Four in the afternoon.
Lead-gray clouds smothered the sky. Rain as fine as ox hair stippled the carved face of Senju Hashirama, drowning it in shadow.
A kilometer from the Academy gates, a nondescript middle-aged man stood alone beneath a blue umbrella. Water slid down the nylon in steady beads. He looked like he was waiting for someone.
Under the Transformation Technique, Konome Taketori held her own umbrella and wore a heavy expression. Deep in her hidden eyes, dead-ash chakra churned. From far off, her Byakugan watched the Academy gate.
For days on end, she had not found a clean chance to get close to Hyuga Neji.
Too many eyes on campus. Too little room to work.
After class Neji always headed straight for the Hyuga compound without a pause. To avoid brushing against his Byakugan, Konome kept herself parked at the very edge of her Byakugan's range. It kept her off his notice, but it never yielded a moment alone.
Only two Hyuga attended the Academy: Neji and Hinata.
Hinata, under School Konome's very deliberate shepherding, was already obedient. Every day she delivered a few more pages from the Eight Trigrams atlas.
Sixty-three pages so far.
There were one hundred twenty-eight forms in all. Nearly half in hand.
Her memory was decent, but the atlas was more than memorization. Each plate demanded calculations and specific sequences of movement to mesh chakra and flesh until they worked as one.
Compared to the Leaf's Straight Fist and its brute torque, Gentle Fist felt almost unlike taijutsu at all. Its fineness made it every bit as hard as ninjutsu or secret arts.
Konome did not struggle, but she could not call her pace fast either.
As the atlas grew more complete, Hinata ceased to be a threat. One more piece remained.
If she secured Neji today, every Hyuga she could touch would be hers.
Her exposure risk would plummet, and a stream of Hyuga intelligence would open besides.
She had not forgotten how dangerous the Hyuga were. As long as these eyes sat in her skull, she would have to settle accounts with them. Sooner or later.
For now, the aim was to stall. Grow to her full height first, then deal with the Hyuga.
At her current speed, barring accidents, she would hit baseline elite jōnin by graduation. Open the Eight Gates on top of that and the Hyuga elders would go down in three blows.
While she was turning this over, the Academy gates swung open a kilometer away. Students trickled out in twos and threes, packs on their backs. There were not many of them. Faculty and students together could not fill even half a grade from her previous life. Chakra was not the kind of thing everyone had.
Her Byakugan swept the flow and quickly found School Konome, surrounded by her little circle, leaving the grounds.
The clone had cultivated her network well. Secret arts could be forgotten, of course. No amount of good will would pry those loose. But from Choji Akimichi she had already gleaned a sliver of how Yang Release worked.
Stripped of mystery, Yang Release was simply this.
Life.
Which was to say it covered absorbing, releasing, healing, reinforcing, motion, balance, every trait of living systems. The scope was too vast. The Akimichi specialized only in absorption, release, and reinforcement. As for training methods, Choji would not and could not share them. Their regimen did not train the essence of Yang Release, but tailored capacities for clan techniques. Without those techniques, it would be pointless for Konome.
She had taken a nibble of Yin Release from Shikamaru Nara. Yin chakra could, through a channel no one yet understood, give shape to thought itself and drag it into reality. It was a universal solvent of a nature. Call it the power of I Think Therefore It Is. With enough mental strength, one could make a person vanish from the world as if they had never been.
There was even a Nara tale of an ancestor who erred in Yin training, was swallowed by his own shadow, and was never seen again.
Shikamaru was coy, riddling, half legend and half smoke. Nowhere near Choji's guileless honesty. After all his talk, Konome held little she could use. Likely the acquaintanceship was too fresh. Everyone kept their cards close.
"See you."
School Konome waved her umbrella and smiled like a flower.
"See you." The Nara trio echoed her with smiles of their own. Naruto was already dazzled.
Boys fell in love young. Konome understood Naruto's small secret. But becoming a Sage of Six Paths was the only pursuit of her life. What was romance beside godhood, immortality, the net that bound every bloodline in her hands. If she had to shed her humanity to achieve it, she would.
Naruto was hardly ruled by love anyway. He fancied Sakura as a child and married Hinata in the end. Whatever warmth he felt now barely mattered.
Let him marry Hinata well. When Boruto was born, she would have a look at that so-called Jōgan and those seal markings for herself.
She watched the clone leave for home, then pushed her vision further. Soon she caught Neji's figure with her Byakugan.
Hm.
Her brow lifted.
Leaving the gate, Hyuga Neji did not take his usual road. For days she had watched him go southwest in a straight line. Today he went the other way.
Where was he headed.
Konome raised chakra, flooding her meridians, and narrowed her pupils. When she forced the Byakugan into a tighter beam, it stopped being a three-hundred-sixty-degree sphere. It straightened into a line, and her sight stretched far further.
This, too, was a special synergy of Byakugan and Shikotsumyaku. She needed no hand seals to use the Byakugan and could shape its operation freely.
Her tunnel vision thinned. Neji moved fast, deeper and deeper into quiet streets. Following that line, she found his destination at last.
That direction was the Forest of Death.
What was he doing there.
He would not already be stealing main-family techniques at this point in time.
Which meant the Forest, shunned by people, was his training ground for those secrets.
Tied to what she remembered, Konome read Neji's aim in a heartbeat.
Opportunity.
If they were to work together, they needed a secluded place. If Neji refused, wild beasts claiming a life in the Forest of Death was not exactly rare.
She tilted the umbrella and set off without a pause, shadowing his back toward the dark line of trees.
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