Rumble, rumble, rumble!
On the eastern side of the Forest of Death, on an unremarkable cliff, a silver-white waterfall scoured the rock face and poured down in a roaring stream. In the pool below, fish floated belly-up, bobbing and rolling with the current.
Within half a kilometer of the pool, withered grass and dead trees lay in ruin. Fat crows had been beheaded, black blood smeared across the ground.
A faint breeze brushed through the bent, stubborn weeds. Hair like metallic silver threads swayed with it, rippling like spilled mercury.
A breathtaking girl with silver hair and ash-gray eyes stepped down from a boulder. Her white robe billowed. At her side stood her Yang Release clone, a massive cleaver-like sword strapped across her back, dressed in Root's black cloak. Together, they faced the figure perched on a treetop in the distance.
"Hiruzen-sensei. It's been a while."
When the star-bright-eyed girl said the word "sensei," Hiruzen Sarutobi felt a strange sense of distance, as if it did not belong.
"Konome!"
His aged voice, tempered by time, strained to hold back fury as he leapt down from the treetop and approached them step by step.
One in white, one in black. One tall, one short.
One blindfolded, radiating a heavy killing intent. One ash-eyed and dazzling, like a goddess.
He stared at the two identical faces, their aura and bearing completely different. Along with anger and shock, confusion flooded in.
Which one was his disciple?
And then, through clenched teeth:
"What exactly are you doing?"
Wrinkles crowded the corners of his eyes. On the way here, the grotesque corpses everywhere, the barren, dead vegetation, it was all too horrifying to look at. If he had not gone to deliver a stipend to Naruto this morning, he would never have known something like this was happening inside the Forest of Death.
"And why did you come in person?" Konome Taketori did not answer his question directly.
She truly was curious.
This place was deep in the Forest of Death, far off the beaten path. By all reason, the odds of being exposed in such a short time were not high. Even if it had been discovered, there were no human casualties. It might not even have drawn serious attention.
So how had it summoned the Third Hokage himself?
Hiruzen let out a cold snort.
He had not known about the anomaly until this morning. When he arrived at Naruto's home, he found kids from the Inuzuka, Nara, Akimichi, and Aburame clans already waiting at the door. Even Uchiha Sasuke was among them.
Each of them wore tight training clothes. Their ninja pouches bulged. Sasuke even carried an oversized shuriken and a bundle of wire on his back, fully armed like he was heading to war.
Hiruzen immediately realized something was wrong. When he pressed them, they finally stammered out the truth.
Ever since the previous attack by Kumogakure, Nara Shikamaru and the others had felt their lack of strength more sharply than ever, as well as the enormous gap between themselves and Konome. Now Konome had disappeared from school and seemed to be developing jutsu again. Who knew how strong she would be when she returned?
That kind of relentless, obsessive self-improvement left them anxious. So every weekend they arranged to train in the Forest of Death, practicing jutsu and fighting beasts to build real combat experience.
Recently, they had noticed a steep drop in the number of wild animals. Yesterday they pushed deeper into the forest and discovered many rotting carcasses of strange beasts.
Those beasts looked as if someone had performed implantation surgeries on them. Every body was grotesque.
Because it was already late, Shikamaru chose caution and did not act rashly. They returned home, recovered, and agreed to gather early the next morning to investigate properly.
This morning, the group waited at the agreed spot for Naruto, but he never showed. They went to his door and found he had been too excited to sleep and had overslept.
So they simply waited outside.
Listening to them talk over each other about the Forest of Death's abnormality, Hiruzen felt both pride and dread. Konome's presence had stirred the next generation into motion. Konoha's future was not barren.
But it also sent a cold sweat down his back.
The Forest of Death was not a playground. Poisonous insects and savage beasts were everywhere. Even genin who had already graduated from the Academy could struggle to survive inside it.
If all of Konoha's young seedlings fell in there together, the village would erupt.
He harshly put a stop to their reckless plan and intended to dispatch ANBU to investigate.
But after returning, the more he thought about it, the more wrong it felt.
From Shikamaru's description, those carcasses could not have formed naturally. Someone was likely experimenting with jutsu inside the Forest of Death.
Possibly even researching dangerous Yin Yang techniques.
And Konome, who had been absent for a long time, had recently used his authorization to borrow many books on medical ninjutsu and curse seals. After that, she requested nearly two months of leave, claiming she was developing a jutsu.
Everything connected in a line.
Hiruzen could no longer sit still. He came alone into the Forest of Death.
Then he saw her.
That familiar figure, seated in the center of a barren dead zone.
The last of his hope went out like a snuffed candle.
Why did it always come back to forbidden Yin Yang arts?
Danzō. Orochimaru.
And now Konome too.
Disappointment hardened into rage. Hiruzen's face turned cold, the lines at his eyes carving deeper as he spoke, each question like a hammer blow.
"Answer me. What are you doing? Why are your eyes normal? Why are there two of you, and why are you completely different? Why is she wearing Root's uniform? Why did you ignore every warning and develop Yin Yang forbidden techniques?"
His voice rose higher and higher until it became a roar.
He truly could not understand.
If she grew step by step, Konome Taketori would inevitably become one of Konoha's strongest. So why choose to entangle herself with Danzō and Root? Why choose to develop a jutsu that toyed with life?
Right now, she looked like Orochimaru reborn.
"S-sensei," Konome said calmly, brushing her loose hair behind her head. "I'm dying."
The waterfall roared, but Hiruzen's own voice faltered. The fire in his eyes paused, suddenly uncertain.
"You…"
He scrutinized her.
Her skin was pale and fine. Her eyes were bright, full of spirit. Vitality pulsed from her body. There was not the slightest hint of death on her.
Compared to her, he looked closer to dying.
The emotional glow above his head shifted from red rage to startled disbelief, then to a gray-blue suspicion.
Konome knew she had succeeded.
She had cut his rising emotion cleanly in half.
There was a principle to it. The first surge is strongest, the second weaker, the third exhausted. It was warfare, and it was also the logic of emotion.
When someone is burning with anger, they cannot hear explanations. The more you explain, the angrier they become.
But once the chain of emotion breaks, what seemed unforgivable a moment ago suddenly becomes… manageable. Sometimes people cannot even understand why they were furious in the first place.
That is what it means to have reason hijacked by emotion.
Emotion does not solve problems. It only inflates them.
She had to stop his anger first, or this would spiral out of control.
Now that she had seized the initiative, she explained at her own pace.
"Have you heard of Bloodline Sickness?"
As soon as she asked, she looked straight at the emotional glow above his head. The anger faded another notch. Even the cloud of suspicion brightened a little.
If she had started with a direct explanation, it would never have worked on an enraged Hiruzen. The more she manipulated emotion, the more clearly she realized just how terrifying the Nine-Tails' malice sensing truly was.
"You… you have Bloodline Sickness?" Hiruzen's voice wavered.
He did not know his emotions were being read. His tone was no longer the same blaze as before.
Of course he knew what Bloodline Sickness was.
It was an incurable illness that only bloodline shinobi could suffer, and only the most gifted among them at that. A legendary "genius disease."
Whether Konome could have it was not even a question. If anything, it would be stranger if she did not.
The shinobi world was fair.
If you were born with power beyond imagination, you paid a price.
No one escaped that law.
Hiruzen thought of the First Hokage, whose body had ultimately collapsed under Bloodline Sickness, and he believed her more than halfway.
"The Shikotsumyaku of the Kaguya Clan comes with Bloodline Sickness by nature," Konome said slowly. "The first stage of awakening is normal. After the second stage, you don't live past twenty.
The higher the awakening, the faster you die."
As Hiruzen's rage continued to ebb, Konome felt the tension in her own body loosen slightly.
She still had not reached the threshold of a true Kage. Samehada's chakra-eating was almost useless against someone like Hiruzen, who wielded fire, earth, and complex combination techniques. Add to that his domineering taijutsu and sealing arts, and Hiruzen was, in some ways, even harder to face than Uchiha Obito.
"Then your awakening stage…"
"My Shikotsumyaku has entered the third stage," Konome said flatly. "Even the gods can't save me. At most, I have half a year left."
Watching her speak of her own death with such calm, Hiruzen's anger vanished without him noticing.
But a thread of doubt remained.
"That's only your word. Why not go to the hospital and have it confirmed?"
"It wouldn't help."
Konome knew it was hard to earn trust with only words. The Sharingan in her palm closed. The wound healed as flesh budded and smoothed over, until her palm looked normal again.
Then she forced one finger to squeeze out a segment of gray bone.
Thunk.
The bone fell from her fingertip and hit the ground with a heavy sound, like a chunk of iron.
Fine gray patterns, thin as velvet fuzz, spread rapidly over the bone and crawled outward.
What happened next made Hiruzen's pupils constrict.
Without warning, the ground covered by that pattern crackled and collapsed into dark gray powder.
A breeze blew through the weeds, and the dust scattered away.
In the shallow pit, only that piece of finger bone lay there, silent and heavy.
The deathly gray pattern continued to crawl.
Dust kept peeling away, and the bone sank deeper and deeper, as if, left unchecked, it could rot straight through the earth itself.
"All the bones in my body have become like this," Konome said softly. "Even if Tsunade came, it would be useless. If I let this power keep growing… one day I'll turn to ash."
As she spoke, the bloody hole at her fingertip had already closed. Threads of blood grew into the shape of curse script, sealing the newly formed bone tightly in place.
Facts spoke louder than any argument.
She truly had suffered Bloodline Sickness.
Even if Reverse Eight Gates had now stabilized the condition, she would never have rushed so desperately to develop it without this.
This was the root of everything.
Silence fell.
Hiruzen sank into a deep, heavy quiet.
The power of that gray bone was terrifying. It turned the very ground into ash. He could not imagine how Konome had survived with her entire skeleton like that, or what kind of pressure and pain she had endured.
"So you developed Yin Yang techniques to save yourself," he said at last, voice hoarse, "not because you craved forbidden power."
The fury in him had drained away. Even his gaze toward her looked clearer, gentler.
Developing a jutsu to heal yourself was a reason anyone could accept. It was only natural.
And she had not used humans as test subjects. She had harmed plants and animals during development, yes, but that was not some unforgivable crime.
Look at it another way.
Even in despair, she did not choose human experimentation. That alone proved she still had a line she would not cross.
Compared to Orochimaru, who treated Konoha's people as materials, she was infinitely better.
Everything became easier when there was something worse to compare it to.
Hiruzen thought of that wayward disciple who sought immortality at any cost, then looked at Konome, a genius burdened with a death sentence yet still fighting forward.
He shook his head and sighed, and he did not speak harshly again.
"Then your eyes?" he asked.
Konome's lips curved. Just from the softened tone, she knew the worst of it had passed.
Her Bloodline Sickness was no longer a true threat. The flesh-and-blood curse seals had locked the Shikotsumyaku mutation down. Once her Sage Body matured, that endless life force would be enough to offset the danger of Ash Bones.
And thanks to this "bitter flesh" truth, she could finally reveal certain secrets to Hiruzen without constantly dancing around them.
"My mother was a member of the Hyūga main house," Konome said. "Hyūga Aoi…"
From there, she concealed her "flesh manipulation" and explained only the Byakugan matter.
Hiding her Byakugan had never been about some dark purpose. She simply did not want the Hyūga to brand her with the Caged Bird Seal.
When Hiruzen heard she was connected to the Hyūga clan, shock spread across his face. Back then, he had assumed her sensing was just an unusually sharp sensory talent, nothing more.
He never imagined it had been the Byakugan.
No wonder her perception and chakra control were so absurd.
As he listened, his realization deepened. When he heard that Hyūga Aoi had ended up in Kirigakure and was rescued by the Kaguya Clan, his tightly drawn brows finally eased.
He remembered this clearly.
Back then, a main-house member had vanished on the battlefield, and a Byakugan had been lost. The Hyūga clan had nearly exploded. They mobilized overnight to retrieve the dōjutsu.
But the war was at its fiercest. Konoha desperately needed Byakugan intelligence across multiple fronts. Hiruzen had forcefully suppressed the Hyūga's mobilization order and instead issued an S-rank mission to retrieve the missing Byakugan.
Then the matter stalled.
The missing girl's name really had been Hyūga Aoi.
Now, seeing the veins bulge at the corners of Konome's eyes when she spoke, Hiruzen's thoughts shifted.
He had once hesitated to accept her as a disciple because she came from Kirigakure.
But if she was Hyūga blood, then she was Konoha to the bone, roots and all.
It seemed he had chosen right after all.
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