Hyuga Hiashi's Decision and the Late-Night Defection

Night hung dark as ink.

The Hyuga Clan's compound lay immersed in a quiet, ancient majesty. Moonlight poured down like liquid mercury, casting the carefully pruned pines and cypresses in the courtyard into rugged shadows. Everything appeared orderly and meticulous, just like the stern rules the Hyuga family had upheld for a thousand years.

Yet inside the clan head Hyuga Hiashi's bedroom, the atmosphere was oppressive enough to suffocate.

He had not lit a lamp. He simply knelt on the cold tatami in a thin white nightshirt. The window stood wide open, and the icy night wind poured in, making his broad sleeves snap and flutter. Yet he felt not the slightest chill.

That was because a deeper, more bone-chilling cold was spreading from the depths of his heart to every limb and bone.

"Thump... thump..."

The sound of his heartbeat was magnified countless times in the deathly silent room. Every beat was like a drum being pounded, heavy and frantic.

He closed his eyes, but the hellish scene he had glimpsed in the conference room that day replayed madly in his mind again and again, branded into his memory!

It had not been an illusion!

His Byakugan, which he took pride in and which was said to see through all things in the world, had seen it with absolute clarity!

Within the seemingly calm body of the Fifth Hokage, Baishi, lay a scene of unspeakable terror! Countless sinister Wood Release Vines, seemingly alive, had woven themselves into an airtight cage. At its center, bound fast and being frantically drained as it let out silent screams, was none other than the legendary One-Tail, Shukaku!

That had not been sealing. It had not been suppression!

It had been... predation!

He had been treating a Tailed Beast as a trophy and nourishment,