"That beam you just fired off should have tipped off your distant 'kin' on the moon," Makoto said to Hanabi.
"Whether he'll drop down on the Shinobi World early is up in the air. But even if he does, it's nothing to sweat over."
Makoto had recently picked up a new ability he dubbed 'Wonder of U.'
However, this skill worked a bit differently from the catastrophic version he initially imagined.
If it were the original, it would have been a disaster.
Everyone would have dropped dead!
Anyone who knew Makoto's true identity would get targeted by non-stop calamities.
Once they all died off, even ordering a simple takeout would become impossible for him.
But the version he scored wasn't purely automatic.
He could tweak the intensity of the bad luck and even temporarily lend the buff to others.
Just now, he used Hanabi as a test subject.
Anyone harboring hostility toward her would suddenly face some extreme, cursed misfortune.
And that unlucky bastard happened to be Ōtsutsuki Toneri, the creepy guy on the moon scheming to steal some eyeballs, abduct a chick for a wife and blow up the Shinobi World!
"On the moon?" Hanabi recalled Makoto bringing this up when he convinced her to ditch the dark side and join his crew back in Konoha.
He warned her that if she stayed weak, some creep would gouge out her eyes and kidnap her older sister.
Hanabi knew the lore, but Tobirama, Orochimaru, and the rest were out of the loop.
Makoto had mostly focused on the main Ōtsutsuki alien threat during his briefings.
He hadn't bothered mentioning this lone, bootleg Ōtsutsuki survivor before.
"A Hyūga branch on the moon... with the Byakugan?" Orochimaru jotted down a note in his creepy little ledger.
"Yep," Makoto explained. "Both Hamura's descendants up there and the Hyūga Clan down here practice endogamy. The main difference is the Hyūga Clan's rules aren't air-tight. Over the centuries, a few exceptions slipped through the cracks to freshen up the gene pool. But Hamura's kids on the moon had zero opportunities for that, even if they begged for it. Forced to breed within their own isolated rock, the biological consequences are pretty obvious."
"The Hyūga Clan on Earth at least gets a tiny bit of genetic diversity from outside sources, plus the Shinobi World's weird natural ecosystem..." As the resident genetics freak, Orochimaru grasped the medical nightmare right away.
"The Sage of the Six Paths' baseline moral standards ensure that even with their obsession with pure bloodlines, the Hyūga Clan maintains some degree of separation, avoiding marriages between direct relatives. But you can't say the same for Hamura's isolated descendants," Tobirama added.
As the former Hokage, his administrative knowledge of the Hyūga confirmed they kept enough distance in their family tree.
While the genetic danger lingered, the overall risk was manageable.
"Spot on," Makoto said. "Ōtsutsuki Hamura might have tried to educate his kids, but his teaching skills were garbage. Later generations misinterpreted the most basic principles. If we ignore the impending Otsutsuki invasion for a second, the Sage of the Six Paths and his brother were decent guys in the narrowest sense. They both wanted peace for the Shinobi World."
Makoto shrugged. "Yet, up on the moon, isolated in their tiny echo chamber with zero interference from Black Zetsu's scheming, their family lore twisted into a cursed mandate: If the Shinobi World created by the Sage fails, we will blow it up and build a new one. This means either Hamura was a total idiot, or all of his descendants on the moon share a collective low IQ."
"The latter makes more sense. It's logical that centuries of aggressive inbreeding would lead to severe intellectual deficiencies," Orochimaru nodded.
"Could these lunatics at least serve as cannon fodder to help us prepare before the real Ōtsutsuki arrive?" Tobirama mused.
"Not a chance," Makoto shook his head.
"Because Hamura's descendants lacked a control mechanism like the Caged Bird Seal, the peace-loving Main Family got slaughtered in a civil war by their own Branch Family, who wanted to destroy the Earth. The mere fact that the surviving Branch Family thinks destroying the planet is a solid plan proves their genetic brain rot has reached a terminal point."
Unsurprisingly, they all suffered from premature death, widespread infertility, and missing limbs.
Toneri himself was born without eyeballs due to a glaring genetic defect.
The remaining branch families died out one by one, leaving Toneri as the sole, lonely survivor.
Maybe the guy was just unlucky.
Despite inheriting a whole bingo card of genetic defects, he only ended up losing his eyes.
Without eyes to see reality, Toneri inherited his family's deranged will.
He resolved to destroy the war-torn Shinobi World and create a new utopia.
As for his grand plan to populate this new world? He intended to find a pure-blooded member of the Earth's Main Family—specifically Hyūga Hinata—marry her, and breed a new race of "perfect" offspring.
Yeah, let that sink in.
To the bitter end, Toneri never realized why he lacked eyeballs or why his entire clan died out.
Millennia of inbreeding had pushed their DNA past the point of no return.
His genius solution for creating a new, flawless Shinobi World?
Destroy everyone and keep the incest loop going!
His critical thinking skills had checked out centuries ago.
But it's not entirely Toneri's fault.
It was a tragic, inescapable cycle.
The inbreeding led to severe intellectual decline, and that brain damage prevented them from recognizing the medical problem, keeping the cursed loop alive.
Still, you have to hand it to him... Toneri's plan was somewhat feasible in a twisted way.
After all, ignorant minds have boundless imagination, and fools find joy in the simplest things.
If the entire New Shinobi World were populated solely by the intellectually disabled, there would probably be no more organized wars—just messy, daily fistfights over shiny rocks at most.
"Fools find joy in the simplest things..." Hanabi's lips twitched.
The others stood around the lab, speechless.
Turning the entire globe into a giant sandbox for the intellectually disabled just to prevent wars was strikingly similar to activating the Infinite Tsukuyomi.
Both plans basically involved lobotomizing humanity to enforce peace.
Hearing Makoto's breakdown, Hanabi finally understood the story behind the warning he gave her back in Konoha.
But... this Toneri guy really was a dim-witted moron!
He needed a pair of pure eyes and a woman to carry on his busted bloodline.
So why didn't he just target her eyes and choose her instead of Hinata?
What trash-tier taste!
Makoto, on the other hand, was a visionary for picking her for his team.
Hanabi muttered smugly to herself.
"So why did he do that?" Black Zetsu posed the soul-searching question, looking up from its book.
"Why didn't Toneri choose Hanabi, who has superior talent and a feistier personality, instead of the timid older one?"
Who could possibly know the answer to it? Even Makoto was clueless.
Could it be that Toneri had some weird NTR fetish, viewing single maidens as boring while regarding other men's crushes as premium targets?
"Beats me," Makoto said, shaking his head.
"Then if it were you in his shoes, what would you choose?" Black Zetsu asked, turning its yellow eyes to Makoto.
"First of all, I wouldn't even think about destroying the planet just to get a date... but fine, let's say I had to make the choice."
Hanabi's small face lit up with smug anticipation, waiting for the praise.
"Then I'd just take both of them!" Makoto declared shamelessly.
"And forget about digging out anyone's eyeballs. What does scooping out eyes even have to do with passing down genetics? It's not like a baby born to a blind mother magically loses its eyes in the womb. Acquired injuries aren't hereditary! Toneri really is a brain-dead moron, right?"
Hanabi's expectant expression froze for a solid second, her ego deflating.
But after chewing on the basic of his rant, she sighed and realized the man was right!