A major incident had shaken the Land of Waves.
A ship full of corpses had run aground on the southeastern shore of the island. Every dead body belonged to men under the wealthy shipping magnate Gato.
Among them were even two missing-nin from Kirigakure.
They had been hired by Gato to help him violently monopolize shipping in the Land of Waves. In their minds, they were just going to bully helpless civilians.
None of them expected to die in silence on Gato's own ship.
Everyone knew this had to be the work of other shinobi.
Even so, the brutal slaughter was enough to terrify the entire island. Ordinary people rarely saw this kind of indiscriminate massacre. As they climbed aboard to clean up the bodies, the villagers could almost feel the panic that had soaked into the planks—the terror of those men in the instant before they died.
The smell of blood mixed with the sea breeze. The stranded ship sat there under the setting sun like a giant, beached coffin.
No one would ever see it as just a "ghost story" again.
Inari had been the first to witness the death ship.
After seeing the corpses, he had thought of his stepfather Kaiza, who had not returned that day. The boy was sure Kaiza had died somewhere on that ship. Clenching his teeth, he had forced himself to walk among the dead, searching through cold faces one by one.
Halfway through, the pressure had been too much.
He had fled, sobbing, all the way back home to tell his grandfather Tazuna what he'd seen.
"Why did I tell him that stupid ghost ship story…"
Tazuna now sat outside, a cigarette burning low between his fingers, guilt written across his face.
The story of the ghost ship had always been just a legend to scare children. He had never imagined that Inari would run into something far more terrifying than the ghost ship: a real death ship, soaked in blood.
Looking at his grandson's haunted eyes, Tazuna felt both sorrow and self-reproach.
"This world is really getting more and more chaotic…" he muttered, scratching his head.
The old boatman's fishing boat had been smashed that same night.
Fortunately, Kaiza had managed to borrow a friend's boat and return to the island very late. Even so, Inari had already been trapped in a nightmare since the moment he'd seen that ship.
Even now, with Kaiza safely back home, Inari could not shake that huge shadow from his heart.
He hadn't told Kaiza everything, either. Some details were buried deep in his chest, impossible to voice.
He had seen too much for a child his age.
Regardless of their fear, the bodies had to be dealt with.
Tazuna, who still had a high reputation in the Land of Waves, stepped forward to take charge. He organized the villagers to register and bury the dead from the ship.
Some of them were young men from the island who had left home to work for Gato Shipping. Their bodies were handed directly back to their families for funerals.
But most of the corpses were from all over the world, with unclear origins and no relatives to claim them.
The weather in June, hot and humid, made it impossible to preserve the bodies for long. When Gato refused to send anyone to retrieve them or pay for funerals, there was only one solution left: burn the bodies, and let those who came for them keep only a portrait and a jar of ashes.
From that day on, even the adults on the island began to sleep uneasily.
The death ship remained stranded on the far beach, crimson stains baked into its hull, like a giant bottle that had drifted across the sea with a warning sealed inside.
Someone eventually found a floating bottle near the coast. The cork was still there.
But the letter inside was gone.
No one would ever know what message it had carried—or who it was meant for.
Far from the villagers, the man behind everything was even more frightened.
Gato, the so-called "world-class wealthy man," had been paranoid ever since the death ship incident. Any tiny change around him sent him into a panic.
He had ordered all his company's ships to sail out and drift aimlessly along different routes. The point was not to do business—it was to make sure any killers hunting him could not easily find his flagship.
His true location was now hidden near a remote dock belonging to Gato Shipping.
"Why can't I keep my mouth shut after drinking…" he grumbled, sweating as he peeked through the curtains.
The more he thought about it, the more certain he was: someone had come to kill him.
A subordinate knelt in front of him, holding a thick stack of bounty posters.
"Boss, this is the latest bounty list."
Gato snatched it up and flipped through quickly.
The bounty amount was the harshest label the underworld gave to a missing-nin. Generally, the higher the bounty, the more dangerous the ninja—and the more expensive it was to hire them.
Depending on the mission, the commission for a missing-nin might range from one tenth to one hundredth of the bounty amount. For escort missions, though, the commission was usually based on the maximum possible damage to the client.
In other words, the stronger the ninja he invited, the more his wallet would bleed.
Gato's eyes narrowed.
"Fifteen million… Demon of the Hidden Mist, Zabuza Momochi… heh."
That was a name with a reputation.
"Pension? No way," Gato sneered, remembering the old woman who had come weeping to his door a few days ago, begging for compensation for her dead son. He had ordered his men to drive her away without a second thought.
He had no intention of losing extra money on the dead.
"Inari's island rubbish… all the same," he muttered.
He licked his thumb and turned to the next page.
"Tsk, tsk… Neiki Hyuga, sixty million," he read, eyes gleaming. "Too bad all of you idiots couldn't find this one to protect me."
If the ninja he hired was too strong, Gato knew he would have no leverage to haggle down the commission.
If he hired someone too weak, they'd be killed just like the last lot.
Since the death ship incident, the wealthy tyrant of the Land of Waves had started to feel, for the first time, that he was very small in the face of the ninja world.
And that thought terrified him.
On the island, life struggled back toward a fragile normal.
"Inari, boys must be brave and strong, you know?" Kaiza said, rubbing his son's head.
"…Okay," Inari murmured. He tried to smile, but his eyes still drifted toward the distant coastline.
He had not told Kaiza how the seawater had turned red, or how the palm prints smeared inside the porthole had looked. Some of the dead had tried to smash the glass and jump, but never made it.
There had even been a headless corpse still gripping the handle of a broken axe, as if the man had faced something with desperate courage at the end.
Inari could not forget any of it.
"Inari, didn't you make a new friend recently?"
In the kitchen, Tsunami laid out a sumptuous dinner. Inari's birthday had passed in tears, and she wanted to make up for it.
"Do you want to invite your friend over for dinner?"
"Ah?" Inari blinked, caught off guard.
Tsunami smiled gently. "You mentioned her before—the girl from the manor in the north?"
"Yes, she's a child from that old manor," Tsunami continued when Kaiza glanced over with curiosity. "I met her once. I think that girl is quite cute."
"If we're just talking about looks, then of course she's cute," Kaiza laughed. "So, Inari, is the girl in that manor really that cute?"
Inari thought of the small figure standing in the yard, of white eyes that seemed to see straight through him, and of a voice colder and more mature than any child's.
His shoulders tensed.
"…She's cute," he admitted honestly.
"New friends, huh?" Kaiza grinned. Seeing Inari brighten even slightly, he felt relieved. "That's good. I was starting to worry."
He paused.
"Inari, do you want to invite your friend over for dinner?" he asked again.
Inari hesitated, then shook his head quickly.
"No… she should be training now."
"What training?" Kaiza asked, genuinely curious.
"Training to… plant trees," Inari said after a moment, answering honestly.
Kaiza blinked.
"…This kid's been tricked?" he thought, a little confused—but even after living on the island all his life, he couldn't find a way to refute it.
Because in this world, "training to plant trees" might really mean anything.
Those words came from a conversation Inari could not forget.
He had been at the manor in the north, facing the girl with the beautiful white eyes.
"Do you know what scum is, Inari?" she had asked, voice oddly calm for someone so young.
Inari had gone silent.
"Why do you feel sorry for those scum?" she continued.
He had thought of the dead on the ship. Of the men who had worked for Gato, who had bullied and extorted people in the Land of Waves every day.
"I… I don't know," he had muttered.
"They are useless people," the girl said coldly. "People who will be chopped into several pieces and planted under the trees."
Inari had shivered.
"They're the kind of scum who, when they die, it's called a worthy death."
"Worthy… death?" Inari had echoed, stunned. "What does that mean?"
The girl looked away, her expression momentarily uncertain.
"I heard my brother say it," she admitted. "It means… something like that."
"Have you seen my eyes?" she added in a low voice. "You don't even know what they wanted to do when they saw my eyes."
Inari had not understood everything she said. But the word "scum" stuck in his chest, heavy and frightening, wrapped together with the image of the crimson ship.
Since then, whenever he closed his eyes, those two images overlapped: the bodies on the deck and the girl with white eyes talking about "worthy deaths."
Back in the present, Kaiza ruffled his son's hair again.
"Okay, okay, it's fine," he said, sensing the tension but not pushing. "Boys have to be brave, that's all. You're doing well, Inari."
Inari pressed his lips together and nodded.
He still didn't know why the girl had said such cruel and strange things, or why her words made him instinctively afraid.
But in a world like this, he was beginning to suspect:
Maybe she was the only one who was telling the truth.
On the other side of the sea, the ship of death that had started all of this still lay stranded, creaking softly with every tide.
No one knew that somewhere, a letter had been taken from a drifting bottle.
Just as no one in the Land of Waves knew that this approaching ship of death was not an end at all—
…but the beginning.
PS :
Gato – The wealthy shipping magnate
Zabuza Momochi – The "Demon of the Hidden Mist," an infamous missing-nin from Kirigakure with a bounty of around 15 million
Tazuna – Veteran boatman and bridge builder of the Land of Waves
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