Chapter 22 (Patreon)

While Nono had been preparing dinner earlier, Kaorui had gone into the kitchen to help.

During their casual conversation, she learned that Kushina spent most of her days training and had therefore asked Nono to help care for Naruto.

Now that Nono had something else to attend to that evening, Kaorui quickly spoke up.

“Leave Naruto-kun with me. Nono-san, please go take care of the orphanage. I’ll make sure he doesn’t disturb Kushina-sama’s rest.”

Kushina nodded in agreement.

She wanted to care for Naruto herself, but her sleeping posture was terrible. She was genuinely worried that she might accidentally kick him out of bed during the night.

Besides, there were certain things she needed to do before falling asleep and after waking up. Keeping Naruto beside her would be rather inconvenient.

“Then I’ll be counting on you, Kaorui,” Nono said. “I’ll stay here and help again in a few days.”

After caring for Naruto over the past several days, Nono knew exactly how exhausting it could be.

Throughout the night, she had to wake repeatedly to prepare formula and feed him. It was almost impossible to get any proper sleep.

Once Nono left, Kaorui carried the two infants, who had just finished eating and were now full of energy, back to her room.

When she placed Naruto on the bed, she noticed the sealing formula on his small stomach.

Curious about what could possibly have been sealed inside such a young child, she casually activated the Mind’s Eye of the Kagura.

In the next instant, an immense and malevolent chakra surged directly into her senses.

Kaorui’s entire body stiffened.

It was almost identical to the presence she had sensed inside Kushina, though there were a few subtle differences.

Before she could fully process that discovery, her attention was drawn toward something happening in the bathroom.

Through her sensory perception, she saw Kushina standing with both hands pressed against the mirror.

The mass of spiritual energy belonging to Roy was controlling a towel and wiping her back.

Roy-sama… Is he truly such an approachable deity?

Kaorui was deeply shocked.

However, as she continued sensing the scene, something gradually began to feel strange.

One of Kushina’s hands left the mirror and reached behind her, moving back and forth.

Kaorui could perceive only the movement of energy rather than a clear physical image, but even so, she quickly understood what was happening.

She hurriedly deactivated the Mind’s Eye of the Kagura.

Her heart pounded violently, and her breathing involuntarily quickened.

Kushina-sama is actually…

During dinner, she had seen a photograph hanging on the wall.

Kushina had clearly introduced the blond-haired man standing beside her as her husband, Konoha’s Fourth Hokage, Minato Namikaze.

There was no character meaning “Roy” anywhere in Minato’s name.

In other words, the divine being she had sensed was not the spirit of Minato Namikaze after his death.

The image of the kind and benevolent deity in Kaorui’s heart changed considerably at that moment.

She patted her heated cheeks and forced herself to focus on the two children, no longer daring to let her thoughts wander.

Unfortunately, the more she tried not to think about it, the more difficult it became to drive the scene from her mind.

---

The Front Lines

Several masked figures slipped past Konoha’s patrol lines and infiltrated the area surrounding Kumogakure’s encampment.

Once the sensor among them confirmed that no one else was nearby, they removed their masks and changed into Kumogakure uniforms and forehead protectors.

The group then separated.

Each of them delivered an intelligence scroll to one of Kumogakure’s patrol squads.

However, when they later arrived at the agreed meeting point, they discovered that the companion responsible for sensing had already been killed.

At the same time, several pairs of blood-red eyes appeared within the darkness of the forest.

“Take them alive!”

The young voice had barely finished speaking when the infiltrators, realising that escape was impossible, bit down on poison capsules hidden inside their teeth.

“Damn it! They were prepared against genjutsu!”

One of the Uchiha looked toward the boy beside him.

“Shisui, what do we do now?”

“We’ll take the bodies back first,” Shisui replied. “Commander Shikaku can decide how to proceed.”

Back at Konoha’s frontline encampment, Nara Shikaku listened silently as Uchiha Shisui delivered his report.

Shisui had gone out that evening to practise the Body Flicker Jutsu when he noticed someone moving suspiciously through the area.

Believing the stranger to be a Kumogakure spy gathering intelligence, Shisui had attempted to capture him.

The moment the infiltrator realised he had been discovered, however, he swallowed poison and killed himself without the slightest hesitation.

Suspecting that the man had accomplices, Shisui contacted a nearby Uchiha squad and arranged an ambush.

As expected, several more infiltrators eventually appeared.

Unfortunately, not a single one had been captured alive.

“It’s a fast-acting poison,” Shikaku said after glancing at one of the corpses. “The moment it enters the bloodstream, death is almost immediate.”

Combined with their precautions against genjutsu, it was no surprise that even Shisui of the Body Flicker had been unable to stop them from committing suicide.

“You’ve done well. Go and rest for now,” Shikaku said. “We’ll have the Intelligence Division examine the bodies and see whether they can uncover anything.”

After Shisui and the other Uchiha left the command tent, Shikaku’s expression darkened.

He had seen this kind of poison before.

He forced open one corpse’s mouth.

Sure enough, there were traces of a sealing technique at the base of the tongue.

The Cursed Tongue Eradication Seal.

Shikaku already understood who these people were.

Rather than informing the Intelligence Division, he sealed the bodies inside a storage scroll.

He then wrote a detailed report and ordered that it be delivered to the Hokage as quickly as possible.

Afterward, he summoned the commanders of the various divisions and reorganised the entire defensive formation.

The others did not understand why their positions were being changed so suddenly, but they followed his orders without question.

When the Uchiha received notice of the new defensive layout, they immediately realised that it was probably related to the corpses they had recovered earlier.

However, since the commander had made no official announcement, they did not spread rumours.

Instead, they warned the few clan members who knew about the incident to remain silent.

---

Early the following morning, Konoha’s advisers, Mitokado Homura and Utatane Koharu, arrived at the Hokage’s office.

“Hiruzen, we heard that Kakashi brought back a woman from the Uzumaki clan.”

“With the front lines currently locked in a stalemate, perhaps we should allow—”

“Enough!”

Hiruzen slammed one hand against the desk, cutting them off.

“I have already told Danzō. If he wants the woman, he can go and ask Kushina for her himself.”

Homura and Koharu were startled by his sudden anger.

Neither of them dared to continue pursuing the subject.

Instead, they changed the topic.

“What has the daimyō said?” Homura asked. “Should we have Danzō speak with him?”

This was not the first time the daimyō had considered reducing Konoha’s military funding.

However, whenever Danzō personally intervened, the military budget was always issued in full.

Hiruzen rubbed his throbbing temples.

After a long silence, he reluctantly agreed.

---

At Kushina’s home, Kaorui stared in complete bewilderment as Kushina strapped more than a hundred pounds of weights onto her body.

Since when had the Uzumaki clan’s training methods become centred around taijutsu?

Should Kushina not have been focusing on fūinjutsu, or at least practising ninjutsu?

Most shinobi trained their bodies to increase their physical strength and, in turn, raise the limits of their chakra reserves.

But even the lowest natural chakra reserves among members of the Uzumaki clan were beyond what most shinobi could ever hope to achieve in their entire lives.

“I’m not doing this to increase the amount of chakra I possess,” Kushina explained. “I’m trying to fully awaken the potential of my body.”

She repeated the explanation Roy had given her.

“Is that really possible?” Kaorui asked. “Can physical training truly awaken our constitution?”

The Uzumaki clan’s history stretched back far beyond the founding of Konoha, yet no one had ever claimed that physical exercise had much connection to the development of their bloodline.

Abilities such as the Mind’s Eye of the Kagura and the Adamantine Sealing Chains would normally awaken naturally once a clan member reached a certain age.

If they never appeared, it simply meant that the person lacked the necessary talent.

Hard work had little influence over whether those abilities awakened.

“In truth, our clan never developed even half of the potential hidden within our bodies.”

Kushina shook her head.

Over the past several days, she had experienced the changes firsthand.

Every time she pushed her body to its limits and then allowed it to recover, her constitution became noticeably stronger than before.

The thirty-percent increase in her chakra reserves was merely the least significant of those changes.