"Why are you here?"
It had been eight years of daily visits and one-sided monologues and a silence so absolute he'd stopped expecting it to break, and now the Dragon had spoken. Of course his first instinct was to check whether he'd imagined it.
Nope, he was reasonably certain of his own senses.
He turned fully to face the silver figure beneath the gates.
"I just want to talk," Hashirama said.
The Dragon's featureless head held its angle. The physical energy modulation continued in a low and steady rhythm, and Hashirama waited.
"Talk," the Dragon repeated. "You have spoken at me for two thousand, nine hundred and twenty-two cycles. Your topics have included children, dead spouses, hair care, a gambling addiction, and a food called unagidon. You have not once required my participation."
"Well, yeah," Hashirama said. "Because you wouldn't participate."
"I am aware."
Hashirama almost laughed. The dragon’s tone of voice reminded him of Tobirama. He sat down cross-legged on the water, six meters from the nearest gate, and put his palms on his knees.
"So," he said. "You can talk. You've been able to talk this whole time. Why now?"
The Dragon's head tilted down a fraction, and Hashirama's gut told him it was deliberate.
"You are persistently annoying," the Dragon said.
"What did you expect?"
The seal script continued its crawl and the water lay flat.
"An Old One," the Dragon said.
Hashirama blinked. “I’m physically around forty.”
"Or something close enough," the Dragon continued. "A practitioner of the same arts. The synthesis of immaterial and material energy into a third substance that imposes structure on both. You call it chakra. The Old Ones had a different name for it. But the mechanism is identical, and the lineage is unmistakable."
Hashirama's hands tightened on his knees. "What do you mean, lineage?"
"Your power does not originate from your species, yes? It was granted to you."
Hashirama's mouth opened, and then closed, and then opened again. "The Sage of Six Paths gave chakra to humanity. At least, that’s what I remember. Otsutsuki Hagoromo."
The Dragon's energy pulse shifted. The modulation changed, and for one beat the constant output carried something that felt like recognition.
"Otsutsuki," the Dragon said.
The seal script slowed its crawl for a fraction of a second before resuming.
Hashirama leaned forward. "You know that name."
"I know what they are."
"How?" His voice came out sharper than he intended, and he heard it and pulled back and took a breath. "I'm sorry, I just... how? How do you know the Otsutsuki?"
The Dragon's head moved again, the featureless face turning a fraction to the left and then back.
"The Otsutsuki were not native to this or your reality any more than I am native to this sealed space," the Dragon said. "They traveled between dimensions with ease. They seeded worlds with abominable trees and harvested the resulting energy. And they fought my brethren and I in a war that spanned the very breadth of creation."
Hashirama's heart was pounding through his entire body, each pulse pushing blood and chakra through channels that suddenly seemed very small.
"The War in Heaven," he said.
"You know of it?"
"Neoth talked about the Old Ones and the Necrontyr and a war that happened millions of years ago. He never mentioned the Otsutsuki."
"He would not have known the name. The Old Ones were a broad category of beings who wielded powers beyond mortal comprehension. The Otsutsuki were one lineage among several, and they were not the architects of the War in Heaven. They were, however, a significant complication within it."
Hashirama stared at the silver face. The Otsutsuki were part of this universe's ancient history. They had been here and they had fought here, and the Void Dragon knew them.
"Tell me more," Hashirama said.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I choose not to." The Dragon said. “That is what separates you and I, mortals from gods. Gods have true freedom, whereas you mortals are confined by the conducts and rules of survival. Everything you do and everything you have done is in service to the preservation of your miserably-short lives or for the miserably-short lives of your brethren. Where is the freedom in that?”
“Very ironic to talk about that when you’re behind bars,” Hashirama said. "But we’re getting distracted. Can we talk more about the Otsutsuki?"
"Don’t feel like it."
Hashirama sat with that for a moment. He couldn't argue with it.
"Fair enough," he said.
He looked around the sealed space. Black water and black sky, the red gates and the seal script and the silver body wrapped in tendrils of living wood. The same view he and the dragon had seen for eight years, the same view that either of them are going to see basically forever if he didn’t get killed.
"I'll offer you something instead," Hashirama said.
The Dragon's head remained still.
"Right now, you're stuck in here," Hashirama said. "And, quite frankly, this place sucks. You feel the seal and the gates and my chakra and that's it. The physical world outside this space, the Webway, the people, the construction, the fountains, the kids playing in the streets, all of it is cut off from you. You're aware that it exists because you can feel the energy signatures through the seal, but you can't perceive any of it directly."
He held out his right hand, palm up. "I can share my senses with you. It's a technique I know. I open a channel between my perception and yours, and you see what I see, hear what I hear, feel what I feel. Sight, sound, touch. The real world, through my eyes."
The silver body lay motionless beneath its bindings. Hashirama waited.
"Why?" the Dragon said.
"I mean, if our places were exchanged, I’d be miserable just starting at nothing, hearing nothing, and being in nothing."
"You assume I am bound by mortal limitations."
"I assume anyone would want to see something after a whole while of nothing, because – let’s face it – thanks to you I’m functionally immortal. You’re going to be stuck here basically forever unless I croak and that’s a very hard thing to do."
The seal script completed two full loops along the nearest tendril before the Dragon spoke again.
"Your offer is... acceptable."
Hashirama smiled and loosened the seals just a tiny amount to let the Dragon perceive the world through his senses and nothing more.
“Light… heat… warmth… acceptable.”
"If you wish to understand the Otsutsuki, you will be better served by my memories than mere words."
The physical energy output surged, a deliberate spike that traveled through the seal architecture and hit Hashirama's chakra system before he could brace for it. The spike carried memory, encoded in physical energy and injected through the sensory channel he'd just opened.
And there was a lot of it.
The black water and the black sky and the gates vanished, and Hashirama was somewhere else.
He was standing in a void between stars, and the stars were wrong, too bright and too close and moving in patterns that didn't correspond to any cosmology he understood. The void between them was saturated with energy so dense that his senses struggled to parse it, layers of physical and spiritual force woven through space itself.
And then he saw them.
They came from between the stars, pale figures, tall and slender, radiating power so absolute that reality bent around them in visible waves. Their skin was white and their hair was white and long and it drifted in slow arcs independent of any wind. Their eyes were ringed and patterned in ways that Hashirama recognized immediately. The Rinnegan.
There were dozens of them. They moved through the void in formations that suggested military precision, each one carrying enough energy to reshape a planet. They carried weapons, staffs and blades and constructs of solidified chakra. Some of them were enormous, ten meters tall, their bodies scaled up as if size were a choice.
They were fighting.
The memory shifted and Hashirama saw a battlefield. A star system, or what had been one before the Otsutsuki arrived. Three planets had been cracked open along their equators, their mantle material spilling into orbit in spreading fields of molten rock that cooled into rings of dark stone. A fourth planet was intact but wrong, its surface rewritten into a lattice of geometric patterns that pulsed with energy and fed a nascent God Tree growing at its core.
The Otsutsuki moved through the wreckage and they fought things that Hashirama couldn't see clearly, entities that existed at the edge of the Dragon's perception and registered only as absences. And the Otsutsuki were using jutsu at a scale that made his Thousand Hands feel like nothing.
One of them raised a hand, and a Chibaku Tensei formed above a continent. The gravitational sphere pulled the continent's surface upward in sheets of rock and ocean and atmosphere, stripping the planet's face and compressing the material into a sphere that grew until it eclipsed the local sun. Another extended both arms and space itself folded between her palms, a technique that looked like Kamui but operated at a dimensional level that erased the distinction between here and there, and everything caught in the fold simply stopped existing.
A third opened his mouth and spoke a word, and the word traveled through the void as a wave of pure spiritual energy that struck a fleet of vessels and dissolved their material structure into constituent atoms. They were gods.
And then the memory narrowed.
The void cleared. The broken star system fell away, and Hashirama was somewhere else. A plane of white stone stretched to every horizon, flat and featureless and lit by a sun that hung at a fixed point in an empty sky. The stone was warm underfoot and the air was still and the silence was complete.
Two figures stood at the center of the plane.
One of them was the Void Dragon, the complete entity rather than the shard beneath his seal. The body, silver and strange in utter defiance of geometry, stretched across the white plane in a form that could have wrapped a planet in its coils. The featureless head, the same smooth silver Hashirama had stared at for eight years, was the size of a mountain, and it was turned toward the figure that stood opposite.
The other figure was an Otsutsuki.
He was tall, and his skin was pale white and his hair was white and it fell past his waist in a sheet that caught the light from the fixed sun. His eyes were closed. His arms hung at his sides. He wore robes of grey and white.
The energy inside him was... Hashirama didn't have a frame of reference. It was chakra, unquestionably. But the volume was beyond anything he'd encountered. It made the ten tails look like an aspiring civilian next to a Bijuu. The Otsutsuki's chakra filled the space around him and saturated the stone beneath his feet and climbed into the sky above in visible columns that didn't scatter or diffuse.
The Dragon's memory supplied a name.
Shibai Otsutsuki.
Shibai opened his eyes.
They were Rinnegan, both of them, and the concentric rings burned with a light that was gold and violet at the same time, and the pupil at the center of each eye was a point of black that pulled the surrounding light inward. He turned toward the Void Dragon and Hashirama recognized the look, because he'd worn it himself a thousand times. A fighter measuring an opponent.
They fought. The memory compressed time, skipping through exchanges that individually lasted hours. The Dragon's attacks were elemental and absolute, forces drawn from the deep structure of physical reality, the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, gravity, and others that had no name in any language Hashirama spoke. Shibai answered each one with chakra shaped into techniques that imposed order on the Dragon's output. Their clash brought about the destruction of entire solar systems. They hurled stars at each other and snuffed out entire sections of the galaxy.
Neither won.
The Dragon and Shibai Otsutsuki had fought to a standstill.
The images cut. He looked at the Dragon. “Holy shit.”
The silver figure lay beneath its gates and its tendrils and its seal script, unchanged and immobile. The featureless head faced him.
"The Otsutsuki were a headache," the Dragon said. "They were the only species that wielded the synthesis with enough precision to contest the C'tan directly. Most used the immaterial alone. This made them uniquely inconvenient during the war."
Hashirama's mouth was dry. He swallowed and found his voice.
"Shibai fought you to a standstill."
"Indeed he did. It was magnificent."
"Yeah," Hashirama said. "Yeah, I figured."