When the man wearing an animal mask looked toward the top of the cave, Kamizuki, who had been standing there, was already gone.
Staring at the empty cave ceiling, the animal-masked man scratched his head in confusion. After exchanging a glance with his similarly masked companion, he turned and went back into the cave.
After the two masked men had returned inside, a stalactite protruding from the ceiling suddenly turned into a cloud of smoke. When the smoke cleared, Kamizuki stood in its place.
Just as the animal-masked man was about to look up at the ceiling, Kamizuki had used the Transformation Technique to turn himself into that stalactite.
Now back in his human form, Kamizuki's eyes were no longer in the Tenseigan state. They were just ordinary Byakugan.
The Tenseigan state didn't consume much chakra, but it still used more than the ordinary Byakugan. So Kamizuki chose to activate the Byakugan instead.
Kamizuki watched the two animal-masked men with his Byakugan. Only after they had gone a little farther did he follow them into the cave.
Once inside, Kamizuki saw that a torch had been lit every ten meters or so, illuminating the cave.
He followed the two masked men for about five minutes. Along the way, he realized that the cave seemed to be nothing more than a passage. He didn't spot anyone else or anything suspicious.
The farther Kamizuki went, the more curious he became about where the passage led, who was waiting inside, and what they were doing in such a hidden cave.
Driven by curiosity, Kamizuki kept following the two men wearing animal masks, using his Byakugan.
After trailing them through countless twists and turns for who knew how long, Kamizuki finally saw the cave's exit through his Byakugan.
His Byakugan let him survey the area beyond the exit, and what he saw left him stunned.
There wasn't another, larger cave beyond the entrance, as he'd expected. Instead, the passage opened into a broad area resembling a canyon.
There were also plenty of people moving around in the canyon-like area, each with some amount of chakra. At a glance, there seemed to be around a hundred of them.
Kamizuki waited until the two masked men had left the cave before cautiously approaching the entrance.
The valley wasn't very large. It looked like a small village, with scattered houses. Night had fallen, and sparse torches dotted the valley.
Kamizuki watched from the entrance for a while. Most of the people inside were resting, with only a few sentries at their posts.
Through his Byakugan, Kamizuki saw that the sentries all seemed to have some sensory abilities, but their range was limited.
Though their detection range was short, the sentries were positioned at carefully measured intervals. Kamizuki suspected they were arranged in a formation. To break through without being discovered, he would have to take them all out in a very short time.
After a little thought, Kamizuki realized that with the Byakugan alone, he couldn't eliminate all the sentries without giving himself away.
So he activated the Tenseigan again and looked up at the moon. The two fish-shaped Tomoe in his eyes, one black and one white, spun rapidly, forming a Bagua pattern in his vision.
An invisible force shot from Kamizuki's Tenseigan toward the moon. The moon reflected it back to the ground like a mirror. As the force returned above the valley, it suddenly burst apart into several smaller streams that shot toward the sentries.
As the invisible force entered the foreheads of all eight sentries at once, their bodies jerked in unison. In about 0.01 seconds, they had lost control of their bodies and could no longer move.
This was Kamizuki's first time using the Tenseigan's power of manipulation on people. He hadn't expected it to work so well: he could control eight people at once, and it felt fairly easy. It truly lived up to its reputation as a power capable of crushing Sasori of the Red Sands' "Performance of a Hundred Puppets."
Under Kamizuki's mental control, the eight sentries left their concealed posts and walked into the cave one after another. Once inside, they lined up in front of him.
Looking at the eight sentries standing before him with blank expressions, Kamizuki nodded slightly, quite pleased with his power of manipulation.
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