Chapter 510: Altering Memories
Temari harbored a profound, visceral concern for her younger brother Gaara, but she was entirely far from being that delicate and polite when managing her alternative sleeping brother, Kankuro.
Administering a relentless barrage of heavy slaps straight across his cheeks, Kankuro violently snapped out of his comatose state, his entire mind completely swimming in a fog of absolute, blank bewilderment.
A subtle smile briefly rippled across Ryo's countenance, yet he quickly suppressed the trace with a soft sigh: "The three elite Jonin native to your village are similarly logging a comatose sleep block down on the ground floor. Travel downstairs to rouse their parameters, subsequent to which you shall establish immediate contact to notify Chiyo and Sasori. The Great Ancestor shall advance ahead to track down Gaara's coordinates first."
"Senior, our collective hope relies entirely on your intervention," Temari spoke with a face packed to the absolute brim with frantic, burning impatience. "Granny Chiyo explicitly detailed that she intended to step out alongside Sasori of the Red Sand this exact morning; I lack the technical data regarding whether their vessels have successfully departed the Land of Rain by this junction."
"Is that how the logistics map out... The Great Ancestor has cleanly parsed the details!" Ryo wove a rapid Body Flicker and flashed out of existence.
Kankuro stood completely, utterly dazed: "Exactly what transpired?!"
Back in the historical timeline, subsequent to enduring a technical defeat at Sasori's hands inside the Hidden Stone Village, Chiyo had single-mindedly locked her focus into relentlessly practicing the precise operational mechanics governing her custom Optimus Prime (Qīngtiānzhù) puppet. Her absolute core objective was centered on relying exclusively on her native prowess as a master puppeteer to thoroughly flatten Sasori in a straight fight, forcefully educating his mind that if a puppeteer genuinely desires to scale past their limitations, mutating one's very own biological vessel into a wooden machine is fundamentally redundant!
As her longevity parameters steadily marched forward drop by drop, Chiyo parsed out the unvarnished reality that her physical constitution was experiencing an accelerating, downward degradation. If she refrained from channeling an absolute, burning effort to test her parameters one final time at this exact junction, the future timeline would inevitably grant her zero supplementary opportunities to execute the trial. Consequentially, at the absolute first break of morning light today, she and Sasori had cleanly crossed the perimeter blocks of the Land of Rain, sprinting straight toward the western horizons to initiate a high-powered sparring rotation deep within the dense mountain forests lining the border separating the Land of Rain and the Land of Waterfalls.
Yet, as the high-powered puppet clash progressed into its peak intensity, the terrestrial terrain beneath their boots violently collapsed into absolute oblivion...
Materializing squarely before their dilated eyes was a wrinkled chrysanthemum face, a deathly pale snake face, and an alternative individual who commanded a dual-braid facial profile—and that specific dual-braid entity was currently executing a maximum-velocity extraction sequence to pull the One-Tail straight out of Gaara's vessel...
"This... exactly what on earth is transpiring here?!"
Tenji's brow twisted into a fierce knot of deep irritation, snapping his head around to command Teuchi: "The optimal milestone to explicitly verify your absolute sincerity has successfully presented itself; advance straight ahead to cleanly eradicate their vessels!"
Teuchi wore a face entirely packed with unadorned dissatisfaction: "Your cognitive processing actually dictates instructing your sovereign Father-in-Law to step forward to verify his sincerity? Operating under a framework of this nature, do your parameters genuinely retain a desire to successfully transition into my son-in-law down the line? Whoever harbors an intense urge can comfortably execute the advance; my presence flatly declines to move!"
Tenji: "..."
Orochimaru elegantly darted his long tongue out to lick his pale lips: "Allow my presence to handle the execution."
The pristine mechanical puppet body of Sasori of the Red Sand was an exquisite laboratory asset he had actively coveted for an exceptionally immense duration, after all.
The Land of Rain.
Ryo had fundamentally not followed through on his verbal claim to immediately hunt down Gaara's tracking signals; instead, executing a sharp spatial displacement, his physical frame flashed directly inside the executive hall of the Land of Rain's central high tower.
Yahiko was currently resting his form atop the central sovereign chair, his eyes subtly closed into a half-slumber state. Catching the acoustic ripple of Ryo's arrival, he slowly forced his dual eyes open: "Your presence has successfully touched down on location."
"Mmm... exactly why?" Ryo's vocal cadence was a fraction raspy. Extensively analyzing Yahiko's current behavioral presentation, he was structurally forced to accept a catastrophic reality he had desperately wished to remain a fictional anomaly—Gaara's successful abduction was explicitly tied to Yahiko's deliberate coordination. The entity who had executed the physical ambush targeting Gaara wasn't Teuchi; it was Tenji himself, and Yahiko... operated as an active accomplice backing his wing!
Yahiko slowly rose to his feet, executing several staggering, heavy paces across the floor, leaning his torso slightly forward to gaze out through the towering floor-to-ceiling glass panel, completely overlooking the vast landscape of the Land of Rain.
"I explicitly detailed to your presence in the past that throughout the trajectory of my single lifetime, I have viscerally endured two distinct instances of absolute pain."
Ryo gave a firm, slow nod: "That historical calamity was an unvarnished sin manufactured entirely by the Great Ancestor's hands; I shall comfortably hoist the complete karmic burden straight across my back. Exactly what relevance does that parameter command relative to Gaara's vessel?"
"The Kazekage is indeed completely, thoroughly innocent," Yahiko let out a long, sweeping sigh. "Back in that historical era, that colossal, heaven-blotting stone sphere violently absorbed my biological mother into its matrix, concurrently swallowing my father's vessel down into the exact same void. The underlying technical reason my presence managed to successfully retain its active spark of life was strictly because my father, mobilizing every single scrap of his residual lifeforce at the absolute terminal micro-second, violently threw my body clear of the danger zone."
"Consequentially... your heart parameters harbor an intense urge to unleash a wave of total retribution?"
"The narrative breakdown I just articulated merely constitutes the specific script I firmly operated under across the vast majority of my timeline."
Ryo given a subtle pause: "Exactly what does that phrasing signify?"
"The intrinsic technical mechanics governing your ninjutsu are elements your presence understands with absolute, peerless clarity. My biological father was a completely, thoroughly ordinary civilian commoner. Even assuming his vessel mobilized its absolute maximum potential, exactly how many metric meters could he realistically throw my physical body? Wielding a mere five-year-old matrix, what technical methodology could I have deployed to independently escape the gravitational pull of your cataclysmic technique?"
Ryo sucked in a sharp, freezing breath of air as the logical pieces locked into place.
"A pitch-white, shadowy monstrosity successfully intercepted my body to execute a high-powered rescue, subsequent to which that white monstrosity seamlessly metamorphosed to assume a human framework—and that specific individual is precisely the Patriarch of the Dark Akatsuki, Tenji!"
An absolute, heavy silence blanketed every corner of the executive hall. Ryo's mind rapidly cycled backward, meticulously evaluating every single drop of historical interaction he had shared alongside Yahiko across the past timelines.
After an immense duration of quiet, Ryo knit his brows into a narrow slit to articulate: "Yahiko, the active memory repository locked inside your brain has highly probably been subjected to a highly sophisticated manipulation sequence orchestrated by Tenji's hands. Permit the Great Ancestor to execute a clinical diagnostic sweep across your matrix to verify the details."
"That is fundamentally redundant, Senior. If your presence had proactively chosen to execute a diagnostic sweep across my memories far earlier in the timeline, how monumentally brilliant it would have been. My memory tracks were indeed subjected to an exceptionally sophisticated manipulation block; prior to a handful of days ago, my cognitive parameters continuously operated under the firm assumption that it was strictly my father who had saved my life, subsequent to which I spent a prolonged duration wandering the outside world as a homeless orphan, picking up a fraction of basic, crude ninjutsu intelligence along the way, until I successfully crossed paths alongside Master Jiraiya across my fourteenth year...
Regrettably, the absolute fraction of a second my dual eyes locked onto the active presence of the Rinnegan, the entirety of my authentic, locked memories violently surged back online. It was undeniably Tenji who had executed my rescue; he was the specific entity who escorted my vessel to wander across every corner of the world, drop by drop, a sequence that is monumentally vivid, authentic, and impeccably credible. I even distinctly retain the precise memory of an instance where he was deploying the Magic Lantern Body Technique (Gentōshin no Jutsu) to establish contact alongside Kakuzu, across which my presence voiced a curious inquiry out of pure childhood instinct, only to receive a stern verbal reprimand from his hands..."
Ryo's heart parameters steadily commenced a deep, downward plunge. He razor-sharply recalled that back in the historical timeline when Kakuzu had decoupled from the Dark Akatsuki to utilize corporate intelligence to squeeze financial capital out of his pockets, the man had indeed explicitly detailed that the Patriarch of the Dark Akatsuki continuously escorted a specific young child along his flanks.
Compounding that, he had continuously harbored a trace of internal confusion regarding the underlying root cause of why Yahiko had failed to share an identical template of destiny alongside Nagato and Konan, chalking it up to a mere twist of fate where his presence had failed to track down his wandering coordinates... If Yahiko hadn't been physically present within the Land of Rain across those specific years to begin with, the logistics aligned with absolute, unvarnished coherence.
"Senior, it is monumentally difficult to place your absolute belief in this narrative framework, correct?" Yahiko shook his head with a bitter laugh: "I have continuously dedicated every single scrap of my internal focus to relentlessly hunt down the coordinates of the Dark Akatsuki's Patriarch, yet I fundamentally failed to parse out the reality that my very own presence operated strictly as a specialized chess piece he had planted via a heavy memory-sealing formulation back across my fourteenth year... Destiny has genuinely orchestrated a monumentally colossal, cosmic joke targeting my lifetime parameters!"
Ryo pursed his lips: "Since your parameters are perfectly clear on the reality that you operate strictly as a chess piece, why on earth did you decline to launch an active internal resistance? Exactly why did you choose to submissively comply alongside his logistical directives?"
Yahiko plunged into silence for several brief moments: "Senior, do your parameters command the active intelligence regarding the ultimate terminal output produced by this Six Kage Summit?"
Ryo smoothly shook his head to signal a negative.
"It shares an absolute, perfect equivalence alongside never hosting the convention to begin with. A unified, global joint investigative grid was completely rejected; every single Kage representing alternative major nations strictly offered superficial verbal assertions that they would independently audit their sovereign domains, completely declining to extend a single shred of baseline trust toward alternative states. Specifically the Fourth Raikage—his vessel had barely sustained the catastrophic loss of his younger brother, yet he continuously..." Yahiko's internal emotional parameters violently spiked into a highly turbulent block. "If the logistics continuously march down that specific track, the shinobi world will fundamentally never capture a single shred of true, absolute peace!"
"Consequentially... your heart parameters harbor a desire to invite absolute, total devastation?"
Yahiko shook his head: "Regarding the technical parameters governing the Ten-Tails, my presence commands a non-negligible tier of baseline understanding. However, my cognitive planning dictates that since it fundamentally lacked the capacity to completely wipe the shinobi world off the map back in the ancient era, its capability to achieve that terminal output in the modern era is exponentially more nonexistent. After all, your presence is firmly anchored under the heavens!"
"Refrain from assuming that tossing a premier compliment straight toward the Great Ancestor will comfortably yield a lenient administrative resolution for your actions; I am fundamentally not an individual whose parameters can be effortlessly hoodwinked by a mere line of flattering praise!"
Yahiko was completely caught flat-footed.
Ryo raised his eyebrows: "Hurry up, deploy a handful of supplementary compliments!"
Yahiko let out a helpless sigh: "Senior, I genuinely harbor a profound tier of absolute admiration targeting your presence. Right at a critical juncture of this nature, you still command the capacity to remain this... monumentally lighthearted and carefree!"
"Sinking into a state of hollow sorrow or frantic impatience possesses absolute zero utility to resolve a single technical failure node; comfortably proceed with your prose." Ryo smiled gently.
Yahiko wove a thoroughly speechless shake of his head: "Since the world is fundamentally insulated from total devastation, why not proactively assist the adversary to secure absolute success? A complete collapse must precede a true, monumental reconstruction; once a unified, global adversary materializes before their flanks, the shinobi world might finally capture a genuine opportunity to converge toward absolute peace!"
"Consequentially, you seamlessly coordinated alongside the Dark Akatsuki's Patriarch to cleanly capture Gaara?"
Yahiko gave a firm nod: "This can comfortably be cast as the absolute final desperate gamble executed by my hands, operating under the sovereign mantle of an Akatsuki Leader who completely failed to deliver absolute peace... Naturally, my articulation of these details is fundamentally not to forge a shallow shield to absolve my vessel of its sovereign guilt. The Kazekage has been successfully captured, meaning the Hidden Sand Village desperately requires a specific target to completely vent its explosive fury upon. Senior, execute your physical strike to terminate my life force!"
Ryo fell into brief, focused calculation for two seconds. Extending his right hand forward, his palm seamlessly flattened directly atop the crown of Yahiko's head, prompting Yahiko to slowly and gracefully seal his dual eyes.
An immense duration of absolute quiet rolled past, subsequent to which Yahiko forced his eyes open, his gaze entirely packed with a trace of blank, vacant bewilderment.
"Senior... my current state is... The Kazekage, his vessel!"
Ryo let out a relaxed, gentle chuckle: "A brief moment ago, your parameters were successfully blindsided by an underhanded ambush launched by the Dark Akatsuki's Patriarch, completely altering your native memory tracks; a structural development of this nature is fundamentally not the fault of your execution. Gaara will remain perfectly secure; refrain from saddling your heart with a single shred of self-reproach. The Great Ancestor shall execute a rapid travel block to handle the logistics and return on the double!"
Watching Ryo's physical frame cleanly flash out of existence, Yahiko lifted his hand to gently trace his forehead, his cognitive processing erupting into an absolute torrent of pure fury: "That utterly detestable bastard Tenji, to think he actually possessed the reckless audacity to deploy a highly specific, underhanded memory-altering methodology targeting my vessel!"
"He deserves to be thoroughly erased from the face of the earth!"
"I desperately pray the Senior's velocity parameters can comfortably match the timeline, ensuring the Kazekage emerges from this crisis completely, thoroughly unharmed..."
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