A golden sun, formed from countless wills, slowly spun in Naruto's palm, radiating a warm yet chaotic light that Jin couldn't understand.
"What is this...?" The Mangekyō Sharingan in Jin's right eye—the one that belonged to Obito—analyzed the energy at an extremely high frequency. The results were nothing but gibberish.
Hope, despair, love, hatred, courage, fear, trust, suspicion... Countless opposing emotional data points tangled together without rhyme or reason, like a pot of boiling stew. They should have repelled and canceled each other out, eventually fading into nothingness. Yet at that moment, they coexisted in a wondrous way, forming an energy structure that was stable yet full of infinite variables.
"An illogical aggregate." Jin reached his conclusion. The streams of numbers across his body flickered more violently, as if a supercomputer had encountered a virus it couldn't process. He tried to isolate a single emotional variable and analyze it, but every time he locked onto one, an entirely opposite emotion surged up at once, trapping his logic in an endless loop.
"I understand." After a brief glitch, Jin's voice turned cold again. "This chaos itself is what you call a 'Bond.' It isn't a form of energy, but a decentralized network protocol. Through a core node called 'Uzumaki Naruto,' it connects all of you independent, bug-ridden programs into... a much larger, more chaotic, antivirus-proof virus cluster."
He raised his hand, palm aimed at Naruto—and at the entire Shinobi Alliance behind him.
"If the bugs can't be fixed, then I'll format the Hard Drive."
As his voice fell, the world began to "drop frames."
The distant desert, the sky, and the clouds seemed to turn into low-resolution textures. Mosaic-like pixels appeared, then peeled away piece by piece, revealing the deep, empty darkness behind them. This wasn't an illusion. It was an