The smell of blood had yet to dissipate from the mine tunnel.
When Hyuga Xiao opened his eyes, Kurenai Yuhi was crouching in front of him, her fingers still held in a hand seal. She had roughly stopped the bleeding from her shoulder with chakra, but the dark red seeping through the edge of the bandage was still glaring.
"You're awake." Hong's voice was cold, like a frozen stream.
Xiao sat up from the ground, a dull ache throbbing in the back of his head. The moment Hong's seal had pressed against his forehead, fragments of memories that were not his had flooded in. Not images, but sensations. In the alley where he and Hong had first met on that rainy night five years ago, there had been a third pair of eyes besides theirs.
"What did you do to me?" Xiao asked, his voice devoid of emotion.
"Genjutsu: Memory Resonance." Hong released her hands, and the seal faded. "It's one of the forbidden techniques my father left behind. The caster and target share their memory perceptions of a specific moment—as long as both of them were present at the time."
She rose to her feet and looked down at Xiao. "I wanted to confirm something. When you saved me back then, did you feel like... someone was watching us?"
Xiao fell silent for three seconds.
He remembered that rainy night. Twelve-year-old Hong had been cornered in an alley by three rogue shinobi. She had just completed her first C-rank mission and had exhausted her chakra. Xiao had merely been passing through and should not have meddled—the Branch House would only incur the Main House's punishment for sticking its nose into things.
But he had intervened.
He used the Gentle Fist: Acupoint Strike he had just learned to take down