Visitors from the Moon

Inside the sealing sphere was a void.

There was no light, no sound, no up or down, no left or right, no passage of time. Kaguya Clan floated at the very center of that void, her white robe motionless despite the absence of wind, her white hair spreading out in the weightlessness like a flower blooming beneath the water. Her eyes were closed, and her breathing was slow—so slow that she resembled a hibernating animal. But her body was not dormant—azure veins glowed faintly across her skin, thin as countless luminous rivers flowing beneath the surface. That light seeped from her body, gathering in the void into strands so fine and dense they were nearly invisible. The ends of those strands pierced deep into empty space, into the sources of the Ninja World's natural energy that she could not see but could sense.

She was draining it.

Six Paths Chibaku Tensei had sealed her body, her movements, and most of her connection to the outside world, but it had not severed the thread between her and the God Tree. That thread ran too deep—so deep that even the Sage of Six Paths had failed to cut it when he sealed her away. Over a thousand years, she had forced that thread out through the cracks in the seal bit by bit, like a tree root boring through cracks in stone in search of water.

That thread was still there. From the gaps between the black patterns on the surface of the sealing sphere, countless fine strands of light, nearly invisible to the naked eye, extended from within the sphere and pierced into the God Tree's withered vines, into the depths of the earth, into the natural energy permeating the air. Those strands were slowly, ceaselessly drawing the life force from