Green Bean Eyes, Reporting for Duty

Holy crap, is this place haunted?!

Genye's expression turned to one of sheer terror the moment he heard that.

Old man, you've got the wrong profession if you're looking for a ninja to deal with ghosts; you need to go find the Demon Slayer Corps next door!

The old man invited the two into his home, served them tea, and began to slowly recount the strange occurrences plaguing the village.

"It all started a few months ago..."

The old man fell into his memories, his face once again uncontrollably contorting with terror.

"Daniu was the strongest young man in our village, a real expert at farming. But he had no illness, nothing at all—he was perfectly fine, and then suddenly, he was just gone."

[At the time, we just assumed the boy had some hidden ailment. We buried him with a heavy heart and gradually forgot about the matter.

But seven days later, another young, healthy man in the village died mysteriously.

That was when we realized something was wrong. We rushed to Daniu's grave, hoping to see if we could find anything unusual.]

"T-the result..." The old man's voice trembled, and the hand holding his teacup shook violently.

"We found that Daniu's grave was empty. The boy's coffin was just lying there, but... but Daniu had vanished."

"The village locksmith checked it and stated quite firmly that there were no signs of the coffin being pried open from the outside. Which, which means..."

"Which means," Jiraiya interjected, "you believe the corpse opened the coffin itself and walked away as a reanimated dead man?"

Holy crap, is it really that intense?

Genye, standing to the side, broke out in a cold sweat. It was a good thing it was daytime; otherwise, he would have used a Body Flicker technique to bolt!

"We didn't believe in such things at first, thinking the locksmith was just old and his eyes were failing him," the old man continued with a bitter smile.

[So, that night, we all gathered together to hold a vigil for the poor boy.

After midnight, something even more terrifying happened!

No one had gone near the boy's coffin, yet the lid... it actually flew into the air on its own.

A few of us gathered our courage and crowded around, only to see the boy sit up from the coffin with a blank expression, his limbs stiff as he crawled out!

"Boruto! Boruto!" Someone, thinking the boy's soul had returned, shouted his name loudly.

But Boruto didn't respond. He walked out of the mourning hall with a numb gait and ran toward the outdoors.

Strange to say, even though his movements were incredibly stiff, his speed was terrifyingly fast. None of us could catch up to him; we could only watch as his corpse vanished into the night.]

"But all of this was just the beginning of the nightmare!" the old man said painfully, tugging at the few remaining hairs on his head.

"Since then, every seven days, a young person has died for no reason, and their bodies have mysteriously disappeared afterward. Everyone is living in fear."

"The village shaman says an evil spirit has latched onto our village. Every seven days, it comes to drain the life force of a young man, then returns at night to drag the corpse back to the mountains to devour it."

"Many young people were so scared they fled the village. Only us old folks who have put down roots here refuse to leave. But the evil spirit doesn't seem to be a picky eater; every seven days, someone still dies!"

At this point, the old man knelt before the two, tears and snot streaming down his face.

"If this keeps up, our village will be wiped out! My Lords, please, have mercy and save us!"

"Old man, don't worry," Jiraiya said, helping him up with a solemn expression. "We will definitely help you deal with this evil spirit."

"Thank you, thank you, my Lords!" the old man said gratefully.

According to the old man, another person had died just today, so Jiraiya took Genye and planned to check the deceased's mourning hall.

Seeing that night was about to fall, Genye tightened his clothes and asked fearfully, "Lord Jiraiya, are we really going to handle this?"

"Of course!" Jiraiya laughed heartily. "Such a mysterious and baffling case will surely make for excellent creative material!"

"But, Lord Jiraiya," Genye grumbled, "in all honesty, the trashy novels you're writing right now don't seem to need this type of material."

"Who says they don't?" Jiraiya gave a lecherous grin. "Draining life force... who knows, maybe the culprit is a beautiful, seductive female ghost?"

At this, Jiraiya looked at Genye, suddenly thoughtful. "Hey, don't tell me you're scared, kid?"

Even though he was scared to death, Genye stubbornly retorted, "As if! I've even dared to punch the Nine-Tails; why would I be afraid of a mere evil spirit?"

The two used concealment techniques to hide in the deceased's mourning hall, waiting for the so-called evil spirit to come and take the body.

The night grew deeper, like an indelible ink, gradually staining the earth black.

Snap.

I don't know how much time passed, but the coffin in front of them suddenly shook violently. A moment later, a pale arm pushed the lid open from the inside.

Watching this scene, Jiraiya and Genye both wore expressions of utter constipation.

They had been anticipating (fearing) this for so long, waiting here like idiots for half the night, and... this was it?

Just now, the two had clearly seen several imperceptible thin threads shooting from a hidden spot into the gaps of the coffin, connecting to the corpse.

In the dark, an ordinary person wouldn't have been able to notice them, but both of them were ninjas; not only could they see the threads, they knew exactly what they were.

"Damn it, it's Sunagakure's chakra threads for puppet manipulation!"

Genye cursed under his breath, used a Body Flicker to appear behind the middle-aged ninja controlling the threads, and kicked him to the ground.

"Did you kill everyone in the village? What are you doing collecting the corpses of ordinary people?" Jiraiya appeared as well, frowning as he asked.

"Are you Konoha ninja?" Caught red-handed, the middle-aged ninja showed no fear; instead, he flashed a provocative grin.

"What am I doing? Naturally, I'm collecting the corpses of you Land of Fire scum to serve as materials for upgrading my puppets."

Snap.

Jiraiya crushed the man's throat with a single strike, then wiped his hands and explained to the bewildered Hyuga Genya standing beside him.

"Not every puppeteer has the capital to forge puppets from rare metals. Some bastards without power or status, who have abandoned their humanity, use human bones as substitutes."

And a Sunagakure ninja proficient in toxicology naturally had countless ways to make ordinary people "die of natural causes."

Having dealt with the "evil spirits" in the village, Jiraiya and Hyuga Genya declined the money the village elders had scraped together and set off on their journey once more.

Half a year passed in the blink of an eye. Hyuga Genya and Jiraiya traveled intermittently, traversing the entire Land of Grass.

However, to his regret, he never managed to find any trace of Karin and her mother.

It's the right time and the right place, so why can't I find them? Hyuga Genya was utterly baffled.

(In a magnificent underground palace.

Uchiha Xia stood with her hands on her hips, laughing triumphantly: "Hahahaha, Hyuga Genya really is my lucky star."

"I just took a casual stroll through Kusagakure, and I actually discovered two members of the Uzumaki Clan!")

(In the direction Uchiha Xia was looking, a red-haired woman held her child, nervously surveying her surroundings, feeling lost about her future fate.)

"Whew, that feels good..."

In the hot spring, Jiraiya scooped up a ladle of hot water and poured it over his head. Looking at the scantily clad girls not far away, he spoke without averting his gaze.

"Xuanye, you've been traveling with me for so long. Have you learned anything from me?"

"...How to soak in bathhouses, write dirty jokes, and hit on women?" Hyuga Genya held it in for a long time before blurting out this sentence.

"Cough, cough!" Jiraiya coughed violently. "Besides that, haven't you learned anything decent, kid?"

"The word 'decent' doesn't apply to you, either," Hyuga Genya said earnestly, landing a one-hit kill on Jiraiya.

Jiraiya instantly lost interest. After watching for another hour, he took Hyuga Genya and left the bathhouse.

"Kid Xuanye, is there anywhere else you want to go?"

Walking through the dense forest, Jiraiya held his hands behind his head and glanced sideways at Hyuga Genya.

"Hmm, next, I want to go to the Land of Wa... Something's wrong!"

Hyuga Genya stopped mid-sentence, suddenly turning his head to look behind him with a grave expression.

In his field of vision, a man entirely shrouded in black, revealing only a pair of green eyes, was striding toward the two of them.

"Oh? Has some incredible fellow arrived?"

Jiraiya curiously followed Hyuga Genya's gaze and soon spotted the figure of the man in black.

"This guy has such powerful chakra..."

The moment he saw the stranger, Jiraiya immediately set aside his playful attitude, his expression turning equally solemn.

"Who are you, sir? What is your purpose in following us?" Jiraiya demanded loudly.

The man in black did not speak. He pulled a roster from his robes and, ignoring the two of them, began flipping through it as if they weren't there.

The man looked at the roster, then at the two of them, repeating the process several times. A flicker of joy flashed in his green eyes.

"That's right. Hyuga Genya, bounty of thirty million ryo! Jiraiya, bounty of forty million ryo!"

A full seventy million ryo!

Rounding it up, this was a massive deal worth a hundred million!

[Not in the best state, so I'm writing a small side-arc as a transition. Tomorrow, we enter the combat phase.]