The sealed burial chamber suddenly fell silent. No one would say a word.
The adults stood quietly where they were, none of them speaking. Their faces were drawn tight as drumskins, utterly expressionless.
Once Madara mentioned it, they all remembered. Shingetsu did seem to have said something like that before, but none of them had taken it seriously. They had dismissed it as a child's passing nonsense.
"Shingetsu really did say she kept seeing a tree when she was little..."
Tōka gave a wry laugh and exchanged a glance with Hōkaku beside her. The two clueless parents scratched their heads, looking thoroughly unreliable and vacant.
Hōkaku's expression went blank. His empty head looked spacious enough to house a whole tank of fish. He looked at Tōka, then Shingetsu, then himself, before murmuring:
"I thought she was just dreaming..."
Even Hashirama chimed in:
"Shingetsu asked me about it too. I didn't think much of it, hahaha..."
He broke into a childish, foolish grin and immediately received a barrage of murderous looks from Tobirama.
Tobirama sighed. No matter how one heard it, it sounded like childish nonsense. Telling this bunch of empty-headed idiots would only mean it went in one ear and out the other. They would never take it seriously.
But thinking about it now, an ordinary child might have talked nonsense, but the one saying it had been Shingetsu-their god!
Yet Tobirama, the only one who would not have dismissed it as nonsense, had never been told.
At that thought, Tobirama knitted his brows and fixed his gaze on Shingetsu, his voice carrying a trace of displeasure, resentment, and anger.
Simply put, he was furious that Shingetsu had guarded against him like this:
"Why didn't you tell me?"
Under Tobirama's aggressive stare, Shingetsu quietly turned her head away and muttered: