The night in the Forest of Death was deeper than anywhere else in Leaf Village.
Moonlight was sliced into shattered patches by layers upon layers of canopy, spilling across the ground covered in rotting leaves. The air was thick with the smell of soil, moss, and the rank stench left behind by some beast. In the distance came the cry of a night owl, short and sharp, like a blade cutting through the silence.
Hyuga Xiao braced himself against a tree trunk, staggering with every step.
The wound on his left shoulder was still bleeding, soaking through the makeshift bandage. Every breath pulled at the dull pain in his chest—that was the backlash from forcibly unleashing the Tenseigan Prototype. More fatal still was the Caged Bird Seal on his forehead, like a red-hot branding iron embedded deep in his skull, devouring what little life he had left with every passing second.
Two days.
No, perhaps only a day and a half remained now.
Xiao clenched his teeth as his Byakugan vision spread clearly through the darkness. Three hundred meters away, the marked giant tree appeared at the edge of his sight—its trunk was over three meters wide, with three inconspicuous scratches carved into its bark in the shape of an equilateral triangle.
A mark left by Tsunade.
He dragged himself closer, his fingers feeling along the scratches. They were cold to the touch. Beneath the rough texture of the bark, he could faintly sense a weak pulse of chakra. Xiao took a deep breath, pressed his palm against the center of the triangle, and injected chakra at a specific frequency according to the sequence Tsunade had quietly told him during their deal.
The bark silently split open.
It was not a physical crack, but a distortion of space—a soft white