My vision opened up into a new dimension, and it was just as impressive as the mountain-sized seal that lead me here.
Impressive, in the sense of seeing a tiger stalking closer to you, it's big and beautiful, but also terrifying and dangerous.
It was clearly a Divine Realm, just like mine, actually, almost exactly like mine when I started out, black and featureless, but that was where the similarities ended.
Because while the Divine Realm was in its default state, a massive God occupied it.
It was formless, giant and floating in the middle of the realm, moving around like an amorphous blob of liquid, it had no discernible features, just a gigantic blob the size of a continent, shifting slowly through the air.
And running through it, like tunnels in an ant hill, were millions, if not billions of souls, moving along unpredictable paths, guided by an unseen force.
I had a feeling I knew what I found, and why this 'Shinigami' was so fucking strong.
A constant in the Elemental Nations is that the dead always go to the Pure Lands, it wasn't truly universal, but no mater what spirits or gods you believed in, death meant the same thing for everyone.
You went to the Pure Lands.
Even I was guilty of the same assumption, not really questioning it, but now?
Well, I think I just found out what the Pure Lands were, a sleeping God, clearly unaware of its power and influence, without thought, running on instinct.
A real Demon Sultan, huh.
And every soul gave it a small trickle of power, some more than others, some almost nothing at all, but when added up over the course of countless millennia?
It was incomprehensible amounts of Divine Power.
And the Uzumaki had somehow tapped into this power source, redirecting a stream of Divinity towards their seal-construct.
For a moment, the thought of just waking this thing up crossed my mind, like how normal people saw a ledge and had the idea of just jumping off.
But that would be a horrible idea, there was no telling what it would do if it woke up, what if it was the godly equivalent of a baby?
It would just flay about, and with the amount of power it could access, it would completely flatten the Elemental Nations.
This... was firmly going into my, deal with it later folder.
Not because I hated the Pure Lands, but because I didn't want the souls to be hurt should this thing ever wake up.
The curiosity could be explored at another time, when I actually had some idea of what to do.
So now I just had to search the area of a continent to find out where the Uzumaki placed their 'tap' in order to stop the flow of energy.
Great...
***
40 MINUTES LATER
Finding it was the easy part, I just had to follow the trail of Divine Power, but dismantling it was another matter, because it regenerated, of course it did.
And I was leery of using Divine Power in close proximity to a god, but at the end of the day, I had time, so I slowly and carefully whittled away at the seal.
Until finally, there was nothing left.
Now to go beat the shit out of a Shinigami.
This time without him cheating.
I returned to the real world, and immediately noticed the small army of Shinobi staring at me.
Woops, if anyone asked, that was on purpose to make sure they didn't betray the Order.
Gotta make sure they are properly intimidated.
With a flex of my power, the ones in the crater were teleported out of it, and then I reestablished the barrier.
This time I didn't bother being careful of my use of DP, I knew the Shinigami itself was not the threat, so I telekinetically grabbed the mask from the rubble.
It was suspiciously undamaged.
And with another flex, the Shinigami was called back into existence.
And then he was immediately hit by a meteor, crushing him into the ground again.
That wasn't even the most efficient way to tire him out, I was just feeling petty.
He got up from the crater, his face still stuck in that creepy smile.
Light started to gather inside his mouth again, and I prepared a portal, waiting for him to unleash the beam at me.
As soon as he did, I opened the portal, right in front of the beam, a second one opening behind his head, causing him to shoot himself.
It went straight through his head, and he immediately stopped firing, falling back to the ground.
He, of course, regenerated that injury as well, his head rebuilding itself from nothing.
The Shinigami stood up again, his movements still smooth and efficient.
He opened his mouth again, the light gathering inside.
But this time, it cut out early, the almost instant beam turning into a thin ray that was slow enough for a Jōnin to dodge.
The Shinigami stood there, jerking for a moment before he dashed forward, slashing at me with his tanto, but without the Divine Power empowering him, it skated off my leg without causing any damage.
And with the confirmation that he had run out of the extra juice, I grabbed him and lifted him up in front of me.
And then smashed him into the ground.
I tried reaching out with my other arm, intending to just tear it apart, but I forgot about the fact that he did something to it.
It just hung limply on my side.
That was getting added to my 'Deal with this as soon as possible list.' Which was thankfully empty.
I didn't know what bullshit he used to permanently cripple my arm, but that shit was dangerous.
For now, I simply formed another arm, it plunged into the Shinigami's stomach, and ripped it open.
And with that, the Realm inside his stomach was opened.
The Realm that held all the souls that used the Reaper Death Seal, I cracked it open like an egg, it burst into a torrent of souls, all slowly fading into the Pure Lands.
Oh hey, there was Minato, I flipped him off, of course.
He couldn't see me, but it was the thought that counts.
Eventually, the stream stopped, leaving only the last one behind.
It was struggling to leave the opening I made, being bigger than the rest.
A fox head appeared first, before the rest of Kurama's soul crawled out.
And then he immediately got yanked into the horizon.
I, of course, waved him goodbye, gotta be polite, ya know?
And now, all that was left was the Shinigami itself, a shell powered by stolen Divinity, but as I dismantled it, I noticed something that made me a bit sad.
A small, stunted soul, curled within the seal construct, it wasn't dead, just... malformed.
Guess when you mix so much Divinity and souls, something gets fucky.
That explained why its eyes kept being drawn to Anko, and why it ignored Ayumu.
The action of consuming a soul probably gave it some small sense of pleasure or satisfaction, it was simply reacting to the presence of souls and trying to consume them.
It wasn't intelligent enough for me to put it into a human body, even a baby, the fact that it was such a mess meant that it would never develop into anything more than what it already was.
At least in a human lifespan.
But I had taken pity on it, if only because it had never gotten a chance to truly live.
So I carefully crafted a body with my DP, and placed its soul inside, I made sure that if the unexpected happened, and it gained sentience, it could use Chakra, and I made it biologically immortal.
And then I sent it to a small family in Wave, their father had died months ago, and one of the last things he wanted to do was to gift his daughters a pet.
It could enjoy some peaceful days there, getting some love and affection.