Chapter 82: Black Holes

I stood on the observation balcony at a dizzying height, the kind that made the whole world look like a map spread out beneath your feet. Below me lay Apex. It was the world's capital and the heart of my civilization. Konoha had been renamed, for the village was no longer hidden behind foliage but proudly showed itself to the world.

Dozens of towers, each rising more than ten kilometers high, pierced the clouds and formed a ring around me. At their bases, thousands of smaller skyscrapers crowded together. Yet even those ten-kilometer spires looked modest from here at the summit of the central tower. This was my latest home and headquarters, standing as the highest point on the planet. These structures couldn't have existed before because no material would have allowed it. But with chakra and new technologies, everything changed.

At night, the city blazed with countless lights weaving into an intricate pattern. By day, it blinded with reflections of sunlight off polished surfaces.

A sight that never grew old, even years later.

The Empire had transformed substantially over time. Countries, or rather the Regions they had become along national or historical lines, had given way to Domains. Each Domain specialized in whatever its resources and climate dictated. The Agricultural Domain sprawled across the fertile plains of the former Land of Fire and Land of Water, feeding the entire planet. The Industrial Domain anchored itself in the mountain ranges of the Land of Iron and the rocky crags of the Land of Earth, supplying metals and complex equipment. The Scientific, the Energy, and others all did what they did best. They exchanged output through a global logistics network.

Of course, the division wasn't absolute. The Scientific Domain still had its farms and mines, just in smaller proportions. Within each Domain existed sub-domains with their own specializations. A Domain's name was simply determined by whichever type predominated. Apex, for instance, fell under the Scientific Domain because scientific sub-domains outnumbered any other kind on its territory.

The system proved far more productive than anything left behind by centuries of wars fought over scraps of fertile land and ore deposits.

My small world had become quite self-sufficient. It was so fragile that a passing whim could shatter it. Yet it mattered enormously to me, for with every passing year it brought more and more value to my research.

Much had changed over the years. My bonds, for one, had finally settled into something permanent.

Terumī Mei had initially approached me with considerable caution, but fate eventually made her a part of my life. She had never found a partner throughout her years, and frequent meetings concerning the management of her Domain had drawn us together. She was a deeply passionate woman, similar to Karin in many ways, yet almost entirely devoted to building a life worth living for others. That dedication got to me. At first, our professional contact gave way to socializing with my girls over shared interests. She wove herself into the fabric of our family gradually and almost imperceptibly. We didn't all see each other together very often given how busy everyone was, but when it happened, she became an indispensable part of our circle.

Ino had also joined us. I jokingly called her the "family friend with benefits." She had grown close to Hinata through their shared work with the mind and the management of matters in that field. Over time, she had mended her cooled friendship with Sakura as well. It wasn't what it had been in childhood, but a certain warmth had returned, along with plenty of common ground. Ino came around often enough that the line between "guest" and "part of the family" had simply dissolved.

As for Karin's little shadow, Yugito, she had finally gotten what she was after. And no, she hadn't slit my throat. Under what I was fairly certain was Karin's sustained propaganda campaign backed by some pretty hard-to-argue-with evidence, the woman had gradually reversed her opinion of me over the years. She replaced it with genuine admiration for what I'd done with the world. After that, it was the same old Karin. This time, she was driven by her love of ropes, though she often sighed that Sakura, Kushina, and especially Hinata refused to indulge her. She also complained that I didn't do it nearly as often as her twisted nature would have liked. It was Karin who began nudging both me and the former Two-Tails jinchuriki into a three-way arrangement. Being the genius she was, she pulled it off. So Karin got what she wanted. Her and Yugito's shared games with ropes and role assignments became a permanent feature of our trio's dynamic. Yugito enjoyed it about as much as I did, meaning it wasn't quite the highlight of anyone's week but wasn't nothing either. The three of us had somehow found a comfortable zone by distributing Karin's enthusiasm between two people.

A light nudge against my leg pulled me out of my thoughts.

Looking down, I saw a blue cat woven entirely from pure blue flame, persistently rubbing against my pant leg.

"What do you want?" I asked, crouching down with a smirk.

She purred, the sound resembling the crackling of a fire catching. Matatabi leapt into the hollow formed between my knees and torso, curling into a ball. The fact that she was roughly a thousand years old and perfectly sentient didn't stop her in the slightest from behaving like an ordinary house cat.

I picked her up and rose to my feet. The warm, vibrating body felt pleasantly soothing against my palms. I stroked her fiery fur, gazing toward the horizon, when my hearing caught a distant, rising rumble.

The sound was coming from the cosmodrome. It sat far beyond the city out in the barren zone, but distance was no obstacle for my ears.

Activating my already-matured God's Eye, I zoomed in to look through dozens of kilometers. An enormous multi-stage rocket wrapped in billowing clouds of steam was slowly lifting off the launch pad and climbing skyward. It was another scientific expedition heading to the far reaches of the system.

It was far from the first. Dozens of habitable planets had been opened to this world through teleporters, and I had even created a few of them myself. Yet this world also had its own ways of traveling.

The Two-Tails in my arms pricked her ears with interest, also looking in that direction.

Out there in the distance, a small flame rose into the sky like a star returning to its place.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" I said quietly, still stroking her.

The cat only purred in response, pressing closer.

In the Impenetrable Darkness of Space

Shortly after.

Myriads of distant stars and the hazy spirals of galaxies were the only witnesses to my presence.

I drifted here in the form of a translucent, dimly glowing silhouette. It was a human outline over ten thousand kilometers tall. The vacuum held no biting cold. For me, space was only marginally less comfortable than the atmosphere of my home Earth.

Another project, God's Body, had also been completed. It was a semi-energetic form that surpassed in durability any material or anything else existing in the upper dimension or the dimensions below it. It held the quintessence of my own mind alongside Earth's other great intellects. This included brilliant people like Orochimaru, Tsunade, their long-lost old friend Hiruko, and other minds gathered from across all of humanity.

My body was an ultra-durable superconductor of energy. Existing simultaneously in the deep dimensions, it contained my power and could process aggressive energy even more efficiently than the Ten-Tails. If I set my mind to devouring worlds, I would be far better at it than any Otsutsuki. But on the path of self-cultivation, I had gone in a different direction.

Before me hung an active black hole of roughly one hundred solar masses. A perfect sphere of absolute darkness formed its event horizon. Beside it spun a blinding, precise vortex of superheated plasma doomed to fall into eternity, serving as its accretion disk.

The hole itself looked tiny. At my current size, it would have fit in the palm of my hand with a bit of room to spare. The accretion disk was another matter entirely. With an outer radius exceeding one hundred and fifty thousand kilometers, it stretched beneath me like a glowing floor.

My body's size was relative to me. I had the capacity to become many times larger still. But right now it felt as though I could step closer and walk across that luminous disk like a solid surface.

I extended my arm. My will and my chakra touched that cosmic storm. The streams of plasma had been obeying the laws of gravity like ocean water parting on either side of a ship's stern, but now they simply began to separate.

Warm water today.

I withdrew the chakra and let the flow of light return to its orbit.

My path of self-strengthening differed from the Otsutsuki way. Instead of devouring worlds, I had learned to harness energy that was less varied but available in far greater abundance. I started with stars and rode a growth rate that had proven much faster than expected. Now I had moved on to the energy of black holes. But let's take it from the beginning.

With my power and resources, reaching stars whose disappearance would have no effect on Earth posed no real challenge. Developing methods to absorb and convert their energy was equally straightforward.

So the years passed. The finest minds of my Earth continuously supplied me with calculations and experimental results. Over time, my God's Eye had allowed me to perceive something I called "the whisper of creation." It was a quiet voice whose tone shifted when I released energy. To put it simply, it played one note when the properties I channeled followed the laws of creation, and another when they violated them.

In principle, any being with a sufficient level of sensitivity and basic observational capacity can feel something like this. But my perception had reached an entirely different level. Now I sense that difference with exquisite precision. Beyond that, I can see objects deeper and broader across multiple dimensions. I can even perceive what is not an object in any conventional sense. Seeing means access to manipulation.

Setting aside the distractions, I regarded the black hole no longer as an object but as a fundamental phenomenon of this reality.

Over more than a decade of deepening my power, I had come to understand one crucial concept. What ordinary beings call reality is merely the thinnest stretched film on the surface of an ocean. It is just the upper layer. Beneath it lay a thickness of other layers and membranes, each denser and more fundamental than the last. No one could say whether they were finite or not. This entire multi-layered Substrate of Being is the true fabric of existence. At least, it is one part of it.

My power growth had continued to decelerate, even with what had initially seemed like an inexhaustible stream of energy from the stars. I had reached a depth where each subsequent meter of descent demanded titanic effort.

My essence had long ceased to belong to the upper world. When I unleash my power there, I am not simply tearing the fragile upper fabric of reality. I am pressing a piece of my own deeper and denser reality into it, one governed by entirely different laws. To the upper world, this is an intrusion it simply cannot sustain.

Every single black hole exists on the upper layer as a phenomenon.

For a being existing entirely on that layer, crossing inside the event horizon means the end, provided they are weak enough. Inside the horizon, gravity is so catastrophic that it exceeds any achievable velocity within that reality. Space there is distorted and warped. Once you are in, any movement in any direction leads only further inward and never outward. It was long assumed that escaping a black hole was only possible for a being capable of violating causality by traveling backward in time.

But through extensive study, I discovered that a black hole is simultaneously more complex and simpler than it seemed.

To my perception, a black hole appeared as both a pulling whirlpool and a well bored through the layers of reality. This well leads downward, but it has a bottom and ultimately becomes an object that can be acted upon. Its depth depends on mass. The more massive the hole, the deeper it goes. Interestingly, it also becomes narrower as it goes deeper.

Because I exist simultaneously on both the upper and sufficiently deep layers of reality, I can approach the hole. I can enter its event horizon with only the part of my essence that exists above while the rest remains outside. Then, if I have the strength, I can climb back out.

Creating two clones and leaving them in position, I dove my essence into the depths of the Substrate. I was like a stone that had grown legs and jumped into the water to sink.

I descended to a level of the Substrate situated below the singularity of this particular black hole. From there, it no longer looked like a bottomless abyss. It was instead a finite, if incredibly complex, multidimensional vortex.

The path to understanding how to work with something like this had been a long one. Earlier, I had experimented on clones. More than a few hundred met their end behind event horizons before I learned to swim up to these vortices and carefully siphon energy off their surface. That had been enough until now to sustain a slow but steadily accelerating growth. This was a growth that allowed me to push my existence ever deeper and dive further into the Substrate.

It was here at depth that another secret of escaping a black hole lay hidden.

Through extensive study, we had determined that the singularity is not a point. It is rather a multidimensional axis that passes through all the layers of the Substrate touched by the black hole's vortex. This is not a flaw in creation. It is an intrinsic mechanism meant to form naturally. Space itself wraps around this axis.

Its function is not purely absorption. A black hole operates like a giant cosmic transformer, much like a processor. All matter and energy that falls into it is broken down to the most fundamental quanta of being. The degree of breakdown depends on the hole's mass and corresponding depth. This base energy is then expelled back into the universe as background radiation, from which new stars and galaxies are eventually born. It is part of the great cosmic cycle.

The singularity axis has different structural integrity at different levels. It is strongest at the top and weakest at its bottom. This makes sense. A black hole typically forms from the explosion or merger of massive objects like stars. The colossal release of energy punches through first and foremost into the least structurally sound upper layer of reality. It is there, collapsing inward, that the visible phenomenon takes form. This also explains why a black hole is wider above and narrower below.

To puncture the singularity from below, several conditions must be met. First, you must be able to withstand the crushing pressure at that bottommost point. This directly depends on the black hole's mass and depth. Second, you must be able to concentrate enough power into a single point to create a puncture. Naturally, you must also be strong enough to survive being at the incredibly low layer of reality where the hole's bottom leads. If the first two conditions are met, the third generally follows as a matter of course.

There is also a second, far more energy-intensive escape method. A sufficiently powerful being that crosses the event horizon on the upper layer doesn't have to wait to be pulled in completely. Instead, it forcibly drags a portion of its deeper essence through with it. This locally overloads reality and creates a bubble with different laws where the maximum achievable velocity is higher. Inside this bubble, one can accelerate beyond the rate of infall for that layer. The being can then move back toward the stretched part of its essence still outside the event horizon and exit cleanly.

Or they might not exit cleanly at all. They could exit in full panic, leaving a trail of biological evidence behind upon realizing they just barely survived. That part depends entirely on the being's strength and composure.

However, it is a crude method. A simpler and more efficient approach is to let yourself get pulled in completely, resist the pressure at the bottom, poke a small hole in the axis, and exit through the back door. This requires that the black hole's bottom doesn't turn out to be too powerful for you. If it does, you will need to act immediately, and the results of that close call might produce some involuntary consequences.

Alternatively, if you have God's Eyes, you can synergistically use jutsu through them to blast a path through spatial distortions that don't entirely outclass you. Then you simply slip through and walk out.

Where all this data came from wasn't hard to guess.

My durability, my capabilities, and my near-total analytical coverage through my personal sensory network and God's Eye allowed me to pull in enormous volumes of data. My Earth-based scientists, especially the physicists, practically pissed themselves with excitement every time I came to visit. I always brought gifts and new materials. If they wanted data from another galaxy, I could provide it. If they needed samples from the core of a supernova, I would oblige. When they asked me to physically feel out a black hole singularity, report back on what it actually is, and dump a mountain of data along with it, I finally agreed. The stuff interested me anyway, and I needed the information.

Our combined efforts and massive computational power helped me learn my current techniques much faster than I could have alone.

Now, positioned beneath the black hole's vortex, I acted directly on its multidimensional structure. I did not fight it. Instead, I entered into resonance with its rotation using my own energy to create a harmonic perturbation. In response, two blazing, rotating beams of pure energy burst from the visible portion of the black hole on the upper layer. The prepared clones absorbed the erupting power and simultaneously fed my essence through our link, fueling both the God's Eye and my body.

By siphoning energy from black holes as well, I had become an order of magnitude stronger than I would have been developing on my own power alone.

You might think that with additional sources I should have skyrocketed in strength by hundreds or thousands of times more. That was not the case, because the deeper you go, the harder it gets. This also meant the reverse was true. Thanks to black holes, I had covered ground in just a few years that would have taken immeasurably longer on my own energy alone.

Thankfully, the God's Eye still had the potential to simply harden and strengthen, even if it had already matured and no new abilities were emerging. The same applied to my body. My SCE and soul continued to grow without pause.

Growing tired of the absorption process, I ceased the interaction. The energy streams died away. The remaining power, together with the clones now dissolving into energy, surged toward me.

I returned to a normal, human-sized form.

My gaze turned slowly toward the galactic center and the true sovereign of this stellar cluster. The Supermassive Black Hole.

It plunged to depths that even my God's Eye could not see the end of. It could not be controlled. At least, not yet. But it could be resonated with.

With thoughts of power, my mind drifted to the subject of the Otsutsuki Progenitor. Maybe she could wipe out star systems with a snap of her fingers. Maybe I would do the same to her. That uncertainty grated on me.

But I was pulled away from philosophy soon enough.

Suddenly, at the very edge of my perception, I sensed a familiar yet out-of-place surge of energy. My chakra, seeded throughout my world, had detected someone's spatial rift.

I grinned at the thought of speaking of the devil. I noted with some amusement that my thoughts had been running toward waste-related metaphors rather frequently lately, and the recent arrivals were partly to blame for that.

Through the link, my eyes drove their gaze across light-years of distance. Neither my position in another galaxy nor the clusters of stars along the way stopped me from making out two silhouettes.

One moment, and under my will, through one of the God's Eye's abilities, the Substrate bent. In an infinitely small point, an almost infinite distance compressed to zero before unfolding into a wormhole and spatial passage.

A fraction of a second later, I was standing on Earth, looking at my uninvited guests.