The Thing That Fell From the Sky

A golden meteor streaked across the night sky.

Beneath the night, couples made wishes upon the shooting star, ninjas stationed abroad prayed for their missions to go smoothly, and children hoped for many gifts...

Only Aoike was enduring the excruciating pain in his eyes; his incomplete Susanoo lacked the ability to fly.

But it was clear that Aoike had not yet advanced to that level of power.

The golden torrent had carried him past the atmosphere, but it could sustain him no further.

At this moment, Aoike could feel the air friction against the shell of his Susanoo.

The intense heat was constantly evaporating the ocular power of his Mangekyo Sharingan, and the scorching flames enveloped the silver-white Susanoo.

With no time to think of anything else, Aoike could only do his best to maintain his defense; it took only one minute to fall from an altitude of ten thousand meters.

The high-quality, massive Susanoo insulated him from the damage caused by crossing the atmosphere, but his descent speed grew faster and faster.

When the continent became visible to the naked eye, Aoike deactivated his Susanoo.

Only a group of people making wishes remained, staring in bewilderment as the meteor carrying their hopes extinguished in mid-air.

The gale winds ruined Aoike's composure; he covered his eyes with his hand, observing the distance to the ground through the gaps in his fingers.

When he was less than a hundred meters from a small hill, the Susanoo, clad in Tengu armor, appeared out of thin air and slammed into the earth in the blink of an eye.

At that moment!

Nagato, who was maintaining the Pain bodies and discussing plans with Konan in a cave, suddenly felt a sense of foreboding, his hair standing on end. Almost instinctively, he cut off the chakra to all the Pain bodies.

"Shinra Tensei!"

Under the supply of a massive amount of chakra, a tremendous repulsive force deflected the mountain-shattering Susanoo a certain distance away.

Even so, the entire mountain nearly collapsed completely.

Nagato furrowed his brows. Besides him, Konan, and the Pain Deva Path, all other Pain bodies, along with the scout White Zetsu, had perished.

He did not care at all about the White Zetsu, which were easily replicated, but the loss of the Naraka Path meant not only that it would be harder to repair the other damaged Pain bodies, but also that his external strength would decline in the short term.

To him, who fancied himself a god, this was an ominous sign, especially under these circumstances of a sudden attack.

"I'll go check the situation."

Konan used her paper-folding secret technique, flapping her wings as she headed toward the center of the ruins, with the Pain Deva Path hurriedly following behind.

Nagato, gaunt and sitting in his wheelchair, wore a gloomy expression as he wheeled himself back into a hidden barrier.

When Konan arrived above the target, she used Wind Style to easily disperse the lingering smoke.

In the deep crater created by the impact, Aoike lay weakly on his back, his eyes tightly shut as two lines of blood tears slid down his cheeks, and blood overflowed from his mouth and nose.

If not for the Shinra Tensei pushing him aside and absorbing a portion of the force, Aoike's condition would have been even worse.

Struggling to open his blurred eyes, he could barely see anything and couldn't even form hand seals.

As he struggled, a mouthful of blood surged up his throat, and the final image that froze in his mind was only a flash of blue.

A month later, amidst the damp, drizzling rain, Nagato was remotely controlling the newly repaired Six Paths of Pain to test their performance.

In a room not far away, Konan stood beside a wooden bed; the air held a faint, musty scent peculiar to the Land of Rain.

"Since you're awake, there's no need to pretend to be asleep."

"You have slept long enough."

The disguise Aoike had honed through two years of crawling through death was not enough to fool the experienced Konan.

As a fish on the chopping block, Aoike cooperated fully and opened his eyes, making no unnecessary movements.

Mainly, the injuries from the high-altitude fall left him in pain all over, unable to muster any strength.

"Can you speak?"

Her cold voice, paired with a detached expression, naturally carried a sense of aloofness.

Aoike's throat emitted a wheezing, rattling sound like wind blowing through thatch.

Konan looked him over, left a single instruction to rest well, and walked away.

Aoike regained his senses and realized this was not Root.

The Root in the darkness had plenty of ways to make a captive with a hoarse throat "speak," though there were rarely any captives who survived anyway.

Aoike blinked; the clear, bright world was filled with details he could usually only see when his Sharingan was active.

He subconsciously switched to his Mangekyo, and as expected, he was blind.

After experiencing successive great battles and the feat of piercing through the atmosphere, that pair of Mangekyo, which had durability far exceeding Sasuke's, was ruined.

But the benefit gained was that from now on, he would no longer be under anyone's thumb.

He could no longer feel the Caged Bird Seal on his forehead, and during his coma, his Byakugan had undergone a fetal mutation, evolving into the Tenseigan.

Unexpectedly, he had also inherited the Byakugan's 360-degree, blind-spot-free field of vision; he would never again need to make his veins bulge just to look at someone.

His blue eyes would develop into their complete form after a few more fetal movements, and by then, he would have the strength to put up a fight against the "original" Otsutsuki when they came to visit.

Most importantly of all...

At the intersection of life and death, he had seen his family.

That conversation made him understand that a person's fate and their choices were different things; although he could not comprehend it, the departed were gone, and Aoike had no choice but to respect that.

And all he could do for them was seek revenge.

It was no longer a venting of resentment, but a realization that came after calming down, though it made no difference to the targets of his vengeance.

Aoike wearily closed his eyes; it had been too long since he had fallen asleep with such peace.

The next day, After resting, Aoike was finally able to produce a raspy voice. Facing Konan's routine interrogation, he answered each question like a robot.

He had nothing to hide other than his own abnormalities.

As for the secrets regarding Konoha, he intended to hold them for a better price to see if he could squeeze out some benefits.

It wasn't until a few days later, when Pain Deva Path tossed a scroll at him densely packed with records of the losses he had caused, that he realized things had taken a turn for the worse.

If it were the old him, he might have found a way to shirk the responsibility, but after experiencing this "rebirth," he still wanted to be a good person with his own unique character.