Realization of the Truth? Soon~

"AHHH!!! Megumi!!! What in the world is this thing! Why won't it leave me alone! The god damn thing keeps coming back! How in the world does it keep finding me!? I don't have any seal on me!!!"

"HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!" Megumi rolled around on the floor along with Hashirama who was laughing out loud at his wife's plight.

*QUACK* *QUACK*

"SHUT IT YOU ANNOYING DUCK!"

"HAHAHAHAHA!!! Mito I haven't seen you so annoyed with anyone for ages!!! Well done Megumi well don-"

*SCHWICK*

A golden chain stabbed in between Hashirama's legs, super close to his jewels, effectively shutting him up.

"Help me! You miserable husband." Mito spoke in a voice dripping with venom.

"Yes, yes!"

Hashirama quickly got up from the floor and went up to Mito to help her get rid of the rubber ducky that seemed to be always following her around and quacking loudly.

Performing a hand seal, he caused a small wooden stake to grow out of the floor and stab it which caused the duck to disappear as if it was an illusion.

"See..? Simple." Hashirama turned and looked at Mito who deadpanned at him.

"If it was so easy why would I ask you to help!?"

*QUACK**QUACK*

As if to prove Mito's words right the yellow rubber ducky appeared right on top of Hashirama's head this time quacking even louder, seemingly annoyed for having been destroyed.

Hashirama quickly looked up at his head bewildered as he couldn't figure out what had just happened.

The rubber ducky then just jumped off of his head and fell back onto the floor where it began dancing around Mito's feet and quacking loudly, annoying her further.

Hashirama stared at the rubber ducky with all of his focus.

He bent down to closely examine it and then looked back at Megumi who was still rolling all around the floor laughing wildly clutching his stomach.

"How…?" Hashirama asked, with the most bewildered Mito had ever seen on him.

"Want to know!?" Megumi asked looking up from the floor and wiggling his eye brows to tease the two old people.

Hashirama just nodded with a serious expression on his face as Mito angrily stood in a stare off with the duck, since as long as she kept eye contact with it, it wouldn't shout with that annoying voice.

"That thing is the same as me." Megumi said pointing at the duck as he sat himself properly on the floor.

"Same thing as you?"

"Yes. It is purely energy with some spiritual energy attached to it. It doesn't have any chakra in it, at all."

"....I can see that you used my idea before of giving colours to different energies to give this thing the yellow colour, but spiritual energy? You can't generate spiritual energy out of thin air. Spiritual energy is connected to a soul, or rather it is the layer of the soul that gives it its identity. And you can't create a soul out of no where."

"I didn't. I just mimicked mine!" Megumi said with the proudest expression he had ever made.

Mito immediately turned to look at him, her face wrought with worry and concern about his well being.

Moving by his side, both Mito and Hashirama performed extensive jutsus to make sure of his well being and looking at him angrily.

"What the hell were you thinking doing such a thing without consulting us first!?" Mito exclaimed.

"And how the hell did you even get in touch with it and learn about it? I made sure to never teach you anything about such things!" which Hashirama followed.

"What…?" Megumi was quite bewildered at their reactions as he had expected Mito and Hashirama to be happier about this.

*sigh* *sigh*

Confirming nothing was wrong with him both Mito and Hashirama sighed at the same time but still looked at Megumi with a little anger.

"How did you do that? There isn't anything missing from your soul."

"Huh? Missing? What are you talking about?"

"You said you used your own soul." Hashirama asked to confirm if what he had heard was correct.

"Yes."

"But there isn't anything missing from you." Mito explained similarly.

"...?"

"...?"

"...?"

Both the parties stared at each other in confusion as if wondering what the other person was talking about.

Curious as to what the two older people meant, Megumi voiced his confusion first.

"What do you mean when you are talking about the soul?"

"The ethereal form of your body…?"

Megumi just stared at them both wide eyed and then smirked at them as if he had won something finally.

Both Mito and Hashirama found the veins on their head throbbing at the narcisistic smirk Megumi was portraying as if he was looking down at them from a high place and they were just fools.

Megumi immediately put on an air of superiority and then began speaking as he stroked his imaginary beard.

"You children have eyes yet you are unable to recognize Mount Tai."

Mito and Hashirama felt like punching Megumi who was acting older than them and calling them children in spite of being a fraction as old as they were, as he did all of it with the infuriating wise old smirking face as if he was an enlightened master.

"Tsk. Tsk. It is such a waste of the resources you have used for your cultivation. You must quickly verify and clear your meridians of impurities and meditate on your Dao and improve its quality and get closer to the truth."

Before either of them could react to Megumi's outrageous claims, he jumped up and ran away leaving behind an annoying and Quacking duck for them both to deal with as he teleported straight into his room using Hirashin.

Lying in his bed Megumi stared outside the window in his room as he smiled feeling refreshed.

'Close! I can feel it! I'm so very close to be able to figure out a way to teleport around just about anywhere.'

Megumi stared around the room he was inside off as several memories from the last few years washed over him.

He looked at GLaDOS who was now much quieter.

She wasn't nice in anyway and hadn't grown a heart to stop insulting, even with her morality core, she was just quieter since she understood well enough how scary Mito could actually be once I snitched on her to Mito about how she was bad mouthing her.

It hadn't been a long time since GLaDOS had become quiet. She had only gained awareness when Megumi had finally figured out a way to attribute spiritual energy to inanimate objects and make them truly 'think' for themselves.

A thick pile of papers hanging around the room were filled with diagrams of seals and the new jutsus he had created by himself and also learnt from both Hashirama and Mito.

He couldn't really perform most of them yet since he was usually running on a chakra deficiency due to his missing body parts.

It was only after he had lost his leg did he find out just how useful a body made from the cells Tsunade had truly was, as all through out the year he spent in the forest without an arm he never felt himself missing any chakra, meaning that after he had lost his arm he still had the same amount of chakra he had earlier while he was in a three year old Sakura body.

Staring at the diagram of elemental transformations that explained his own understanding and notes about them on the wall, he looked at the three elemental transformations he didn't really know much about, earth, wind and fire.

Just learning how to master lightning and water elemental nature transformations had taken him over half a decade, he couldn't begin to imagine how exactly other people learnt the remaining elemental nature transformations in such a short period of time and became jounin's at a young age like Kakashi did.

He remembered how Mito and Hashirama laughed at him when he explained to them his plan of mastering all the elemental natures.

Even after he told them that there was the Third Hokgae who was supposed to have mastered all the elemental nature transformations he got laughed at by both of them.

When he was confused about what was going on they exlained to him just how hard it was to actually master any elemental transformation, and how it got exponentially harder to master ones that were different from your own affinity, especially ones that were particularly strong against your own element.

To try and prove them wrong he had attempted to learn wind release jutsus which was the element that countered lightning but ended up failing spectacularly after basically attempting to learn one single jutsu from Mito which allowed him to create a small puff of air out of his palm.

It was a lot of hard work for almost half an year with basically no return, so he quit trying to do it since he felt he could do better things with his time.

The only good thing about learning wind release was that it allowed him to create seals that could use wind to float things around. Since you coudn't perform nature transformation jutsus using seals Megumi wasn't able to perform any wind related jutsus, but what he did achieve was being able to manipulate the flow of air after pumping chakra into seals to create a cushion for things to float on as long as they were light enough, like the paper bird and his hover board that would hover a few centimeters off of the ground.

Trying to find a way to perform a jutsu that would let him teleport out of this place he had requested to learn the Hirashin from Mito who did her best to teach him.

This was his first exposure to any space related jutsu and Megumi had spent nearly three whole years just delving into the depths of this one single jutsu, trying to understand and isolate every single thing he could about it.

The jutsu worked in a simple way, you first marked an area or just chose a mark to which you wanted to teleport to with your own spiritual energy, activating the seal for the jutsu then converted you into chakra that was then stored into the space of the domain you were in, and once you were entirely converted into chakra you were spit out at the point in space that had your spiritual energy since you weren't allowed to die with chakra in your body.

If Megumi had to explain it he would explain it as a glitch in the world, it was basically like a minecraft bed which was used to set your spawn point and then each time you "died" you would respawn at the bed you last slept in, but along with your items that you paid to keep. You essentially used your spiritual energy as a marker to trick the world into thinking you were still alive at the spot where the mark was instead of where you had "died" by converting yourself into chakra fully which cause you to instantly teleport to the new spot.

Because of Megumi's in depth exploration of this jutsu he had gotten extremely good and precise at it, to the point that not even Hashirama and Mito could figure out when and where he was teleporting to anymore. His only problem with this was his small chakra reserves which depleted after about thirty or forty close continuous teleportation.

But it didn't make a difference to Megumi since he still couldn't leave outside the domain he was stuck in.

What he was attempting to do was basically teleport from the Minecraft Nether dimension back to the Overworld. The problem was he didn't have a portal to travel through them even though the worlds were located right beside each other.

This problem with domains had caused Megumi to study exactly how the damn thing was made, which began his venturing into spiritual energy and how exactly it was formed and what it did, given that domains were made from spiritual energy taking control over space.

His experiments began from the most direct form in which he could interact with spiritual energy, Genjutsu.

He began to try and use his circuit seals to probe and pick apart exactly how genjutsus were built and made with their components, especially how spiritual energy affected physical energy to create these fantastical delusions.

This study led to the development of the gift he had given granny Mito for her birthday, a seal to craft the genjutsu manga books he had made. It was like an engine to create the exact experience you wanted to create even if you weren't good at genjutsu. He had given it to her since he often found her writing story books which filled the libraries in the statue, and she had often expressed her desire to read these books in the same form as Megumi's One punch book he had given Hashirama earlier.

Once he had reached what he believed to be the limits of the interactions between genjutsu and his circuit seals he stepped in to study how spiritual energy affected physical energy to form chakra in his free time.

With no progress for a while, Megumi turned to study and analyze Senjutsu chakra in the sage mode.

And his analysis left him a little stunned as well as a little confused.

Senjutsu chakra was essentially the harmony of nature and man, i.e their spiritual energies coincided and focused on the exact same thing giving the person the ability to control the Nature chakra around himself and gain a massive reserve of combined chakra called Senjutsu chakra.

The thing was though that nature chakra or rather Nature itself had no reason to cooperate with a person attempting to use Nature chakra to convert it into Senjutsu chakra.

The only thing that allowed Nature chakra to sync up with a human's chakra was the physical energy that was common in both which allowed for their spiritual energies to mix together as long as a person absorbed natural energy from places where their intent were similar.

And since you wouldn't usually find the form of Nature energy around yourself that was suitable for your use, it was easier to adapt your thinking to be the same as the Nature energy that you were around to absorb it with what ever method you learnt to trick it into thinking it was being absorbed by an animal.

After this discovery Megumi thought, 'If physical energy is the common energy between all things then why couldn't he just find a way to manipulate this energy directly, since Nature energy jutsus couldn't be used in Hashirama's domain?'

Delving a little deeper into physical energy, Megumi quickly realized physical energy wasn't as simple as he had initially thought it to be.

During all his tests he quickly came to believe that physical energy was just another form of spiritual energy, or rather the spiritual energy of an entity that included all the planets, the stars and the galaxies in it.

The entity was not an alien being that existed somewhere but the very universe itself, it existed everywhere.

In essence the universe was its own domain that was so simple and without rules that it allowed everything else to happen inside it, meaning consciousness had begun forming using this physical energy which then gave rise to independent domains with their own spiritual energy inside it, like universe which gave rise to the planet and the planet which gave rise to a human.

To Megumi everything seemed clearer when he sat down and began to label everything that was built on physical energy as just another spiritual energy layer that provided the physical energy with some properties of its own.

For example, if one used physical energy to create chakra, then that was still just physical energy just with additional restrictions placed by their own domain.

The easiest example to explain this was chakra affinity, the same physical energy attained different affinities when different spiritual energies were mixed with it.

This excited Megumi quite a bit since it meant he could perform jutsus simply using physical energy and then creating a false spiritual background to it if he was right about this theory, which began his two year long experimentation filled with trial and error on how exactly he could directly interact with physical energy and directly give it properties without turning it into chakra.

The search had led him to the very core of a human being or life itself, the soul.

The soul was an elusive thing that Megumi couldn't really figure out himself as he initially began to venture on this path. Asking Hashirama and Mito didn't yield any results since they didn't think Megumi was ready for learning about such things yet, but he conducted his research by himself.

To study the soul, Megumi employed the same technique he had used to teleport himself into Hashirama's domain, the modified version of Kushina's seal which he partially knew.

Combining with all that he learnt about Hirashin and the other things about all the forms of energy, he added fail safes for himself incase he went too far with it and got carried away, so that he could always return back to where he was safe and sound.

It wasn't long afterward that Megumi found out about the ethereal body that he first thought was the soul itself. Something about repeatedly almost wiping himself out of existence by merging with the planet and separating himself had made it easier for him to look and analyze himself as he was dying.

The ethereal body first confused him a little but once he broke it down into its components he made a discovery that frightened and excited him at the same time.

What he figured out was that there was no "one individual" soul. The spiritual energy of the body just built a framework for the physical energy of the universe to exert its consciousness independently.

It was like the universe had figured out a way to split its own mind to look at and experience itself.

The reason it terrified Megumi a little since that meant there was never a person holding the identity of Megumi in the first place, it was just the universe with a different set of rules that restricted it.

But after a few days of staring at the truth as it stared back at his face, he just accepted it since it also meant that even if it meant that there was effectively no difference between the universe and the individual it was the experience that made it all fun, since the identity of Megumi or the spiritual energy could choose to experience life or the universe in any way it wanted it made the experience fun and enjoyable.

A surprising thing happened to Megumi as he came to this realization that he and the universe were the same.

The next time Megumi attempted to seal himself using Kushina's seal, he could no longer obliterate himself, or rather, there was no obliterating himself, he could always access his spiritual energy even as he was slowly losing himself in to the depths of the cosmos.

He could clearly feel that he was becoming as thoughtless and neutral as the universe. He could see that it had his spiritual energy attached to it which he could pick up at any point in time and regain focus on his body.

Although regaining his body felt quite limiting and felt uncomfortable after experiencing the sheer unending scale of the entire universe itself, Megumi still held on to his body for now, since he still had work to do and people waiting for him.

Megumi named this process the Universal sage mode.

Where ones own spiritual energy becomes attuned with the neutrality of the universe such that it allows everything to reflect off of it like a mirror, exactly as it is.

He couldn't figure out what he could do with this new sage mode since it did not give him any extra chakra or even physical energy, it usually required him to become empty, just like the emptiness of the universe.

He recalled the first time he retained his consciousness during his testing with Kushina's seal and the first time in this Universe Sage Mode, where he could listen to the sounds his spiritual energy made. The stillness and silence clearly let him hear the orchestra of sounds that were required to generate spiritual energy.

He could clearly see all the sounds that were required for him to make a framework out of them for the universe to treat it as a new conscious life.

He could see the plan of the universe or the plan of life.

If the DNA was the basis of the formation of the human body, then the frequencies of attributes were the basis of formation of consciousness.

Which was exactly how he gave GLaDOS her spiritual energy, just by giving normal physical energy certain frequencies which tricked the universe into thinking GLaDOS was alive.

His next experiment was the rubber ducky, a combination between spiritual energy and space seals which gave life to an anthropomorphic rubber ducky that would follow around a person's chakra it had consumed.

He had collected Mito's chakra pretty easily from the seals she had used to prank him, so he set the rubber ducky on her to test his creation.

It wasn't anything material, it was the ethereal body that both Mito and Hashirama were talking about, it was untouchable but a visible energy. Hashirama and Mito had somehow mistaken that the ethereal body was the last stop of the soul when in reality it was just a container or a gateway to the truth which was the consciousness of the universe itself.

Each soul was just that, a gateway into the universe from a unique perspective.

Now all Megumi needed to figure out was how to use this physical energy to directly teleport himself out of the domain he was currently in.

He had to essentially trick the universe into believing that he was not in Hashirama's domain but the planet's, which meant tricking the universe's consciousness into misunderstanding his parent domain.

Looking at the darkening sky outside and the empty space in between the stars and all around, Megumi smiled since he knew how he could do such a thing and he was excited to do it.

'Soon, Rura, soon I'll be right there, with you.'

-------------------------

Thank you for reading!

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