After the Aftermath

Three days later, in Konoha's underground shelter.

Boruto had recovered, but his Light Pattern had changed permanently. It now showed a pattern interwoven with gold and blue, as if two forces within him had reached an unstable balance. Representatives of the Five Great Nations gathered once again, but this time, the atmosphere was different.

Kurotsuchi had come in person, without an escort. The Raikage joined by encrypted communication. Chojuro sat in a corner, turning an ancient Kirigakure coin over in his hand. It was a relic from before the Otsutsuki era, said to have come from the "drowned ancestors."

The crystal was placed inside a specially designed chakra-shielding field. Boruto didn't explain where it had come from. He only said that he'd found it in the underwater ruins, and that it might contain crucial information about the "screening" mechanism.

"How do we activate it?" Naruto asked.

"My blood," Boruto said. "Or, more precisely, a genetic sequence similar to mine. An Otsutsuki descendant or a carrier of a planetary Node."

He cut his palm, and golden blood—not pure red anymore—dripped onto the crystal's surface.

Light burst forth.

It wasn't an image, but an experience projected directly into everyone's minds. They saw a planet—not Earth, but one with similar features. They saw its civilization, whose technology was on par with that of the Shinobi World today, and which had just mastered the deeper applications of chakra.

Then they saw the "harvest."

The sky split open. Not metaphorically, but in a real rift in space, revealing the endless Void beyond. Some kind of structure extended from the fissure, like enormous roots made of light, burrowing into the planet's atmosphere, oceans, and crust. Life withered the instant the roots made contact. The living weren't killed, but drained—their chakra, life force, even their very souls