The Cause

The night wind swept up half-burned paper flowers, sending them fluttering toward the ghostly ruins like a swarm of death-seeking butterflies. The shrill howling of the wind sounded like the unwilling wails of the dead, lingering around the group.

Shizune shuddered, hugged Tonton tighter, and edged closer to the bonfire.

Xiao Xi also curled up beside Neji without saying a word.

For once, everyone was strangely silent.

"Who's there? Come out!"

Neji had long noticed a figure leaving the ruins and heading this way, so he spoke up to warn the others.

The three, whose nerves had already been stretched taut, instantly looked up. Their figures flashed as they appeared beside Neji.

"It's... it's me, my lords. We met during the day!"

A girl stepped out from behind a boulder. Neji recognized her as the genin who had been following the Hot Water Shadow Village chunin earlier, the one who had tried to speak but had been interrupted.

"What do you want?" Neji asked expressionlessly.

"I... I know what happened here. I'll tell you everything. Please... please take me with you. I know you aren't ordinary ninja. The Great Elder took my little sister away. I have to find her and bring her home!"

Silence answered her. Information suddenly appearing at a moment like this—who knew whether it was a trap? Besides, this matter was certainly inseparable from the Hot Water Ninja Village.

"Please believe me, my lords. Everything I said is true. I need to save my sister. It was all the Great Elder's doing. Everything was done by the Great Elder. Sob...!"

Seeing Neji and the others remain silent, the girl became so anxious that she cried, wiping away her tears as she spoke.

"All right, stop crying. Tell us what you know. We'll make our own judgment."

Neji intended to hear her information first.

"It happened like this... A ninja blessed by the Evil God appeared in the village. He possessed an immortal, indestructible body, but then he suddenly abandoned the village. The Great Elder and the others wanted to obtain the Evil God's power too, so they began trying to please the Evil God. At first..."

As the girl named Misaki recounted the story through her sobs, a turbulent and sinister picture formed in the minds of the group.

Moonlight streamed through the broken lattice windows of the shrine, shattering into silver flecks over Misaki's trembling fingertips. She curled beneath the offering table, listening to the endless screams outside. Her five-year-old sister had already cried herself hoarse in her arms.

"Shh, Chizuru has to be a good girl." She bit through her lip and swallowed back her sobs. The taste of blood fermented between her teeth with the scent of burning incense. Thick liquid dripped from the mutilated Evil God statue atop the offering table. She could not tell whether it was melted wax or the blood of the old woman next door.

Misaki still remembered how, three mornings earlier, the Great Elder had stood beneath the cherry blossoms with a kindly expression, patiently instructing everyone. Yet by that very night, he had descended into madness.

"This is a divine miracle!" He waved a scroll made of some charred, greasy, unidentified material and sliced open his wrist upon the altar.

Misaki's hand shook violently as she held the wine cup, watching blood draw an inverted pentagram across the bluestone floor. What frightened her even more were the onlookers' eyes—those hot spring owners and dumpling-selling aunties who were usually so gentle now had scarlet light dancing in their pupils.

That night, while on watch, Misaki caught the apothecary owner mutilating himself in the storeroom. The man smashed his own kneecap with a pestle, yet let out a blissful groan. "It doesn't hurt enough... The Evil God must hear it!" As he smeared blood across the wall, the image of a vicious ghost seemed ready to leap out of it.

The first formal ritual took place on the night of a lunar eclipse. Misaki had been chosen to hold the sacrificial blade.

Because she stood so close, when the Great Elder plunged the dagger into the abdomen of the body at the center of the altar, she could hear the blood spraying out with a sizzling sound.

The instant the blood splashed over the sealing array, the night sky seemed to split open with a scarlet eye.

After that night, screams became the village's background noise. Misaki often heard whispers seeping from cracks in the walls late at night. "Those who are not devout enough shall be offered to the god as firewood..." By morning, some household's doors and windows would always be found wide open, with bloody human-shaped imprints left on the bedding.

At last, the clear-minded ninja smashed the altar, and the Hot Water Shadow Village split apart.

The riot reached its peak on the night of the full moon. When Misaki fled into the shrine with her sister, she saw moonlight wrap around the crazed villagers like spider silk. They hacked one another with kitchen knives while laughing wildly, their severed limbs writhing in pools of blood and forming new symbols.

Misaki stuffed her sister into a pickle jar in the shrine's cellar. "Chizuru must be as quiet as a little fish." She kissed her sister's forehead one last time. As she turned away, she crushed the shell wind chime she had loved most as a child beneath her foot.

She joined the resistance and followed the villagers in driving the Great Elder's group from the village. But when she returned for her sister, she found the jar completely empty. She searched everywhere like a madwoman until the leader told her that he seemed to have seen the expelled Great Elder leaving with many children in tow.

She wanted to leave and search for her sister, but she was not permitted to do so. Only after the village massacre occurred did the higher-ups finally take this hidden danger seriously and make an exception by allowing her to join the operation.

The oil lamp suddenly crackled and flared, jolting Misaki awake from her nightmare. She instinctively reached for the burn on her left cheek, only to discover that Shizune was changing her medicine. The medical ninja's hands were steady, but Misaki could see the hairs standing up on the back of her neck.

"Is pain really a staircase leading to eternal life?" Misaki murmured.

"Heh! I'd say it's a passage leading straight to hell!"

Tsunade snorted with her arms folded, speaking disdainfully.

After saying that, she gave Neji a look. Its meaning was obvious—what did he think?

Although Neji really wanted to answer, I'm looking at it while standing right here, he remained silent for a moment before nodding slightly to avoid getting beaten up.

Its meaning was equally obvious—they could take her along.

Their daytime investigation had already yielded ample clues. Even the direction in which the culprits had retreated had been laid bare beneath the Byakugan's perception. Now, Misaki's account filled in the doubts lingering in Neji's mind. Once the cause of the matter was clear, they could naturally act with purpose.

As for whether it might be a trap, Neji felt he could handle that. With a Byakugan superior to those of ordinary clan members, and a Shadow Rank powerhouse on their side, Neji was confident that the advantage was theirs this time.

As for the person in Misaki's account who had been blessed by the Evil God, a wild face surfaced in Neji's mind. Its owner was Hidan of the Akatsuki, one of the people Neji knew to possess the traits of immortality and indestructibility.

The greatest danger of this mission was the high possibility of encountering Akatsuki's immortal duo. However, after carefully analyzing the incident, Neji found it unlikely that Hidan had been involved. There was no other reason—given Hidan's intelligence, he was unlikely to be the mastermind.

As for whether the mastermind was the Akatsuki, Neji doubted that Nagato, who possessed the Rinnegan, would think highly of the Evil God behind Hidan.

Still, Neji was somewhat interested in this Evil God. Like the God of Death summoned by the Uzumaki Clan's Reaper Death Seal, it was another so-called god Neji knew of that had responded within the Ninja World.

Neji wanted to know whether these gods were manifestations of native spiritual wills or scattered fragments of Kaguya Otsutsuki's spirit.

Could the existence of gods with such unique spiritual characteristics help him make a breakthrough in his Visualization Method? Neji subconsciously pressed his lips together.