Kōshi landed heavily on the fractured ground, dust scattering around his feet. He had just been about to search for the Ten-Tails that had burrowed beneath the earth when a violent explosion erupted behind him, shaking the battlefield with a thunderous roar.
Whipping his head around, he froze. In the very center of the massive bone sphere that had imprisoned Uchiha Chiga, a blinding golden sun had burst into existence. The hardened bones began to corrode and dissolve as though they were being burned away by divine fire.
Before Kōshi could react, the entire sphere evaporated into wisps of gray smoke, vanishing into the air.
As the haze cleared, Chiga stepped forward, his figure once more revealed. But his eyes—those eyes—had transformed. Both irises now blazed with the likeness of radiant suns, spinning with divine patterns.
Kōshi's expression twisted in disbelief, the same shock that had once overtaken Momoshiki washing over him.
"Golden Wheel Eye?! Impossible! How could you possess the Clan Head's eyes?!"
Chiga's face remained calm, his voice detached and steady.
"So this is the Golden Wheel Eye? Interesting. I'll remember that."
Kōshi's throat tightened. His entire body trembled. He knew better than anyone the terror of that power.
The Golden Wheel Eye was no myth. Since ancient times, only one being in the Ōtsutsuki Clan had ever awakened it—the Clan Head, Ōtsutsuki Shibai. The clan's crest itself bore the eye's pattern, a testament to its absolute might.
Kōshi had once fantasized that if he consumed enough God Tree fruit, perhaps he too would awaken those divine eyes. But millennia passed, and all he gained were eyes turned black with corrupted energy, never evolving further.
Yet here was Chiga, standing before him, wielding what should have been impossible.
Chiga himself was piecing it together. The awakening of the Golden Wheel Eye could not have been from Rinnegan and Tenseigan alone. No, the Ten-Tails—born from Shibai's very body—was the deciding factor. It was like the conditions of the Rinnegan, a fusion of spiritual and physical essence, except here, both forces originated from the God of the Ōtsutsuki.
The Ten-Tails had not fully matured before now, and so the Golden Wheel Eye had slumbered within him. Faced with Kōshi's killing technique earlier, Chiga had been forced to unleash this final trump card.
The sheer chakra radiating from the awakened eyes had been enough to obliterate Kōshi's Earth Explosion Star reinforced by Ash Bones. And this was not even the Golden Wheel Eye's full might.
For a fleeting moment, Chiga wondered how Ōtsutsuki Shibai, with such power, could ever have been slain by Zero-shiki. He bowed his head slightly, mourning the fallen Clan Head in silence. Then his gaze hardened once more, fixing upon Kōshi.
The instant Kōshi met the burning sun-patterns of the Golden Wheel Eye, terror seized his spirit. His will to fight crumbled. Panic overwhelmed him as he attempted to summon a portal and flee.
But it was too late. The left eye's sun began to rotate, its rays spiraling with inevitable judgment.
"Divine Stillness," Chiga whispered.
No sound followed. Yet Kōshi's body convulsed violently. His bone armor cracked and fell away piece by piece. His eyes rolled back, fading to a lifeless gray. With a heavy thud, he collapsed.
His soul was gone—erased as completely as if it had never existed.
This was the horror of Divine Stillness: an ability that directly extinguished the soul itself. Even one such as Kōshi, who had devoured countless God Tree fruits and achieved a mockery of immortality, could not resist. This was a rule-level power—what Chiga spoke became absolute law.
Ignoring the empty husk of Kōshi's body, Chiga raised his hand.
The ground split open with a violent tremor. Countless black branches surged upward, twining together as they stretched to the heavens. The air thickened with suffocating energy as the Ten-Tails took form, blossoming into a God Tree so vast that Kaguya's once-feared creation seemed like nothing more than a sapling beside it.
All that remained was for it to bear fruit.
A thick vine burst forth from beneath Kōshi's corpse, dragging the body into the earth. Moments later, a massive blood-red bud swelled at the crown of the God Tree, pulsing like a beating heart.
Chiga ascended swiftly, his figure dwarfed by the titanic petals. The gaps between them were as wide as ravines. From the Door-Door Space, he retrieved a condensed "pill," crafted from the corpses of countless Ōtsutsuki, and scattered it into the opening of the bud.
The reaction was immediate.
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The bud absorbed the offering and bloomed wide. At its core emerged a colossal fruit, radiant with divine energy.
Chiga narrowed his eyes. Consuming such a thing whole was impossible, but thanks to the Sukunahikona ability he had inherited from Isshiki, reducing its size was a trivial matter. A golden light flashed, and the titanic fruit shrank down to the size of an apple.
Hovering before it, Chiga paused. A thought flickered in his mind—Devil Fruits. The Ten-Tails had once borne those cursed fruits before maturing into a God Tree. Would this final product be just as foul in taste? The memory of the Nine-Tailed Fox Fruit still haunted his tongue.
Should he risk shrinking it further? Or perhaps use the Ope Ope no Mi to implant it directly into his body?
If Kōshi could see him now, fretting over flavor, he would have died of outrage all over again. To the rest of the universe, the fruit was beyond priceless. Even if it tasted worse than rot, beings would line up from one end of creation to the other just for a chance to consume it.
Yet Chiga could not deny his own curiosity. He finally lifted the fruit to his lips, bit into it, and chewed.
Sweet. Rich. Exquisite. By far the most delicious thing he had ever tasted. Compared to the bitter torment of Devil Fruits, this was heaven itself.
But before he could savor the moment, a torrent of energy surged violently through his body.
Golden cracks spread across his skin, splitting like fractured glass. His face tightened. "Not good… am I about to explode?!"
In the next instant, a brilliant golden light erupted outward, engulfing his form. The explosion swallowed the entire Ōtsutsuki Star, reducing it to absolute nothingness.
In the void of space, Chiga looked down at himself in shock. His body was whole—yet no longer flesh. He was composed entirely of pure golden energy. No impurities remained.
He felt weightless, unbound, free of every chain.
"This…" he whispered, awe dawning in his voice. "This is beyond the Six Paths. I've stepped into something greater."
He paused, then named it with certainty.