Takigakure

It was the same inn as before; under the dim, warm light, the old woman sat behind the counter, nodding off.

Pushing aside the door curtain to enter, Yura walked straight up to the old woman and tapped her fingers lightly on the counter, waking her from her light slumber.

Opening her eyes and recognizing Yura, the old woman smiled kindly. "You're back, little girl."

"Mm." With a slight nod, Yura placed a stack of money on the counter and smiled faintly. "Old one, settling the bill. Checking out."

"Not staying the night?" the old woman asked.

"I probably can't stay tonight." Yura shook her head. "A bit of minor trouble; I'd rather not deal with it."

Before long, the somewhat perceptive captain of the town guard would likely conduct a town-wide search.

After all, aside from ghosts, the only suspects they could possibly imagine were ninjas.

"I see..." the old woman muttered, then pulled out stack after stack of neatly arranged Explosive Tags. "You child, you stuck so many of these around the room, it took this old bag quite a while to clean up. Here, take them back."

Yura nodded, retrieved the Explosive Tags, and smiled faintly. "By the way, old one, thank you for the trouble earlier."

The old woman chuckled. "What trouble? I don't know what you're talking about."

"Mm..." Yura shook her head with a soft smile. "Old one, if the ninjas from Konoha find you later, it would be better to tell them the truth to avoid suffering. After all, as you know, it isn't exactly valuable information; it's not worth going against ninjas."

"It seems this old woman is just being meddlesome." The old woman stiffened her neck and said stubbornly, "But I've lived long enough on my own; I'm not afraid of those ninja lords."

"If that makes you happy~" Yura spread her small hands, sighed, and said, "Then, I shall take my leave. Farewell, old one."

"Goodbye, have a safe journey, guest." The old woman watched as Yura departed.

Walking to the door curtain, Yura paused, turned her head slightly, and asked, "Come to think of it, I am truly curious: why did you help me?"

Staring into Yura's scarlet eyes, the familiar gaze seemed to stir distant memories, leaving her momentarily dazed.

Yura waited patiently for an answer.

She could probably guess the reason—something like her being similar to a daughter or granddaughter.

After a short while, the old woman smiled and shook her head. "No special reason. Perhaps it's just because you look very cute."

"Is that so..." Yura turned back, lifted the curtain, and smiled faintly. "In all the time I've lived, you are the first person to call me cute. Thank you, Granny."

The curtain fell, and the hanging wind chime swayed softly.

Watching the lonely figure depart, the solitary old woman sat back in her chair and gradually drifted into a deep sleep.

Traveling through the night to cross the border of the Land of Fire, by the time the sun rose the next day, Yura had already arrived near Takigakure in the Land of Waterfalls.

Due to the village's losses from capturing the Tailed Beast, their defensive strength had clearly weakened. Furthermore, because Takigakure's location was extremely secretive—with no outsiders knowing the intelligence besides the village's own ninjas—the defensive forces were almost entirely concentrated within the village. Thus, Yura found a concealed spot on the outskirts to settle down temporarily.

Putting the affairs of the Land of Fire to the back of her mind, for the moment, aside from continuing her cultivation and the development of her ninjutsu, Yura had to conduct an in-depth reconnaissance of Takigakure. To avoid alerting the enemy, everything would naturally focus on stealthy operations.

As a Chunin of the village, Yura naturally did not know most of the secrets, including the location of secret techniques, the storage site of the Hero Water, or where the Tailed Beast was housed.

Black Secret Technique: Hell Butterfly.

A pitch-black butterfly, carrying an eyeball, crawled out from Yura's eye socket. It flapped its wings and took flight, heading toward Takigakure. It passed through the waterfall and entered the mountain tunnel hidden behind it. Along the tunnel floor, there were numerous deep, bottomless pools of water. The waterways beneath the pools delved deep underground, crisscrossing in all directions. Some led to the depths of the earth, but most were dead ends; only a few rare channels led to the true Takigakure.

Relying on this natural maze-like defense system, Takigakure had secured its position as the most secretive ninja village in the ninja world.

Yura naturally knew the specific path. The Hell Butterfly stopped in front of one of the pools and immediately dove into the water.

Underwater, the butterfly's form was not easy to maneuver, so her hair shifted, transforming in the blink of an eye into a small fish. It flicked its tail and swam toward the depths. Before long, after crossing the long underwater passage, the fish left the water and transformed back into a pitch-black butterfly, fluttering above the surface, its eyeball rotating to observe the surroundings.

Very good, the hidden sentries had not changed.

Outside Takigakure, Yura narrowed her eyes, sitting atop a giant black cocoon in the forest.

The giant cocoon, woven from hair, was Yura's resting nest. It protected her from wind and rain, but most importantly, the hair strands extending deep into the ground spread out in all directions. Within a radius of two kilometers, no vibration on the ground could escape Yura's perception.

Black Secret Technique: Black Nest.

Sitting atop the Black Nest was like a spider sitting on its web, quietly and patiently waiting for prey to step into the trap. It was a super-wide-area reconnaissance technique.

Yura's current position was at the very edge of the technique's range, just enough to reach the outskirts of Takigakure.

Yura toyed with a strand of hair at her fingertips. The black hair combined and deformed into a small, ugly doll, hovering at her fingertips, spinning and dancing continuously.

This was an ability Doflamingo developed based on the String-String Fruit: a clone doll made of strings, also known as the Black Knight, or Shadow Puppet. The Hell Butterfly was a variation of this form, which Yura called "Animalization."

In Bayonetta, the protagonist's ability used hair as a medium for weaving and transformation, possessing magic to turn into animals for movement—turning into a panther to run fast, a crow for short-term flight, a swarm of bats to dodge attacks, or a snake to move quickly through water.

This complex morphological change required extremely precise control over the hair strands. At this moment, in the gaps of her reconnaissance mission, Yura was seizing the time to practice the transformation and manipulation of her hair.

However, the "Animalization" ability was removed in the third game. Still using hair as a medium, the ability was renamed "Umbran Climax," which allowed summoned demons to fuse with one's own hair, granting the user the corresponding power of the demon to fight.

The ninja world had no demons, but it had Tailed Beasts.

Takigakure's structure was simple: it was located inside a giant underground cavern. The entire village was built around the underground lake at the center of the cavern. The village was not large—nowhere near the scale of Konoha. Aside from some households of citizens from the Land of Waterfalls who had migrated nearby, there were only a few ninja clans. Altogether, the total number of households barely reached a thousand, with a population of only a few thousand people.

This was Takigakure at its peak; later on, it would become even more pathetic, with barely a handful of people left.

In the center of the lake grew a massive, towering tree.

This tree was called the God Tree, though it was not the God Tree of the Otsutsuki clan. The Hero Water was produced by this very tree, and it also served as the village's primary light source. Externally, they claimed the God Tree condensed only one drop every hundred years, accumulating only a dozen or so drops over a millennium. But looking at how the village used the Hero Water, the efficiency of its accumulation shouldn't be that low, otherwise, the accounts of their usage wouldn't add up.

For this assassination of Senju Hashirama, the twelve-man assassination squad's standard was to have one drop of Hero Water per person to use in a desperate struggle at a critical moment.

This tree definitely had some origin, but the ninja world was full of strange treasures, so one more God Tree was nothing out of the ordinary.

What she needed to find now was the shrine hidden inside the God Tree, where the Hero Water was worshipped and accumulated.

Considering the village's defensive strength, this would not be an easy task. It would be necessary to create some chaos to draw attention when seizing it, to prevent the village from acting like a cornered dog and using or destroying the Hero Water. Otherwise, the Chunin in the village could be turned into Jonin in batches under the effects of the Hero Water, and Yura didn't particularly want to face hundreds of Jonin. Fortunately, Yura was not without help.

For instance, the elite Jonin currently locked in her cage: Kakuzu.