The morning mist outside the dojo hadn't yet lifted, and Hyuga Hinata's training clothes were already soaked through with sweat.
Each breath she exhaled came out as a thick white puff, only to be shredded a moment later by the full-force sweeps of her palms. Her nose and cheeks were red from the cold, but her eyes stayed locked with full concentration on the marked tenketsu points on the wooden training post.
"Stop."
Hyuga Hiashi's voice suddenly rang out. Hinata stopped at once. Her bangs, damp with sweat, clung to her forehead, but couldn't hide the faint look of anticipation in her eyes.
"Go bathe and change, then rest for a while. This afternoon, Hizashi will bring Neji over. You saw him yesterday already—don't embarrass yourself."
His tone was calm, without the slightest ripple, and his face showed no expression at all.
But Hinata understood: sometimes, saying nothing was an answer in itself.
Only after Hiashi's figure disappeared into the corridor did the light in Hinata's eyes slowly fade. "I still can't make Father happy, can I…"
After a while, Hinata patted her cheeks and took a deep breath to encourage herself. "This afternoon… this afternoon I have to do my best!"
By the afternoon, Hyuga Neji and Hyuga Hinata were sparring in the dojo.
Even without his Byakugan activated yet, Neji could still read every one of Hinata's movements just from his understanding of Gentle Fist, predicting them and laying out his next step in advance.
He deliberately slowed down his own speed to give her space to react. But even so, the pressure Neji exerted made fine beads of sweat form on Hinata's brow.
"Hinata-sama, please focus a bit more," Neji reminded her quietly.
He felt he had already broken Gentle Fist down into very simple pieces; Hinata's slow progress could only be because she wasn't taking it seriously enough. No matter how dumb someone is, could they really fail to learn Eight Trigrams Sixty-Four Palms?
"Okay."
Hinata bit her lip as she answered, trying to make her movements a little faster. But simply rushing her speed only threw her rhythm further off. In the end, even with Neji constantly "holding back" his strikes, she stumbled backward and was completely overwhelmed.
On the sidelines, Hyuga Hizashi watched the two of them silently.
Seeing Neji effortlessly control the flow of the match, every strike and step showing the ease of a natural genius, while Hinata—the main family heir—kept making one mistake after another even with Neji being so considerate of her…
Hizashi's brows tightened ever so slightly. His gaze repeatedly drifted toward Neji's forehead, and an emotion he'd thought long buried began to well up in his chest again.
When Hinata once more nearly tripped over her own footwork, a thread-thin hint of killing intent leaked out from him.
A bird with talent like this… and it can never fly free.
And all because he had the misfortune of being born after his older brother.
Almost the same instant that killing intent slipped out, Hyuga Hiashi was already standing in front of Hinata.
He didn't question him and he didn't warn him. He simply formed a seal with his hand.
"Ah!!!"
Hizashi clutched his head, letting out a scream as he dropped to his knees. The burning pain of the curse mark made his body curl in on itself as he rolled on the dojo floor in agony.
"Father!"
Neji's voice held a panic he'd never felt before. He rushed to Hizashi's side, but as soon as he knelt down, he froze.
He didn't dare touch his father, who was writhing in pain, and he had no idea what he could do to help. All he could do was helplessly watch his father's face twist and contort.
In the end, Hiashi softened. He lowered the hand that had been forming the seal. "Hizashi, I thought you'd let it go a long time ago."
Collapsed in Neji's arms, Hizashi panted heavily, forcing out a strained, ugly smile. "Yeah… I thought I'd let it go too."
You're doing this for your son. I'm doing this for my daughter.
Hiashi's eyes were nothing but cold. "Don't forget your place, Hizashi. This pain is the price you pay for overstepping."
After leaving the dojo, Hinata sat alone in her room, the scene from earlier replaying in her mind over and over. Even now, she still couldn't understand what had actually happened.
She ran over to her desk and took out the black notebook from the drawer. When she opened the title page, she discovered that under the original [Start Simulation] there were now two new options:
[Continue Simulation]
[Designated Simulation]
The first one was easy to understand, but the second… Just as she was wondering, a line of small text slowly surfaced on the paper.
"So that's how it is…"
[Designated Simulation] meant manually adding content—changing the direction of the simulator's story to reach a specific kind of ending. But using this function would lengthen the simulator's cooldown time.
Hinata bit her lower lip, picked up a pen, and carefully wrote on the blank space, stroke by stroke:
[This afternoon, Father suddenly used the Caged Bird Seal on Uncle Hizashi. Father said that seal was to protect the branch family's eyes, so why did it turn out like this?]
[I want to know the reason, and what I can do.]
Soon, new text appeared in the notebook.
[In Year 54 of Konoha, the delegation from Kumogakure arrived, and Father became very busy. I found another chance to slip out of the compound. With questions weighing on my heart, I decided to go look for Neji-nii.]
[However, just outside the wall, I spotted a suspicious figure. His skin was dark, very much like someone from the Land of Lightning.]
[Now, I have two options.]
[1. Call out loudly that there is a spy from an enemy village here.]
[2. Ignore it and continue looking for Neji.]
Without hesitation, Hinata tapped on the second option.
[Because I didn't want to be found out, I decided to act like I hadn't seen anything and quietly slipped away.]
[When I arrived in front of Uncle Hizashi's house, I suddenly didn't know what I should say once I saw them. Just as I was hesitating, two figures appeared at the far corner of the street—it was Neji-nii and Kiyonari.]
[I had just raised my hand to greet them when a sharp pain stabbed the back of my neck. In the final moment before I lost consciousness, I saw a dark-skinned hand.]
["He's from the Cloud Village…"]
[When I woke up, the Kumogakure jōnin who attacked me was already dead. Father said that he was killed by Neji-nii and Kiyonari—that they had saved me.]
[I instinctively doubted this, but when Father saw the look in my eyes, he showed no surprise at all. In fact, there was even a hint of… relief.]
[Soon after, Kumogakure accused Konoha and the Hyuga clan of sheltering the real culprit. They claimed it was Father who killed the envoy they had sent to Konoha, and demanded that Konoha and the Hyuga clan hand Father over.]
[No one would believe that two children who weren't even ninja yet could kill a jōnin from the Cloud. They only believed that Father had shoved the blame for killing onto two kids.]
[In the end, Father left a note, destroyed his own eyes, and let the village hand his body over.]
[But Father's death was not the end. Instead, it pushed the Hyuga clan completely to the brink.]
[The main family decided the branch family had colluded with outsiders to drive the clan head to his death, so they tried to tighten control with the Caged Bird Seal. This only further enraged the branch family, who felt the main family saw them as nothing but tools, not fellow "Hyuga."]
[It seemed there were only two outcomes left for the Hyuga clan: a split, or civil war.]
[This simulation has ended.]
[Evaluation: What was it that truly killed Hyuga Hiashi?]