The daimyō knelt beneath the idol for a very long time.
But the Evil God gave him no answer.
He had found this idol years ago in a ruined temple out in the wilderness.
When he first discovered it, the blood on its surface had long since dried. It had been filthy, foul-smelling, and abandoned.
Yet after several years of ritual offerings, the idol had finally come alive.
Now, every day, fresh blood seeped endlessly from its head.
The daimyō slowly rose and walked toward the back corner of the chamber, where several cages had been stacked.
Inside them were a number of weak, half-starved children.
They had been deprived of food and water until they no longer had the strength to resist.
Perfect sacrifices.
The daimyō dragged one child out of a cage and returned to the foot of the idol.
He forced the child to kneel before it, then grabbed the filthy hair on the back of the child's head and yanked it upward, exposing the throat toward the blood-soaked god.
From his waist, he drew a jeweled dagger.
First, he sliced open the child's forehead.
Then, after licking the blood from the blade, he used the child's blood to draw a ritual formation across the floor—an outer circle enclosing an inner triangle.
Once the preparations were complete, the daimyō slashed open his own throat.
His blood and the child's blood gushed together into the blood pool beneath the idol.
The blood pool began to churn.
Fresh blood moved as though it had come alive, flowing upward against gravity, crawling back over the idol's body.
The child died quickly.
But strangely enough, the daimyō did not.
The wound across his throat began healing at once.
A miracle.
This was a true miracle.
His throat had been slit open, and yet he had survived.
With an immortal body like this, what was there left to fear from shinobi?
Whether they were Cloud ninja or Konoha ninja, none of them could kill him.
"O great Evil God…"
His eyes shone with feverish devotion.
"Grant me power beyond the shinobi.
"For that, I am willing to offer you everything in the Land of Hot Water!"
Outside the capital walls, several consecutive blasts of Lightning Release: False Darkness struck the Threefold Wood Golem, only to be blocked effortlessly.
And yet Yako wasn't even looking at Gomoi anymore.
He suddenly turned his head.
His gaze passed over the countless rooftops and hot spring bathhouses of the capital and fixed itself in the direction of Tenshu Castle.
A strange power was enveloping the castle.
That power…
It was completely different from chakra.
If one wished to stand against the Ōtsutsuki, one would need a power system beyond chakra.
And now, Yako had just encountered a strange energy source of exactly that kind.
He lowered his gaze toward Gomoi below.
"You're getting in the way…"
Gomoi's Lightning Release Body Flicker Technique was fast.
Just troublesome enough to be annoying.
"Wood Release: Deep Forest Bloom!"
Across the maple forest, vivid flower buds blossomed into full bloom.
A great cloud of toxic pollen began drifting beneath the walls.
"Cough…! Cough—!"
As the ever-expanding Wood Release forced Gomoi to keep jumping and dodging, he inevitably inhaled some of the poisonous pollen.
He began coughing violently.
His vision blurred.
A blast of False Darkness split apart two thick tree trunks.
But Fox was still dozens of meters away.
His Lightning Release couldn't threaten Fox's real body at all.
He had been running in circles inside the Wood Release the entire time, endlessly entangled by trunks that kept growing out of nowhere.
He had been carefully trying to organize an opening, trying to build an attack route…
But he still couldn't break through the three-headed, six-armed Threefold Wood Golem.
As he twisted aside to avoid one trunk, Gomoi's lower back slammed into another.
Pain shot through him.
He opened his mouth on instinct—
and inhaled a second mouthful of toxic pollen.
His mind immediately began to slip.
Suddenly, thunderclouds appeared before his eyes.
They looked so real.
So familiar.
Back when he was a child, those same storm clouds used to gather around the mountain peaks he often climbed.
His entire Lightning Release style…
had been born in storms like those.
The thunderclouds rushed toward him.
A heavy pressure settled over his body.
His eyes widened, and he violently shook his head.
Impossible.
There couldn't be thunderclouds here.
By the time his mind snapped back into clarity, it was already too late.
A massive tree trunk was crushing down on his chest.
His ribcage shattered under the pressure.
The toxic pollen carried a powerful neurotoxin.
He had fallen into hallucinations.
And so, after Ryuuren, Gomoi died as well.
From afar, Totai saw Gomoi's corpse hanging amid the branches.
His chest had been crushed flat.
The lower half of his body dangled grotesquely beneath the trunk.
"Advisor Gomoi…"
A miserable, broken laugh escaped Totai's lips.
People said Konoha had been dealt a devastating blow by the rogue ninja Uchiha Madara, losing three of its upper leadership.
But in the blink of an eye, Kumogakure had lost two of its own high-ranking figures as well.
The Two-Tails' Jinchūriki, Ryuuren.
And Advisor Gomoi.
Even a heavily wounded Konoha could still drive people into despair.
Totai truly couldn't imagine how terrifying Konoha would be if it were free of rogue shinobi and internal strife.
From beginning to end, Gomoi had been struggling against Wood Release itself.
Fox had never moved once.
Totai forced himself to tear his eyes away from Gomoi's corpse and fled north with a portion of the remaining Cloud ninja, toward the mountain ranges beyond the capital.
No one knew how many of those hundred-plus Cloud shinobi would make it out alive.
After killing Gomoi, Yako flashed Hippo a hand signal.
Hippo immediately led the Konoha shinobi in pursuit of Totai.
Totai specialized in defense, and his offensive power was mediocre.
Hippo wouldn't be facing too much danger.
Yako's figure vanished.
He slipped into the capital and headed straight for Tenshu Castle.
Inside the castle, after completing his worship of the Evil God, the daimyō returned to the wall where the cages were stacked.
"Only one child left already? That's nowhere near enough…"
He clicked his tongue in irritation.
"I'll need to replenish the supply soon.
"What was your name again…? Ah, right. Hidan."
Hidan shrank into the corner of the cage, staring at the daimyō in terror.
Blood was still running down the daimyō's neck, though his so-called immortal body was already knitting the wound shut.
Back then, Hidan's village had been attacked by wandering samurai.
In the end, every child in the village had been taken away to Tenshu Castle.
Those wandering samurai…
had all been the daimyō's men.
Satisfied, the daimyō climbed the long stone staircase leading upward and returned to the underground chamber's sealed entrance.
He pressed the mechanism to open the stone door.
But the servants outside did not open it.
A long silence passed.
Then, from beyond the door—
the sound of explosive tags.
Boom!
The stone door was blown apart.
The daimyō was sent flying backward by the blast and shattered rubble, his luxurious silk robes torn and dirtied.
Nara Kyoichi, who had just breached the entrance, was startled to realize the daimyō had been standing directly behind the stone door.
He rushed inside at once and helped the man up.
"Your Lordship, we came too late. Are you alright?"
In an instant, the daimyō's expression changed.
The cold gloom vanished.
In its place appeared the harmless, almost simpleminded look of a soft, plump nobleman.
He glanced at Kyoichi's signature pineapple-shaped hairstyle and said, "A Nara shinobi… thank goodness you came. Have the Cloud ninja left?"
Kyoichi nodded.
"The battle outside the walls has already stopped. I'd say Lord Fox has probably already finished it."
Kyoichi cast a glance deeper into the underground chamber.
It was too dark to make out anything clearly.
"That's good. That's very good."
The daimyō gave a strained smile.
"This is just a shelter I had built, Nara shinobi. Please forgive the embarrassment. I don't know ninjutsu. When trouble comes, all I can do is hide."
He walked out of the underground chamber and into the grand hall.
The moment he stepped inside, he saw corpses everywhere.
Samurai corpses.
Servant corpses.
Even the corpse of his own younger brother.
The long hanging silk curtains near the doors and windows, each several meters high, were splattered with bright red blood.
For a brief instant, the daimyō's face became truly ugly.
Kyoichi quickly pulled his attention away from the blood bath and explained,
"Your Lordship, the Cloud ninja abandoned you. They sent assassins to kill you.
"Fortunately, I arrived in time and killed the two Cloud shinobi.
"But unfortunately… many people in the hall were murdered by them before I got here."
"Tragic… truly tragic…"
The daimyō thought to himself:
Was this really the Cloud's doing?
Or was this Konoha's warning?
He had accepted Kumogakure's protection.
He had allowed Cloud shinobi to become his guardian force.
Konoha had not liked that.
So perhaps they had used the Cloud as an excuse and slaughtered the people around him to send a message.
And even if he knew that was what had happened…
what could he possibly do about it?
Nothing.
All he could do was pretend not to know.
And be grateful for Konoha's mercy in not killing him.
The mercy of not being killed…
The words curdled in his heart like poison.
With nowhere to vent the hatred boiling inside him, the daimyō suddenly drew his jeweled dagger and dropped to his knees before the two Cloud shinobi corpses, stabbing them over and over in a frenzy.
Kyoichi assumed the daimyō was simply consumed by hatred toward the Cloud.
Considering that so many of the daimyō's close attendants had just been slaughtered, he allowed the outburst to continue in silence.
The shinobi world was a twisted place.
Shinobi, one way or another, all carried some form of mental damage.
And nobles were no different.
Death was everywhere.
Many people had experienced things so heartbreaking they became hysterical, unstable, or broken.
The Nara clan was so highly valued by the village, and so often chosen for strategist roles, for one simple reason:
their spiritual energy was strong, and their minds tended to remain stable.
They were less likely to make irrational or extreme decisions under emotional stress.
Konoha was filled with madmen.
Filled with trauma.
Filled with people barely holding themselves together.
And among that crowd of broken people, the calm and clear-headed Nara were priceless.
At last, the daimyō rose to his feet, drenched in blood.
He carefully wiped the dagger clean and returned it to his waist.
Then he turned and smiled at Kyoichi.
"This Konoha jonin… would you please become the captain of my guardian shinobi?
"Tenshu Castle may survive without me… but it cannot survive without a captain of the guardian force."
Kyoichi looked at the smile on the daimyō's face and felt an instinctive wave of revulsion.
Especially because the daimyō was covered in blood.
And there was a difference between the blood of the living and the blood of the dead.
The blood on corpses was filthier.
Heavier.
And it stank.
What frightened Kyoichi most was this:
even after all those close to him had been slaughtered by the Cloud, the daimyō could still calmly and clearly ask him to become captain of his guardians.
For the first time in a long while, Kyoichi felt fear.
And what frightened him…
wasn't a shinobi.
It was a noble.
In that instant, he even found himself wanting to recommend that the village kill the daimyō and replace him with a more obedient one.
But instead of answering, he simply said,
"Let Lord Fox come first. He'll arrange everything here."
Deep within the underground chamber, a fox mask slowly emerged from the wall.
The chamber was lit only by two candles, their weak flames casting light across the idol covered in flowing blood.
In places where the blood reflected the candlelight, the statue looked like a giant sculpture of crimson glass.
Yako concealed his presence completely.
Next full moon cycle…
he would return and test the depths of this Evil God for himself.
If possible, he wanted to obtain the Evil God's power.
Perhaps even replace the god entirely.
At his current level—already beyond ordinary Kage class—his growth had nearly reached a limit.
Unless he obtained the Ten-Tails, or received Six Paths–level Yin-Yang Release from the Sage of Six Paths, there was little room left for him to ascend.
The Evil God's power tempted him.
When Yako returned to the surface, he used Body Flicker Technique and appeared instantly at the entrance of the grand hall.
The moment the daimyō saw the ANBU in the fox mask, he hurried over in a small trot.
"Lord Fox! You're Konoha's Fox, aren't you? I've heard your name before. You're Konoha's most active ANBU shinobi.
"Please, arrange some guardian shinobi for me at once. Without them, I don't know how many more people in Tenshu Castle will die."
Through the mask, Yako stared at the warm-faced fat man before him.
Who would have thought…
that this plump noble had secretly been worshipping the Evil God all along?
Yako turned to Kyoichi.
"Jonin Kyoichi, send word back to the village. Request a new foreign affairs advisor to handle matters in the Land of Hot Water.
"Assign a few guardian shinobi here, then take the rest and pursue Totai immediately.
"The ones who killed Lord Shinnosuke—I want them dead.
"Every last one of them."
He paused, then continued,
"I'm going to catch up with Hippo now. Move as quickly as you can."
"Yes, sir!"
The daimyō was just about to stop him—
but Fox had already vanished with Body Flicker Technique.
He immediately turned back to Kyoichi.
"Jonin Kyoichi, are you leaving too? You won't remain in the capital?"
Kyoichi replied flatly,
"I was Lord Shinnosuke's aide and bodyguard. Of course I'm going to avenge him.
"Don't worry. I'll leave a few capable guardian shinobi behind for you."