"I have less than three days left to live."
Shengu Xuan crouched there, the spot at the corner of his mouth empty where the grass stem had fallen away at some unknown point long ago. His chaos-colored eyes watched the white phantom before him grow thinner in the moonlight.
"Three days?" He tilted his head. "An Otsutsuki in the flesh, older than the universe itself, and you only have three days of battery left?"
"My physical body is exhausted." Isshiki's voice was much weaker than when he had been inside Jigen, like an echo coming from far away. "Jigen was my last vessel, but his body could not hold my entire consciousness. Every awakening accelerated the deterioration."
"So that's why you kept hiding inside him."
"Every time I emerged, I lost a year of life." Isshiki's white Rinnegan stared at Shengu Xuan's face. "Coming out to meet you today was my last time."
Shengu Xuan rose from his crouch and patted the dust off his knees, his chaos-colored eyes looking down at the mass of consciousness on the verge of dispersing.
"Then why come out? To wait for death?"
"To reincarnate."
As Isshiki spoke those words, his white phantom suddenly stopped sinking and steadied itself half a meter above the ground. The concentric rings of his white Rinnegan began spinning faster.
"The Ōtsutsuki Clan's reincarnation technique." His voice regained a little substance, as though he had concentrated all his remaining life force into a single point. "It imprints the core consciousness into a new vessel, overwrites the host's soul, and completes a total replacement of the body."
"Who do you want to reincarnate into?" There was no tension in Shengu Xuan's tone, only curiosity. Pure curiosity.
Isshiki's white Rinnegan fixed on him.
"Who do you think?"
Shengu Xuan froze for