Chapter 36.5- One Thousand Hands

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A week since we had been sent out here, and there was no doubt that Suna had wisened up to what was going on now. Uraume still kept an eye on their movements and found that they had begun to panic in small ways. The officer in charge, a no-name Jounin had already held close to a dozen meetings with his best agents so far. We also got a front row seat to the effect of Shiba’s bugs in one. Sadly, the tainted water had not made it as far as we’d expected in terms of what it had been able to achieve.

Only about a dozen shinobi had died before their medical shinobi had been able to trace the water as the source. The sight of giant bugs ripping themselves out of screaming humans was not something that I was going to be forgetting anytime soon. After that, their first recourse had been to begin boiling the water before using it. Sadly, they had the common sense to have a single chunin test the water before they began dispersing it among their troops. Sadly for them, then the eight-hour window that they had given hadn’t been sufficient for the Chunin with his pitiful chakra reserves to show symptoms of infestation. Dozens died after they cleared the boiled water for use before they banned it entirely. Now, shinobi were forced to rely on their own stores of water which were being rationed extremely. They’d sent letters asking for more, but each of those had been intercepted.

I was sure someone would be sent tomorrow morning but for now the camp was quiet and still so I spent my time reading instead of watching them. What was I reading, you might ask? Hashiirama’s notes. These weren’t about the Mokuton. Those notes had been given to me in the vaguer hope that I’d manifest the Kekkei Genkai. Instead, these were about general ninjutsu and his exploration with Senjutsu. The Senjutsu part had only been discovered this evening when I finished with the first of the journals.

This energy, it is like nothing I have ever felt before. It is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. When I first discovered it in the Blessed Grove, it had been so bountiful and plentiful, like there was too much of it for the world itself to even contain. Now, I have meditated for hours on end and can not find anything. Tobi insists that the water in the blessed forest must have had something mixed into it and that I merely hallucinated the energy. I know what I felt. I know it was real. Something tells me that in this energy lies the answer to questions aplenty. Questions I might never even have known to ask, and the gnawing inquiries that keep me up at night. I shall ask Madara about it the next time we meet. 

Reading that, I felt my heart skip a beat. There was no way. This was the first mention of Madara in any of the Journals. I’d thought that was strange from the onset, but now I was beginning to understand. These journals, they were his. The others had been for the clan- the treatises on ninjutsu and Mokuton were for the clan to pass down from Son to Son. These ones, they were for his own thoughts. That’s why the writing style was so different. I adjusted my back against the unmoving Oak bark of the tree I leaned against and continued to read, devouring every word.