Echoes from the Abyss

The Light Spot in Boruto's palm had floated there for three whole days.

It didn't accept Chakra, respond to the resonance of the Light Pattern, or even obey the gravity of the physical world. Sometimes it floated before Boruto's eyes, sometimes it sank several meters underground, and sometimes it appeared in two different places at once. Sarada's Mangekyō Sharingan couldn't track its probabilistic trajectory, Okita's "Kurosawa" blade couldn't cut through its essence, and even the oldest Judgement node in the network could only record its existence, not understand how it worked.

"It isn't energy," Chiyo reported from the ruined archive. Her voice trembled with a strange electronic quality as it traveled through the network. "Nor is it information. I compared it with the records of every cleansed civilization and found nothing like it."

"Then what is it?" Boruto asked.

"It's...the question itself." Chiyo paused, as if searching for the right words. "Not a question about any particular subject, but the pure form of a question. Just as Chakra is a form of energy, this is...a form of cognition."

Boruto stared at the Light Spot. For three days, he had tried everything: wrapping it in the network, analyzing it with the Light Pattern, even using "Time Dilation" to slow its flow of time for Sarada. But the Light Spot had remained unsettlingly...neutral. It didn't resist or cooperate. It simply existed.

On the morning of the fourth day, the first answer appeared.

It came not from some powerful cleanser or the descendant of some ancient bloodline, but from a node Boruto had almost forgotten: the young kunoichi who had received the first layer of truth in a medical tent in Sunagakure. Her Light Pattern was so faint as to be almost imperceptible, and her Chakra reserves could barely sustain basic Medical Ninjutsu.