Jigen

Isshiki's influence kept Jigen's frame looking young despite its truly ancient age. He was a tall figure of pale skin, his scalp shaved bare except for a long black mohawk gathered into a ponytail that hung to his lower back. Heavy ridges rose where eyebrows would normally sit, above a broad nose and wide black eyes. Once the takeover was complete, a diamond-shaped Kāma appeared on his chin and the numeral four was marked below his left eye, while the region over his stomach turned entirely black. He painted his nails dark, wore several red studs along each ear, and, in his earliest scenes, dressed in the hooded maroon-lined cloak worn across Kara. Later he traded it for a flowing white robe fastened loosely at the waist, trimmed with red and marked with his personal crest.

When Kaguya and Isshiki first reached Earth, Jigen was only a novice monk. Kaguya left him for dead, but Isshiki survived by shrinking himself and slipping into the monk's ear, then slowly drained his nutrients until he commanded the body outright. He planted his Kāma on his new host, yet the frame proved too frail to hold his full chakra, so he chose to bide his time rather than resurrect himself inside it. Working through Jigen, Isshiki assembled the clandestine organization known as Kara to pursue his ends.

Searching for a stronger vessel, Jigen paid a large sum to take the boy Kawaki from a cruel father, presenting himself as the child's new parent. Alongside the scientist Amado, he tried to force a Kāma onto Kawaki and fourteen other boys; thirteen died at once and only Kawaki endured. Despite his promises of safety, Jigen drove the boy through brutal training and belittled him as nothing but a container, and like the rest of Kara his own body was heavily rebuilt with Scientific Ninja Tools. Isshiki intended to sacrifice the failing Jigen, himself included, to the young Ten-Tails so it could bloom into a God Tree.

His reach toward Kawaki eventually brought him to Naruto's home, and when the Hokage resisted, Jigen carried the fight into another dimension where Sasuke joined in. He toyed with the two legends before unleashing his full power, sealing Naruto away and nearly killing Sasuke. The strain shattered him, the black core of his abdomen cracking and forcing a long recovery. Later, Koji Kashin, a clone raised from Jiraiya's cells, cornered him with natural flames the Kāma could not absorb and burned the body to ash. Isshiki revived within the corpse, only to be worn down at last by Naruto's Baryon Mode, and Jigen's remains finally crumbled to dust.

As Isshiki's vessel, Jigen was rebuilt by Amado with Scientific Ninja Tools and traces of Shibai Ōtsutsuki's DNA into something monstrous in raw power. He towered over every other Inner, and even without tapping his full strength he could press both Naruto and Sasuke together. Once he called on the complete power of the Kāma, he crushed the pair with ease, blocking a Rasengan barrage and Sasuke's Amaterasu as if they were nothing.

The Kāma mark on his chin was the source of it all. It granted him immense longevity, keeping him in his prime for over a thousand years, and it could spread across his whole body in radiating patterns to amplify him further. Through it he drew on Isshiki's shinjutsu, producing chakra-draining black rods, shrinking matter down to microscopic size and back in an instant, and pulling stored weapons from a pocket dimension with a mere flick of the fingers. Combining these, he would fire rods at invisible scale into an enemy before enlarging them to inflict sudden devastating wounds, or shrink himself to dart around the battlefield like teleportation. At full power a horn curled from his temple around his skull like a crown, boosting his speed and strength to the point that he could split Sasuke's Susanoo and knock Naruto out of Tailed Beast Mode. That state came at a price, however. His borrowed frame could not sustain it, cracking under the load, and unlike Kawaki he could never awaken the Byakugan or Kokugan, marking him a flawed host to the end.