On a warm, sun-drenched spring day three years ago…
Four-year-old Neji met his younger cousin for the very first time.
She was tiny, soft, and looked so fragile that one couldn’t help but want to pat her small head.
She followed Lord Hiashi with absolute obedience…
“Neji, this is Lady Hinata.
She is the person you will spend your entire life protecting.”
Neji had nodded instinctively, responding to his father’s words beside him.
She’s so cute~
I want to protect her forever.
That had been the very first thought that popped into Neji’s head upon meeting Hinata.
She’s a total monster!
When in the world is she ever going to let me go?!
That was Neji’s current view of Hinata.
Inside the training hall of the Hyuga estate—a traditional wooden structure built entirely of fine timber—two children stood facing each other in black and white training robes.
No way!
Didn’t we just finish sparring this morning?!
Why do we have to do another round?!
The seven-year-old boy in the white training robe stared at the cute, smiling girl across from him, fighting with all his might to keep a calm, composed face.
Neji looked around instinctively.
Only a few servants were scattered near the perimeter, and his father, Hizashi, was away on clan business…
Which meant…
He didn’t even have the chance to cry out for his father to save him!
“Brother Neji, one must never slack off in training.
We have to give it our absolute all,” Hinata said from across the floor, dressed in her black training gear.
Sensing her cousin’s inner turmoil, she offered him a gentle, well-intentioned reminder.
“I’m sure someone with your talent doesn’t need to be reminded of that.”
“…”
My talent?!
How come I didn’t know I had this kind of ‘talent’ for getting beaten to a pulp?!
Neji felt like crying, but he had no choice.
He could only grit his teeth and nod, forced into compliance.
Hinata’s father, Hiashi, and Neji’s father, Hizashi, were twin brothers born of the same mother.
Because of the unique nature of the Byakugan, the simple order of their birth had dictated their entire destinies.
It was a division unique to the Hyuga Clan: the Main Branch and the Branch House.
The Branch House was branded with the Caged Bird seal.
If the Main Branch ever desired it, they could activate the curse mark at any moment to destroy a Branch member’s brain cells.
The Caged Bird could never be removed; only death offered true liberation.
Yet behind these seemingly cold, ruthless rules lay a far deeper secret.
The Tenseigan.
It was the ultimate secret of the Hyuga Clan, passed down strictly by word of mouth through successive leaders of both branches.
A Tenseigan could only be awakened by combining a vast collection of pure Byakugan.
If the clan’s only worry had been preventing the Byakugan from falling into foreign hands, there would have been no need for such extreme measures.
No matter how powerful the Byakugan’s sensory capabilities were, they could not match the Uzumaki Clan’s Mind’s Eye of the Kagura.
One could simply kidnap an Uzumaki male to act as a stud and eventually acquire that sensory trait anyway.
Thus, the Hyuga’s Caged Bird seal was never originally designed to defend against outside enemies; it was created to guard against their own people.
That was the real reason why, in over a thousand years, no member of the Branch House had ever successfully rebelled against the Main Branch.
Furthermore, the Caged Bird had to be actively triggered by the Main Branch rather than going off automatically.
If a Main Branch member proved overly cruel, stubborn, or tyrannical…
the day the Branch House could no longer endure it, a rope would quietly find its way around that leader’s neck while they slept.
After all, nobody was a fool.
Otherwise, back when the Leaf Village was first founded, someone with Hashirama Senju’s personality would have certainly stepped in to stop such extreme methods the moment he learned of them.
And right now, standing across from Hinata, Neji was a member of that very Branch House.
Hinata and Neji took their respective Gentle Fist stances, activating their Byakugan simultaneously.
Veins bulged around their pale eyes.
Gentle Fist was the signature combat style of the Hyuga Clan, developed specifically to capitalize on the Byakugan’s ability to see the body’s chakra pathway system.
It allowed them to inject their own chakra to strike an opponent’s tenketsu, damaging internal organs and disrupting chakra flow.
It was, without question, the most iconic taijutsu style of the Hyuga.
In close-quarters combat, a single touch could seal an enemy’s chakra points, turning the fight into a death sentence.
Over time, “Gentle Fist” became practically synonymous with the Hyuga Clan.
Their ninjas focused almost exclusively on this style, rarely bothering with standard ninjutsu.
Standing across from Hinata, Neji had been hailed as a prodigy since childhood.
That title of “genius” represented his sheer, unadulterated talent for mastering the Gentle Fist.
As for why Hinata could beat this so-called genius so badly during daily sparring that he wanted to cry for his dad?
The reason was painfully simple.
In the center of the training hall, Hinata and Neji held the opening stance of the Eight Trigrams, an invisible Bagua diagram spreading out to cover the entire floor.
Neji stood on the Yang side; Hinata occupied the Yin.
The very next second, both moved at the exact same moment!
First Palm!
Hinata and Neji moved like lightning, their open palms colliding in mid-air.
An invisible shockwave of chakra erupted between them.
From just that single strike, Neji’s expression shifted slightly.
Second Palm!
After another lightning-fast exchange, the force behind Neji’s attacks noticeably intensified.
Fourth Palm!
The two traded a blur of offensive and defensive moves in a split second.
By now, Neji’s jaw was clenched tight, his entire face strained.
Eighth Palm…
A hand, fast as a strike of lightning, slipped cleanly through a gap in Neji’s defensive guard and slammed directly against his chest.
A burst of invisible energy erupted against his ribs.
The force drove Neji backward, making him stumble two full steps before catching his balance.
Eight palms, eight strikes.
The Eight Trigrams Palms could scale up to one hundred and twenty-eight strikes, yet Hinata had needed only a tiny fraction of that sequence to break through Neji’s defenses and land a clean blow.
In a real fight, Neji would already be dead.
“Again!”
Hinata pulled her palm back, straightening her posture as she smoothly reset into her combat stance.
Neji looked down at his chest, gritting his teeth hard before stepping forward to clash with her once more.
For a long while, the training hall was filled with their shifting blurs, the air popping repeatedly with the sharp concussions of colliding Gentle Fist chakra.
This world belonged to bloodlines.
The main protagonist, Naruto, carried the blood of the Otsutsuki.
The second lead, Sasuke, carried the blood of the Otsutsuki.
The Uchiha, Senju, Uzumaki, Hyuga, and Kaguya clans all traced their origins back to the Otsutsuki Clan.
This held true for the heroes, and it held equally true for the villains.
In short, it was as if almost every major player had a legendary bloodline backing them up.
So how did Hinata manage to crush the so-called genius Neji in under ten moves when both shared similar clan advantages?
Because as the mother of the future savior, Boruto, her genetic lineage was extraordinary.
Boruto had perfectly inherited the combined bloodline advantages of both Naruto and Hinata.
What was Hinata’s inherent advantage, then?
Or rather, did she possess the raw latent talent to become a top-tier powerhouse?
In the original timeline, Hinata’s future had amounted to little more than becoming a housewife, capping out at the rank of Chunin.
That version of Hinata Hyuga had been a girl entirely consumed by love.
She spent her days whispering “Naruto-kun” under her breath and following him from the shadows.
As the main character’s wife, she had fulfilled the exact role expected of her.
Because of her gentle, reserved nature, she had probably only eaten her fill a handful of times in her entire life.
During the Fourth Shinobi World War, when the Leaf 11 were giving everything they had, original-timeline Hinata—backed by Nine-Tails chakra and the power of emotional flashbacks—had barely managed to push out an Eight Trigrams Sixty-Four Palms sequence to knock down a single Ten-Tails clone.
To a reincarnated soul with a modern perspective, that level of performance was utterly unacceptable.