The crystals on the altar trembled faintly in the ghostly blue light.
Hyuga Xiao stood before the thousand-year-old mummy, the icy sensation from touching its eye sockets still lingering on his fingertips. The faint fluctuations of the Tenseigan rippled through the air like water, each rise and fall drawing a resonance from the thousand-plus Branch House Byakugan on the altar.
Then, he heard voices.
They did not enter through his ears, but whispered directly within his mind—countless fragmented thoughts filled with grief and resentment surged from the crystals containing the Byakugan, converging into a silent torrent.
"Main House... plunder..."
"My eyes... they took my eyes..."
"My child... my child was branded with the Curse Mark too..."
"Why... we are Hyuga Clan too..."
"Hatred... such hatred..."
The voices overlapped, male and female, old and young. Some sounded ancient, as if they had traveled from a thousand years ago, while others were heartbreakingly young. Hyuga Xiao's temples throbbed as the immense flood of information nearly split his skull apart.
He gritted his teeth. The Caged Bird Seal on his forehead flared with burning pain—that was the Main House bloodline's instinctive rejection of the Branch House dead.
"Quiet."
Hyuga Xiao shouted low, not with his mouth, but with his will.
He forcibly steadied his mind and slowly sorted through and organized those fragmented thoughts. These were not simple fragments of memory, but the final obsessions that generations of Branch House members had branded into their bloodlines through Byakugan power before death. They had been sealed here as the "fuel" sustaining the altar, yet they retained the most primal information.
Images began to emerge in his mind.
One day, a thousand years ago.
The moon was larger than it was now, occupying nearly a quarter of the night sky.
Six Ōtsutsuki Clan members in