While Xue Ge silently grilled his fish, all hell was breaking loose in the Naruto Building.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Danzo slammed the desk. "Three days! It's been three days, Hiruzen! Still no news at all?!"
"Calm down, Danzo. I've already sent missions to all our shinobi out in the field... calm down." Hiruzen didn't dare provoke Danzo in his fury and could only try to soothe him.
"If your own student went missing for three days without a word, I'd like to see how calm you'd be."
Danzo took a deep breath and hammered the desk with his fist again. Hiruzen's heart jumped at the sight. This desk is an old companion. Don't smash it to pieces...
A fire smoldered inside Danzo. He had begun taking over Root, toning down the training methods he had used on Xue Ge and using them to train those children in batches. Yet the "Prototype" he had poured so much effort into raising had actually disappeared. A test subject he could have used to experiment with countless training methods in the future had vanished! What the hell was this?
And he had disappeared through a contractless Summoning Technique, something Danzo had only seen happen once in his entire life. Fucking Orochimaru!
Without Xue Ge, where am I supposed to find such a durable test subject?! Damn it!
"Orochimaru! What about your end?!" Danzo roared at Orochimaru, who stood in a corner with a dark expression. "If you don't bring him back, you'll answer to me!"
"...Tch!" Orochimaru's face twitched, but he didn't dare argue with Danzo.
This really was his fault... What the hell? That brat actually didn't know the taboo surrounding the Summoning Technique... and he succeeded on his very first try?! A ninjutsu prodigy?
"I've already contacted Ryūchi Cave. Xue Ge isn't there... don't worry, I'm helping with the search too."
Orochimaru rolled his eyes. "The Black Market. I've already posted a bounty there... plenty of people should be keeping an eye out. I'll pay the bounty."
"Whew..." Danzo let out a long breath, letting Orochimaru off the hook for the moment.
Seeing this, Hiruzen hurried over and patted Danzo's back. "Don't worry, don't worry. I've sent letters to Tsunade and Jiraiya too. They'll help search. As for the other villages..."
"Don't send any special notice to the other villages!" Danzo said at once.
What a joke. Even if Xue Ge died out there, that would be better than letting another village snatch him away. Posting missions and missing-person notices was one thing. Probably no one would think of such a young child as a shinobi anyway. But if an official notice let people know that the child stranded out there was Danzo's student, who knew how many would set their sights on him?
"All right, all right. We'll do it your way." At this point, Hiruzen went along with Danzo whenever he could.
The office fell silent for a long while, and the atmosphere gradually grew suffocating.
"Hiruzen, give me a written order. Hmph. I'll take some men out and search myself." Danzo held out his hand to Hiruzen.
Hiruzen wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and nodded. "Fine, fine. You've led teams on your own plenty of times anyway... how about this? I'll establish a leadership post in Root for you. From now on, you can deploy Root personnel directly. That should make things easier."
"Good." Danzo agreed without the slightest change in his expression.
Excellent. Actual control of Root... finally in my hands.
Xue Ge, oh, Xue Ge. You really are a fine card to have up my sleeve.
"Then I'll leave the village to search too. Old man, remember to post a mission to find him." Orochimaru shook his head and vanished from the Naruto Building in a flash. Once Hiruzen finished writing the order, Danzo took it and left without looking back.
Hiruzen sat at his desk, smoking nonstop. Thinking of that seemingly withdrawn child, he couldn't help feeling worried too.
Jiraiya had been transported to Mount Myōboku in much the same way back then. But this time, none of the Three Great Sage Lands had seen the boy. Three days had passed without any news, and there was no telling how he was doing now.
Hiruzen cared a great deal about his old classmate having someone to carry on his legacy. Danzo had finally found a student he liked. The boy had better not die.
"A missing-person notice with a twenty-million bounty?? And an A-Rank Ninjutsu too??"
Inside the Black Market Bounty Station, a group of wandering shinobi crowded around a mission sheet, chattering among themselves.
"Whose rich young master went missing? Tsk, tsk. Alive only..."
"Oh, he's a pretty little thing. Could it be a girl dressed as a boy?" "Are you blind? It clearly says boy right here."
"Why isn't there even an approximate location where he disappeared? How are we supposed to find him?" "Just keep an eye out while you're at it. If you run into him on the road, you'll make a fortune! That's twenty million and an A-Rank Ninjutsu!"
"A six-year-old kid, huh? Probably some merchant caravan's young master who wandered off and got lost, and now they don't even know where they lost him. Tsk, tsk. Let's hope he hasn't fed the bears out in the wilderness."
"Wouldn't that be a good thing? Haha! One less menace!"
The wandering shinobi were both interested and uninterested in this bizarre mission. They were interested because the reward was outrageously high, and uninterested because there wasn't a single lead to guide the search. All they could do was keep an eye out in passing.
Away from the noisy crowd, a few people sat scattered around the corners of the bounty station. They were all prominent figures among the wandering shinobi. Having seen plenty of bigger things, they naturally weren't as excited as the ordinary wanderers.
One of them, a masked shinobi with green eyes, heard the crowd's shouts from a distance. He stood and walked over behind them. Thanks to his height, he could read the missing-person notice from outside the crowd.
"A twenty-million bounty..." the masked shinobi murmured.
He turned, tore down a mission sheet offering a ten-million bounty, and promptly left the bounty station.
He had work to do. On this trip, he had one person to kill and another to find.
"Konoha is posting missions everywhere to find a child, and there are this many notices in the Black Market too?"
Ōnoki was a little baffled by the intelligence before him. Had some fabulously wealthy man in the Land of Fire lost his child and gone to Konoha for help?
But if they had already turned to the Black Market, why hadn't they approached shinobi villages like his? Could they be certain the child had disappeared within the Land of Fire?
After carefully examining the missing-person notice brought back from the Black Market and pondering for a moment, Ōnoki addressed the shinobi awaiting his orders. "Post an A-Rank Mission in the village. Find this child and bring him back. Twenty million and an A-Rank Ninjutsu... I wonder who's being so generous."
"Yes, sir!" The shinobi accepted the order, took the missing-person notice Ōnoki handed back, and swiftly disappeared.
Similar scenes played out in the other three shinobi villages at the same time. For a while, the entire shinobi world stirred. The sudden disappearance of a black-haired boy had shifted currents throughout the shinobi world.
The shinobi of the Five Great Shinobi Villages, the wandering shinobi in the Black Market, and countless shinobi from small shinobi villages coveting the A-Rank Ninjutsu all began, deliberately or
otherwise, to search for that black-haired boy. An all-encompassing search net spread across the shinobi world.
Meanwhile, Xue Ge knew nothing about any of this. All he could think about was how long he needed to grill the fish in his hands to get it just right, and what he had on hand to remove its fishy smell so it wouldn't taste unpleasant.