A short while back, high above the clouds, hidden deep within a mountain range shrouded in mist, lay Mount Myōboku, the sacred land of the toads.
It was a vast realm suspended between dream and nature, where waterfalls glowed faintly with natural energy and enormous mushrooms towered like ancient trees.
The air was thick with vitality, every breath heavy with the essence of the natural energy of this world.
Ripples of life pulsed through the terrain itself, a steady rhythm that even the wind seemed to follow.
At the heart of this serene chaos stood the Great Toad Sage's temple, an enormous hall carved into stone and moss, surrounded by water lilies and a tranquil pond where smaller toads rested like silent monks.
The air there was always still, as if time hesitated to move without the old sage's permission.
Inside, Gamamaru, the Great Toad Sage, sat upon his raised dais, half-immersed in the natural energy that surrounded him.
His body was colossal, the size of a small mountain in itself, skin wrinkled and ancient, mottled in dark green and brown.
His eyes were enormous golden pools with slitted pupils, but now they were open, truly open, which was rare enough to make the other elder toads exchange uneasy glances.
He was not asleep, nor lost in one of his prophetic trances.
Today, Gamamaru was fully awake, his expression deep and solemn, the long white whiskers hanging from his mouth stirring faintly as he exhaled.
The faint sound of dripping water echoed across the chamber as he slowly shifted his gaze toward the horizon visible through the temple's open arch.
Long before the age of shinobi, before chakra was shaped or war ever scarred the land, there existed three ancient beings, lifeforms born not of flesh, but of the world's own will.
They were chosen and nourished by the planet's natural energy itself, formed during the age when the God Tree first took root, and the Ōtsutsuki descended upon the world.
From that cataclysmic event, nature reacted, creating its own balancing force.
Gamamaru, the Great Toad Sage of Mount Myōboku.
Katsuyu, the Great Slug of Shikkotsu Forest.
Hakuja, the White Snake Sage of Ryūchi Cave.
They were not chakra beings, but anchors, three living poles stabilizing the planet's natural energy, countering the artificial chakra corruption that followed in humanity's wake.
Each resided on the distant edges of the known world, their realms barely reachable by ordinary means, protected by geography, natural energy storms, and the will of nature itself.
They were incredibly hard to find; they revealed themselves only to those chosen by fate.
Gamamaru believed that all three had been shaped by the planet to preserve its equilibrium, though the truth had always eluded him.
He often wondered if they were accidents of evolution, creatures who had once been ordinary animals, mutated by prolonged exposure to pure natural energy, transcending the need for chakra entirely.
Or perhaps they were deliberately created by the planet itself, its subconscious response to invasion and imbalance.
Whatever the truth, the result was the same: they bypassed the very foundation of chakra creation.
They no longer needed to mold power. They were power, direct conduits of the world's life force.
Over the countless years, they gained sentience, vast size, and a divine awareness of existence itself.
Their followers, the toads, snakes evolved under them, bathed in the energy of their respective realms until they too became vessels of senjutsu.
Where chakra could be weaponized and distorted, natural energy remained pure, untamed, and absolute.
It could grant awareness, transformation, or even near-immortality.
The Great Sages became its interpreters, its voices, gods of nature, born not from chakra, but from life itself.
The toads represent foresight, observation, and destiny.
They are the watchers of the world, interpreters of fate.
Gamamaru himself is so deeply attuned to the flow of natural energy that he does not see events in linear time; he perceives ripples, disturbances, and inevitabilities as one continuous field.
His prophecies are not glimpses of the future, but readings of imbalance yet to manifest.
The snakes embody transformation and rebirth.
Their White Sage channels natural energy through mutation, creating strength through domination and evolution.
Her teachings are ruthless, power gained only through shedding one's limits, through self-destruction and reformation.
Those who seek her are either reborn or consumed.
To her, evolution is nature's truest will.
The slugs embody unity, adaptation, and restoration.
Katsuyu's existence transcends individuality; she is a collective consciousness, a hive mind spread through countless smaller selves.
She can divide infinitely, exist everywhere, and mend life at its smallest scale.
Her essence is healing, the maintenance of balance at the cellular and spiritual level.
Together, they represent nature's trinity — observation, transformation, and restoration.
Gamamaru had long accepted this cosmic balance, though he was the only one who still worried about the future.
The White Snake sought only evolution, ever testing mortals like Orochimaru to find the next worthy vessel of helping it pursue its ultimate evolution and domination.
Katsuyu cared little for human affairs, content in her solitude, conversing with her endless clones in quiet reflection.
Only Gamamaru watched the skies.
He saw the ripples of the Ōtsutsuki still echoing across history, their threat never truly gone.
He often meditated upon the paradox that while the chakra connected humanity, it also enslaved it to the same cycle of hunger the God Tree had birthed.
Perhaps that was why fate made him the seer.
While the others guarded their realms, Gamamaru reached out to the world through dreams and chance.
It was he who guided Jiraiya to Myōboku when the man performed a careless summoning without a target.
It was he who whispered fate into the paths of those marked by destiny.
It was he who foresaw the one called "The Child of Prophecy."
After the three Sage Regions couldn't be reached by normal means, it was usually they who reached out to the chosen.
That's how fate worked with them, not the other way around.
It wasn't people who found these places, but the places that found people.
Still, Gamamaru never really understood why nature created the other two like him.
The White Snake and the Great Slug, their reasons for existing were still unclear even after all these centuries.
Out of the three, he was the only one who constantly worried about the future, always trying to read what was coming.
The others simply acted according to their instincts.
Still, he knew there had to be a purpose for them, too. The will of the planet and natural energy itself wouldn't have chosen them otherwise, even if he couldn't yet see what that purpose was.
Around the same time, he found Jiraiya, the snakes from Ryūchi Cave, found their own destined "experiment" of this generation, Orochimaru, who carried the right mix of talent and obsession they wanted.
Katsuyu, meanwhile, was the laziest of the three.
She simply threw her summoning link in the world a long time ago, and whoever managed to survive it or match her nature became her summoner, of each generation, by chance.
Among them all, only Gamamaru still thought about the larger picture, about the threat that had never truly disappeared from this world.
The Ōtsutsuki
He could still sense that faint, cold presence somewhere beyond the sky.
No matter how much time passed, he knew they would come again.
And when they did, this planet would need someone ready for it.
This was why it had been Gamamaru himself who first approached those two brothers, long ago, when he was still small, not too long after his creation.
The world was still raw then, the God Tree still pulsing faintly with its stolen energy.
Humanity was enslaved to its will, and Kaguya, the so-called Rabbit Goddess, ruled as both its servant and master.
Gamamaru had been the one to reveal the truth to Hagoromo and Hamura, the "true nature" of their mother, and what she had done to the world.
He helped them understand what she truly was: not a divine protector, but a usurper enslaving mankind through chakra.
It was under his quiet guidance that they gathered the resolve to act, and with his visions as their warning, they confronted her. With his help, they won.
Even then, Gamamaru already saw fragments of futures, incomplete, distorted images of what might come.
Among them, one stood out clearly, brighter than all the rest: a mischievous blue-eyed boy, and the son of that boy.
A lineage, distant but clear, carrying the greatest chance this planet would ever have against the return of the Ōtsutsuki.
Because of that, he took the first step to ensure the world's survival, too. Kaguya Otsustuki needed to be gone.
He taught Hagoromo the path to Sagehood, or rather, helped him awaken what was already dormant in him.
The blood of the Ōtsutsuki carried natural energy within it from the chakra fruit their ancestors consumed, meaning they were, in a way, born as natural sages.
But Hagoromo, as a half-blood, had never truly understood what it meant until Gamamaru showed him how to use it properly, how to align himself with nature instead of dominating it.
This was why Hagoromo's Sage Mode stood above that of any human who came after him, even Ashura or Hashirama Senju.
It wasn't just training, it was blood.
His affinity for natural energy was something innate, not learned, a reflection of what he was, not what he became.
His lineage already carried it, inherited from the chakra fruit his mother had consumed.
So, he didn't grant Hagoromo power through his own toad nature and special tools as a conduit; he simply guided him, helping awaken what was already dormant within him and leading him toward his own, fully enlightened Sage Mode.
From there, after successfully dealing with Kaguya, the two worked together, subtly shaping the flow of the world for centuries.
Behind every legend, every prophecy, every system that led to the shinobi world's formation, there was a faint trace of their hand.
They worked in the shadows, ensuring that when the next Ōtsutsuki came, the world would have the highest possible chance of survival.
Gamamaru's visions didn't come like clear words or fixed prophecies.
They came as fragments, like dream shards, splintered reflections of countless possibilities.
The future wasn't a path, but a sea of probabilities.
At best, he could calculate outcomes depending on what choices were made and which ripples disturbed the flow of natural energy.
But then, everything changed.
About a year and a half ago, the future suddenly began to blur gradually.
Gamamaru noticed it first in his meditations, a faint distortion, like mud spilling into clear water.
The once-stable current of fate was clouded.
His calculations stopped aligning; his visions no longer connected.
The lines of destiny twisted, warped, and eventually vanished altogether.
Something, or someone, had disrupted the rhythm of the world.
He tried to trace it.
For months, he observed, watching every major chakra disturbance across the continents.
And eventually, he found the source, a single human, one whose energy didn't belong here at all.
Ryusei Nishida.
The last Senju.
A fourteen-year-old boy from Konoha, whose presence alone seemed to distort every predictable outcome.
Gamamaru quickly realized that this was no ordinary anomaly.
Ryusei's existence felt foreign, like it wasn't created by this world's natural energy.
Almost as if he had been inserted into it from outside its system.
The natural energy of the planet didn't reject him outright, but it didn't recognize him either.
Worse, the disturbance was spreading.
Those closest to him, Tsunade, Orochimaru, and a handful of others, all began to carry faint traces of the same irregularity.
They were no longer moving along the old, expected trajectories Gamamaru had predicted.
The butterfly effect had already begun.
That terrified him more than anything else.
Without the path he had cultivated for thousands of years, the chance of survival against the Ōtsutsuki invasion dropped to near zero.
The once-clear "best possible route", the one built around the lineage of the blue-eyed boy and his descendants, had collapsed.
Could Ryusei Nishida somehow replace that role?
Could he truly protect this world from something that didn't even belong to it?
Gamamaru doubted it.
He had already confirmed, through the faint glimpses available to him, that this boy's presence alone caused constant deviation, like a foreign code inserted into a stable system.
Even his natural energy sensing couldn't pierce Ryusei's core.
It was like staring at a void wrapped in a body of chakra.
"Almost like he's not one of us," Gamamaru had muttered more than once.
But even so, nature itself didn't move to erase the boy.
That told him something, too.
Either nature couldn't act that way anymore, or it was simply waiting, the same way it had once waited for the God Tree's first bloom.
Perhaps it wasn't sentient enough to "choose" anything.
Maybe it just reacted — like water flowing, wind shifting, or light bending around matter.
Gamamaru didn't know.
But he knew what he had to do.
If the future was now unreadable, the only way to regain control was to remove the variable.
To erase the one element that clouded all visions.
Ryusei Nishida had to be expeditiously neutralized — erased.
And those altered by him — Tsunade, Orochimaru, and perhaps others — would also need to be corrected, or even eliminated, one way or another.
And he still had to, at all costs, protect the most important nodes of fate — those tied to the original line of destiny.
Minato. Kushina. Jiraiya, and others.
Both those already born, or the parents of those who still weren't.
The ones who would one day bring forth the child of prophecy.
Only by doing this could the world's fate become visible again.
There was no other choice.
Now that he had identified the source of the disturbance, the target was clear.
As long as he could deal with Ryusei Nishida — cleanse him and the ripple effects he caused — even if the world couldn't return fully to its original state, the flow of fate might at least stabilize again.
Then he could glimpse the future once more, perhaps find a new optimal path against the inevitable Ōtsutsuki return, or at least salvage something from the collapse of the old trajectory.
But for that, the key variable had to be removed.
Even if all else failed, that one objective could not.
The anomaly had to be purged.
Only then would the haze over the future clear, and the world's natural energy flow return to its proper rhythm.
Thankfully, Gamamaru wasn't alone in this.
Gamamaru's eyes, old and heavy, opened in the dim light of Mount Myōboku's temple.
His pupils dilated slightly — sensing a ripple through dimensions.
A familiar presence touched the edge of his consciousness.
The voice came not through sound, but through vibration, carried by the space between life and death.
His own voice then came low, deep, echoing like stone rolling across time.
"So… you've returned again."
From beyond the stillness, a faint light shimmered — and the silhouette of a tall, robed figure began to form.
It was Hagoromo Ōtsutsuki, the Sage of Six Paths — now a soul existing in the Purgatory between the living world and the Pure Land.