Chapter 67.6- One Thousand Hands

Nowhere immediately obvious, and my choices were beginning to be limited. If I couldn’t find the cells and harness their power, then my options for Uraume’s prosthetic would have to involve mechanically designing one like a puppet’s arm. I still had the remains of the puppet I’d stolen from that Suna Jounin to earn how they worked in concept and crafting one couldn’t be that hard. I had the resources to hire all the best builders in the village. The only issue with that was that it would not be as useful for the gentle fist— it was more likely to be useless than not to be completely honest. Maybe I could come up with an alternative but anything less than Hashirama cells would be a poor substitute.

So I did the drastic thing. I had a reputation for acting first and thinking later, but I had thought this particular action through multiple times. If I couldn’t find where his cells had been harvested, then maybe they hadn’t been harvested yet. Sure, with how long he’d been dead for, there would only be a skeleton at the very most, but it was something I had to try. That was why I had a clone at home creating an alibi and making dinner with both Mito and Kushina. That was also why I was doing this in the dead of the night dressed in the most nondescript clothes I had. Black and black and covered with the camouflage jutsu. I’d even gone to the trouble of marking the area with seals to prevent the Byakugan from penetrating the walls.

Ans so I entered Konoha’s cemetery. It said something that basically every other clan made use of their clan’s burial grounds while the Senju did not. It wasn’t accidental— like a lot of things, it was designed to show that we were all in. So I ventured to the end of it where there was a massive edifice. Tobirama’s was next to his, equally as grand and if everything went well, then I would get the one next to his. I planted my hand on the ground in front of the marble structure. If I did this right, there would be no disturbance. No one would even know that I was here. I turned the ground to mud, and did the same across a straight line to the coffin.

Creating the mud was not enough. Next, I bent it to my will, using the mud to move the coffin while being careful to keep the rest of the surrounding earth undisturbed. Ideally, this would happen with no one ever being able to to tell that anything had happened in th first place. And it worked. He coffin moved slowly but surely until it floated right above ground, ferried by dozens of tiny little mud hands. I looked at it with a breath holding in my chest, and a feeling of awe suffusing my very being.

It was a simple coffin. It was made of wood— at least it was clear to see that it had originally comprised just a purely wooden structure. Now, there were leaves, vines, all sorts of greenery around it. My Grandfather’s chakra, even after his death, it still gave life to so much. It was beautiful. But sadly, I was going to have to mess with it a small bit. With a flick of my kunai, I cut straight through the vines and other plants that covered the coffin’s opening so I could swing it open.

With how little time I had for all this in general, I probably spent way too much of it just taking in the moment before I moved to open it. It was that ever present ticking clock that someone would decide to come see a family member so late at night or a Hyuga member of the temporary policing unit would come investigate why their view of the Cemetery was blocked off that forced me into motion in the end. I moved, and instead of using my mud or wind please, I pried it open with my bare hands before swinging it flat open.

The inside of the coffin was many things— it was white and it was cushioned, and it was filled with flowers that still hadn’t died. But there was one thing it wasn’t— Hashirama’s final resting place. His body wasn’t here.