The Two Sides

Silver moonlight paved the road, and the night was so quiet that the chirping of insects could be heard.

Ye Zi looked at the girl who irritated him and said coldly, "What is it?"

The two brief words seemed to add a chill to the air, and even the insects' chirping seemed to quiet at that moment.

The boy radiated an aloofness that kept others at a distance, but Kushina did not retreat in the slightest. Her gaze shifted away from the places wrapped in bandages and turned to Ye Zi's cold eyes. Her tone was as natural as it had been more than a year ago as she smiled and said, "What are you carrying? Is it something delicious?"

Ye Zi glanced at the lunch box in his hand, then silently looked at Kushina's smiling face, growing increasingly irritated.

Looking at the silent Ye Zi, a trace of disappointment flashed through Kushina's eyes, but it was quickly filled with bright light again. Like a chatterbox, she continued asking, "The little flowers on the cloth wrapped around the lunch box are adorable. It looks like a girl's work. Is she a new friend of yours? Is her cooking good?"

Under the silver moonlight, the girl chattered nonstop. In the moonlight, Ye Zi's eyes remained cold, yet he carefully and seriously examined Kushina. As she grew older, her pretty face seemed to be slowly overlapping with the most important person in his memories. Perhaps in another two or three years, she would look even more like her.

"Did you know? I'm really good at cooking now. After you made fun of me that time, I put a lot of effort into learning."

Feeling that Ye Zi's cold gaze had not changed at all, Kushina's cheerful tone gradually sank. A faint sadness appeared in her eyes. Even to this day, she still did not understand how Ye Zi had suddenly become so cold.

She slowly closed her mouth. After remaining silent for a long while, she finally asked what she most wanted to know: "How did you get hurt? Does it hurt?"

The bandages wrapped around nearly his entire body showed that his injuries were not light. How could it not hurt?

A faint change appeared in Ye Zi's cold gaze. In his memories, he had once fought desperately even over a single piece of moldy bread. Sometimes, finding stinking seafood had been like discovering treasure, though it had always brought even fiercer struggles. Every time he returned to his shabby dwelling covered in wounds, someone would look at his injuries with a heartbroken expression, then always say the same thing to him.

An imperceptible sorrow flashed through his dark pupils. He silently stared at Kushina. After a moment, he slightly lifted the lunch box and said coldly, "Is there anything else?"

Kushina froze, then slowly lowered her head and said softly, "No."

Ye Zi looked at the Kushina with her head bowed. Yet in that instant, his icy gaze melted like an iceberg and became exceptionally gentle. That gaze was frighteningly tender, as though the person before him were an extremely precious family member. But soon, the tenderness in his eyes turned cold again.

Minato, hiding in the shadows, caught the fleeting gentleness in Ye Zi's eyes. His expression was slightly astonished, and then he watched thoughtfully as Ye Zi disappeared from sight.

On the silent street, Kushina stared at the ground covered in silver light, her expression sorrowful. After a while, she raised her head, her expression once again resolute. She looked at the road ahead and firmly took one step, then another.

Minato walked across the rooftop, glancing sideways at the girl beneath the moonlight as he accompanied her.

They walked along the same road, heading in the same direction. In another direction, on another road, walked the boy who seemed to possess a trace of tenderness within his icy shell.

In the days that followed, Ye Zi always received blood-nourishing food cooked by that medical ninja. He silently thanked the girl. Thanks to those nourishing dishes, his body recovered much faster than usual. Occasionally, they would encounter each other by chance, yet they seemed to share an unspoken understanding. They never looked at each other for long, and they could not even be considered acquaintances who merely exchanged nods.

Ye Zi did not want too many ties to this world. He could wake up and thank her when she treated him, because that was her job. Thus, he would not thank her simply because she prepared food that helped his body recover faster, even though saying thank you was so easy.

He had his reasons, but what about that girl?

Sometimes, he wondered why the girl did this, but each time he quickly forced the question down and turned around to plunge straight into his books.

Two weeks later, after his injuries had healed, Ye Zi was quickly assigned another mission: assassinating a spy hiding in Konoha.

After barely surviving while stealing confidential information about the spy's identity from the Stone ninja last time, Root immediately carried out a secret purge of Konoha. However, truly outstanding spies would not leave records of their identities within a ninja village. They possessed superb disguises and terrifying abilities to steal intelligence. No one knew who their contacts were, nor how they transmitted information.

These outstanding Stone ninja spies were hidden within Konoha. The spies had no connections with one another, and each had a designated contact. The only person who knew the identities of all the spies was the head of the intelligence agency.

Spies were troublesome existences.

Although the information Ye Zi had stolen had enabled a purge of the spies, it had not uprooted the most crucial point.

However, Konoha's Root was no pushover. In just two weeks, they had identified three suspects. Ye Zi's mission was to observe and confirm the true identities of those three suspects, then... kill them!

Among the three suspects was an old man named Kimura Takuya whom Ye Zi knew. The old man lived alone. According to the intelligence, he was a long-standing ordinary resident of Konoha and one of the village's first residents since its founding. Other than never having married, there was nothing unusual in his life history. It was hard to imagine that an old man with such seniority would be one of the suspects.

"Kimura Takuya."

Ye Zi quietly looked at the information. Wasn't his first mission after graduating from the Ninja Academy to clear weeds for this old man who lived alone? He vaguely remembered the old man's aged face and the benevolent smile that occasionally appeared on it. A person like that was actually one of the suspects.

His cold gaze fell on the person in the photograph. The wrinkled skin resembled the bark of a dying tree, while the mottled age spots accentuated the deathly air of old age. Only his eyes, which were not yet cloudy, still held clarity.

The next day at dusk, Ye Zi dressed casually and carried some yokan bought from Ika-ya as he headed toward Kimura Takuya's home.

Kimura Takuya lived in the suburbs, surrounded by fields. He himself owned a large plot of land, which he used to grow vegetables.

At sunset, the sun hung at the end of the country lane. From far away, Ye Zi could see the wooden house bathed in orange light, as well as Kimura Takuya sitting on the wooden veranda with a cup of hot tea in his hands.

Ye Zi naturally walked toward the wooden house and stopped at the fence gate. He called out to Kimura Takuya, "Grandpa Kimura, I've come to visit you."

"Oh?"

Kimura Takuya narrowed his left eye, while his right eye lifted and opened with apparent difficulty. Looking at the boy by the fence gate, confusion showed in the open eye as he struggled to remember who the boy was. Then he glanced at the yokan beside the teapot and suddenly said, "Oh, it's you. Come in, heh heh."

Ye Zi smiled faintly, pushed open the fence gate, and walked inside.

Kimura Takuya lightly patted the spot beside him, gesturing for Ye Zi to sit. Ye Zi obediently sat down and was just about to hand the yokan he had bought to the old man when he suddenly saw the yokan on the plate beside the teapot. He could not help freezing. The faint fragrance drifting into his nose showed that it was yokan from Ika-ya.

Kimura Takuya looked at the wrapped box Ye Zi held out, chuckled, and said, "This afternoon, that girl who used to be with you also brought yokan to visit me. You youngsters are so thoughtful, remembering that this old man likes yokan from Ika-ya."

Hearing that Kushina had come that afternoon, Ye Zi's expression did not change. He smiled faintly, handed the yokan to Kimura Takuya, and asked, "Are you doing well?"

"I'm just an old bag of bones. How could anything be wrong? I won't live for many more years, either. But whenever I see lively young people like you, I always feel I can live a few more years." The old man narrowed his eyes and looked at the last trace of afterglow about to disappear beneath the horizon, releasing a long sigh.

Ye Zi smiled. "You're still hale and hearty. I'm sure you can live for several more decades."

The old man's eyes curved slightly. "The sun is setting. If you're not in a hurry, stay for dinner."

Ye Zi's eyes shifted slightly, and he readily agreed.