The beams and pillars of the abandoned shrine creaked and groaned in the night wind.
Hyuga Xiao leaned against the rotting altar and drove the last shuriken into a crack in the floor as an alarm trap. Moonlight filtered through the ruined roof, cutting alternating bands of light and shadow across his pale face.
The burning pain of the Caged Bird Seal writhed deep within his brow bone like a living thing.
He took out the Curse Mark Fragment he had stripped from Kimimaro's spine—a piece no larger than a fingernail, its texture somewhere between crystal and flesh, its surface flowing with an eerie dark-purple sheen. It grew faintly warm in his palm, pulsing as if resonating with the seal on his forehead.
"Same origin..."
Xiao murmured as his Byakugan silently opened in the darkness.
Within his vision, the fragment's internal structure was revealed in perfect detail—countless fine chains of runes intertwined into a web, with a chakra vortex at the core that continuously contracted and expanded. Its structure was nearly a mirror image of the "ocular power lock" portion of the Caged Bird Seal, except for subtle differences in the arrangement of the runes.
He cautiously brought the fragment close to his forehead.
Buzz—
The agony instantly lessened by thirty percent.
The price was a violent contraction of his heart, as if an invisible hand had gripped one of its chambers. Xiao gave a muffled groan and looked down at his palm—his veins beneath the skin were visibly dulling at a rapid rate, a sign that his life force was being drained at an accelerated pace.
"Suppressing pain by burning lifespan." Xiao tugged at the corner of his mouth. "Orochimaru, you really did make a decent painkiller."
He kept the fragment against his forehead, enduring the weakness brought by