Nine-Tails Jinchūriki

Five months was truly not a short time. It felt like a lifetime had passed.

Kaedeji stood beneath the sunlight once more, spreading his hands and feeling its warmth, as though he had escaped the icy chill built from countless corpses.

"This feeling is truly strange. It's as though the entire world has become different. How should I describe it? The scent of freedom?"

Kaedeji took a deep breath.

For five months, he had seized every second in a frenzy, cultivating desperately without regard for anything else, paving his path forward with countless corpses. The energy expended in the process was simply impossible to measure.

It was only because he had endured years of illness, grown accustomed to wandering the boundary between life and death, and tempered his will into something as unyielding as stone that he could truly remain patient through this period of endless cultivation, with no idea when he would ever see the dawn.

But in the end, he had seen the dawn and could bathe beneath the light.

"It feels like a long time has passed."

Kaedeji's expression returned to calm. The prolonged absence of sunlight had left his skin deathly pale, but his physique had recovered somewhat. At the very least, he was no longer as gaunt as before.

"Lord Kaedeji, are you going out?"

The three assistants from the Corpse Disposal Unit looked up in astonishment, their faces filled with disbelief.

Since being transferred here, they had never once seen Kaedeji leave. Even after the ruins had been restored to their former state, Kaedeji had done nothing but remain in the deepest laboratory, accompanied by countless corpses.

It was a place the three assistants did not dare approach. They could always hear the wails of corpses from within.

"Yes, I'm going out for a walk. Otherwise, I feel like I'll turn into a quiet corpse myself... Do your work properly. Call me if anything unusual happens."

Leaving those words behind, Kaedeji picked up his trench coat and headed into the village.

He knew the three assistants were not entirely clean. Some of them were surely passing information to certain people, but it did not matter. Kaedeji did not care about intelligence leaks of this level.

Shimura Danzō knew about his embezzlement of corpses, and Tsunade probably knew as well, yet neither had said anything. They were waiting—waiting to see what level Kaedeji would display once his cultivation ended. Kaedeji was the first ninja who needed to consume Large Amounts Of corpses to increase his strength. Since Konoha's founding, there had only been this one case. Using enemy corpses for this sort of secret, special cultivation was within the bounds of tolerance.

Kaedeji had to thank the atmosphere of the village in this era once again. If this had been the era of Naruto and Sasuke, he would have been cursed out by the entire village for daring to pull something like this. By Then, even his very existence would have become an uncomfortable mistake.

Along the way, Kaedeji occasionally stopped, observing all kinds of things as though he had come to this bustling village for the first time. At other times, he took out some money and bought things from various shops.

If one ignored the forehead protector he wore as a belt, he looked exactly like a tourist.

Indeed, while Konoha was an enormous military district in the Land of Fire, serving functions akin to a Ministry of Defense, national security bureau, and police department, the fact that it had the authority to earn its own military budget alone destined it to become a mixed military-civilian zone.

Although the war continued, Iwagakure lacked the ability to completely defeat Konoha. With its powerful capacity for recovery, Konoha was rapidly replenishing its strength. With every passing day, Konoha's advantage over Iwagakure increased.

By now, commerce had gradually flourished. Though grim expressions occasionally appeared on the villagers' faces, they could generally enjoy a relative peace and engage in all manner of spending.

"Hey, did you hear? We destroyed two more enemy strongholds and killed over sixty ninja!"

"Really? That's indeed excellent progress. If we get a few dozen more victories like that, Iwa definitely won't be able to hold on!"

"Those damned Iwa bastards! Why are they really as smelly and hard as rocks? Why are they still fighting? They should just surrender to us already!"

"Sunagakure has already signed a surrender agreement, handing 31 percent of its annual mission volume over to Konoha. I heard the reparations have already been paid! Why is Iwa still stubbornly holding out?"

As he wandered, Kaedeji listened to the villagers' conversations and noticed that many of them were cracking under the pressure, even becoming enraged.

"As official residents of the world's strongest ninja village, faced with a powerful enemy of sufficient scale that rejects all compromise, their emotions, which had loosened somewhat, have tensed once more. It's only natural for them to feel pained and uncomfortable..."

Kaedeji nodded to himself, roughly grasping the current direction of public sentiment. Of course, he did not actually care about the thoughts of ordinary villagers. He was merely taking the opportunity to understand present-day Konoha.

He knew very well that a decisive battle would definitely erupt this year—either once Konoha had accumulated enough advantages, or when Iwagakure realized that if it did not risk everything on a decisive battle, it would lose its chance completely.

Do not forget that Kumogakure and Kirigakure had been playing their little game of small-unit infiltration operations from beginning to end. They were not only harassing Konoha, but also causing trouble for Iwagakure, seeking opportunities and never missing a chance to bleed an enemy village.

Every additional enemy ninja killed meant weakening the enemy's strength and potential. Those two ninja villages had nothing better to do anyway.

Moreover, Iwa and Kumogakure were hereditary enemies. The hatred between them ran even deeper than the enmity between Konoha and Sunagakure.

As Kaedeji pondered, he tried to blend into the current atmosphere. The natural coldness radiating from him, that unapproachable aura, was gradually melting away.

For several days in a row, Kaedeji simply wandered around. He had no work, carried out no missions, visited no one, and received no visitors. He treated himself as an ordinary villager, enjoying this rare leisure and relaxation.

"Hm?"

That day, Kaedeji walked out of a barbecue restaurant and abruptly stopped, a slight frown appearing on his face as he looked at the two women approaching him.

One was old, the other young. Both had red hair, and to an ordinary person's eyes, they looked completely unremarkable.

They were a perfectly normal grandmother-and-granddaughter pair. As for their hair? There was nothing worth paying special attention to. Everyone's hair came in all sorts of colors anyway.

Yet Kaedeji's hair stood on end. Instinctively, the muscles all over his body quietly tensed.

He had already recognized them. They were... Uzumaki Mito and Uzumaki Kushina!

Kaedeji had not expected that, after spending so many days idling about and experiencing a sense of ease he had not felt in over a decade, he would run into these two special figures.

Uzumaki Kushina showed no reaction beneath Kaedeji's gaze. She was merely a fourteen-year-old girl. Let alone experience with killing, she even lacked proper combat experience. Since entering Konoha, she had never left.

Kushina enjoyed the highest level of protection in Konoha, but her personal freedom was also restricted.

Uzumaki Mito, however, was far more frightening.

This kind seventy-six-year-old grandmother, the First Hokage's wife and the current Nine-Tails Jinchūriki, showed no change in expression. Yet the instant her casually cast glance met Kaedeji's eyes, he felt a mountain-like pressure bearing down on him.