The night was ink-black, and the lights of the Leaf Village flickered in the distance.
Hyuga Xiao stood in the shadows at the edge of the training ground, a slip of paper as thin as a cicada's wing pinched between his fingers. Moonlight filtered through gaps in the leaves, casting mottled shadows across the page—this was the Ancestral Shrine guard rotation schedule he had spent three full days gathering bit by bit under the identity of a Branch House member.
"Shift change at the Hour of the Boar. Barrier nodes reset at a quarter past midnight. Patrol teams cross paths at half past the Hour of the Ox..."
He murmured the words, his voice nearly inaudible in the silence.
The paper was densely marked with times, names, routes, and even several "blind spots" denoted by special symbols—tiny flaws he had discovered while lurking outside the Ancestral Shrine for three consecutive nights and observing the barrier's chakra flow with his Byakugan.
Each flaw lasted no longer than ten seconds.
Ten seconds was no more than a breath to an ordinary person, but for a ninja, it was enough to infiltrate, assassinate, or steal intelligence.
"Not enough."
Xiao put away the slip of paper and took another scroll from his robes. Once unfurled, it revealed a three-dimensional structural map of the Ancestral Shrine complex—an old blueprint from thirty years ago that he had dug out of a pile of discarded materials in the Hyuga Clan archives.
The Main House had probably forgotten such a thing even existed.
But Xiao remembered.
He remembered the location of every scroll in the archives, which materials had gathered dust, and how the old Branch House member guarding the archives took a ten-minute nap at two every afternoon.
"Three layers of barriers at the front gate, two