In the blink of an eye, three weeks passed.
Hyuga Kagami was rather surprised.
After all this time, the village still hadn’t sent a reinforcement squad, nor had they made another attempt to purge him and Anko.
This clearly didn’t match his expectations, nor did it make any sense.
Who carried out a purge this slowly and halfheartedly?
“Could something have happened in the village?”
Searching through the hazy memories in his mind, Hyuga Kagami tried to find some clue that would explain what exactly had happened, but after thinking back for a long while, he came up empty-handed.
Suddenly, an image flashed through his mind.
His entire body jolted as he muttered, “The…
the Nine-Tails Incident!?”
Although he didn’t know the exact date when the Nine-Tails Incident occurred, Hyuga Kagami knew that it happened on the very night Naruto was born.
Naruto’s mother, Kushina, was the Nine-Tails’ jinchūriki.
Everything related to her was classified information, and with Hyuga Kagami’s status in the village, there was simply no way for him to obtain any details about her.
But that didn’t stop him from making an educated guess.
Hinata was around the same age as Naruto, and before leaving the village, Kagami had already heard that the clan head’s wife was pregnant.
If Naruto was a few months older than Hinata, then Naruto’s birthday—and therefore the Nine-Tails Incident—should be sometime around now.
“How could I have forgotten about this!?”
Hyuga Kagami silently berated himself.
Still, it was somewhat understandable.
After all, he had already been transported to the shinobi world for more than a decade, so some of his memories had inevitably grown hazy.
On top of that, given his lack of strength all these years, he had constantly lived under the threat of death.
He had neither the ability nor the desire to interfere in major events, so naturally, he hadn’t paid much attention to the great upheavals of the shinobi world.
But things were different now.
With the Tenseigan, he finally possessed the strength to involve himself in certain matters.
From now on, he needed to pay attention to every major event in the shinobi world like a true powerhouse, so that he could seize whatever benefits might arise from them.
After reflecting on his mistake, Hyuga Kagami began analyzing the village’s current situation.
If the Nine-Tails Incident really had occurred, then the balance of power within the village was about to undergo a tremendous upheaval.
The Fourth Hokage, still in the prime of his youth, and Kushina, the Nine-Tails’ jinchūriki, had both died.
Not only had Konoha lost two of its most promising Kage-level combatants at once, but their deaths had also left the village in the awkward position of having no strong successors ready to take their place. Read the latest chapters at novelping.com.
The White Fang had committed suicide, Tsunade had left the village, Orochimaru had defected, and Jiraiya had left Konoha in pursuit of him.
Among Konoha’s younger and middle-aged generations, aside from Jiraiya, who wasn’t currently in the village, there was no longer anyone who could truly be considered Kage-level.
All that remained to hold up Konoha’s prestige were the Third Hokage, Danzo, and the rest of the old guard who had held power for more than twenty years.
Furthermore, during the Nine-Tails Incident, the Nine-Tails had seemingly been controlled by the Sharingan.
This caused suspicion to fall upon the Uchiha clan, one of the village’s most important military forces.
Every powerful member of the Uchiha clan was placed under surveillance.
Even without relying on his memories from his previous life, Hyuga Kagami could already foresee that internal conflict between the Uchiha and the village would become unavoidable.
After analyzing the changes in the village’s power structure, Hyuga Kagami turned his attention to his own situation.
Without a doubt, compared to the Uchiha clan—who were suspected of having caused the Nine-Tails Incident and were both powerful and tightly united—Hyuga Kagami and the other former subordinates of Orochimaru could hardly be considered much of a threat in the village’s eyes.
Moreover, a large number of ordinary shinobi had perished during the Nine-Tails Incident.
Having suffered such severe losses, the village not only had to immediately rebuild the devastated areas, but also had to divert elite personnel to monitor the Uchiha clan.
Even for a village as powerful as Konoha, manpower was probably stretched thin at the moment.
Under such circumstances, it made perfect sense that they had no attention to spare for a remote border outpost.
Before long, Hyuga Kagami’s speculation was confirmed.
A message arrived from the village: abandon the outpost and have all personnel return to Konoha immediately.
After briefly packing their belongings, the four shinobi at the outpost set off on the journey back to the village.
Along the way, Hyuga Kagami secretly congratulated himself on his good fortune.
After so much time had passed, Sasori still hadn’t managed to track him down.
In truth, however, Hyuga Kagami had misunderstood the situation.
Stealing the Third Kazekage human puppet had indeed been an accident.
Hyuga Kagami knew that, but Sasori didn’t.
From Sasori’s perspective, Hyuga Kagami’s Wheel of Will and his ability to control puppets without chakra threads were simply too bizarre.
As a result, Sasori had overestimated Kagami’s strength, mistakenly believing him to be at least an elite jōnin, and had therefore completely overlooked the border outposts.
After all, under normal circumstances, border outposts whose primary purpose was to provide early warning would never have an elite jōnin stationed there.
As a result, the border outpost where Hyuga Kagami was stationed became a perfect blind spot—hidden in plain sight—and ironically turned into the safest place he could have been.
That was precisely why Sasori had been unable to find him all this time.
Traveling at full speed, the four of them finally returned to the village a week later.
At this moment, the entire village looked like one enormous construction site.
Everywhere Hyuga Kagami looked, there were busy craftsmen, scaffolding erected all over the place, and transport carts constantly moving back and forth. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Pointing toward the damaged wall in the distance, Anko stared blankly.
“What happened here?”
The two shinobi traveling with them, who were suspected of being members of Root, seemed to know something about what had happened.
Yet even they couldn’t hide their surprise at the sight before them.
Clearly, the extent of the village’s destruction had far exceeded what they had expected.
Hyuga Kagami was equally shocked.
Although he had already known that the Nine-Tails Incident had dealt Konoha a devastating blow, seeing the village in such a ruined state still left him struggling to take it all in.
After all, even during the brutal wars of the past, the village had never suffered damage this severe!
Once they arrived at the Mission Center and completed the simple procedures for handing over their mission, the four of them went their separate ways.
Having regained his freedom for the first time in several months, Hyuga Kagami didn’t waste any time.
He immediately began gathering information about everything that had happened in the village.
Before long, he had collected quite a bit of information.
First, the Nine-Tails Incident had occurred approximately one month ago.
Judging by the timing, it had happened right around the same few days when Hyuga Kagami encountered Sasori at the border.
Second, in just a single night of chaos, more than twenty jōnin and several hundred chūnin and genin had been killed.
Nearly every shinobi clan in the village had suffered casualties.
It was said that the funerals alone had continued for an entire week.
Finally, several districts that had been ravaged by the Nine-Tails were completely razed to the ground.
Civilian casualties were impossible to estimate, and even now, the bodies of many civilians had yet to be found.
Having gathered enough information, Hyuga Kagami returned home with his mind weighed down by countless thoughts.
Kagami was no stranger to Obito.
Back when they were classmates, there had only been a handful of people Kagami could barely claim to have an edge over—and Obito had been one of them.
Yet that very same dead-last, who had once seemed like he had a screw loose, had now grown into a mastermind capable of driving both the Fourth Hokage and the Nine-Tails’ jinchūriki to their deaths, all while manipulating the entire shinobi world from behind the scenes.
To be frank, Hyuga Kagami found that rather irritating.
But irritated or not, he understood perfectly well that Obito was no longer the person he used to be.
Now that Obito possessed the Mangekyō Sharingan as well as the First Hokage’s cells, he had long since undergone a complete transformation.
Kagami could no longer judge him by the same standards he had used back at the Academy.
At the same time, a spark of ambition began to burn within Hyuga Kagami’s heart.
If Obito could stir up such chaos with nothing more than the Mangekyō Sharingan, then why couldn’t he, with the Tenseigan, step out of the audience and onto a stage that belonged entirely to himself?