Following the drainage channels, Uchiha Yoru walked down from the hill and kept going until he reached their end. There he found a hot spring marsh. Several spring vents bubbled and gurgled, steam drifted everywhere in the air, and the smell of sulfur hung thick and heavy.
It was obvious at a glance.
No digging here.
He didn't even need sage art detection to know it. This was a place where the water veins were abundant. If he opened a hole here, all he would get was a surge of sulfuric hot spring water. Judging by how strong the sulfur smell was in the air, it might even be poisonous.
So he changed direction and continued searching for a more suitable spot.
But the Land of Hot Water truly lived up to its name.
Hot springs were everywhere in this country. That was also why, even though the land here was relatively flat, it severely lacked farmland.
Kubota Village had only been built on this hill because the soil on the hill itself was actually the best farmland in the area. That was why such an unusually large village had gathered here, with a population of more than ten thousand.
Unfortunately, that was all in the past now.
As soon as the hundred Konoha squads had moved in earlier, all the villagers had been driven out. It was done partly to prevent spies from hiding among them, and partly to keep them from dying in the aftermath of battle.
Shinobi battles did affect civilians a little less directly, but once a village was unlucky enough to become a battlefield, no one would truly care about civilian interests.
Shinobi from a place like Konoha were relatively decent. They would drive villagers out, but they wouldn't kill people indiscriminately, nor would they rob civilians of their possessions.
The shinobi of the other four great villages were still acceptable too. Aside from a few lunatics from Kirigakure, they generally wouldn't slaughter at random either, though stealing things on the side was extremely common.
As for smaller hidden villages like Kusagakure, Amegakure, Yugakure, or Tsukigakure, their shinobi were far more vicious. Robbery and murder were commonplace among them. For money, they would launch attacks on their own initiative. Even if a village wasn't a battlefield, they would still rob it, and sometimes even wipe it out entirely.
During wartime, the Five Great Nations kept all their attention fixed on each other. No one bothered maintaining basic order. Massacres like that nearly always ended with no one left to seek justice, and the matter simply faded away.
Uchiha Yoru didn't like that kind of thing.
But as long as it didn't happen right in front of him, he felt nothing much at all.
He had some faint degree of identification with the Uchiha clan. As for Konoha, what he wanted from it was only safety, prosperity, and resources. And for the shinobi world as a whole, he felt even less. Naturally, he had no reason to develop any broad sense of empathy or shared sorrow.
So now that this village had already been emptied, all he felt was relief.
At least he didn't have to be the one handling the troublesome work of driving people out of their homes.
After circling the hill from all eight directions, Uchiha Yoru smiled.
He had found the right place.
It was on the southwest side.
Not only was there no underground water vein there, there was even a decent-sized underground hollow, though he couldn't tell whether it was a limestone cavern or some sort of volcanic cavity.
Still, judging from the sensation fed back through the natural energy, as long as he broke through roughly three hundred meters of surface layer, he would connect to an underground space of unknown size.
Uchiha Yoru chuckled.
"This place is perfect. Perfect."
"I don't know how big it is, but one thing's certain—if every Kirigakure shinobi worked themselves to death with Water Release, they still wouldn't be able to fill this underground space."
"The only thing they could do is try to block the opening after I make it."
"That means I'll have to make things a little harder for them."
Grinning to himself, Uchiha Yoru got to work on the earth.
Earth-spirit natural energy surged out in force, and the ground beneath him liquefied instantly, turning smooth as a mirror.
Eyes closed, he concentrated fully on reading the underground through natural energy, extending the liquefaction deeper and deeper until it touched a broad empty space.
Uchiha Yoru didn't actually have much control over liquefied earth. The moment it touched the hollow below, the softened rock and soil poured downward like a waterfall, and in short order a huge whirlpool-like cavity appeared in the ground above.
Once the opening at the surface grew wide enough, Uchiha Yoru even entered it himself, descending with the flowing rock. All the way down, he kept softening more stone, widening the shaft, smoothing out bends and angles, and reshaping the passage into the straightest cylindrical tunnel he could manage.
He continued downward until, at a little over six hundred meters, the ground suddenly vanished beneath his feet and he nearly fell.
The underground chamber had opened.
It was a very strange space.
It was huge, yet the ceiling nowhere rose higher than twelve meters. And instead of being one broad cavern hall, it was formed from more than thirty winding tunnels of different sizes. Yet although there were so many passages, they had no real vertical rise or fall. They spread outward like rays, extending flatly in every direction, leading who knew how far.
Uchiha Yoru didn't concern himself with where those tunnels went.
He only muttered, "What a weird cave."
After confirming that the underground space was large enough, he turned back and rose in a spiral path, widening the vertical shaft bit by bit along the way.
By the time Uchiha Yoru returned to the surface, the passage behind him had already been expanded into a giant sinkhole more than three hundred and fifty meters in diameter.
That alone already exceeded the limit of what Kirigakure shinobi could realistically block up.
But if Uchiha Yoru was going to make things difficult for Kirigakure, how could he make it so simple and direct that one glance would tell them they had no choice but to give up? That wouldn't count as much of a challenge at all.
A sly little smile curled at the corner of his mouth.
Like when he used to dig traps for his childhood companions, he began shaping stone spires upward. As the spires connected and spread outward to either side, they gradually sealed over the enormous opening, disguising it as a shallow depression shaped like a bowl.
In truth, the inside was hollow.
Only six opposing stone spires held the structure up, and none of it could be called sturdy.
At the center of the depression he left a narrow crack, and around that crack the structure was made especially thin. Once water collected to a depth of half a meter, it would collapse. That fine crack would then open into a large oval hole.
As the water level rose further, there would be additional collapses at depths of two meters and six meters. In the end, the full opening would expand to the entire three hundred and fifty meters, revealing a sinkhole so huge it would make anyone looking at it despair.
This was a sinkhole big enough to swallow an American aircraft carrier dropped flat into it.
Uchiha Yoru could picture it perfectly—after the whole thing gave way and its full scale was exposed, the Kirigakure shinobi who had worked so hard trying to block it would look at that abyss and feel exactly what true despair was.
Once the disguise was complete, Uchiha Yoru inspected it again and again. Only after confirming there was no flaw left did he finally leave in satisfaction.
When he returned to Kubota Village, Uchiha Shigenobu came to find him and reported the progress on every front, along with the results of their hunt for Kirigakure scouts.
Uchiha Yoru nodded and asked, "They were all killed?"
Uchiha Shigenobu's expression turned a little ugly, and he shook his head.
"We didn't kill them. They all committed suicide."
"Yoru-brother, why was it so hard even though we had so many people? And in the end, why couldn't we stop them from killing themselves?"
"Wasn't the Sharingan supposed to be the strongest bloodline limit?"
Uchiha Yoru patted him on the shoulder and said, "Battle doesn't depend only on ability. It also depends on experience and combat reactions. This is all your first time on a battlefield. Your combat experience is basically zero. The fact that you managed to force all those Kirigakure shinobi to kill themselves already proves your strength."
"Kirigakure calls itself the Bloody Mist. Their shinobi training preserved a great deal of the Warring States mentality, and the process is extremely brutal. Naturally, the shinobi it produces are cruel and cold-blooded as well. They aren't only cruel to enemies—they're just as cruel to comrades, and even to themselves. Killing teammates when things go bad, or committing suicide when escape becomes impossible, are all instinctive, almost natural actions to them."
"So it's completely normal that you couldn't capture a live Kirigakure shinobi. As long as you killed them all and let none of them escape, that's enough."
"Yes, I understand, Yoru-brother."
"Good. Keep working. Try to finish everything tonight and get some rest early."
Uchiha Yoru added, "The fact that we were able to catch seven Kirigakure shinobi today means their main body is already close enough. At most in another day, we'll be facing the real enemy."
"We're not afraid!"
"I am."
Uchiha Yoru's voice was so loud that Uchiha Shigenobu actually flinched and straightened himself at once.
"I'm afraid of you dying pointlessly."
"I'm afraid of failure caused by carelessness."
"I'm afraid that when we go back to the village, what I return to your families are corpses instead of living people!"
Uchiha Yoru reached out with both hands and gripped Uchiha Shigenobu's face firmly, looking straight at him as he said, "Go tell everyone this. I want every one of them serious. No arrogance, no underestimating the enemy, and no cowardice or fear in front of the enemy. Understood?"
Infected by Uchiha Yoru's emotion, Uchiha Shigenobu suddenly felt that the strange layer of unreality standing between himself and war had been pierced through.
His heart tightened involuntarily, but not to the point of panic.
He stood upright with great seriousness and promised, "I'll go tell everyone right now. I'll make sure they all get serious!"
"Go on."
Uchiha Yoru watched Shigenobu leave, a faint smile appearing at the corner of his mouth.
[Good. My genjutsu has improved a little again.]
People never truly shared the same joys and sorrows.
How could Uchiha Yoru's own feelings toward war possibly have been transferred directly into Shigenobu's heart?
Naturally, genjutsu had played its part.
Taking advantage of the trust already built between them, along with the suggestion seeds planted earlier, Uchiha Yoru used increasingly refined illusion techniques to project his own mentality into Uchiha Shigenobu's inner world.
And that was only the seed of the genjutsu.
It also had a transmissive quality.
At least within the Tiger Unit, it could spread from person to person through eye contact, passing repeatedly back and forth, strengthening itself through overlap, until it formed exactly the sort of mindset best suited to novices heading into war.
With that, Uchiha Yoru's final battlefield preparation was complete.
His confidence in victory had risen to eighty-five percent.
The rest could only be won on the battlefield itself.
As a commander, he had ultimately still failed to achieve his preferred condition—ensuring victory first, and only then opening the battle.
Truly regrettable.
...
Kubota Village lay less than eighty kilometers from the coast.
The reason the Kirigakure shinobi had still not reached it was that this section of the coastline was extremely complicated, full of reefs and shallows, making it unsuitable for the Kirigakure fleet to approach.
The fleet had chosen a landing point far to the north, on a beach about three hundred and fifty kilometers away. That coastline was free of reefs, and the sand there was solid enough to allow the building of wooden ramps for unloading supplies directly from ships.
But once they weren't engaged in massive troop movement, Kirigakure shinobi did not need to remain constrained by logistics.
They could land almost anywhere.
That was exactly why, despite Kumo and Konoha fighting semi-jointly against them for two months, they had still failed to clear Kirigakure shinobi from the Land of Hot Water.
They were like cockroaches.
No matter how many were killed, they never seemed to run out.
As Konoha's main force gathered to face the Kirigakure advance, infiltration and reconnaissance by Kirigakure shinobi became even more active. Their presence could now be found practically anywhere in the Land of Hot Water.
By the time the Tiger Unit arrived at Kubota Village, it had already been spotted by infiltrating Kirigakure shinobi, and intelligence on the large-scale war preparations being made by the Uchiha was quickly passed upward to Kirigakure's high command.
By now, Kirigakure had already obtained intelligence on the first defensive line Orochimaru established.
Naturally, they could see that the Kubota hill was the key point in this battle.
It might even determine the fate of the entire Land of Hot Water.
If they could reach it within a day, seize Kubota Village within half a day after that, then they could smash through Orochimaru's force in one sweep and directly capture Tangquan City, the key border point between the Land of Fire and the Land of Hot Water.
Hozuki Sakuyuki tapped the map where Tangquan City lay and said, "If we take this place, then with only a small force left behind, we can hold off any Konoha counterattack. Then we can turn around and deal with Kumogakure."
"But the best outcome would be if Kumogakure sees Konoha collapse, pretends to have only minor friction with us on the surface, while secretly attacking Konoha shinobi and quietly taking a bite out of the Land of Fire."
Kaguya Ren burst into loud laughter and said, "What exactly is Orochimaru thinking? He actually adjusted troop strength at a key position today, and reduced it from three hundred down to a hundred. Is that stinking snake giving up the first line?"
"That's not impossible. Konoha's numbers are low already, and they moved more than two thousand aside just to guard against Kumo. The disparity got even worse. Pulling back as much as possible would shorten the distance to the Land of Fire and make it easier to receive reinforcements and supplies."
"So we need to move quickly. Before Konoha's support arrives, we take the entire Land of Hot Water in one stroke!"
"In that case, let me lead the opening attack." Kaguya Ren's eyes gleamed with excitement. "A key point like that should naturally be cracked open by the Kaguya clan's hard bones."
Before Hozuki Sakuyuki could speak, the Yuki clan's Rei coldly opened his mouth.
"Hah. As expected of the mighty Kaguya clan. You want to rush right in against a position held by only a hundred men. But when we reach Tangquan City and face Orochimaru himself, will you suddenly lose your nerve instead?"
"What did you say?"
"I said… you bully the weak and fear the strong."
"You damn pretty-boy bastard, I'll kill you right now!"
"Hah. Idiot. So all you can do is act fierce inside your own camp?"
Kaguya Ren was boiling with anger, but he truly did not dare lay hands on Rei.
It wasn't because Rei was pretty.
It was because this man was the strongest Ice Release shinobi in the Yuki clan after the Third Mizukage, a user of techniques like Demonic Ice Mirrors, and an extremely troublesome opponent.
Far from being angry, Hozuki Sakuyuki was actually grateful that Rei had stepped in to absorb Kaguya Ren's temper. That gave him room to maneuver.
"Enough. This is only the first clash against Konoha. Let someone else take the lead."
He offered Kaguya Ren an easy way down.
"What sense is there in throwing out your trump card at the very start of the war? If you use it now, what will we do later when we face the real enemy?"
Then he gestured toward the representatives of the smaller clans, who hadn't dared speak.
"Or are you saying we should send them to challenge one of the Three Ninja—Orochimaru himself?"
Because of his bloodline, Kaguya Ren was naturally hot-tempered and impulsive, but at least he still knew enough to distinguish what was sensible. Since Hozuki Sakuyuki had offered him a ladder down, he naturally climbed down from it at once.
"Fine. I'll listen to you this time. But the next time I meet Orochimaru, he's mine."
Rei's beautiful eyes turned lazily with clear contempt.
"Sure. As long as you can actually beat Orochimaru, I won't fight you for him."
Once the relationship among the three main figures relaxed, the atmosphere in the command room immediately became lighter. Before long, the shinobi were even chatting and laughing while beginning their evening meal.
As time passed, the shadow of that mysterious figure they had encountered at sea gradually faded.
And from the moment Kirigakure landed until now, the progress of the war had gone extremely smoothly. They could already see the outline of a phase victory, and that put everyone in an excellent mood.
But by nightfall, that good mood was completely destroyed.
"The Third Mizukage was attacked and severely wounded?"
"Six Anbu from the Mizukage's direct guard were killed?"
"The Mizukage building was damaged, and thirty-seven shinobi died?"
Kaguya Ren asked immediately, "Who did it? Did we kill him?"
The messenger shinobi answered, "We don't know. We… we failed to catch the enemy. Every shinobi who saw him either died on the spot or lost their memory."
It took Hozuki Sakuyuki quite a while to recover from the shock.
Then he immediately waved over two shinobi, pointed at the messenger, and ordered, "Lock him up. Until this battle is over, no one is to see him!"
Then he looked around at all the jonin present, his expression dark and murderous as he asked, "Everyone here understands what a gag order is, correct?"
"We understand."
"Rest assured, for the sake of army morale, none of us will speak carelessly."
Rei then said, "We have to end this battle as quickly as possible. No matter how tightly we block the information, it'll still leak out bit by bit. By the time it does, morale will have dropped and the war will become much harder to fight."
"Earlier, the plan was to strike Kubota Village tomorrow with two hundred men. To be safe, I suggest raising that to three hundred. Take it in one blow."
Hozuki Sakuyuki nodded in agreement.
"That makes sense. We'll do exactly that."
Kaguya Ren proposed, "Then should we send shinobi out right now? Maybe we can catch the Konoha side completely off guard."
Hozuki Sakuyuki shook his head immediately.
"Absolutely not. The shinobi squads below us already know tomorrow's attack is coming, but they don't know how many men we're actually sending. So in their eyes, increasing the force changes nothing."
"The only thing that would let them realize our plan has changed is altering the timing. We cannot let them know that."
Kaguya Ren answered sourly, "Got it."
Kirigakure's Bloody Mist policy had not only produced shinobi who were unusually cruel.
It had also produced shinobi who were unusually fond of rebelling against those above them.
As Mencius once told King Xuan of Qi: if a ruler treats his ministers like hands and feet, the ministers treat him like heart and soul; if he treats them like dogs and horses, they treat him like an ordinary man; if he treats them like dirt and weeds, they treat him like a bandit and enemy.
So long as one replaced "ruler" with "village," the final line fit Kirigakure perfectly.
When Kirigakure treated its own shinobi as less than human—crushing them cruelly in peacetime, spending them casually in war—then naturally those shinobi would come to hate Kirigakure itself.
When the situation in Kirigakure was stable, the upper shinobi could suppress the resentment of the lower ranks.
But when the situation turned unstable and uncertain, the lower ranks would seize the chance to rebel.
Even if they could not beat the higher-ranking shinobi, they could still flee at the first opportunity, become free rogue ninjas, and drive Kirigakure's entire situation toward collapse anyway.
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