Kagome-sensei had warned him, long ago: a stressed-out, fatigued, or freshly-traumatised sealmaster could fall prey to a dangerous fallacy, a failed conception. Saviour Syndrome. The deeply-held belief that by scribing the right seal, the sufficient array, the perfect plan, the superlative list, one could make all well and fix what cannot be. An obligatorily destructive endeavour, that belief put in practice only ever resulted in tragedy.
But Hazō was not a stressed-out, fatigued, or freshly traumatised sealmaster. Indeed, he felt more lucid than he had at any point in the last month. And he had outgrown his master, for all that he respected him, they both knew it.
No longer did he use the flawed creations of men, in an art that granted, was long-developed and elegant, but he now was tapping into the primeval substances that shaped the world.
Hazō was stressed-out, fatigued, and freshly-traumatised, but sealmaster was no longer a satisfactory nomer. By eschewing the need for paper and tools, bypassing simple carvings (an eidolon of the purer arts), and skipping ahead to the true heart of sealing, stolen fully-shaped from the earth in high-relief like gargantuan bones of a dread beast, he was now a
sealshaper.
With but a detailed thought, and application of his chakra, from the ground could rise his machines, written in a language both too deep for the matter they were made of and too true to be made of anything else. Around him, pillars, arches, roofs, would grow fully formed. Chains and branches would sprout and link diverse structures, geometrical yet irregular interlockings of mazes he knew the secret to, with no correct path but all at once and sideways through time.
o-o-o-o-o-o-o
That was the theory. After a week of planning, the practice in effect left him panting, exhausted, in the dead city of stone and dirt he infused his life-force shaping from the ground. More power than he had would be required to power this mad labyrinth of serpentine angles, but he had accounted for this.
A step one, done and over with. Drinking a vial of water containing the power of his brother's birth right, he felt the familiar buzzing of an energy not his own, untamed and yet within himself. He pushed every last bit of that chakra in the displaced earth around him.
The structure could power itself through its basic function, amplifying the power in magnitude and essence, burning itself into the world as a fully-powered engine of both order and chaos.
When the infusion succeeded, a thin crust of earth fell off the newly-formed Seal, willing itself into existence, made of gleaming crystals with an air of ice, inspired by the lattices that so entranced his sister. The enhanced power was visible, coursing through the crystal as though it were veins of a waking behemoth, somehow both skeletal and gigantic.
All that was left for the exhausted man in the labyrinth was to jolt his consciousness a tiny bit out of frame. Move it slightly out of the way, disconnect it a bit from the body it was stuck in, and his Last Seal would do the rest.
Breathing in, Hazō focused on Akane and Ino, twain anchors of his to the material world. He held their images in his mind, the scent of their hair, the glint of their many smiles, the heat from their skin.
Breathing out, he let go of them.
And he was gone.
o-o-o-o-o-o-o
Fire.
Fire and screaming and crashes. That was what it would feel like, if Hazō could still feel.
Unprotected by the Paint and the cobweb of "reality," he splintered. Guided by a machine more real than anything else, the splinters recompiled. Rebuilt themselves. Recombined into a being greater than he'd ever been.
o-o-o-o-o-o-o
Hazō - no, the new-Hazō, Shin-Hazō, knew what to do. Thrown at the beginning of time, with life eternal, he could... he could
solve it. Learn every secret, find every loophole, avoid wars, achieve Uplift easily, even rescue Akane...
He saw her die again, murdered by Rock spies in broad daylight.
But he could do this. He had to. He erected the Last Seal again, sending his spirit into the depths of time again. He would manipulate the world line more carefully.
o-o-o-o-o-o-o
Hazō (Shin) would do everything to prevent the last war, robbing them of the cause for murder.
But Akane did not live to be born in a world without the source of Rock and Leaf's enmity.
He built his Last Seal once more. This time, he would be more hands-on.
o-o-o-o-o-o-o
Hasshin would not prevent wars. Civilians, ninja, nobles, animals, they all were dead more times than saving them once would be worth. The weight of the hundredfold sin of letting them die, compounded by millions of lives on each world, bore on his back. But he needed to solve this. He had to see it through to the end. And if he failed... if he failed he could always try again.
Akane lived, but he was fatally wounded in saving her. Only time enough to activate it all again, with reserves long prepared - just in case.
o-o-o-o-o-o-o
Hashin expended lives time and again, eliminating threats, burning causality at the root. He would burn it all, all, to protect her. To save her. To make things right again.
She took her own life when he did, his unseen hand crafting a world too bleak for her to survive in.
o-o-o-o-o-o-o
Jashin taught murder, indiscriminate murder, moderated by repopulation. All to a select few. Plans in centuries, tactics over decades, strategies by the ebb and flow of generations. Wars played like symphonies to the ear of the Mad God. Invisibly guiding his pawns to the only end state to the game that he would accept. The only end that could be.
He would fix the world. He would make it right. He was bringing Akane back, no matter what.
