In the following days, my life remained a high-speed loop of cultivation and research. My Chunin-level "bandwidth" was a game-changer. My Wind and Earth nature transformations were getting sharper, and my initial tests with Magnet Release had proven that the theory was sound. Every night, the Body Tempering Furnace hummed, steadily patching my system and solidifying my foundation.
But the world outside Suna doesn't wait for your R&D to finish. A piece of news hit the village like a sudden cold front, freezing the gears of the geopolitical machine.
Konoha's White Fang, Sakumo Hatake, had committed suicide.
The news didn't come through an official press release. It came through the back channels, traders, rogue ninjas, and the whispers of the Logistics wing. It was full of speculation and disbelief. The most feared man in the Land of Fire had been taken down not by a blade, but by rumors and "village rules."
At first, I didn't think much of it. As an engineer, I saw it as a major player being removed from the board. To my dad and the old-timers in Maintenance, White Fang was a nightmare, the man who had personally dismantled Suna's elite, including Sasori's parents. To the average Suna ninja, this was justice; the man who killed their friends was finally dead.
It wasn't until I went to Chiyo's house for my weekly Puppet Technique session that I realized how badly this news had glitched the local system.
The courtyard was deathly silent. Granny Chiyo wasn't home, so I headed straight for Sasori's workshop. Usually, you could hear the rhythmic scritch-scritch of a carving knife or the hum of a lathe from thirty feet away. Today? Nothing.
I pushed the door open.
Sasori wasn't at his bench. He was standing by the window, his back to me, staring out at the hazy, yellow sandstorm. His posture was rigid, like a piece of over-tensioned wire. The aura coming off him was colder than I'd ever felt.
"Senior Sasori?" I called out.
He turned around slowly. His face was a mask of indifference, but his purple eyes were burning with something dark and frantic. It wasn't the look of a man who'd just gotten his revenge. It was the look of a man whose life's purpose had just been deleted by a system error.
"You heard, didn't you?" his voice was a hoarse rasp. "That man... is dead."
"I heard," I said, keeping my voice level.
"Dead... haha..." Sasori let out a short, hollow laugh that didn't reach his eyes. "He just... quit? Because of some rumors and 'rules'? It's preposterous. It's a joke."
His voice started to rise, the "monotone" cracking to reveal a volcano of fury underneath.
"How could he just die?! He was mine! He was supposed to die beneath the blades of the artwork I spent years perfecting for him! His blood was supposed to be the final coat of varnish! And he just... escaped? This isn't justice. It's an insult! It's a desecration of my parents' memory!"
I watched him silently. I understood the "logic" of his madness. For Sasori, the White Fang was the anchor for his hatred the goal that kept him moving. With Sakumo dead by his own hand, Sasori's revenge had nowhere to go. It was a massive amount of kinetic energy with no target.
Then, the "bug" pivoted.
Sasori's gaze turned predatory, his chakra flickering wildly enough to make the parts on his workbench rattle. His voice dropped into a lethal, snake-like whisper.
"It's all because of that incompetent man. If he hadn't sent them on that suicide mission... if he hadn't botched the command... they never would have seen the White Fang. It's his fault. He's the one who really killed them. And now, he's the one who robbed me of my revenge. Unforgivable."
My heart skipped a beat. I knew exactly who he was talking about. He wasn't looking at Konoha anymore. He was looking at the Kazekage's office.
Sasori had just redirected 100% of his trauma and hatred toward the Third Kazekage.
A chill ran down my spine. I didn't try to talk him down. You don't try to debug a system while the CPU is literally melting through the floor. I just stood there, a silent witness to the exact moment one of Suna's greatest geniuses decided to become its greatest threat.
Sasori eventually went back to being a "stone," waving me out without another word. His retreating figure looked smaller, lonelier, and infinitely more dangerous.
I walked home through the wailing wind, the air feeling heavy with the scent of an impending storm. The death of the White Fang was a domino that had just knocked over a much larger piece in Suna.
"The village is about to get a lot noisier," I thought, looking up at the Kazekage Rock in the distance.
The "Cold Peace" wasn't just fraying. The internal logic of Suna was starting to fail. And in the silence of the desert, I could almost hear the gears of a much darker future beginning to turn.