The Capital they eventually reached marked the end of Hirotada's part.
Once the wagons reached his business compound there, and the gold was checked, he all but vanished into the arms of his accountants, shoving signed papers at Okabe as if to speed them on their way.
Proof of completion in hand, Team Okabe left him there.
The road back to Konoha took a few more days.
Fields gave way to forests again, and by the ti the palisade and carved gates of the village ca into view, the dust of travel sat thick on their uniforms.
The Mission Desk was waiting.
The report had already been forwarded from the Capital, but details were thin.
Unknown shinobi involvent ant a reevaluation.
The rank was raised to B post hoc, and their paynt matched it.
The clerk also noted Hirotada would be written up for not filing a full disclosure.
Too many such warnings, they said, and he'd lose the right to hire shinobi altogether.
Konoha didn't overlook omissions that could have cost lives.
When the envelopes were handed out, Okabe slipped his into a sleeve and faced them.
"I've been called for further questioning," he said evenly. "You can guess what about."
Ryusei already knew. Masked attackers didn't vanish quietly.
Renjiro stretched, envelope already pocketed. "So we're dismissed?"
"You're dismissed," Okabe confird.
"They said they'll call us when the next mission cos up. And Ryusei, rest well. Two missions in a row with false intel, both tis leaving you injured… I expect they'll give you at least another month off again."
He gave another nod, then turned back into the Mission Desk.
The three of them lingered outside a mont, the late light spilling across the stone steps.
Kanae adjusted her pouch, her pale eyes sliding briefly toward Ryusei before looking away.
Renjiro was the first to break it. "Well, I'll say this, mystery jōnin or not, at least it wasn't dull. Wonder what's next."
"Stop wondering," Ryusei said, dryly.
Kanae's lips pressed faintly together. "Just stay alive. I don't want to explain another teammate's death to the Desk."
Renjiro chuckled and headed off toward the Hatake compound.
Kanae turned in the opposite direction, posture straight, disappearing into the crowd.
Ryusei watched them both go, the weight of the envelope steady in his hand.
For a mont, he stood in the noise of Konoha's streets before turning toward ho. Plans waiting. Always more plans.
Ryusei went straight ho.
As always, before and after stepping inside, he scanned every corner with both his sensing and his eyes, checking if anything suspicious had been planted while he was away.
It was a habit the original owner had drilled into himself long ago.
Once satisfied, he washed up, treated his injuries again, and changed into fresh clothes. Dropping onto his bed, he let his thoughts line up.
"It's good this wound isn't as deep as last ti. I didn't burn myself out suppressing it with too much Yang Palm either, so it'll close quicker. I wasn't nearly as stressed after it hit, and I managed to trigger the Mystical Palm right away, which made the later healing easier too. Put all that together… I'll probably be back to normal in a week, not a month like before. A week without physical training, sure, but there are plenty of other things I can work on."
As for the 'sensory net' he had shown during the mission, it was sothing he had only mastered in the last few days of his previous rest.
After witnessing the original owner's fate, Ryusei felt it couldn't be delayed any longer. And it was easiest to train even with the previously broken body.
It wasn't especially difficult, more a matter of focus and trade-offs.
He gave up wide-range detection in order to maintain constant, precise awareness of the space nearest to his body.
In return for missing so distant movents, he would miss far fewer threats that ca close.
For Ryusei, it made sense. He wasn't trying to be a support sensor for his team. He wasn't interested in covering missions for comrades. He only needed a shield for himself.
Because once a threat closed in too near, a single instant could decide everything.
Sensory ability in this world was tied deeply to talent.
No amount of training could bridge the gap entirely.
At its core, sensing was simple.
A shinobi dispersed their own chakra outward, not in a condensed form that could damage or affect the surroundings, but in a scattered, diffuse state that spread far and wide.
That scattered chakra then carried back faint impressions.
The larger one's baseline reserves, the further and denser this field could reach.
This was why the Uzumaki and Senju stood above others in sensory arts.
Their natural vitality, linked to their imnse reserves, let them sustain wide fields and even push into the higher state known as "sensory mode."
Ordinary clans could train all they wanted, but they would never sense bloodlines, ancestry, or emotions across vast distances, countries-wide and hundreds of kiloters, the way so of the geniuses from those two clans could.
Technique mattered too, but only after that raw foundation.
The original owner's parents had left him instructions, and he had practiced since childhood, understanding its importance.
Yet, in the end, he had not sharpened it enough to save himself.
Ryusei's adjustnts were simple corrections of what was already there.
And that tied directly into sothing else: killing intent.
In essence, it was a cousin of sensing, half a step from genjutsu.
When Ryusei ford his sensory net, he had brushed against it by accident.
True killing intent, like the aura Orochimaru once smothered Sasuke with, was simply chakra scattered outward as if sensing, but concentrated and sharpened too much on the imdiate area and those within it.
It wasn't refined enough to be genjutsu, but it pressed on the mind all the sa, forcing instinctive fear.
Most who felt it couldn't even explain the sensation, only the suffocating terror it left behind.
The key was that the particles carried not just chakra, but the user's will to kill.
The more enemies a shinobi had slain, the stronger their intent beca, and the heavier that pressure could grow.
Ryusei knew he had no shortage of will in that regard.
For now, as a re chūnin, such a technique could probably frighten academy students or shake green genin at best.
But later? Against groups of lower-ranked enemies, it could break morale before a fight even began and save him considerable energy.
At a Kage's level, one could flood entire squads of dozens upon dozens of chūnin with it, crushing their will to struggle.
This active killing intent wasn't to be confused with the passive pressure every stronger veteran shinobi gave off.
That was just residue from long years of survival and battle.
The active form was closer to a true technique, one few mastered, and it demanded advanced sensory experience to wield.
There was also a clear difference between sensing and the observation abilities of dōjutsu, like the Sharingan or Byakugan. They were fundantally not the sa.
Dōjutsu specialized in vision, seeing everything clearly within closer ranges.
The Sharingan excelled at pattern recognition, prediction, and reading movent, while the Byakugan offered x-ray sight, full 360-degree awareness, and telescopic focus.
But even the Byakugan's telescopic vision, in the most talented specialists, rarely exceeded a few dozen kiloters, and that ca at the cost of losing its x-ray and 360 fields.
Sensing, by contrast, could extend for hundreds of kiloters in every direction in the hands of the best Uzumaki and Senju.
The tradeoff was that it wasn't "seeing" at all, but "feeling." It didn't pick up the fine details of inanimate objects.
Even with living beings, it gave impressions drawn from their chakra auras.
At best, these were interpretations, guesses, not a crystal-clear picture.
Still, there were things only sensing could grasp.
A dōjutsu could capture the perfect detail of a person's movents or anatomy, but not the total balance of their chakra nature.
That kind of understanding was only possible through the vague accumulation of scattered traits across the entire aura, not by breaking it down piece by piece.
And it relied more on observing the soul and the spiritual energy portion of their chakra.
In that sense, Byakugan was more about seeing the physical, while sensing was more about feeling the spiritual.
As for the so-called "Kagura's Mind's Eye" of the Uzumaki, it was not a unique bloodline gift or a technique at all.
It was simply their clan's na for the highest state of sensory mode, a refinent the Senju were just as capable of reaching. After all, Tobirama was the one ntioned to have the best sensing range in the original series.
Another gift Ryusei inherited from his bloodline was a natural talent for Yang Release, and with it, dical ninjutsu.
The original owner had also done well in that field, so the current Ryusei saw little reason to make corrections or change the pace of that trajectory.
Back when he was still only a soul in the original owner's mindscape, he had considered creating techniques similar to Kabuto's A-rank Yin Healing Wound Destruction—an art that far surpassed the original owner's B-rank Yang Palm—or even so of Kabuto's other offensive dical jutsu.
But once Ryusei took over the body and tested things directly, he realized just how unrealistic that path would have been.
To reach that level required years of near-exclusive focus on dical ninjutsu, incredible chakra control, and ingrained procedural mory.
Even mastering the basic dical scalpel was demanding, let alone advancing to Kabuto's level, where he could sever nerves in battle.
Ryusei simply couldn't afford to dedicate so much ti when he had other ideas with higher payoffs.
Still, the realization raised his opinion of Kabuto.
Achieving so much with no clan backing and only a certain civilian bloodline spoke of intelligence and talent nearly on par with Orochimaru.
For soone like that to reach so far, especially during the later parts of the series, was very impressive.
His own technique, the Yang Pulse Override Palm, which was its full na, was really just a lower-tier counterpart to Kabuto's.
Ryusei's version worked by flooding an injured area with concentrated Yang chakra, temporarily overriding the body's feedback systems and masking the damage after it occurred.
It didn't actually prevent the wound; it only forced the body to ignore and suppress the effects until proper healing could follow.
Kabuto's Yin Healing Wound Destruction, on the other hand, was on another level entirely.
That jutsu predicted and countered the injury before it ever landed, reshaping tissue at the mont of impact so the damage never fully registered in the first place.
No side effects, no masking, just precise, anticipatory regeneration.
It didn't co from bloodline talent but from at least a decade of obsessive refinent, exacting control, and dical battle experience.
In comparison, Ryusei's technique was cruder, reliant on his natural gift for Yang Release rather than mastery of dical arts. Against Kabuto's, it was undeniably inferior.
As for anyone creating a dical ninjutsu that could truly heal oneself in the middle of battle, it was basically impossible.
Many had tried, even the Senju and Uzumaki, and all of them failed.
What was possible, however, was sothing else entirely: the so-called pinnacle of dical ninjutsu, the ultimate regeneration technique Tsunade herself had created.
Her S-rank Creation Rebirth didn't heal in the middle of damage; it rewrote the rules before the injury even landed.
The core idea was simple: you couldn't patch yourself up mid-swing, but you could pre-program your cells to endure and regenerate through incoming trauma.
Kabuto could only manage this in small patches with his Yin Healing Wound Destruction, reacting to what he saw in real ti.
Tsunade, on the other hand, applied it to her entire body at once, powered by her absurd reserves of chakra and natural Yang affinity from her bloodline.
Its advanced form, the Strength of a Hundred–backed Creation Rebirth, took things even further.
With a seal that stored chakra over the years and then unleashed it all at once, Tsunade could keep her body regenerating at full throttle until the stored pool ran dry.
Whether she invented the 'Yin Seal' herself or inherited it from the Uzumaki through Mito was uncertain; so in Ryusei's past life had speculated about that, but the base Creation Rebirth was definitely her own work, inspired by Hashirama's legendary natural regeneration.
Still, such a technique wasn't the kind of thing you whipped up on a whim.
It must have taken her at least one or more decades of research and practice to bring it into reality.
Her world-leading body chakra enhancent, "Monster Strength", was just as unique in the shinobi world, tied directly to her dical ninjutsu. That, too, had likely cost her decades to perfect.
And that thought made Ryusei smirk as he lay back, staring at the ceiling.
"Which is exactly why I can't wait to et this… slightly ignorant, slightly misguided 'aunt' of mine once the war kicks off," he thought. "Besides, there's that complicated little 'knot' she had with my father. Isn't it my job, as the younger generation, to tie up those loose threads?"
His grin widened. "Or at least tug on them until sothing interesting happens."
User Comments
0 comments from readers