At the gates of Kirigakure.
Horses strained at their traces, wagons creaked, and a press of bodies boiled at the threshold.
A silk-robed merchant at the front argued with the ANBU blocking the way.
"Why won't you let us leave the village. We are only here to trade. We are not citizens of the Mist."
"Exactly."
"You cannot just announce a lockdown."
Voices piled over one another, accents from everywhere.
Most were traders from the Land of Lightning and the Land of Fire.
Kirigakure sat in the Land of Water, an island nation.
Besides fish, most goods had to come in from abroad.
The Land of Water neighbored the Land of Fire and the Land of Lightning, so most merchants moving through the Mist came from those two.
"Everyone, calm down…"
The ANBU in the crow mask raised a hand, trying to soothe the crowd.
"You owe us an explanation."
Sensing the ANBU step back a half pace, the lead merchant only grew louder.
People in line took two steps forward in support. The pulse of the crowd quickened. A few angry souls even lifted hands to shove the shinobi aside.
The tall ANBU in a hound mask stepped forward. His broad frame shouldered the surge apart. He caught the ringleader by the throat in one hand and lifted him off the ground.
Killing intent bled out.
A red mist unfurled. It had no body, yet around the ANBU it reeked of copper and clung like slime. It felt ready to drip out of the air. The sky went veined with blood and the sunlight, weak to begin with, dimmed another shade.
People froze at the sight.
The heat went out of the crowd. Several timid ones wet themselves and the sour stink made the rest edge away.
Thud.
The ringleader hit the dirt and bounced, howling.
Blood Hound took another step and looked down over the throng that now crouched like quail. "Kirigakure is under martial law. You may enter. You may not leave. Break this order and you die here."
His voice was a ship's engine, a bass that pulsed in the bones.
Staring at the ANBU slick with malice, the once boiling crowd fell dead silent.
"Easy, easy. Use your words. No need to get excited…"
Mist Crow let his hidden hand seal loosen and smiled as he smoothed the air. Blood Hound eased back in step, and the taut wire along the gate relaxed. No one dared say the word leave again.
At the back of the crowd,
a silver-haired blind girl in a white cloak and hood touched her staff to the ground and turned away.
Under the broad blindfold, the Byakugan's pale ring glinted with a dead-ash pupil that scrubbed the blood-red haze out of the air.
Genjutsu immunity.
One of the Byakugan's gifts.
All ninjutsu are chakra at heart. The Byakugan can see chakra with the naked eye, which makes most illusions little more than smoke on glass to a user.
There are limits.
Kotoamatsukami and Tsukuyomi are cheats of a different order. Even a Byakugan will not shrug those off.
Moving against the flow,
the blind girl's staff tapped the stone. When people heard the sound they stepped aside to give her room.
This was Konome Taketori's second day playing the blind, and her third since crossing into the Mist.
All yesterday she had waited at the inn for a summons from Kirigakure and tested the new faculty she had awakened.
It was as she had guessed. Shikotsumyaku and the Byakugan belonged to one system.
Shikotsumyaku split into two functions, corpse and bone.
The bone side everyone knew.
The corpse side gave living flesh a kind of dead man's quality so that it could bear the bone's workings.
The point remained the same.
Flesh, bone, and skin in a living human are not islands. Any mutation in one pulls the rest out of true and the system collapses.
Under Shikotsumyaku, Konome's single body-system seemed to split into several sub-systems.
Skin, muscle, bone, blood, and organs could be taken apart at will.
Each system ran on its own and did its job, then joined and separated again as needed. A fault in one did not cripple the others.
That was why she could route muscle, pull bone, and not care about the ripples.
The eyes were part of the body too, so the corpse state touched the Byakugan as well.
Once she had needed a seal to switch the Byakugan on. Now a thought was enough.
Her sight was freer too. She could let the Byakugan see through her blindfold and stop at wood and stone.
With that constraint, the chakra to maintain the eye was laughably small. She could hold it all day.
The Byakugan had sharpened chakra control before. Now it could also micromanage flesh, bone, and even hair.
She could gather the strength of her whole body's muscles into a point on a whim. A light flick could land with the force of a full-power punch.
There were drawbacks.
You could not draw the whole body's strength again and again in a short span. It cost stamina. Each time you gathered it, bone and blood vessels took strain.
After every peak burst, you needed three to six seconds of cooldown.
Even so, the branches of this gift were many.
Muscle was only one.
Hair, body hair, skin, hormones, nerve signals, heartbeat and pulse, even chakra synthesis responded with ease.
The truth was
her body had become like clay in the hand.
She even suspected the Byakugan had always had the capacity to rule flesh. The paired Shikotsumyaku had been taken by the Taketori, and ordinary bodies were too fragile to be steered at will, so the Hyuga had walked the path of pure chakra control.
She named the Byakugan's new faculty Flesh Command.
Its ceiling was high and the applications many.
It took her a whole day just to learn the feel of it. No message came from the Mist about her posted mission.
This morning she visited the Mizukage Tower and learned why.
The village had imposed a ban yesterday. No one in or out. Her mission was on ice until it lifted.
They would not lock a great village over a few dead ANBU.
Konome frowned.
Kirigakure was one of the Five Great Villages.
People flowed in and out by the hundreds. A lockdown meant merchants shut out and shinobi stuck inside, money cut off at the root.
Under that kind of pressure, this could not be about a handful of corpses.
Was it the Byakugan.
No.
She shook her head.
Everyone knew the eye's value. Other than her parents this life, only the Taketori clan head and a few elders had known she bore it. They had all died last night.
There was no way the Mist had learned her secret.
There had to be a deeper reason.
A hard sense of danger climbed her spine.
She could not say why, but the village's strange turn set every bell in her head ringing. The joy at a deeper awakening drained away. Fear and tension flowed in where it had been, the cold certainty that life could be stripped away without a word.
She had to get out.
Fast.
As fast as she could.