The Peace You Worship Is the Footprint I Tread Upon

The last ray of afterglow over the desert was swallowed by the horizon, and a profound dead silence descended upon heaven and earth.

Atop a sand dune, the ghostly blue ripples emanating from the crystal along Xuan's spine gradually faded. The violent energy originating from the Four-Tails' old ape now flowed through his meridians like a gentle stream.

He slowly opened his eyes. Within his left pupil, a crimson vertical fox eye flashed past, more solid and stable than ever before.

A cold notification sounded in his mind.

"Notification: Nine-Tails Chakra Mode simulation unlocked. Current duration: three minutes. Can be used for intimidation, disguise, and short-term bursts of power. Note: Simulated energy does not possess the regenerative properties of a jinchūriki." The corner of Xuan's mouth curled almost imperceptibly.

Three minutes—enough to make anyone misjudge the situation at a critical moment.

This was the first smoke bomb he had cast onto the chessboard, and also the most crucial one.

Meanwhile, at a border post dozens of miles away, a silent drama was quietly unfolding in three separate guest rooms.

Under the dim light of an oil lamp, a "messenger" dressed in the standard uniform of the Hidden Mist Village tucked a secret letter into the gap beneath a bed. His movements were stiff yet precise. It was Puppet Number One, controlled by Saori.

Written on the letter in a special potion were the words: "The Hidden Sand Village harbors sinister intentions. It is suspected of secretly possessing a remnant soul of the Four-Tails and seeking to revive a jinchūriki weapon. This must be reported to the Mizukage immediately." A breeze drifted past, leaving a faint trace of tailed-beast chakra cleverly lingering on the paper.

In another room, Puppet Number Two, posing as a guard for a Hidden Stone Village merchant caravan, casually revealed another piece of "inside information" while chatting with his "companions." "Have you heard? Those hypocrites from the Hidden Leaf Village have recently reinforced their border troops. They say it's to guard against Akatsuki, but I think they want to swallow the Land of Wind whole while the Hidden Sand Village is at its weakest!" Several genuine traveling merchants in the adjacent room heard every word clearly. They exchanged terrified looks and silently committed this intelligence—enough to alter trade routes and destinies—to memory.

The most eye-catching was Puppet Number Three—a Hidden Leaf Village genin wrapped head to toe in bandages, disguised as someone gravely wounded during a mission.

While receiving treatment at the post's clinic, he "accidentally" dropped a letter.

The paper and ink were unmistakably in the style of the Hidden Cloud Village, while the handwriting imitated the wild strokes of A, the Fourth Raikage: "Final ultimatum! If the Hidden Sand Village does not hand over the culprit who abducted our Hidden Cloud Village jinchūriki within one month, the Hidden Cloud Village will regard it as a provocation of war. The flames of the Fourth Shinobi World War will first burn across the Land of Wind!" The post's supervisor, a retired ninja from the Hidden Sand Village, discovered the letter. When he sensed the familiar oppressive presence of tailed-beast chakra upon it, his face instantly turned pale as paper.

Three utterly different pieces of intelligence, all tainted with the aura of tailed beasts, were like three stones thrown into muddy waters, silently stirring layer upon layer of ripples.

At a checkpoint farther away, Baba Tesshin was leading a group of Hidden Sand Village elites disguised as refugees through an arduous inspection.

His clothes were ragged and his face sallow, allowing him to blend perfectly into the fleeing crowd.

At the rear of the group, he brushed past a wandering ninja with gloomy eyes.

In that instant, an unremarkable capsule was slipped into the man's hand.

"This contains what you wanted—a drop of the old ape's blood," Baba Tesshin said in a voice only the two of them could hear.

The wandering ninja—an outer-circle intelligence broker for Akatsuki—was about to leave when Baba Tesshin added, "Tell your master when you return: 'Beneath the red sands, a new god has awakened.'" The broker's body stiffened abruptly. He cast Baba Tesshin a startled, uncertain glance, then swiftly vanished into the night.

Watching him leave, Baba Tesshin silently thought, Let the world descend into chaos. The more chaotic it becomes, the better chance the Hidden Sand Village has of truly rising from the cracks between the great nations.

As the night deepened, Xuan stood alone atop the tallest dune. The Mangekyō Sharingan in his right eye slowly turned as he activated [Myriad Phenomena Return to the Eye] at maximum output.

In an instant, the flow of chakra within a hundred miles appeared in his vision as clearly as lines on his palm.

He saw that along the Hidden Leaf Village's eastern border, the number of patrols had doubled, while several Anbu squads were setting up tightly sealed sensory barriers along the national frontier.

At the Hidden Cloud Village camp to the north, hundreds of reconnaissance hawks rose like dark clouds and scattered toward the heartland of the Land of Wind.

To the northwest, the Hidden Rock Village had directly shut down three trade routes bordering the Land of Wind, assuming a posture of strict defense.

Because of these rumors, impossible to distinguish as true or false, the entire shinobi world had instantly become jumpy at every shadow.

"Fear always spreads faster than truth." Xuan's voice was especially cold in the night wind as he spoke to Saori behind him. "As long as they continue to suspect and guard against one another, none of them will have the leisure to look up and see that the true eye of the storm is actually in the sky."

However, he did not know that not everyone had been deceived on the ground.

Deep within a distant Hidden Leaf Village camp, Hinata Hyūga, who was undergoing nighttime training, suddenly shuddered without warning and snapped open her pure Byakugan.

An extremely faint yet incomparably domineering and ancient chakra fluctuation crossed thousands of miles and forcefully intruded into the range of her senses.

"This chakra... it's very similar to the Nine-Tails inside Naruto, but... why does it feel even more ancient than the Nine-Tails?" Her heart trembled. She immediately formed hand seals, trying to focus all her attention on tracing the source of that fluctuation.

Just as her vision was about to pierce through layer upon layer of obstructions and reach that desert, an invisible spiritual pressure, vast and heavy as a mountain, exploded back against her!

Hinata let out a muffled groan. A thread of blood spilled from the corner of her lips, and her Byakugan shut off at once. Only a fleeting image remained in her mind—a cold, merciless crimson vertical eye overlooking the entire earth.

That image planted a seed of unease in her heart: perhaps there existed in this world some kind of "eye" that had been born even before the tailed beasts.

On the sand dune, Xuan put away the detection crystal used to amplify his senses, unaware that he had just been watched.

His gaze crossed countless mountain ranges and settled in the direction of the Land of Lightning.

There, deep within an unbroken volcanic range, lay the second sealed object of "Xuan," as well as the ultimate goal of his journey.

"Prepare to head south." Without turning his head, he gave Saori the order. "Bring the old ape's 'heart.' It will be our first mobile arsenal." Saori nodded respectfully, her slender fingers lightly brushing over the freshly carved inscription on a puppet's shoulder armor: a tightly shut vertical eye, with four small words beneath it—Xuan's command is destiny.

A gale howled to life, sweeping up sand that filled the sky and burying every trace they had left upon the dunes.

In the darkness, only a solitary, steadfast line of footprints stretched straight toward the distant, legendary Earthfire Abyss.

Yet neither Xuan, who had laid out the chessboard, nor Hinata, watching from afar, noticed.

At the other end, beyond the reach of their gazes, a long-planned killing trap along the border of the Fire Country was also slowly drawing open with the fall of night.