Yet, Hagoromo had not tethered himself to the world blindly.
Just as Indra and Ashura had eventually bound themselves through conflict and reincarnation, he had bound himself through structure.
Ninshū had never truly vanished.
Its public face had eroded, diluted into platitudes about harmony and understanding, then hollowed out entirely as ninjutsu took its place.
But beneath that decay, deeper and quieter, its infrastructure endured.
Belief networks that never sought converts.
Temples that kept no records of allegiance.
Relics whose purpose was preservation, not power.
Anchor points that touched both the living world and the Pure Land without announcing themselves as either.
As long as ninshū-derived doctrine was practiced somewhere, not as love, not as compassion, but as balance, order, and correction, in the real world as well, Hagoromo's consciousness retained traction.
Not omnipresence.
Presence.
The Fire Temples were the most visible remnants, and even they were misunderstood.
To the world, they were little more than religious institutions, places of prayer, charity, and withdrawal.
To shinobi villages, politically irrelevant. To history, footnotes.
But within them, hidden in plain sight, existed a quieter order.
Not fighters.
Not politicians.
Not village shinobi.
Custodians.
Archivists.
Ritualists.
Wanderers who moved between temples carrying texts that were never meant to be read aloud, maintaining seals no one remembered placing, listening for his quiet instructions that rarely came.
They believed chakra was moral before it was tactical. That imbalance was a sickness. That his correction was sometimes cruel, but always necessary.
They did not rule history.
They stabilized it.
That was why no one knew they existed.
They never acted openly. Never seized power.
Never left signatures that could be traced.
Their interventions looked like a coincidence, like lost scrolls resurfacing at the right time, like people vanishing quietly before they could destabilize something larger.
And when Shisui Uchiha fell into the river, it was they who were waiting.
They did not save him.
There was no healing, no restoration, no resurrection.
They intercepted him at the moment his soul detached, when the poison had already finished its work, and his body was beyond them.
Using Six Paths–derived sealing, they anchored his soul before it could disperse, preserving his will intact.
Not his flesh.
They transferred him into a spare vessel prepared long before, one never meant to live independently.
A container, not a body. When his soul settled, it reshaped that vessel according to its last coherent self, blind eyes and all.
He was not alive.
He was not dead.
He was stored.
A contingency file sealed until needed.
And so Shisui remained in the Pure Land, semi-immortal, outside the cycle, while time passed.
That was where Hagoromo's influence became most precise.
He could not teach techniques. That was beyond even him.
But he could do something subtler. He could inject understanding.
Through dreams.
Through impressions that carried no words.
Structural intuition.
Conceptual blueprints.
Shisui still had to integrate it.
Adapt it. Make it his own.
Which he did.
He studied the echoes of past Uchiha, not as people, but as chakra states Hagoromo could read and pass along.
Susanoo forms that had failed.
Designs abandoned too early.
Patterns never generalized because their wielders had died before understanding them.
Susanoo, Shisui realized, was never a fixed construct.
It was an ideology given shape.
His own flaw, the hollow point that had once marked his incomplete manifestation, became something else entirely.
A modular interface.
A place where form could be replaced without destabilizing the whole.
Not symbols of power.
Solutions to problems.
All of it remained dormant until the calculations shifted.
Hagoromo did not activate contingencies lightly.
For decades, Madara had been dangerous, but predictable.
Obito had always been destructive, but contained.
Even Kaguya's return had been accounted for, folded into the path through Naruto and Sasuke.
But what was emerging now was different.
This was not escalation.
It was corruption of trajectory.
A disciplined anomaly.
A system-builder of sorts, not a destroyer.
Bloodlines strangely consolidating instead of dispersing.
Ideology seemingly replacing instinct.
That crossed the threshold.
So Hagoromo began activating what he had left behind.
Shisui was unsealed first.
And as Shisui stepped back into the living world, the purpose was clear.
Not vengeance.
Not correction of the past.
Containment.
Stabilization.
Protection of Konoha, not because it was righteous, but because too many trajectories still ran through it.
If it collapsed the wrong way, the future would not merely change.
It would become unreachable.
Yet this was not the first time Hagoromo's influence had brushed against Shisui Uchiha.
Imagine this, once upon a time, Shisui had been very young and moldable, sent on an unremarkable mission, the kind that never reached archives or memory.
There had been no summoning, no possession, no divine hand dragging him elsewhere in this story.
Only a gradual drift.
A wrong turn taken without noticing.
Chakra currents subtly misaligned.
A moment of curiosity when he should have kept moving.
A mind already burdened by loss and loyalty pausing in the wrong place.
That was how it happened.
He found something old.
Not a shrine meant to be found.
Not a monument announcing importance.
Just a quiet remnant, worn down by time and neglect, half-swallowed by the land itself.
A Ninshū-era anchor, left behind when doctrine still mattered more than technique.
There were no words to read.
What lingered there was some Six-Paths Yin chakra, thin but persistent, structured in patterns rather than force.
Not power, but intent.
When Shisui touched it, he didn't learn anything new.
He synchronized.
The philosophy embedded within it did not overwrite him.
It didn't erase memory or impose commands.
It simply reweighted what already existed inside him
Stability became heavier than justice.
Collective survival outweighed individual bonds.
Conflict felt acceptable only if resolved quietly, invisibly, without spectacle.
And most importantly, Shisui agreed.
That was why it held.
He left unchanged on the surface, the same prodigy, the same loyal shinobi.
But his moral compass no longer pointed quite where it used to.
Sacrifice felt natural.
Being hated felt acceptable.
Containing disaster mattered more than confronting it.
He carried something with him afterward, a small relic he never questioned.
Not a weapon. Not a tool.
Just an object that resonated faintly with chakra, calming to hold, easy to forget about.
It did nothing on its own.
It didn't compel thought or emotion.
What it did was lower resistance.
When Shisui later placed it into Itachi's hands, he wasn't spreading control.
He was spreading compatibility. A shared wavelength. That was all it took.
Their alignment never felt forced because it wasn't.
Their thoughts converged because they were already tilted the same way.
Each reinforced the other's instincts, their worst tendencies stabilizing into certainty. No malice. No manipulation they could perceive. Just an agreement.
Only then did Hagoromo gain perfect access.
Not as a voice. Not as a god issuing decrees. As moments.
Dreams that felt like clarity rather than intrusion.
Visions that arrived during emotional fracture, never instructing, only affirming.
You already know what must be done.
This is the right path.
They never felt controlled or questioned because they weren't.
When Mangekyō awakened, it didn't create this alignment. It recorded it.
The crystallization locked what had already formed.
Their chakra networks stabilized around that doctrine.
Dissonance became painful.
Alternative choices felt wrong in a way that had nothing to do with logic.
Shisui's calm acceptance of death, Itachi's willingness to shoulder hatred, their shared readiness to erase themselves for the system, all of it followed naturally.
They were no longer drifting.
They were fixed points.
That was why Shisui never reached the weapons meant to seal outcomes.
He was preventative. Flexible.
A correction tool meant to act early and disappear.
Itachi was different.
By the time his Mangekyō awakened, the system fully recognized him.
His Susanoo didn't manifest as armor alone, but as a conduit.
The Yata Mirror and Totsuka Blade were not granted. They unlocked.
Not because of lineage.
Because of compatibility.
Hagoromo never forced them.
He never needed to.
He shaped the scale, adjusted the weight, and let them choose freely on ground that had already been tilted.
That was the worst for them.
Not that they were controlled.
But that they believed, sincerely, that they were right.
That was the elegance of it.
To Hagoromo, there was no romance in it.
No tragedy worth mourning.
Shisui and Itachi had been useful precisely because they were willing to hollow themselves out.
Because they accepted being hated.
Because they mistook submission for virtue and restraint for wisdom.
They abandoned blood, clan, and future for an abstract system that men like Danzō could rot inside of and still benefit from.
Useful tools were often like that.
They called it loyalty.
He called it convenience.
They believed they had chosen the village.
World peace.
The "greater good."
In truth, they had chosen to disappear neatly, sparing the system the inconvenience of open resistance.
And they had been perfect candidates for it.
Born slightly wrong. Too reflective. Too self-denying.
Too eager to shoulder guilt that was never theirs to begin with.
Hagoromo had known early.
Long before the eyes awakened.
Long before the choices hardened.
So he shaped them, patiently.
Through dreams that felt like insight.
Through doctrines that felt like reason.
Through quiet Yin chakra imprints, from anchors, that never screamed command, only whispered inevitability.
He had even subtly guided them into believing, more than once, without ever stating it outright, that they were carrying out his own visions, the Sage of Six Paths' will made manifest.
He never needed to claim it openly.
The implication was enough.
After all, with his image preserved as flawless in the world's memory, wisdom and benevolence given form, how could such a figure ever be wrong?
Hagoromo felt no guilt.
Only mild disdain, and a colder, more enduring satisfaction.
Even self-sacrificing fools had their place in a well-constructed design.
It was not that even the current Shisui was his strongest piece.
If anything, Itachi might still surpass him in raw power.
And Hagoromo still had other contingencies, deeper ones, sealed further away, meant for far worse deviations than this.
But using Itachi now felt premature.
Pulling him fully into motion would disturb the trajectory Gamamaru had calculated, the path they were still clinging to despite how murky it had become, not least because of Itachi's own not-so-small role in shaping it.
The course was imperfect, partially obscured, yet it remained their best option until the distortion could be properly measured and understood.
Introducing heavier instruments, or stronger external hands that did not belong to this era, risked shattering too many variables at once and turning deviation into collapse.
That was how worlds collapsed.
Not through failure, but through overcorrection.
So they would start smaller.
Test the anomaly.
Measure its current influence.
Probe his nearest points of corruption.
Shisui was sufficient for that.
Only if matters truly spiraled beyond recovery, if the anomaly still refused to yield no matter the cost, would Hagoromo begin to discard that restraint way more.
Only then would he commit without reservation, even if it meant shattering every trajectory and structure they had cultivated across a thousand years in the end.
Gamamaru would be forced to reconstruct his vision from the ruins, once it returned to clarity with the anomaly finally gone, eventually, sifting through broken futures in search of completely new paths, then, hoping that whatever emerged would still be sufficient on time when the Ōtsutsuki descended in full.
And if not, then at least they could hope that enough fragments of the old design could be salvaged to forge something barely workable before the end. Or some compromise between these two, finding new paths that could restore what remained into something close enough to their design, quickly enough to matter.
Through the muted senses of the two vessels accompanying him, Hagoromo still observed the shattered expanse of Konoha ahead.
This was no longer a matter for distant calculation.
The anomaly warranted action. Now.
His awareness narrowed, drawn to that single convergence point, where power pressed against power at a depth that scraped the edge of Six Paths territory.
Hiashi, patriarch of the Hyūga of this generation, forced into awakening reserves his clan was never meant to touch at this point in time.
And opposite him—
The white-haired youth.
Kaguya's blood, refined, disciplined, will-bound instead of feral.
Many times more powerful than anything a Kaguya, one not even deemed worthy of a background mark on his board, not even a footnote, had ever been meant to possess.
Capabilities that outright shattered the limits imposed on Kaguya blood, a lineage he had long since dismissed as inconsequential, little more than background noise in a far larger design.
Understanding settled with cold clarity.
So this was it.
This was the anomaly itself.
After all, Hagoromo did not manipulate every human on the planet, every moment, without pause.
That was impossible even for him in his current state.
What he did instead was far more precise.
He nudged key events. Adjusted pivotal moments.
Fine-tuned outcomes in real time where it mattered, relying on the fact that most of the groundwork had been laid long before his ascent to the Pure Land.
Which made this all the more troubling.
How could he have known that Kimimaro Kaguya, a figure not even worthy of classification as a proper side variable in his designs, would leap ten stages beyond his projected trajectory?
Therefore, Hagoromo's certainty hardened into something final momentarily.
And it seemed Shisui, still unaware of the presence watching beside him, reached the same conclusion on his own.
He shifted subtly, intent forming, already preparing to lead the two accompanying figures forward, to finally enter the battlefield and engage the four masked females below after the period of observation.
At this point, through proximity alone, through prolonged exposure to that soul, one that stubbornly refused to move in step with the world's flow, refused to integrate as if it did not truly belong to it at all, the first such case Hagoromo had ever witnessed, they too had crossed a threshold.
Touched. Distorted.
Anomalies in their own right.
Not origin points, but carriers.
All of them would need to be cut away next.
Neither their current intentions nor the kind of power they were drawing out of their bloodlines could be allowed to continue.
The two figures beside Shisui were not recent creations.
They were relics.
The strongest monk and the strongest samurai Hagoromo had ever faced while still alive, champions of an age that predated shinobi entirely, when discipline and devotion, not chakra systems, defined the pinnacle of combat.
They had challenged him at the dawn of that era.
He had defeated them.
And rather than kill them, he had sealed them away in secret, preserving their bodies, their wills, and their perfected forms as contingencies.
Living proof of a world before ninjutsu.
Now, guided by his hand from beyond, the remnants of his followers had unsealed them once more.
They were prepared for this purpose.
Prepared to act.
Prepared to serve as vessels capable of bearing fragments of his awareness without breaking, allowing him to observe, to judge, and to intervene through them without fully manifesting himself.
However, they were also far from weak.
As the strongest of their era, they possessed power that did not rely on chakra molding as modern shinobi understood it.
They had never needed it.
Through decades of discipline and meditation, they had learned to draw in natural energy externally, reinforcing palm strikes, fists, and various sword slashes from the outside rather than shaping chakra within.
Cruder, perhaps, but brutally effective.
They lacked the versatility of contemporary shinobi, and even now they stood below Shisui in overall capability and output.
But they were steady. Durable. Reliable.
And for Hagoromo's purposes, that made them more than sufficient.