of unity with the world, Jiraiya still sensed a trace of natural energy in the restored files.
To use the violent power of nature to smooth even fragile paper back into shape with such delicate precision was something even the sages of Mount Myoboku could not accomplish.
"Teacher, who exactly is she?"
He could not hold back the question any longer.
Hiruzen looked toward the departing figure in the hall, rubbing his stiff right hand. His expression held both the helplessness of a teacher surpassed by his student and a strange, quiet pride.
"She is my final disciple. She is the greatest genius in Konoha's history. She is also the newborn God of Shinobi... Konome Taketori."
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