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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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[X] Action Plan: Resume the Conversation (and Reputation Patching)

Why are we so focused on talking about Forbidden Lore? The Kagome conversation is the more urgent FMPOV.
 
faflec said:
[X] Action Plan: Resume the Conversation (and Reputation Patching)

Why are we so focused on talking about Forbidden Lore? The Kagome conversation is the more urgent FMPOV.
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Write for the author of the day, Thinker shit seems more fitting for Vel and EJ likes writing Kagome more (though I know they can both write both)
 
CC: @MMKII, @Twinnstars, @Shrooms.

Saw some theorizing on Discord about Forbidden Lore. Below is a brain-dump of my current thoughts on the subject, somewhat haphazard.
  • The whole setting is a thin coat of paint on top of an inchoate abyss of cosmic horror. A fragile cobweb swaying in the wind. Sealing's Out directly interfaces with this truth. Everything we've seen and the biggest entities we've considered are contained in a very small region of what's really out there. There are no closed causal loops, not everything can be traced back to one of them. Notably, none of them created Out itself.
  • The Sage and his five companions were human. When we hear people talking about them adventuring or being "bearded bastards", it's not a metaphorical translation of interactions between incomprehensible entities, it's factual.
  • The local subset of Out originally consisted of six Paths/realities. The Sage created none of those. He'd only created the Seventh Path, his attempt at paradise.
  • The Five, as in the sealed entities the Thinkers are hooked up to, are not human and never were. They were the most powerful entities in this region, superintelligent and revered as gods. Each Path except the Human one is their own personally crafted paradise. They reside in them and rule them.
    • They may have created humanity. Or just found it, and decided it's a fun toy.
    • (There's a speculation that they originally were the Sage's companions. I think that's wrong. Kei and Ami talked about them in terms of "something that can only destroy" and "monsters too powerful to be slain, only sealed" and "a recognition of surrender by the human race", and overall none of the language is the sort of language I'd expect to be used for corrupted heroes. Also: does the Mori Voice really reads like something that was ever human?)
  • The Sage was empowered by something, perhaps being the analogue of Pain, a previous Rinnegan-wielder.
  • Wild guess: "the Five" were initially one entity, with five aspects and a core. The aspects corresponded to the afterlife-Paths, the entity itself to the Human Path. The Sage was empowered by the core, hence "of Six Paths".
  • The Sage's five companions were each a chosen one of a different aspect of that, uh, "Hexal" Entity.
  • The Sage et al. were tasked by the Five/the Hexal Entity with "clearing house": purging all the other monstrosities from the Paths that the local big honcho(s) didn't want around. As they did so, their personal ambition was in fortifying the world against cosmic horrors and empowering humanity relative to them.
    • They engaged in some Uplift-y projects. Notable: According to Kagome, they took hold of a local distributed parasitic species, and turned them into chakra. A distributed computational system, a sort of cloud of metaphysical nanomachines that people could program and control at will. He'd programmed a bunch of subroutines into it, ways for it to interface with the other local cosmic horrors like the Five and the bijuu and Sealing.
    • They defeated the Tenfold Abomination, likely with the help of the Dragons they created. The Sage split it into nine pieces, sealed each piece in a human.
    • At some point, the Dragons went out of control as well, and the Sage repeated the trick: split them into pieces, sealed each piece into a Summon Clan, plus sealed the "core" of the entities in the Great Seal.
  • Once the Sage et al.'s job was done, they turned on their patron(s). Attempted to shut the Five/the Hexal Entity out of the Human Path as well, trap them in their own realms.
    • As part of this, the Sage may have employed the technique already tried on the Tenfold Abomination and the Dragons. Split the ur-entity into its Five aspects plus the "core". (So e. g. like the Tenfold Abomination became the Nine Beasts, the "Hexal" Entity became the Five.)
    • The Sage's companions perished over the course of this betrayal. Either the Five managed to destroy their minds, or the act of splitting the Hexal Entity into parts did so.
  • At some point over the course of this, probably after the betrayal, the Sage created the Seventh Path as an attempt at a paradise. It's supposed to be completely insulated from the outside reality, all cosmic horrors screened off. That's why invoking the Frozen Skein there is prohibited, why summoning Death is prohibited, why Sealing is prohibited.
    • It was, for one reason or another, a failure. He'd co-opted it as a prison for the Dragons.
Thaaat... largely brings us to now, I think. Open questions:
  • What is Jashin?
    • Prospectively, it's the "core" remnant of the Hexal Entity.
      • Rules over the Human Path specifically, over the fate of entities from birth to death but not beyond that. Indeed, He wants to steal souls back from the afterlife.
      • At the same time, seems very eager to send souls to the afterlife. Kind of seems like it's at odds with itself, a piece of a greater mechanism that isn't supposed to operate independently...
      • The only one who made the Sage bleed — because it was directly connected to him, unlike the other five aspects. And much like the Sage's companions were hurt and destroyed by their direct patrons, the Sage was hurt by his — though not destroyed.
    • Alternatively, Jashin is the Tama aspect, as the Hierophant story suggests. The containment of that aspect is flawed, and it's able to influence the world through this "side channel" of Hidan's cult, not only through the "legitimate channel" of the Tama. (And perhaps all of the Five are shoddily contained and their influence still leaks out.)
    • Alternatively, just some stray other entity. Why not?
  • What is chakra?
    • Just some entity the Sage and his companions created or repurposed.
    • Or that's the core remnant of the Hexal Entity?
  • Is the Tenfold Abomination important? Or just some vermin in the Hexal Entity's garden?
  • What was Pain doing? Seedling? Ninshu? What?
  • What is the King of Hell? Oro had implied he's related to the Sage the same way Oro is related to Tsunade. So he's... the creature empowered by the Naraka Path's governing entity? But isn't that just the Sage's former companion? Or... I'unno, it doesn't map on very well.
But note that it's just one way of fitting a curve to the known datapoints. Also I may have missed any number of details that characters mentioned, I haven't been diligently jotting them all down since a while ago.
 
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Twinnstars said:
@Noumero flaw in the logic, Kumokōgō says that the Dragons rebelled before they even got to be used in the fight and were immediately broken up
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Oh. Okay, the Dragons rebel, the Sage figures out the split-and-seal trick, then figures out he can reapply it to the Tenfold Abomination itself, so although the Dragons failed they're also now unnecessary?
 
Noumero said:
Wild guess: "the Five" were initially one entity, with five aspects and a core. The aspects corresponded to the afterlife-Paths, the entity itself to the Human Path. The Sage was empowered by the core, hence "of Six Paths".
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This part and the hexal entity stuff in general feel like a stretch to me but you did caveat it, so fair enough! Otherwise, largely fits with my understanding. Good analysis!

I kinda have the impression that Jashin is the King of Hell, personally. Fits the whole lord-of-life-and-death thing. He reincarnates people, creating life, but also governs the death that leads him to reincarnate them. Maybe he's a rogue AI created for the role and started rebelling like all the Sage's other creations, maybe he was an independent entity captured or repurposed and put on the job by the Sage and rebelled, maybe he was already doing it and the Sage fucked with his system, leading to their beef, or maybe Jashin is a parasitic entity that took the role from the Sage's original pick. The Pure Lands (which, based on the Buddhist concept of Bardo that it seemingly loosely correlates with) does kind of seem like a "The Sage tried to save more humans/make the system better and fucked it up" thing. Maybe Jashin didn't like that and wants it fixed, maybe Jashin is the reason it didn't quite work correctly, maybe Jashin is the only one holding it together at all and he needs a steady stream of births and deaths to keep the system intact at all. A lot of interesting possibilities here.
 
Noumero said:
Oh. Okay, the Dragons rebel, the Sage figures out the split-and-seal trick, then figures out he can reapply it to the Tenfold Abomination itself, so although the Dragons failed they're also now unnecessary?
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I'm not sure how likely I rate the hexal theory. I think the companions were also real people, likely a champion/sage from each path. It was easier to move between the paths then, though I bet still not easy, so I can definitely imagine the sage going on a Shonen friends acquiring journey.

Once he has his party, he seals the paths to trap the tenfold abomination somewhere, then tries to make dragons as steeds. They instantly rebel, so he makes summon scrolls instead, to summon specific aspects of the Dragons that he needs. Made of the skin of the companion that became the boss for each clan?

~~~

Thinking about it more, I like the hex idea more, except the 7th Path itself is the center bit made from the 5
 
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Noumero said:
I'll just make another fork and let votes fall where Jashin wills.

[x] Action Plan: Due Diligence w/o Shikamaru BUT w/ Ami
Word count: <300.
  • Meeting: Kei, Ami, Mari.
    • Topics: Jashin and Akatsuki.
    • Preparations:
      • Refresh Mari on your Thinker-conspiracy inferences.
      • Review the ANBU transcript of your Hidan conversations. Anything you don't remember?
      • Request the extracted Isan lore. Anything Jashin-related?
      • Keep a live transcript. Periodically review it.
    • Pool ~all relevant knowledge on Jashin. He wasn't known to Shikamaru, and unknown threats of this scale are apocalyptically concerning (see: Dragons). We need to investigate.
      • Priority: Your Orochimaru Q&A. You followed a strict list, then "forgot" about Jashin, apparently repeating yourself.
        • An antimeme?
      • Everything Hidan said about Jashin. Balance, conviction, death and birth, quotas, dreams...
      • Particulars:
        • Some alleged interest in humanity's prosperity and non-extinction.
        • "'They' cut out Jashin's tongue."
        • Jashin making the Sage bleed.
      • Jashin's symbol. Recognizable?
      • Events at O'uzu and Bakuchioka.
      • Jashin's powers. Probability-manipulation?
        • Hidan's powers/blessings.
      • Potential Hierophant connection.
      • Relation to "summoning Death"?
      • Omit your afterlife-viewing and Scroll-locating experiments.
    • Do they know anything more?
    • Prepare for a follow-up Hidan meeting.
      • What are the highest-priority questions to ask? How should we approach him?
      • Ami, Mari: Distracting Hidan from the rift isn't of much value: he isn't a researcher. However, being in his good graces gives you a semi-trusted channel to the rest of Akatsuki. Any ideas on what distracting information we may seed it with?
  • Meet Hidan (with Asuma's permission). Express interest in finally learning theology.
    • Follow the prepared questionnaire, plus:
      • What's Jashin's ideal world?
      • How's Jashin connected to the Five? What are they, in His view? You're only familiar with... biased perspectives.
        • (Conceal this from everyone but Mari.)
    • Justifications (if needed):
      • Clearly your insight's useful.
      • If you start a Jashinism branch, you'll need to know what to preach.



I'll consider it.

Edit: Changed that line to:
  • How's Jashin connected to the Five? What are they, in His view? You're only familiar with... biased perspectives.
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[x] Action Plan: Due Diligence w/o Shikamaru BUT w/ Ami

Found two artifact errors:
  • We don't need to omit the seance, because everyone here was involved or is pretty informed.
  • Mari no longer adds anything to the meeting(no Shika), and here presence might mage the ex-Mori more tightliped with forbidden lore that Mari has no business knowing. She shouldn't be in this meeting.
 
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RandomOTP said:
IIRC, Kagome said that Summons were humans turned into Summons by the Sage.

My theory is that they were loved ones/trusted friends/Companions that agreed to receive a fragment of the Dragons' power, and watch over the Dragon Seal.
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Oh, right! Good catch, and I largely agree.
Shrooms said:
This part and the hexal entity stuff in general feel like a stretch to me
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Twinnstars said:
I'm not sure how likely I rate the hexal theory
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Yeah, but numerology told me to do it. Consider: Why do we have seven Paths, a Sage of the Six Paths, but also the Five entities? Let's try to unravel this step-by-step:
  • First, the Sage only created the Seventh Path, as implied by Oro and explicitly said by Kagome. So we have six Paths that existed initially.
  • From that initial standpoint, if we stand on the Human Path and look out, we'll see five other Paths. And we have confirmations that the Mori Voice is associated with the Deva Path and the Nara with the Asura Path (edit: ignore that, I hallucinated that). So that maps on: each of the Five entities are associated with one of these five initial non-Human paths.
  • But then — how's the Sage of Six Paths the Sage of all Six Paths? There's a missing fragment, an entity governing over the Human Path; and by implication, it was the dominant one, capable of handing over privileges over all six initial Paths.
  • Hence, the Five were initially the Six!
And once we establish that, well — we already have the datapoint of the Tenfold Abomination becoming the Nine Beasts, so the Hexal Entity => the Five just seems like the obvious logical leap.

(Alternative hypothesis: the Human Path was governed by all Five other entities in a council.)
RandomOTP said:
Remember our simpler days, when we wondered if the Ryuugamine was Hazō's grandfather? Good times.
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Ha, I don't. My very first contribution to the thread was asking Kagome about Forbidden Lore, leading to that initial conspiracy-dump that basically kicked off the entire cosmic-horror plot thread.

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Left-Hand Mutant said:
Found two artifact errors:
  • We don't need to omit the seance, because everyone here was involved or is pretty informed.
  • Mari no longer adds anything to the meeting(no Shika), and here presence might mage the ex-Mori more tightliped with forbidden lore that Mari has no business knowing. She shouldn't be in this meeting.
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  • Neither Ami nor Kei, nor maybe even Mari, was aware that we prayed to Jashin before doing the seance.
  • I think Mari's presence balances out the power dynamics a bit. Hazou vs. Ami and Kei leads to the latter two efficiently coordinating to Forbid all the Lore either of them decides he shouldn't know about. Hazou will be basically repurposed into their puppet, a mere vehicle by which they make inquiries of Hidan. With Mari there, that'd be more difficult to do.
 
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Shrooms said:
Really? I figured that given that the Nara are very heavily associated with the color black that they were correlated to the Naraka Path (which also has 'Nara' in it, though that's weaker evidence imo.)
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... Huh. I vaguely recall that this was confirmed in-universe, but searching the story for "asura" appears to disprove that. I apparently hallucinated this.

@faflec, was the Nara's connection with the Asura Path canonically established?
 
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Interlude: Pale Reflections
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    • Interlude: Pale Reflections​

    The moon was a hazy waxing gibbous, lurking behind intermittent clouds. Its glow cast a ghostly veil over the rough granite of the new Gōketsu Estate, which was quiet and still at this time of night. Not all its residents were slumbering, Noburi noted. One of the other Gōketsu ninja (tonight was Jin's shift, maybe?) would be keeping a watchful eye on their people, in case any important situations arose (as such situations often did when one was a member of a Clan of Sealmasters.) Besides that, young lovers occasionally snuck out, deluding themselves into thinking they wouldn't be noticed by someone trained to snap to attention at the slightest crinkle of a leaf, but they were often given their space nonetheless. And of course, the new Gōketsu clinic was always staffed, even if just by civilians who could send for Noburi when needed. It was nice to feel needed, despite the occasionally grisly circumstances that lead to his presence being required. But neither Leaf General nor the Gōketsu clinic needed him at this hour. He had another important role to play in the family.

    The others had tittered about, upon Hazō's return. Ino came by, but he waved her off after reassuring her he was fine. Mari was clearly trying not to show how badly she was ricocheting between wanting to help and doubting if her "help" would be healthy. Yuno didn't even understand what was wrong. Kagome was once again locked up in his workstation, once he was sure everyone was still alive. Akane- oh, right. Kei was dealing with some burden of her own that Noburi still hadn't been told about. It seemed they all carried more of those these days.

    Which left Noburi.

    Hazō faced the moon, sitting on the roof of Akane's seal bank slash shrine, one of the only buildings on their estate that actually looked halfway decent, though the estate was soon due for an overhaul. In spite of, or perhaps because of the clan's income changing like the seasons, it seemed that fortune had favored them again. Noburi had been meaning to ask what harebrained scheme Hazō pulled to manage the sudden windfall this time, and what harebrained scheme he was expecting to ruin it all again, but now didn't seem like the time. With a deft hop, he landed beside Hazō, without a whisper of a splash coming from his barrel. He'd like to see cousin Kiri manage that.

    "'Sup bro," he said evenly. Might as well ease into things first.

    "Noburi, do you think I'm a good person?" Hazō asked, without looking at him. So much for easing into things.

    "Of course I do. With the number of lives you've saved with your ideas and projects, I'd say only Tsunade gives you a run for your money-"

    Hazō gave a frustrated huff, cutting him off. "Stop. Just… think about it for ten seconds? And give me your honest answer. Not 'do I do good things.' Am I a good person?"

    Noburi winced at the note of desperation but did as he was asked, taking ten seconds to consider the question. Did he think Hazō was a good person, examining him as objectively as he was able to?

    After a pause, Noburi carefully began to construct his response. "I think… that you try. You see suffering in others and you want it to stop. You feel remorse for your part in the suffering of others. You… you seek to improve where you've slipped up…" he trailed off, but picked back up quickly. "What is a good person if not someone that wants to help reduce the pain that other people experience?"

    "I agree with that definition. You are a good person, Noburi… It's getting harder and harder to believe that applies to me too." His voice hitched a fraction but he pressed onward. "You said I'm seeking to improve my slip ups, but I'm constantly feeling like I'm trending the wrong way. My attempts to improve the world may have led to as many deaths as lives I've saved. I haven't dared ask Shikamaru to run the numbers on it for fear of the answer." Finally, he looked at Noburi, a hollow look in his eye, one that showed such vacancy in the heart. Noburi didn't realize Hazō had ever experienced something like that. Even when Akane… disappeared, Hazō showed pain, anguish, anger… not defeat. Noburi had seen patients diagnosed with terminal illness look more chipper than Hazō did right now.

    Monotone, Hazō asked, "Noburi… have you ever killed someone?"

    "You're not exactly helping those Jashinist rumors with questions like that, bro," Noburi joked, but Hazō didn't take the bait.

    "You haven't, not directly?"

    Noburi sighed. "Not like what you meant. There was, of course, the Sunset Racer." Somehow, it always came back to that damned boat. "There've been surgeries I've performed where… maybe if it had been Tsunade performing it, they'd have lived. My hands aren't delicate enough, precise enough, to do what she does, and I don't have the skills in medical ninjutsu to come back from a catastrophic failure the way she does. I guess… in that regard, I get what you mean. It sucks, to put in all that work into trying to save someone, and ultimately, being the one who dooms them. Maybe they'd have been doomed if I hadn't helped, maybe not. But I tried helping nonetheless, and they were dead by the time I was done. Still, with the way this world is, I'm sure there'll come a day where I'll have to kill someone personally. I can't say I look forward to it, but I think I've made my peace with it, as best as I can. We were raised to do it, after all."

    Hazō nodded, absorbing that. "Killing a person changes you, they say. Well, maybe at first. I've directly killed maybe two dozen people by now, more depending on how you count Summons… Just today Hidan had me butcher a dozen bandits to uphold Jashin's Birth aspect or whatever. Do you know what I felt afterwards?"

    Noburi shivered, but he suspected he knew the answer. "Nothing."

    Hazō nodded. "It was so easy. Like splitting wood for the fireplace. And people look at me like I'm crazy for thinking there's something wrong with that. Why don't any of us feel anything about that? If Jiraiya were sitting on the other side of me, and I asked him if that made me a bad person, he'd laugh in my face. But, you know… if I asked him if he thought he was a good person… I don't think he'd have said yes." Hazō shook his head. "I can feel myself becoming that, a little more, every day. The lives become more abstract, the deaths become easier. This world of Death turns us into more instruments of Death, and everyone learns to love it, or at least do their best not to care." Hazō rubbed the roof of Akane's shrine gently. "This world, this village, and I… we turned her into that too. One of the only people I've ever met who was sane enough to hate that process for what it was, and we put her through it. Showed her that all her ideals and principles were nothing but ash she'd mistaken for her inner Will of Fire. It tore her up and then this world took her away. Even if- even when I- we get her back, I can't… I can't give her that back. It was stolen from her. And it was stolen from me too, I just wasn't as upset about it as her. Not until I realized how precious a thing it was that I'd lost. When I saw how much it had meant to her."

    Noburi processed that. No one could deny how the war had changed Akane. Their resident ray of sunshine had become a dreary raincloud looming over them. And yet…

    "Hazō… what this world, and I do mean this world, not you, turned her into, it- it sucks. It does, but- fuck, I feel like an ass just for saying it-"

    "She wasn't being realistic?" Hazō supplied.

    "Pragmatic, maybe. After everything we've accomplished together and will accomplish together, I wouldn't dare tell anyone what can or can't be made real. But still, yeah. As much as I wish that every patient that rolls into the hospital can be saved, I know that's not the case, not yet. And sometimes it's hard not to think that if medicine were more valued, if more medics were mandated by the Tower, if our work was respected enough to be allowed to use Shadow Clone, so many lives wouldn't be lost for no reason."

    Hazō scoffed. "That's easy to say when you were the doctor sidelined by the Tower, and not the disease they unleashed on their enemies."

    Noburi scowled, gripping Hazō's shoulder. "Look bro, I loved Akane too. She was the older sister I never had. She was put in a lose-lose situation and had to do things she regretted, and that burns me up inside, no theocratic metaphor intended." Despite everything, Hazō smirked at that. Noburi pressed on. "But you're fucking wrong. Her ideals weren't stolen from her, okay? What was stolen was her chance to grow back tougher, to remind our family why we fell in love with her in the first place. What was stolen was her chance to heal, to learn from her mistakes, and to become strong enough and wise enough not to make them again. To become someone who could protect others from needing to make those same choices. And when we get her back, she'll have that chance again. You'll have that chance, too."

    "I'm… I'm afraid, Noburi. From what I've been trending towards… I don't know if I'll like who I am by then. I don't know how much of me is going to be left. I don't know if I can stand being what I need to become to do the things I have to."

    "Sheesh, you sound like a character right out of Jiraiya's writing."

    "I'm serious!"

    "I know, that's the worst part about it." Hazō opened his mouth in protest, but Noburi kept going. "And I'm going to tell you what they always need to be told. I believe in you, even if you don't. See? Easy."

    Hazō didn't even roll his eyes. That vacancy was still there, though lessened. With little mirth, Hazō said, "Somehow, I don't feel better."

    Noburi held up his hands in mock surrender. "Fine, fine, shows how much my support is valued, I guess. Look, Hazō… When we lived in Mist, it was hard to have heroes. Yagura, Zabuza, Terumi Mei, Mori Ryūgamine… it was more like- like having a bunch of scary ghosts that I also sort of respected lurking in the corners of my eyes all the time. And then we were missing-nin, and we bumped into Jiraiya, who we'd been raised to fear and hate and all that, but… he treated us well, treated us mostly fairly, he won me over. He arranged a teacher, got me into medicine. And then he took us in and I got to be a part of that legend up close. And Tsunade, well, it goes without saying. There's few people I admire more than her. Losing that apprenticeship killed me inside. But, well, for all the respect I still hold for them, somewhere in there, they stopped being my heroes."

    "Why?"

    "One simple reason. They stopped believing. They quit, they settled. Tsunade stopped believing the world could be improved, she resigned herself to making it the least bad she could. Jiraiya may have never believed it in the first place, and- dammit, I know he meant well, but it made my blood boil sometimes how he shut you, us, down on occasion. How he refused to consider that maybe, just maybe, we could play in the big leagues and make a goddamned difference. He became the strongest man in the world with little to show for it. Against all odds… Jiraiya of all people fucking played it safe. And that cynicism just oozed into me a little more every time he expressed it. Except one small thing happened."

    He put an arm around Hazō's shoulder.

    "You happened. You started to make him believe. You stood your ground and told Lady Tsunade I was worth something as a doctor when she didn't dare take me seriously, then you turned around and had her laughing aloud at Clan Council meetings, as the Gōketsu trapped Leaf's Clans into giving a damn for once. You helped Ami overcome that poisonous cynicism, of being resigned to the world dying and watching it happen, turned her from nothing but a chaos gremlin into… well, a slightly less cynical chaos gremlin, I guess. You killed something the Sage never managed to, to protect a world that wasn't even yours. You created the means to get us citizenship in an enemy village, to get us political power and a path to fix things. Jiraiya and Tsunade stopped being my heroes, because that spot got filled by you."

    Hazō blinked in surprise.

    "Don't go getting a fat head on me, now. You're still hopeless without the rest of us to rein you in." Now Hazō rolled his eyes. "I don't know what kind of guy you're gonna be when we're all legendary S-Rank badasses. Probably not as suave and handsome as I am, but I'm sure you'll still be pretty cool. Maybe you'll be a little colder, more calculated, I don't know. But there's one thing my hero doesn't get to be, and that's a quitter. We're the Gōketsu, we don't back down. Maybe we retreat, we reassess, we make concessions, but we don't give up on the things that really matter. Ever. We find a way, no matter how long it takes us. For all the pain Akane went through after the war, I believe she still understood that. Maybe that's why it hurt so bad. Because after all of that, she understood that she couldn't just let it go. She had to carry that weight. Because it fucking mattered, and because we don't settle down and accept that that's the way things are, no matter how frustrating or despair-inducing it is. Whatever it is you gotta do, Hazō, you gotta do. Maybe I'll judge you for it, or I won't know how to feel about it, but I meant it when I said I believed in you. We all do, in our own way, even if we don't always show it. And no one believed in you more than she did. More than she does."

    Hazō didn't reply, looking back at the moon.

    "No pressure, by the way."

    Hazō socked him in the shoulder, getting an anguished laugh from Noburi. Though lessened, there was still a trace of that emptiness in Hazō's expression… some things, only time could heal, but Noburi did believe anything could heal. An ambitious doctor couldn't believe any less.

    "For what it's worth, Noburi, you're my hero too."

    "Well, of course. That just goes without saying."

    Hazō socked him in the shoulder again.
     
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    • Noumero said:
    What is the King of Hell? Oro had implied he's related to the Sage the same way Oro is related to Tsunade. So he's... the creature empowered by the Naraka Path's governing entity? But isn't that just the Sage's former companion? Or... I'unno, it doesn't map on very well.
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    Well, Tsunade is Orochimaru's former companion and now she's opposed to most of his methodologies and maybe even current goals.
     
    Noumero said:
    CC: @MMKII, @Twinnstars, @Shrooms.

    Saw some theorizing on Discord about Forbidden Lore. Below is a brain-dump of my current thoughts on the subject, somewhat haphazard.
    • The whole setting is a thin coat of paint on top of an inchoate abyss of cosmic horror. A fragile cobweb swaying in the wind. Sealing's Out directly interfaces with this truth. Everything we've seen and the biggest entities we've considered are contained in a very small region of what's really out there. There are no closed causal loops, not everything can be traced back to one of them. Notably, none of them created Out itself.
    • The Sage and his five companions were human. When we hear people talking about them adventuring or being "bearded bastards", it's not a metaphorical translation of interactions between incomprehensible entities, it's factual.
    • The local subset of Out originally consisted of six Paths/realities. The Sage created none of those. He'd only created the Seventh Path, his attempt at paradise.
    • The Five, as in the sealed entities the Thinkers are hooked up to, are not human and never were. They were the most powerful entities in this region, superintelligent and revered as gods. Each Path except the Human one is their own personally crafted paradise. They reside in them and rule them.
      • They may have created humanity. Or just found it, and decided it's a fun toy.
      • (There's a speculation that they originally were the Sage's companions. I think that's wrong. Kei and Ami talked about them in terms of "something that can only destroy" and "monsters too powerful to be slain, only sealed" and "a recognition of surrender by the human race", and overall none of the language is the sort of language I'd expect to be used for corrupted heroes. Also: does the Mori Voice really reads like something that was ever human?)
    • The Sage was empowered by something, perhaps being the analogue of Pain, a previous Rinnegan-wielder.
    • Wild guess: "the Five" were initially one entity, with five aspects and a core. The aspects corresponded to the afterlife-Paths, the entity itself to the Human Path. The Sage was empowered by the core, hence "of Six Paths".
    • The Sage's five companions were each a chosen one of a different aspect of that, uh, "Hexal" Entity.
    • The Sage et al. were tasked by the Five/the Hexal Entity with "clearing house": purging all the other monstrosities from the Paths that the local big honcho(s) didn't want around. As they did so, their personal ambition was in fortifying the world against cosmic horrors and empowering humanity relative to them.
      • They engaged in some Uplift-y projects. Notable: According to Kagome, they took hold of a local distributed parasitic species, and turned them into chakra. A distributed computational system, a sort of cloud of metaphysical nanomachines that people could program and control at will. He'd programmed a bunch of subroutines into it, ways for it to interface with the other local cosmic horrors like the Five and the bijuu and Sealing.
      • They defeated the Tenfold Abomination, likely with the help of the Dragons they created. The Sage split it into nine pieces, sealed each piece in a human.
      • At some point, the Dragons went out of control as well, and the Sage repeated the trick: split them into pieces, sealed each piece into a Summon Clan, plus sealed the "core" of the entities in the Great Seal.
    • Once the Sage et al.'s job was done, they turned on their patron(s). Attempted to shut the Five/the Hexal Entity out of the Human Path as well, trap them in their own realms.
      • As part of this, the Sage may have employed the technique already tried on the Tenfold Abomination and the Dragons. Split the ur-entity into its Five aspects plus the "core". (So e. g. like the Tenfold Abomination became the Nine Beasts, the "Hexal" Entity became the Five.)
      • The Sage's companions perished over the course of this betrayal. Either the Five managed to destroy their minds, or the act of splitting the Hexal Entity into parts did so.
    • At some point over the course of this, probably after the betrayal, the Sage created the Seventh Path as an attempt at a paradise. It's supposed to be completely insulated from the outside reality, all cosmic horrors screened off. That's why invoking the Frozen Skein there is prohibited, why summoning Death is prohibited, why Sealing is prohibited.
      • It was, for one reason or another, a failure. He'd co-opted it as a prison for the Dragons.
    Thaaat... largely brings us to now, I think. Open questions:
    • What is Jashin?
      • Prospectively, it's the "core" remnant of the Hexal Entity.
        • Rules over the Human Path specifically, over the fate of entities from birth to death but not beyond that. Indeed, He wants to steal souls back from the afterlife.
        • At the same time, seems very eager to send souls to the afterlife. Kind of seems like it's at odds with itself, a piece of a greater mechanism that isn't supposed to operate independently...
        • The only one who made the Sage bleed — because it was directly connected to him, unlike the other five aspects. And much like the Sage's companions were hurt and destroyed by their direct patrons, the Sage was hurt by his — though not destroyed.
      • Alternatively, Jashin is the Tama aspect, as the Hierophant story suggests. The containment of that aspect is flawed, and it's able to influence the world through this "side channel" of Hidan's cult, not only through the "legitimate channel" of the Tama. (And perhaps all of the Five are shoddily contained and their influence still leaks out.)
      • Alternatively, just some stray other entity. Why not?
    • What is chakra?
      • Just some entity the Sage and his companions created or repurposed.
      • Or that's the core remnant of the Hexal Entity?
    • Is the Tenfold Abomination important? Or just some vermin in the Hexal Entity's garden?
    • What was Pain doing? Seedling? Ninshu? What?
    • What is the King of Hell? Oro had implied he's related to the Sage the same way Oro is related to Tsunade. So he's... the creature empowered by the Naraka Path's governing entity? But isn't that just the Sage's former companion? Or... I'unno, it doesn't map on very well.
    But note that it's just one way of fitting a curve to the known datapoints. Also I may have missed any number of details that characters mentioned, I haven't been diligently jotting them all down since a while ago.
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    And this shit right here is why I hate the traditional uplift plan of raise standard of living and build infrastructure. It's just not going to matter. We will either become immortal god-kings or the setting will be devoured by the c'tuhlean we unleashed upon the world
     
    acidshill said:
    Thanks for the omake, Shrooms. Although I think Hazō's actual reaction to events, with his Resolve and TYS, would be simultaneously far more unhinged and resolute.
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    Not so long ago, he cried in Mari's arms over Canaut dying by dragon despite not knowing him super well, because he felt responsible. When you're already feeling bad it's easy for "smaller" things like the ritual slaughter of hundreds of innocents and personal murder of a dozen bandits (or in this case, the lack of reaction to it) to break the "camel of feeling okay" 's back. I rationalize it as Hazou still feeling pretty beat up about Akane, a still pretty fresh wound, which has understandably crushed him more than made him feel resolute, at least so far

    Glad you enjoyed it!
     
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