In the Pure Land, that realm of nothingness between life and death, soft white light shrouded everything like an eternal dusk.
Uchiha Shinichi's dead-fish eyes, usually half-lidded, were fully open for once. His golden Rinne Tenseigan gleamed with a light that seemed to see through everything as he stared straight at the legendary forefather of shinobi before him.
His barrage of blunt questions struck like a boulder hurled into a still lake, sending ripples through this void that had remained unchanged since time immemorial.
The Sage of Six Paths, Hagoromo Otsutsuki, floated silently in the white light.
Neither anger nor joy showed on his time-worn face. His purple Rinnegan seemed to hold a thousand years of hardship and countless lifetimes of reincarnation. Only upon hearing Shinichi's almost insolent questions did they stir slightly, like faint ripples in an ancient well.
"A sense of accomplishment?" the Sage of Six Paths began slowly. His voice was as old and peaceful as ever, yet carried an indescribable weariness and... remoteness. "Do you think watching my own bloodline sink into endless conflict is something I enjoy?"
He sighed softly. The sound was unusually clear in the void, as though it carried the weight of a thousand years.
"Uchiha Shinichi, those eyes of yours do see more clearly than most."
The Sage of Six Paths did not answer Shinichi's questions directly. His gaze seemed to pass through Shinichi, reaching into a more distant time and space, toward a long-buried past filled with blood and tears.
Emotions difficult to fathom gradually surfaced in those ancient Rinnegan: compassion, helplessness, pain, and a trace of... a deeply buried struggle no one knew of.
Hagoromo's voice, laden with a thousand years of weariness and a loneliness no one could understand, echoed quietly within his own consciousness:
*Mother... when I