After they passed the mountain gap, the thin trickle of clear water was still flowing through the roadside drainage ditch. The green algae clinging to the pebbles on its bed looked almost unreal in the morning light.
After roughly two hours of walking, Chisen suddenly paused.
He planted his walking stick on a roadside rock and glanced back at the ridgeline to the north.
The ridge where Otogakure stood looked ordinary in the morning light-gray limestone slopes, dark green conifer forests covering the mountainside, and a summit hidden in the thinning morning mist.
"What are you looking at?" Tenten turned back to ask him.
"How many empty rooms Orochimaru left in that mountain." Chisen turned back around and continued along the dirt road, tapping his walking stick as he went. "And whether someone in another room will pick up those unfinished theories in Kabuto's notes again-immune integration, Divine Plant, bead compression."
"What if someone does?" Tenten asked.
"Then we'll go after them again." Guy kept walking ahead without looking back.
Neji walked half a step behind Guy. At those words, the corner of his mouth shifted slightly.
It was not a smile, but the instinctive, barely visible acknowledgment of someone from the Hyuga Branch Family hearing a taijutsu-specialist jonin make an extraordinary promise in the most ordinary tone, with no need for any further declaration.
After winding through the hills for roughly two hours, the dirt road joined a wider gravel road.
This gravel road led south toward the Land of Fire Border.
Other travelers began appearing on the road-merchants driving mules loaded with goods, farm women carrying baskets on their backs to market, and a postman delivering letters by bicycle.
The postman's bicycle bell jingled along the gravel road. As he rode past the four of them, he glanced