The Hyūga kept their records in a windowless room beneath the eastern wing of the compound.
The room had no ceremonial name. It was simply referred to as archives, which was fitting. The place existed to remember things long after people had stopped caring about them. Paper stacked to the ceiling. Shelves reinforced twice over the years as the weight of history proved heavier than expected.
It smelled of old ink, dried incense, and stone that had never known sunlight.
A single oil lamp burned in the corner, its flame low and obedient.
An elder turned a page.
The sound was soft, but final.
Hyūga Sōma appeared halfway down the sheet, written in precise, economical strokes.
Male.
Branch family.
Mother: deceased (postpartum complications).
Father: unrecorded.
The brush paused.
Another elder leaned closer, peering over the shoulder of the one writing. His eyes were pale, unblinking.
"Any manifestation?"
The brush resumed.
Byakugan: none observed.
A third man exhaled through his nose. Not disappointment. Calculation.
"At what age did Neji awaken?"
"Four."
The brush hovered again.
"Then this one is late."
"Or empty."
No one corrected him.
The elder closed the ledger and slid it back into its place. The shelf swallowed the record without comment.
No seal was prepared. No ritual scheduled. There was nothing to correct yet.
Some failures took time.
Sōma learned how to be quiet before he learned how to read.
It wasn't taught. It was absorbed, the way damp seeps into walls when no one bothers to fix a leak. Raised voices carried through the compound easily. Silence carried further.
He lived near the servants' corridor, where rooms were small and the walls thin enough to learn from. At night, he lay awake on his futon and listened to footsteps pass, sometimes stopping outside his door.
The stopping was the worst part.
Adults rarely spoke directly about children when children could hear. They spoke around them, in tones carefully neutral, as if discussing tools that might still be useful.
"He eats well."
"He's obedient."
"He doesn't cause trouble."
None of it sounded like praise.
Once, a woman paused outside his door longer than usual.
"He looks normal," she said quietly.
"That's the problem," a man replied.
They moved on.
Sōma stared at the ceiling, tracing the cracks with his eyes. He had counted them all already. Thirty-two large fractures. One that branched like a tree.
Normal was a verdict, not a description.
The Hyūga compound was designed for observation.
Open courtyards. Wide training grounds. Walkways positioned so that no one ever truly walked alone. Even the shadows felt supervised.
Sōma moved through it like someone passing through a place that had already decided what he was allowed to be.
He trained when told. He bowed when expected. He did not ask questions. Questions drew attention, and attention required answers.
When the children played, he played. When they fought, he endured.
It was during one of those games that the space between things began misbehaving.
They were throwing a ball—an old, leather-wrapped thing with cracked stitching. It bounced badly, which made it more interesting than it deserved to be. One of the older boys threw it too hard.
The ball flew wrong.
It arced toward the inner steps.
Someone shouted. Someone laughed. Someone froze.
Sōma ran.
He did not think about running. His body moved before permission was required. He reached out, fingers stretching—
—and the ball stopped.
Not caught. Not blocked.
Stopped.
It hovered a finger's width from his hand, trembling slightly, as though uncertain how to continue existing in that direction.
The world went quiet.
Sōma's heartbeat did not change. He noticed that first. The absence of fear felt important.
The ball dropped.
Someone clapped. Laughter resumed, louder now, relief disguised as humor. A child grabbed the ball and ran off.
No one said anything.
Sōma stood very still.
Something in him recognized the moment the way one recognized a familiar sound without knowing where they had heard it before.
After that, the compound felt… larger.
Distances stretched when he wasn't paying attention. Compressed when he was. He did not bump into people anymore. Doorways always seemed to be exactly where he expected them.
Once, an older child shoved him in irritation.
The hand slid away.
The boy blinked, tried again, harder. His fingers met resistance, invisible and firm. He recoiled as if burned.
"What did you do?" the boy demanded.
"Nothing," Sōma said.
It was true.
That night, lying awake, images surfaced uninvited.
Lights. Moving pictures. People explaining the impossible as if repetition could make it reasonable. Words without context. Names without faces.
The impressions faded as quickly as they came.
Sōma stared into the darkness and decided, with the seriousness of a child who did not yet know how many mistakes he would make, that he would tell no one.
The Hyūga noticed useful things.
They punished inconvenient ones.
Morning came.
The compound resumed its careful choreography. Elders walked. Servants bowed. Children trained.
In the central courtyard, Neji Hyūga awakened his Byakugan.
The reaction was immediate. Controlled. Proud in the way pride was permitted here. Pale veins flared at Neji's temples, elegant and unmistakable.
Sōma watched from behind a pillar.
No one noticed him watching.
A future unfolded around Neji without asking his opinion.
Someone glanced toward Sōma.
Then away.
The comparison required no ceremony.
That night, sitting alone beneath a sky the compound could not fully cage, Sōma focused idly on a leaf drifting across the stone.
It slowed.
Stopped.
Hovered.
Sōma frowned and released whatever invisible pressure he had applied without understanding how he had done it.
The leaf fell and skittered away.
He felt no triumph. Only a faint, persistent irritation.
Power, he would learn much later, did not feel like strength.
It felt like something that complicated quiet.