The notebook was completely yellowed and discolored, but still in surprisingly good condition, considering how many years it had weathered. Proof that it had been kept cherished and safe in Hinata’s treasure box.
“Maybe Neji’d be mad at me,” Hinata said. “For showing it to you.”
“Yeah, but you read it, right?” Naruto replied.
She nodded awkwardly and lowered her voice. “Just a little when I was sad. In secret.”
Her saying that so quietly means he’s definitely listening. He’s such a fussy guy.
The next morning, Naruto got up early and stopped by the training ground before heading to the Hokage’s office. He wanted to learn how to use the goggles as soon as possible to compensate for not using chakra.
The dewy grass reflected the pale morning sun, making the whole area glitter.
He closed his eyes and pulled the lever on the goggles.
Don’t try to grasp all the chakra flowing through the keirakukei network. Gaze at the whole and predict the next chakra movement …
Reflecting on Neji’s words, he slowly opened his eyes.
All the visual information in the area flooded into his retinas.
“Gaaaah!”
With a fierce cry, he tightened his grip on his fraying mind and braced himself. He could see all the things. He could feel a vein in his forehead throbbing. His optic nerves were at full throttle, on the edge of exploding.
Calm down. Choose what to see. You don’t have to look at everything. First … a bird. I’ll find a bird.
Naruto looked around. Dirt, stone, grass, dirt.
There.
There was a small bluish bird in the leaves of a tree. And not just one. Two, three … Five in total. He’d gotten that far when he reached his limit.
“Ngah! I can’t!”
His eyes threatened to roll into the back of his head permanently, and Naruto ripped the goggles off. Surprised by his shout, the blue birds flew up into the air. One, two, three, four, five …
“There were eight of ’em!”
Naruto dropped to the ground. He had missed three whole birds. He still had a long, long way to go.
He looked up at the clouds slowly rolling through the sky and sighed. The vein in his forehead was still throbbing. He had no idea it would be this hard. Neji had never once let on that it was a struggle.
“That guy really was a genius …”
Narrow down the target, focus on that.
Close off sound and smell, concentrate on seeing only with the eyes.
The day before, Naruto had stayed up late reading the notes in the familiar hand that Neji had left behind. The thought that Neji could have taught him himself if he were alive made Naruto’s eyes suddenly grow hot, and the tearstain he’d made on the cherished keepsake was a secret from Hinata.
The advice Neji had jotted down was a tremendous source of strength for Naruto. The efficiency of his training would improve from learning how to implement a deceptively simple mechanism of the tool.
“Woooohaky!” He leaped to his feet and slapped his cheeks. “Let’s do this!”
After that, Naruto threw himself into his Byakugan training. He’d always had better-than-average reflexes and senses. As he drilled away day after day, he was able to endure the Byakugan for longer and longer, if only bit by bit.
And then, one afternoon …
Taking advantage of a break in his work, Naruto climbed to the top of Hokage Rock. He wanted to test out the Byakugan in a spot with a much richer view than the training ground.
He pulled the lever on the goggles and looked out over the old city. With fewer obstructions, the amount of information coming in was of a different magnitude from what he was used to at the training ground. On top of that, chakra-filled shinobi were wandering around all over the place, which was very distracting.
“Ngh …” He forced himself to focus his field of vision and spotted an unnatural chakra flow.
He turned his mind that way and found chakra leaking like a fog from the base of an old camphor tree on a narrow residential street.
“Hm? What’s that?”
Does chakra usually come out of tree roots?
Naruto leaped down from Hokage Rock and went to check it out.
The camphor tree stood in a quiet area with few people passing by, even in the middle of the old city. The chakra wasn’t being emitted by the tree roots themselves, but rather appeared to be leaking out from openings in the ground. Unless a shinobi had been buried alive in that spot, it was probably coming from a room underground.
There was a traditional townhouse in front of the camphor tree. The high windows were cracked, the gable was on an incline, and the structure looked quite abandoned.
“Helloooo?” Naruto opened the unlocked door and found dust piled up on the entryway floor. The old owner had apparently been some kind of merchant—an abacus lay on the step up into the house, and there was a bookcase next to the window.
“No stairs?”
He saw a large Japanese-style room, but he couldn’t spot anything that looked like stairs in the bungalow.
Wait.
Naruto touched the hand that was not a prosthetic to the wall in the entryway.
Of course. The texture was the same as the liquid crystal wall in Tami’s sweet shop.
When he examined the surface closely, he found a small black hole in amongst the woodgrain and knots. This was probably the keyhole. In which case, there had to be a key somewhere.
Prime suspects were the bookmark tucked into an old book and the long metal cooking chopsticks stabbed into the ashes in the brazier. The old-style pipe on the bookcase was also a possibility.
He hit the jackpot with his third choice, the pipe. There was a rattling sound inside the hole, and then the wall abruptly turned transparent. He pushed it lightly, and it opened toward the inside like a door.
The crystals throughout the panel were forced into arrays with electricity, resulting in the image of a detailed surface. It had been invented at the research institute, but because the technology hadn’t yet been scaled up to mass production, it shouldn’t have been out in the wild like this.
Which meant that whoever was here was connected with the institute?
On the other side of the wall was an old wooden staircase. The flames of evenly spaced lamps illuminated the steps in the gloom.