Chapter 11
Chapter 11
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Translator: Ace
Chapter: 11
Chapter Title: Pledge Allegiance to Me!
-----------------------------------------------------------------
This pain, as if ten thousand shuriken were stabbing into his brain, was something Hizashi had only recently experienced.
It happened while he was watching Hinata's training. He had shown deep killing intent toward the extraordinarily talented Hinata, which was noticed by Hyuga Hiashi standing nearby. Hiashi then activated the Caged Bird Seal to punish him.
And he did it right in front of Neji.
But why did the mysterious person before him know the hand seals to activate the Caged Bird Seal curse mark?
This was the Hyuga clan's most closely guarded secret, never leaked outside for hundreds of years. It was passed down only through word of mouth from successive clan heads and elders.
No one outside the main house could possibly know it!
And in the hundreds of years since the Caged Bird Seal was created, there had never been a single instance of a branch house member using it!
Yet this man before him was repeatedly shattering Hizashi's understanding of Hyuga clan traditions!
As Uzumaki Menma finished forming the seals, the splitting headache finally eased for Hizashi.
"You're not from the Hyuga Clan!"
Hyuga Hizashi gasped for breath, staring at the mysterious person before him with lingering fear. This was the only thing he could be certain of.
"You're also not one of those who once massacred my Hyuga Clan!"
Before he knew it, Hyuga Hizashi had accepted the "historical truth" that Uzumaki Menma had instilled in him.
The Hyuga Clan wasn't without instances of Byakugan leaking out. For example, Ao from the Hidden Mist had stolen a main house Hyuga ninja's Byakugan during the Third Great Ninja War, earning him the moniker Byakugan Killer.
But such incidents were rare outliers, hardly enough to justify the Hyuga Clan widely implementing the Caged Bird Seal.
The only explanation that made sense was a powerful external enemy—one that even the Hyuga Clan struggled to oppose—which forced the creation of the Caged Bird Seal.
"Your target is that giant eyeball fused from countless Byakugan, isn't it!"
Hyuga Hizashi recalled the devastating power of that Giant Tenseigan, his voice trembling slightly.
He wasn't a fool. On the contrary, Hizashi was quite intelligent—smart enough, even when forced to commit suicide, to leave behind a so-called "suicide note" instructing Neji not to resent the main house.
But Hiashi had kept that letter until the first Chunin Exams, when he finally handed it over to Neji.
Wasn't that just another way Hizashi had protected Neji?
"You're very smart. That's one of the reasons I chose you over your brother."
Uzumaki Menma didn't deny his ambitions.
The existence of the Giant Tenseigan was equivalent to an orbital weapon, capable of launching attacks on the shinobi world directly from the moon, with no way for anyone in the shinobi world to fight back.
Naturally, Uzumaki Menma wanted to seize such a superweapon for himself.
Even in the world of Tsukuyomi of Limited Duration, he had searched for traces of the Giant Tenseigan and the Otsutsuki Clan on the moon, but scouring the Hyuga family's archives had yielded nothing.
Hearing the man compare him to his brother, Hizashi's knuckles turned white.
"You're no worse than him. And I can sense you've already grasped the essence of the Eight Trigrams Sixty-Four Palms. So why didn't you use it in the previous battle?"
Uzumaki Menma continued to prod Hizashi with words.
That's right...
Recalling the earlier fight, if not for the death crisis triggered by the mysterious person's attack on that one blind spot, Hizashi never would have used Rotation.
"I... am not inferior to him..."
Hizashi murmured to himself.
This was the deep-seated trauma that had plagued him for over twenty years.
Simply because he was born a mere dozen minutes later, he—as a twin—had been relegated to branch house status. Not only was the Caged Bird Seal branded on his forehead, barring him from learning advanced Gentle Fist taijutsu and Hyuga clan secret techniques.
Even his own children—his descendants for generations to come—would all be forcibly branded with the Caged Bird Seal!