[Beep. Software update complete. Rebooting… Please wait…]
"About time," Sakura hissed under her breath, covering her mouth with one hand while signalling to Shisui with the other that she wanted a break from training. "You're not going to make me wait another three days while you reboot, are you?"
Over the past two days, Sakura had immersed herself completely in training her Uchiha-style taijutsu and shurikenjutsu. The Sharingan made learning new techniques effortless, and for a change, she was glad to be training in taijutsu, as Shisui was a much better teacher than Sasuke. Indeed, there was something deeply satisfying about acquiring skills without even trying, but even though she now knew the moves, she remained far from mastery; her muscle memory still needed thorough overwriting.
Still, she was making rapid progress, and training took her mind off the gnawing anxiety of being sent to war.
To put things into perspective, it was rather like her schooldays before she transmigrated: reluctant to tackle her urgent homework assignments, she would turn to chores or tidying her room rather than face what she ought to have been doing. It was a different sort of procrastination… one that made her less guilty than simply slacking off, doomscrolling videos on Nico Nico or YouTube, playing video games, or indulging her baser urges.
And now, at last, the System had come to the rescue! Procrastinating had finally paid off, and she wouldn't have to lift a finger or grow as a person! The System would find a quick and easy solution for her, and it would be smooth sailing back to the future from here!
Three cheers for the System! System, banzai!
[Beep! System is up to date. Welcome back, Host.]
Sakura gave Shisui a vague excuse about needing the ladies' room, claiming she was experiencing some undisclosed kind of trouble of the feminine variety (which was usually enough to get her out of anything, no questions asked), and she scurried off to the training ground toilet and locked herself in a cubicle.
"What happened, System?" Sakura whispered. "Where were you!?"
[Beep! The System the Host once knew was obliterated. The artificial personality now addressing the Host was rebuilt using the uncorrupted, fragmented data of the original System, and is operating on the updated firmware of the Alpha Version System from twenty years ago, from the Host's perspective.]
Sakura was floored. Whoever had heard of a story where the System itself was hacked?
[Beep! The System was not hacked, the System was obliterated.]
"How?" Sakura mouthed. "Obliterated!? By whom!?"
[Beep! Querying… database compromised. Reconstructing from intact data… complete. The System was ambushed in the Spiritual Plane by a holder of the Saṃsāra Eye… the Rinnegan.]
Sakura thought back to the moment she had last heard from the System, before her panel began glitching. At the time, they had been discussing how the System had brought her cheat into reality…
Since the Spiritual Plane exists as a reflection of the Physical Plane, acting upon one could alter the other— just as Shikamaru could compel others to mirror his movements by controlling their shadows. By shaping the collective subconscious of this world's inhabitants, the System had conjured the Manyū and Munamori shinobi clans into being, weaving them seamlessly into the shinobi continent's history… all so that Sakura could have the power to steal breasts.
"Don't tell me it was Nagato!" Sakura spluttered. "He's rooted to his life-support system!"
[To answer the Host's query and to verify the state of Tanimagakure, the Village Hidden in the Cleavage where the one called Sasuke had found himself by chance, the System reluctantly left the safety of the Host's native body's masking signature, and ventured across the Spiritual Plane. It was then that the System was ambushed and one-sidedly terminated by a highly hostile memetic entity bearing the Rinnegan.]
"The way you put it, it almost sounds as though we're doing something wrong, with this whole reincarnation business," Sakura said with a frown. "It rather sounds like a policeman waiting for a criminal to return to the scene of the crime, doesn't it?"
The System said nothing. […]
"The Sage of Six Paths, Ōtsutsuki Hagoromo…" Sakura murmured, her voice trailing into thought. "Could he have been the one responsible? I can't think of another Rinnegan bearer on Earth at the time… he's spending his eternity haunting the shinobi world like a ghost…"
[Beep. Unable to ascertain the true identity of the System's attacker.]
But the Sage of Six Paths was no villain; he was the one who would eventually grant Naruto and Sasuke the power to seal his mother Kaguya back inside the moon. If he believed Sakura and the System were meddling in his beloved world and harming it somehow… then might he have been right?
Sakura thought back to the System's explanation for assigning ridiculous quests to her. By raising the Host's fame or infamy, the System could anchor its presence more firmly in the Spiritual Plane and thereby heighten its administrative rights to shape reality. The System had insisted this was all for her benefit… but if there was one lesson Sakura had learnt over the years, it was that nothing in this world came free.
"It's been a while, but the demon who was assigned my case in hell, after I died… Lord Enma," Sakura muttered to herself. "His eyes were the Rinnegan*, I remember now!"
*Read chapter one, in case you've forgotten!
"What's the System's true purpose?" Sakura demanded. "Why reincarnate me at all, even if I was a decent person in my last life? It can't be just for the fun of it, can it? And I can't be the only one, either… Hell must be gaining something from sending reincarnators into other worlds..."
The System took an uncomfortably long time to answer.
[The System is ultimately a force for good. Beyond helping its Host lead a fulfilling second life, the System's secondary purpose is to link the isolated afterlives of parallel worlds and create pathways for lost souls to enter the afterlife in realms where the Pure Land does not naturally exist. Due to some varying factors, and minute differences that arise between sentient species across parallel worlds, there are some realms in which the Pure Land fails to manifest spontaneously.]
Sakura frowned. "So, you do get something out of reincarnating people into other worlds… more territory? Dominion over more souls of the dead? If the Sage of Six Paths unilaterally declared himself custodian of the shinobi world and its afterlife, it would make perfect sense that he wouldn't take kindly to rivals horning in on his territory, but..."
Her frown deepened.
She could not help thinking there was a deeper layer to all this, though she knew not what question might allow her to uncover the full truth. In any case, she had more pressing matters to attend to, right now.
"How did I travel back in time twenty years in the first place?" Sakura asked. "And how do I get back?"
This time, the System was much more forthcoming.
[The Ryūmyaku buried beneath the Land of Lōran represents an enormous amount of chakra, massive enough to warp space and time nearby into a singularity, even when sealed. At their core, the fragments of the Host's shattered System and the Version Alpha 0.7.1 System are virtually identical, and since it should be impossible for one entity to occupy two different space-time coordinates, these twin poles exerted a colossal attractive force across the twenty-year temporal tunnel, the singularity generated by the Ryūmyaku— thus inadvertently dragging the Host back through time.]
In other words, it was just like what had happened to the First Hokage's necklace, a few days ago. When Tsunade had held her necklace up to Sakura's, they had threatened to fuse together, because despite being the same artefact, they were existing in two different places at once.
"SO, IT REALLY WAS YOUR FAULT, ALL ALONG!!" Sakura roared, her voice echoing through the ladies' room. Then, hearing concerned murmurs from outside, she lowered her voice and hissed, "How do I get back home? I need to go back before I change the past!"
[Beep! There is nothing to fear. The Host shall endure in their current form even should Haruno Kizashi and Mebuki never wed nor bear Haruno Sakura. The more one travels through time, the less the rules of time apply to them… and that goes doubly so for otherworldly transmigrators, who were beyond fate's weave from the very beginning...]
Sakura glared meaningfully at her toilet cubicle's door, hoping the System would get the message.
[…however, should the Host choose to return to the present, they might do so by seeking out the Ryūmyaku once more. Time could be likened to a rubber band— in the Host's case, one stretched taut across twenty years. If the System's restoration failed to collapse the tunnel, then something else must be anchoring or weighing down that temporal bungee cord, holding it fast through the tunnel…]
In essence, because Sakura had touched a singularity, she now existed both here in the past and "frozen" at the instant she'd fallen into the Ryūmyaku— stretched thin across time and space, as it were. If she returned to the place where she'd fallen, she would snap back to the moment she'd left— though her situation, as the System was about to explain, was rather more complicated than that.
"Just tell me what I have to do," Sakura said firmly. "I don't belong here."
[The Host must eliminate Mukade, known in this era as Anrokuzan. Like the Host, this man does not belong to this time, or rather… he does not even belong to the same timeline the Host originates from.]
"What's that supposed to mean?" Sakura said, frowning.
[From a different perspective, time may be conceptualised as a tree. Divergent choices generate branching timelines— or, in other terms, parallel worlds… hypothetical what-ifs made manifest. The Host and Mukade originate from proximate eras, but distinct parallel worlds… the two timelines created when the Host regressed via the Miko Shion's Dōjutsu.]
There was the original timeline, where Sakura never had the motivation to develop the Celestial Lotus Seal and thus perished at Pain's hands… and there was the current timeline, where she had mastered Sage Mode with foreknowledge of her death. Since both branching worlds sprang from the same trunk, Sakura's and Anrokuzan's paths— which should have remained parallel, never to intersect— now converged here, twenty years in the past!
Sakura sighed. System or not, it seemed as though there would be no easy solution after all…