The campfire in the abandoned wooden cabin crackled, casting shifting shadows across Hyuga Xiao's face.
He sat cross-legged on a straw mat. The wound on his left shoulder had stopped bleeding, but the patterns emerging across his skin had grown ever clearer—the black script of the Caged Bird Seal intertwined with the deep-blue glow of the Covenant Stone Fragments, like some living totem slowly consuming the flesh around it.
Kurenai Yuhi handed him warmed dry rations. When her gaze fell on his shoulder, her brows unconsciously drew together. "Your body..."
"I won't die for now." Xiao accepted the rations, his voice so calm that no emotion could be heard in it. "The fragment and the Curse Mark have reached some kind of balance. They're devouring each other, but they're also nourishing each other."
He took a bite of the rations and chewed slowly, as though savoring a bitter aftertaste.
The truth he had glimpsed in the illusion was far too heavy—the descendants of the Ōtsutsuki Clan on the moon, the Main House's plundering of the Branch House, the Tenseigan obtained at the cost of madness... This information was like a set of heavy chains, wrapping layer upon layer around the history of the Shinobi World.
And the Hyuga Clan on the ground was merely a crude imitation.
"The Land of Iron." Xiao swallowed his food and looked up at Hong. "Glacier Shrine is on the northern border of the Land of Iron, near the permanently frozen snowline. To get there from the Land of Hot Water, we'll have to cross the Land of Rice Paddies, the Land of Waterfalls, then pass through the entire Land of Iron."
Hong immediately unfolded the simple map she carried with her, her slender finger moving across it. "Three routes. The first is overland: cross