On the British Continent, in the New Capital, deep within the Imperial Palace, lay a top-secret laboratory shrouded in layers of Dragon Vein runes, spacetime seals, and Toyotomi Yinglang's own will.
This place was utterly unlike the bustle and flourishing vitality outside. The air was almost stagnant, filled only with the exceedingly faint hum of operating instruments and the rhythm stirred by flowing energy, like the breathing of stars.
At the center of the laboratory stood a ring-shaped Control Console constructed entirely from dark-gold Dragon Vein crystals and covered in complex three-dimensional runes.
Above the Control Console hovered a transparent containment field, with a liquid energy barrier flowing within it.
At the center of the field, two eyeballs floated silently.
They were the Rinnegan extracted from Nagato's eye sockets, originally belonging to Madara Uchiha and born from the combination of the powers of Indra and Asura, the eldest and second sons of the Sage of Six Paths.
But now, these eyes, which had once held purple ripples and wielded authority over life, death, and reincarnation, had taken on a strange grayish-white hue. Their surfaces were covered in fine lines like the crackled glaze of porcelain, and the concentric ripples at their centers had faded completely and vanished, as though all their divinity had been drained away, leaving only two hollow, lifeless organ specimens. Yet within them lingered some exceedingly obscure, unfathomably deep "imprint" or "frequency" that seemed to resonate faintly with the underlying laws of the entire world.
Toyotomi Yinglang's original body, already back in the empire, stood before the Control Console. He had changed into a white research outfit that allowed easy movement, shedding his usual regal composure and severity for a measure of a researcher's characteristic focus and... an almost merciless rationality. He had not activated his Eternal