Chapter 537: The White Zetsu Incident Ends
Rinne Rebirth Jutsu.
The ultimate technique of the Rinnegan -- the power over life and death at its most absolute. A forbidden art that could undo death itself, calling back those who had already departed and reigniting the fire of life within bodies that had gone cold.
The technique could return the dead to the living world.
The cost to the caster was chakra, and life energy.
Not a life for a life. Not one death traded for another.
In the original account of the technique, Nagato had died after using it -- but not because the jutsu itself demanded the caster's life as payment. He died because his body was already completely spent before he began. His chakra and life force had been drained to absolute zero long before the technique was finished, and what little remained could not sustain him.
Now, Satsuki stood below Konoha's wall with both hands forming the single snake seal, feeling what was happening inside her.
Chakra was flooding outward at a rate that was difficult to comprehend.
The speed of the drain was staggering. Most ninja -- even Kage-level -- could not have maintained it for more than a few seconds. It was the scale of this consumption that had killed Nagato, his body simply unable to bear the depletion.
But Satsuki was different.
She possessed an eye unlike any other -- the Nine Tomoe Rinne-Sharingan.
And even as the chakra began pouring out of her at that impossible rate, something deeper within those eyes woke up in response.
Tokoyo. The eye that governs the time of all things.
Her own technique. Her own ability -- the power to freely manipulate the flow of time for any object or any living being.
Life has a timeline.
Chakra has a timeline.
So Satsuki did something simple.
Every time her chakra depleted, she rewound her own timeline back to the moment when it was fullest.
Each consumption undone by a reversal. Each drain immediately cancelled by restoration.
An endless loop.
Zero net cost.
Yes -- Satsuki could use Rinne Rebirth Jutsu with no consumption at all.
Green light poured from her body like water overflowing a container, spreading outward in every direction.
It was a gentle light, and a bright one -- carrying the feeling of life, of something dormant waking up. It swept over Konoha's walls, across the empty plain beyond, through the ruins of the nearby villages, over the ground where the fallen patrol ninja lay.
One. Two. Three. More, and more.
The dead opened their eyes, one by one, within the spreading green.
The fires of life that had gone out began to burn again.
The families that had been broken came back together.
Everyone caught in the White Zetsu's path -- every single one of them -- returned.
Naruto stood on the wall and watched the green light move across the land, feeling the enormous pulse of life energy contained within it.
His sensory range was tracking every fluctuation of chakra inside Satsuki's body. Those fluctuations rose and fell in rapid alternation -- draining at a catastrophic rate, then instantly restored to peak. Draining again, restored again.
He understood.
Her Tokoyo was enabling her to use Rinne Rebirth at no cost. The knot of concern inside him loosened.
Beside him, Jiraiya and Hiruzen had stopped being able to form words some time ago.
The ruined villages in the distance. The destroyed homes. The fallen patrol ninja. All of it -- bathed in green light, alive again.
This was not a genjutsu. This was real.
"Jiraiya-sensei. Third Hokage." Naruto spoke beside them, pulling them both back to the present.
"What Satsuki just used is an ability of the Rinnegan."
He explained it carefully and patiently. "It's a technique called Rinne Rebirth Jutsu -- it can restore the dead to life." He went on to explain that Satsuki's eyes had awakened into the legendary Rinnegan.
Jiraiya's throat moved.
Rinnegan.
He had encountered that name before, those eyes before. But Satsuki's eyes were not the same as Nagato's. One was red, one was purple, and within them were shapes like Sharingan tomoe...
Naruto had said something about "Rinne-Sharingan"?
Jiraiya's mind was still working through the tangle of it -- but that wasn't what gripped him most in this moment.
What gripped him most was the technique itself.
Rinne Rebirth. A technique that could bring back the dead.
The eyes of the Sage of Six Paths could actually govern life and death?
The thought detonated in his mind, and before he had consciously reached for it, two names rose to the surface.
Nawaki. And Dan Kato.
Tsunade's little brother. And Tsunade's lost love.
Those two deaths were the deepest wounds in Tsunade's life. The things that had broken her. The reason she had fallen afterward into gambling and drinking -- anything that could blunt the pain for a little while longer.
If they could come back... if Tsunade could see them again... the part of her that had shattered might finally heal.
He was almost certain of it.
But then --
Jiraiya's feelings turned complicated.
Because recently, in the years since he had taken the Hokage position and Tsunade had become his closest advisor, he had noticed something. The two of them working alongside each other every day, navigating governance together, worrying about the village's future together -- in the middle of all that, something had shifted in the way Tsunade looked at him.
He couldn't always name it. But sometimes, on the rare occasions when he was dressed properly and standing in his role to address the village, she would come over afterward and say in her most offhand voice, "You actually looked like a Hokage today" -- and the glimmer in her eyes behind those words was not something she could quite hide.
A few days ago, he had said something offhand: "Tsunade, you look nicer than usual today." She had stared at him for a moment, then slammed her fist on the desk and called him a shameless old man. But her face had been thoroughly, unmistakably red.
Jiraiya could not work out what to make of it.
He and Tsunade had known each other for decades. They had been on the same team, fought in the same battles, survived the same near-deaths together. When in that entire history had Tsunade ever blushed around him?
Was it because he had become Hokage? Did Tsunade actually have a thing for men who carried the title, or aspired to it?
Jiraiya's mind turned the question over in circles and arrived nowhere.
It never occurred to him to look in a different direction entirely.
He never noticed that in recent years, out of some unconscious concern for maintaining a Hokage's dignity, he had quietly stopped all of his "research activities." The establishments he used to frequent -- he hadn't set foot in them for a long time. The explicit materials he used to browse -- he hadn't looked at them in ages. The habits that had always made Tsunade's brow furrow with displeasure -- he had stopped doing all of them, practically without thinking about it.
That was the entire change. Nothing more than that.
But he couldn't see it.