It was late at night, and the lights of Leaf Village were gradually going out.
The bamboo grove of the Hyuga Ancestral Shrine cast mottled shadows beneath the moonlight. The bamboo leaves rustled like countless faint whispers. Xiao stood in the shadows at the edge of the grove, his Byakugan silently activated, veins bulging faintly around his temples.
His vision pierced through the ground.
Three meters underground, dense chakra conduits crisscrossed like blood vessels, all converging toward the depths beneath the center of the bamboo grove. The chakra flowing through those conduits carried a familiar presence—the unique chakra fluctuations of the Branch House Byakugan, tainted by the Curse Mark.
Xiao breathed quietly.
Following the map of barrier flaws he had drawn, he slowly moved along the edge of the bamboo grove. He stopped every seven steps, his Byakugan continuously scanning the energy flow through the barrier nodes. The barrier laid by the Main House was ancient, at least two hundred years old, but even the most perfect barrier would develop brief gaps through the erosion of time.
He found it.
At 1:43 in the morning, three nodes at the barrier's northwestern corner would create a 0.7-second resonance gap due to an energy cycle. The window was so brief that even an Elite Ninja would struggle to notice it, but for Xiao, who possessed the Byakugan, it was enough.
He crouched and pressed both hands against the ground.
Chakra seeped from his palms, silently permeating the soil and flowing in reverse along the barrier's energy veins. This was not destruction, but guidance—like lightly nudging the gears of a clock with a fine needle, making that 0.7-second gap arrive 0.3 seconds earlier.
The time had come.
Xiao's figure became a blurred afterimage as he passed through the bamboo grove at the instant