Lin Qing wasn't only looking for Kaguya.
He had also investigated Black Zetsu and the Masked Man.
In the four-plus years since Lin Qing arrived in the Ninja World, he had slain all kinds of enemies:
Ninja, samurai, Daimyo, Tailed Beasts, the White Snake Sage, and Nagato from a few days ago—the owner of the Rinnegan.
Some of these opponents had been powerful, some bizarre, and others had possessed all manner of unusual backgrounds.
Yet all they had brought Lin Qing were Soul Shards.
The Dimensional Ascension Star Core, which represented a shift in the world and was used to evolve Stands, had nothing to do with how many people Lin Qing killed. It was firmly bound to the course of the world itself.
Lin Qing had long understood this through repeated experiments.
Then why did Fate Ink, which represented breaking past the critical point and allowing a Stand to take another step beyond the end of its limits, exist?
If Lin Qing's guess was correct, and Fate Ink had been created for "Requiem," "Made in Heaven," and "Love Train," then in terms of rarity:
Fate Ink > Dimensional Ascension Star Core.
Black Zetsu was just a lump of mud. What gave him the right to be compared to a change in the worldline, or even be more important than one?
Lin Qing's intuition told him that the answer to all this lay with "Kaguya."
"And then there's the 'pen.'"
Lin Qing sat in an izakaya, with a slightly tipsy Hayato Kamihara beside him.
It was the night Lin Qing returned to Kirigakure from the Land of Earth.
The moment Hayato Kamihara heard that Lin Qing had truly walked step by step from the border of the Land of Earth all the way to its royal capital, he thumped