bookbashuk Chapter 378 I'm Not Enough Alone
Chapter 378 I'm Not Enough Alone
Chapter 378 I'm Not Enough Alone
"Lord Chiquan, sir Hokage, please report urgently."
Chi Quan took the letter, pried open the sealing wax with his thumb, and pulled out the letter. The handwriting on the paper was Shikamaru's; it was very messy and written very quickly, but every word was legible—"Southeastern Territory, Pheasant Valley, patrol team witnessed a white humanoid figure with abnormal chakra reaction, suspected to be a White Zetsu. Return immediately."
After reading the letter, Chi Quan folded the paper twice and stuffed it into the inside pocket of his coat.
Ya carried the pot of porridge over and noticed that his expression was not right.
"What's wrong?"
"White Zetsu discovered in the southeastern region."
Ya's hand trembled slightly. The porridge pot tilted, and a few drops of hot porridge splashed out, burning his fingers, but he didn't feel any pain. Akamaru stood up from the fire, his tail held straight up, and made a low, warning growl in his throat.
"White Zetsu?" Kiba's voice was low. "Wasn't that thing there during the Fourth Shinobi World War?"
"That was then." Chi Quan stood up, buttoned up his coat collar, picked up his sword from the well platform and tucked it back into his waistband. "Back then, they said they were all wiped out. But White Zetsu is a product of the Divine Tree. As long as the roots of the Divine Tree are still in the soil, it can grow again."
Ya put the porridge pot on the ground, squatted down, and hugged Akamaru in his arms. Akamaru was still whimpering, not loudly, but persistently, like a taut string that never let go.
"Are you going back?" Ya asked.
"Go back," Ikezumi said. "Continue distributing the farm tools. After you finish distributing them in Iwami Village, head south to Tsuruta Village, Ashihara Village, and Mitani."
The map is in your bag.
"Aren't you taking me with you?"
"You take Akamaru with you. The western border cannot stop until all the farm tools are distributed."
Ya opened his mouth, as if to say something, but then swallowed it back. He watched as Chi Quan tucked the knife away, straightened his coat, rewrapped the bandage on his left hand, and stood up from the well.
"You're going to the southeastern border alone?"
"The Anbu are already over there. I'm going to meet them."
"Your Wound One"
"alright."
"Not done yet." Ya stood up, walked to Chi Quan, and poked his left shoulder. Chi Quan didn't dodge, but his left shoulder involuntarily shrank back half an inch—a protective muscle contraction that he couldn't control.
He withdrew his hand.
"Not done."
Chi Quan looked at him.
"Bai will never wait for me to recover."
The teeth didn't speak again.
Chi Quan walked past him, picked up a rice ball from the fire—the porridge wasn't even cooked yet, and the rice ball was leftover from yesterday, completely cold and as hard as a rock. He stuffed the rice ball into his pocket and walked eastward without looking back. Ya stood at the village entrance watching him walk away, watching him cross the field ridges, cross the frosty wasteland, and cross the bushes at the edge of the forest. His dark gray coat grew smaller and smaller in the gray winter, finally swallowed up by the trees.
Akamaru cried out. The sound wasn't loud, but it was shrill, like a needle pricking Ya's ear.
Kiba squatted down and turned Akamaru's face towards him.
"He's fine," Ya said. "He's always fine."
Akamaru stared at him, his eyes bright and black, like two black stones soaking in water. Feeling guilty under his gaze, Ya turned his face away, looking at the porridge in the pot.
The porridge had cooled down. A thin film had formed on the surface, but when stirred with a spoon, the film broke and sank into the porridge.
In the southeastern border region, there is Pheasant Feather Valley.
It was already evening when we arrived at Chiquan.
Pheasant Valley is located southeast of Konoha, about a half-day's walk from the village. It's not far, but it's very remote. The valley is flanked by low hills covered with pine trees and shrubs, and a shallow stream runs through the bottom, almost drying up in winter. There are no villages or inhabitants here; even hunters rarely come because the forest is too dense and impassable.
The secret agents had already set up a makeshift camp at the valley entrance. There were three small tents and a small fire, the smoke of which was dispersed by the branches of the trees and was not visible from the outside. There were four people in the camp. The leader was a secret agent whom Chi Quan knew, codenamed "Owl." He was short and thin, and wore a secret agent mask with an owl pattern on his face.
When Xiao saw Chi Quan approaching, he stood up from the fire and nodded to him.
"Lord Chiquan."
"The situation." Chi Quan walked to the fire and squatted down, stretching out his right hand to warm it. The fire wasn't big, and the light wasn't bright, but several red marks had already appeared on the back of his hand from the cold.
Xiao pulled a hand-drawn map from his pocket and spread it on the ground. The map was drawn with charcoal and the lines were thick, but the terrain of Pheasant Feather Valley was clearly marked—the valley entrance, the stream, the three branching gullies, and the south and north slopes.
"The day before yesterday afternoon, when the western patrol passed over the valley, the Byakugan detected an abnormal chakra reaction 120 meters underground. It wasn't normal earth vein flow, nor was it residual chakra from ninjas. They said the texture of that chakra was like something dead, but not completely dead."
Chi Quan looked at the location marked on the map—the deepest part of Pheasant Feather Valley, at the end of the third fork in the ravine, near the bottom of the north slope.
"Have you dug it up yet?" he asked.
"No. We'll dig again when you come."
Chi Quan warmed his hands for a while longer before standing up.
"lead the way."
Xiao led the way, with Chi Quan following behind. Two of the other three members of the secret service scouted ahead, while one brought up the rear. The five of them walked upwards along the stream at the bottom of the valley. The water was covered with a thin layer of ice, which crunched underfoot. The pine trees on both sides grew denser, their branches intertwining overhead, blocking out even the last vestiges of evening light. The light in the forest changed from grayish-white to grayish-blue, and then from grayish-blue to an almost invisible deep gray.
The owl held a flashlight, its beam sweeping between tree trunks and bushes like a groping finger.
After walking for about twenty minutes, the table stopped.
"We're here. This is it."
Chi Quan looked around. This place was no different from the rest of the valley—pine trees, shrubs, pebbles, and a dried-up streambed. But the soil under his feet was different. It wasn't the hard kind of frozen soil; it was a soft, loose kind, like something had turned it over, with an indescribable smell.
He squatted down, grabbed a handful of soil, and brought it to his nose to smell it.
There was a musty smell in the soil. It wasn't the kind of mold that comes from rotting leaves; it was a deeper, more persistent mold, like something that had been rotting deep underground for a long time. Chi Quan put the soil down and dusted off his hands.
"dig."
Xiao gestured behind him. Two ANBU members took out folded shovels from their backpacks and began digging. The shovels were newly made by the forging team, using steel melted from the swords of Jonin from the Land of Lightning. The blades were very sharp, making a crisp sound when they cut into the frozen ground. Ikezumi watched the two shovels gleaming in the light, and thought of the young man carrying a hoe in Iwami Village, the man with the broken leg in Kamishira Village, and the old woman who gave him rice balls in Shimohira Village.
Those people are using these tools to farm.
He was using these tools to dig for white dolphins.
The same piece of steel, the same forging team, the same quenching process. Whether it becomes a farm tool or a weapon depends not on the steel itself, but on the person wielding it.
After digging for about ten minutes, the sound of the shovel changing changed. The crisp cracking sound turned into a muffled thud, like the shovel plunging into something very wet and dense.
The operative digging in the soil stopped and looked down at his feet.
The shovel blade was covered in a grayish-white, sticky substance, unlike soil, mud, or any natural material he had ever seen. It slid slowly, very slowly, down the blade, like half-melted wax or half-solidified glue. When the flashlight shone on it, it reflected an abnormal, oily sheen.
Chi Quan walked over, squatted down, took the shovel from the dark guard, scraped off some of the grayish-white stuff from the blade, and put it in his palm.
Cool. Not the cool of ice, but a coolness devoid of temperature. Like touching the shed skin of a snake, lifeless yet still carrying the coolness of the snake's body.
Chi Quan shook the object out of his hand and wiped his hands on his pants.
"continue."
They dug for another twenty minutes. The pit had increased in depth from half a meter to one and a half meters, and in width from one meter to two meters. More and more things were appearing at the bottom of the pit—not a single piece, but many pieces, large and small, resembling tree roots, yet not quite. They had no branches, no joints, and their surfaces were abnormally smooth, as if polished by something. Their color was grayish-white, with a faint, sickly greenish glow under the light.
Chi Quan jumped into the pit, squatted down, and touched one of the spots with his hand.
That's not wood.
That's meat.
It's not the flesh of a living creature, nor the flesh of a dead creature. It's something in between, something that's hard to describe.
The surface was covered by a thin, slippery membrane, beneath which lay very fine, dense fibers, like muscle fibers, but tougher and smoother. Chi Quan pinched a small piece with his fingers and pulled hard; it broke. A drop of clear, yellowish liquid seeped from the break, resembling lymph or resin.
The brand on the back of my neck suddenly felt cold.
Chi Quan's hand paused.
The brand won't react to White Zetsu. White Zetsu isn't Yan Shui, it's not from the Hamura family, and it has no connection to the Suigetsu family's bloodline limit. The brand cooling down means Yan Shui is present here. Not inside White Zetsu's body—it's below White Zetsu, deeper inside.
"Dig deeper," Chi Quan said to Xiao as he climbed out of the pit. "Two and a half meters."
Xiao didn't ask why. He led his men to continue digging.
The deeper he went, the more numerous and thicker the grayish-white root-like structures became. They intertwined and tangled in the soil, like a huge, dense net extending upwards from the depths of the earth. Some roots were already as thick as an adult's arm, and tiny, pore-like pits began to appear on their surfaces. Chi Quan squatted by the pit, looking at those pits, and suddenly remembered something.
The sacred tree.
He hadn't personally witnessed the Divine Tree; he was still in Konoha during the Fourth Shinobi World War and hadn't gone to the front lines. But he had seen the post-war archives, the photos brought back from the battlefield, and the tissue samples cut from the Ten-Tails' corpse and sealed in the archives. In those photos, the surface of the Divine Tree had these kinds of pits. Fine, even pits, as if something had pushed them out from the inside.
"Lord Chiquan," Xiao's voice was low, "this is... the root of the Divine Tree." Chiquan said.
The three members of the secret service in the pit simultaneously stopped what they were doing. They looked at the grayish-white substance sticking to their shovels, and at the increasingly thick root-like objects on the pit wall. Their expressions changed from focused to wary, and from wary to fear.
The Fourth Shinobi World War was only a little over a decade ago. For the older generation of shinobi, the memory of that war was a scar etched into their bones, while for the younger generation it was a legend they had heard since childhood, like a myth. But regardless of age, everyone knew what the words "Divine Tree" meant.
It means Infinite Tsukuyomi. It means White Zetsu. It means the Ten-Tails.
It means something that almost ended the entire world.
The owl's voice was strained.
"But—wasn't the Divine Tree already sealed? Class 7 back then—"
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"What's sealed is the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path," Chi Quan said. "The roots of the Divine Tree may still be spreading underground. As long as the roots are there, it will grow. White Zetsu is a product of the Divine Tree; as long as the Divine Tree lives, White Zetsu will also perish."
The hidden members climbed out of the pit, moving much faster than usual. Chi Quan didn't blame them. It's normal to be afraid when facing something like this. It would be abnormal not to be afraid.
Chi Quan handed the flashlight to Xiao, then picked up a shovel from the edge of the pit and jumped in. He crouched at the bottom and carefully used the tip of the shovel to pry away the soil around a grayish-white root-like object, pulling it out of the ground. The root was long, extending all the way down from the bottom of the pit. He pried down about half a meter along the root, but it kept going down, with no end in sight.
He planted the shovel in the ground, stood up, and looked up at the opening of the pit.
Above the pit, it was completely dark. The pine branches swayed gently in the night breeze. The beam of a flashlight shone down from the pit and fell on him, casting his shadow on the pit wall. It was large and dark, like a big insect clinging to the wall.
"Owl".
"exist."
"This isn't a single one. There are at least thirty or forty more below, going deeper into the valley. This isn't newly grown; it's been growing for at least five or six years."
"Five or six years?" Owl's voice changed. "Then why was it only discovered now?"
Chi Quan thought for a moment.
"Because it hadn't moved before. It was sleeping underground. It recently woke up."
"Why did you wake up?"
Chi Quan did not answer.
But then he considered a possibility. The Rain-Cracked Basin. Twenty-three thousand people. So much blood seeped into the ground, so many lives vanished in an instant. Something underground was awakened by that blood. Not science, not ninjutsu, but some more primal, more ancient instinctual life force that awakens in places where death accumulates in such large numbers.
He climbed out of the pit and returned the flashlight to Xiao.
"Fill it back in. Don't use chakra, use soil. Tamp it down layer by layer. After filling it, put a layer of lime on top, then a layer of clay, and then cover it with a sealing jutsu. Have you learned anything from Kagura-san?"
Xiao nodded.
"I've studied it. But I'm not enough on my own."
"I'll call Kagura-san over," Ikezumi said. "You seal it tonight. It's okay if you don't seal it well, just make sure it stops growing any further."
Xiao, along with two members of the secret service, began filling the pit. They threw shovelfuls of soil back in, each shovelful hitting the grayish-white root-like structure at the bottom with a muffled thud. Chi Quan stood at the edge of the pit, watching as the soil gradually buried the roots back in.