Chapter 539: Parallel Universe
Naruto agreed to the trip without thinking about it.
Traveling together through the ninja world -- seeing places they had never seen, scenery they had never witnessed, food they had never tasted, walking hand in hand with nothing that needed doing and nowhere they had to be. This was exactly what a honeymoon was supposed to look like, wasn't it?
Even if the honeymoon had perhaps been running somewhat longer than the conventional definition might suggest.
The thought crossed his mind from time to time. But every time it surfaced, Satsuki's bright, expectant eyes would look at him from across wherever they were, and the thought would retreat.
Fine. Long was fine. Nobody had ever specified how long a honeymoon had to be.
Satsuki's own position on the matter was that she intended to remain in this state, attached to Naruto's side without interruption, until the day she became pregnant. Naruto had no particular objection to this.
So the two of them committed to the trip immediately and went to pack. There wasn't much to bring. A few changes of clothes, some money, the basic necessities -- everything went into a storage scroll with room to spare. Satsuki specifically included a compact camera to document the journey, every small moment of it.
The overall setup looked essentially like preparing for a mission, logistically speaking.
The feeling was completely different. Then it had been duty. Now it was nothing but the desire to enjoy themselves, and to be with each other.
Once they were ready, Naruto wrapped one arm around Satsuki's waist.
A flash of Flying Thunder God.
They were outside the village -- a quiet clearing, dense forest on all sides, mountains rolling in the distance, blue sky above with slow white clouds drifting through it.
Naruto released his hold and turned to Satsuki, opening his mouth to ask where she wanted to go first.
She was already ahead of him.
That expression was on her face -- the pleased, anticipatory one, the one that looked like a child who had planned everything long in advance and had only been waiting for the signal to move. Her eyes were bright with it.
Then she opened those eyes fully.
Six Tomoe Rinnegan. Nine Tomoe Rinne-Sharingan.
Naruto paused. Did traveling require those eyes?
Satsuki had been wanting to do this since the day she awakened them.
From the very first moment those eyes had come into being, she had understood one of the Rinnegan's abilities. It had been pulling at her curiosity ever since, tempting her to try it every time the thought surfaced.
The only thing that had delayed her was not being quite ready to leave the private world she and Naruto had built during the honeymoon -- that uninterruptible space that belonged only to the two of them.
But now she felt the time was right.
"Naruto." Satsuki spoke, and she couldn't keep the excitement entirely out of her voice. "My Rinnegan has a bloodline ability. It's called Setsunaju."
A time-type ability.
Naruto knew how powerful Satsuki's Tokoyo was -- pausing time, reversing time, accelerating time, erasing time, every operation relating to time was within its reach. He had seen what it could do.
So what came after time?
The answer was: space-time.
One of Satsuki's Rinnegan eyes possessed the ability to traverse space-time. To travel at random to parallel universes, into different worlds, to experience different possibilities.
It sounded complex. The technique itself was not. It needed no elaborate jutsu, no enormous chakra cost. Only the power of those eyes, and the barriers between worlds could be torn open and stepped through.
"Satsuki's eyes are really something," Naruto said, and he meant it completely.
He looked down at those mismatched irises and thought: it was almost symmetric. His Universal Manifestation could rewrite reality. Satsuki's Setsunaju could cross between realities. One changed the world. The other moved between worlds.
And crossing between worlds was, if anything, safer than rewriting one.
Something from the distant past surfaced in his mind.
There had been two visitors once from another timeline -- Uchiha Sasuke and Uzumaki Boruto, a master and student from a different world who had arrived here preparing for a threat they expected from Otsutsuki Urashiki, staying for a period before returning home.
That, apparently, was what he was about to do in reverse.
But there was something else to consider.
Why exactly was Satsuki so excited about parallel universes?
Parallel universes meant other possibilities.
And in other possibilities -- in other worlds -- there existed a genuine female Naruto. Not a puppet made in her image, not a transformation technique. A girl named Naruko, born that way from the very beginning, who had lived her entire life as herself.
The moment Satsuki thought about meeting the Naruto of a world where he was a girl from birth, she couldn't stop her mouth from curving upward.
She was confident, too.
If Naruto was a girl in that world, then the version of herself in that world would absolutely have already claimed her.
She had already played out the scene in her head -- her arm linked through Naruko's, both of them standing together, smiling at a camera.
She was going to take as many photographs as possible.
And when she came back, she was going to show every single one of them to Gaara. To thoroughly, definitively drive that red-haired sand ninja absolutely up the wall.
There was no massive surge of energy.
No blinding light, no thundering sound, none of the dramatic effects that crossing the boundaries of space and time might reasonably be expected to produce.
After Naruto nodded to say he was ready, Satsuki's Six Tomoe Rinnegan began to rotate slowly.
Yin Release chakra flowed outward from the depths of those eyes, wrapping around both of them like a second skin.
The next moment.
A soft sound, barely there.
They were gone.
-- -- --
Naruto felt strange.
He was clearly moving -- crossing space-time at what should have been an incomprehensible velocity -- and yet he felt nothing. No sensation of motion whatsoever. He might as well have been standing on level ground. No weightlessness, no vertigo, not the smallest hint of disorientation.
But the world around them had changed.
Gone was the familiar forest. Gone was every landscape he had grown up looking at.
In their place: the universe.
Dark, vast space, scattered in every direction with the light of countless stars. Distant nebulae turned slowly through brilliant color. Enormous planets rotated in silence. All of it swept past them at dizzying speed as they flew forward, the cosmos blurring at the edges of his vision.
Naruto looked at all of it, and an odd feeling moved through him.
A spontaneous decision, made on a whim, leading directly to crossing the boundaries of space-time?
That was...
He thought about it. Then he decided it wasn't that surprising, actually.
History was full of people who had crossed through time for impulsive or trivial reasons. That blue robotic cat with all the gadgets in its pocket came to mind immediately.
When you put it that way, this was fairly normal.
He turned to look at Satsuki.
She was watching the star-light sweep past, that eager, anticipatory expression fully in place, looking for all the world like a child who had finally, finally made it to the day of the school trip she had been waiting for all term.
Naruto couldn't help smiling.
Fine. She wanted to play. He would play with her.
Ahead of them, at the far edge of the darkness, a light appeared.
Bright. Vivid. Like an exit. Or -- more accurately -- like a door. Through that door should be their destination.
The light grew closer.
Closer, and larger.
And then, all at once -- it opened.
The stars and nebulae and cosmic sweep of everything were gone. In their place, a completely new expanse of world.
Naruto blinked. His feet were solid on the ground again, the weight of the earth real beneath him.
Around them: a forest.
It looked, honestly, almost identical to the forest they had left. Trees. Grass. The smell of soil and bark. Only slightly denser here, the canopy a little thicker.
Entirely, disappointingly ordinary. The kind of ordinary that made a person briefly question whether they had actually gone anywhere at all.
Satsuki scratched her head, a trace of puzzlement crossing her face.
This was not quite what she had imagined. She had been expecting something striking -- a dramatically different world, breathtaking landscapes, something to make the journey feel real. A forest was not that.
Naruto looked around at the trees, the paths winding between them, the familiar-yet-not-quite-right quality of everything he was seeing.
Somehow, inexplicably, he felt like he recognized this forest path.
Satsuki was just opening her mouth to say something --
A voice reached them from somewhere nearby.
A young voice. Male. The voice of a teenager, carrying the raw, unpolished edges of youth -- and filled with something that pulled tight in the chest just to hear it. He was crying out at full volume.
The sound was grief. Was outrage. Was the particular kind of anguish that only comes from loving someone and watching them choose to disappear.
"Why -- why, Sasuke! Why have you become like this?!"
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Ahhhh....even canon's Naruto's relationship with Sasuke was a bit sus...and this Chinese author has a habit of stretching the word "bromance" let's hope this Isn't what I think it is.
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