Konoha: The Absolute Justice of the Uchiha.

Chapter 403 Containers

"Alright." Chi Quan stood up and put the tools into the canvas bag. "For the next three weeks, keep them in a place with diffused light, and avoid direct sunlight."

Water in the morning, but in winter, once a week – and by once a week I don't mean water randomly, but rather insert your finger two centimeters into the soil; if it feels wet, then don't water; water only when it feels dry.

If you're unsure, come see me. I'll come check on you once a week.

Mrs. Yamaguchi took an envelope out of her apron pocket. The envelope was thick, and judging from its shape, it contained money.

She slipped the envelope into Chi Quan's hand.

"This is the medical fee."

It's not much—you can keep it.

Chi Quan tucked his cane under his arm, freeing both hands to push the envelope back.

No consultation fee will be charged.

But I want to replace it with a pothos plant.

My teammate's pothos plant is dying, and I want to replace it with a healthier one.

Mrs. Yamaguchi paused for a moment, then smiled.

She went into the flower shop and took a potted green ivy from the shelf.

The leaves of this pothos are glossy, and the vines hang down from the edge of the pot for nearly a meter. Each leaf is dark green, and there are no withered or scorched edges.

The basin is a white porcelain basin with a blue carp printed on its side.

"This pot is for you."

"And after you help me revive my clivia, you can buy flowers from me at cost price."

Chi Quan took the pothos, looked at the carp in the white porcelain basin, and said thank you.

That evening, he placed the pothos on the coffee table in Kai's apartment.

Kai brought out two cups of tea from the kitchen. He paused for a moment when he saw the potted green ivy. His original pot was on the windowsill, and the leaves had all turned yellow, and the vines were dry and looked like a tangled mess of rope.

"When did you buy it?" Kai asked, pointing to the new pothos plant.

"today.

"Mrs. Yamaguchi gave it to me." Ikezumi picked up her teacup and took a sip.

The tea is barley tea. Kai's family doesn't have any other tea besides barley tea because Chi Quan said last time he came that his constitution wasn't suitable for drinking green tea.

"Where's the original pot?" Kai asked.

"I threw it away."

"The roots are all rotten, there's no way to save it." Chi Quan flicked a leaf of the pothos with his finger, and the leaf trembled slightly under his fingertip. "This pot is new, there are drainage holes at the bottom, the soil is nutrient soil, and I've already watered it for the first time."

Remember—water your pothos once a week, watering thoroughly but not to the point of waterlogging.

Don't try to show more love by watering it every day; watering it every day is just killing it.

Kai looked at the potted green ivy; its lush vines cascaded down the edge of the white porcelain pot, adding a touch of life to the otherwise sparsely furnished living room.

He reached out and touched a leaf; its surface was smooth and slightly cool.

"We replaced the pothos with a new one, saved the clivia, found the cat, and retrieved the photo of Granny Persimmon." Kai sat on the sofa and placed the barley tea on the coffee table. "You've done more this week than many people do in a month of seeing patients at the hospital."

"This is basic logic." Chi Quan put down his teacup and slowly circled his finger around the rim. "Whether a ninja is carrying out an A-rank mission or helping an old lady find a photo, they are essentially solving a problem."

Problems are not distinguished by size, but by whether they have been discovered.

I spotted it, so I took care of it.

Kai looked at the pool.

Chi Quan sat at the other end of the sofa, his cane leaning against the armrest. Green ivy vines hung down from the white porcelain pot, just beside his hand.

Chi Quan's finger unconsciously flicked the vine's leaves, and the leaves spun halfway around before bouncing back.

"And what about your own problem?" Kay said.

Chi Quan paused for a moment.

"What's the problem?"

"It's your own problem." Kai repeated, without emphasizing his words, but looking into Chi Quan's eyes, "After you came back from Pheasant Feather Valley, you helped others solve all sorts of problems every day: finding cats, rescuing flowers, finding photos, doing rehabilitation, and revising prescriptions."

But you haven't mentioned a single one of your own problems.

How is the muscle atrophy in your right leg recovering? What time do you go to bed at night? Have you been secretly doing chakra recovery training?

Chi Quan remained silent for about five seconds.

It was completely dark outside the window, and the sounds of pedestrians returning home late and the occasional bark of a dog could be heard from the streets of Konoha.

"The strength of my right leg has recovered to level four plus, which is half a level higher than when I was discharged from the hospital."

I go to bed between 1 and 2 a.m. every day, about an hour later than before I was injured.

"I didn't secretly do chakra training. Shizuko wrote 'chakra is prohibited' on my medical record, and I wouldn't cheat on a surgical record that I signed myself." He answered point by point, his voice steady, as if reading a medical report, "But I am indeed thinking about something."

"What is it?"

Chi Quan pulled his fingers off the pothos leaves and placed them on his knees.

There were several scratches on the back of his hand that were almost healed, and the old scar on his ring finger gleamed faintly white under the light.

"The data beneath Pheasant Valley," he said. "Kabuto probably destroyed some of it during his evacuation, but it's impossible that he destroyed it all."

The energy surge from the ground when the main root breaks would paralyze a large area of ​​his facilities, but his archives on the ground floor should still be intact.

The complete experimental records of the Divine Tree tissue culture, the construction parameters of the chakra field for White Zetsu cultivation, and the engineering blueprints for the underground facilities—if Konoha obtained this information, it would have at least 40% more initiative in dealing with potential threats related to the Divine Tree in the future.

After hearing this, Kai put down his teacup.

His gaze shifted from Ikezumi's eyes to the hand Ikezumi placed on the coffee table—that hand was steadyer than ever before when she spoke of "Chiba Valley information," so steady that the water in the teacup didn't even ripple.

"When are you going back?" Kai asked.

It's not "Do you want to go back?" or "Can you not go back?", it's "When are you going back?"

Chi Quan looked up at Kai. Kai's expression was calm, but beneath that calmness lay something he had known for many years—something that said, "I know I can't stop you, so I choose to go with you."

Chi Quan looked at Kai.

Kai looked at the pool.

The ivy vines hung quietly over the edge of the coffee table between the two people, like a green, still, yet still growing dividing line.

Then Chi Quan's lips twitched.

"Eight weeks later," he said, "when your ribs are fully healed, when my chakra has recovered enough to support basic combat, and when Neji and Tenten are fully recovered."

We'll go back in eight weeks.

Kai picked up his teacup and gently tapped it against Chi Quan's.

Both teacups were ordinary white porcelain cups. When they were touched together, the sound was very light and crisp, like one small piece of porcelain tapping another.

"It's a deal," Kai said.

"It's a deal," Chi Quan said.

The message arrived on a rainy evening.

That day, Konoha was experiencing its heaviest rain since the beginning of autumn. The raindrops pounded against the windowpane of the Hokage's office, creating a dense, arrhythmic sound.

The ginkgo tree outside the window was shaking violently in the rain, and its leaves were knocked off and stuck to the wet windowsill, like letters soaked and ruined by the water.

Tsunade sat behind her desk, the ashtray in front of her already piled with four cigarette butts, and a fifth one was emitting thin wisps of smoke between her fingers.

In front of her lay an intelligence scroll that had just been delivered by the Anbu Decoding Team. The scroll paper was waterproof, but the edges were still stained with a small, blurry ink stain from the wet handprints of the messenger ninja.

Shizune stood beside the desk, holding a tea tray in her hand. The teacups on the tray had gone cold, and Tsunade hadn't touched them.

Shizune watched as Tsunade read the scroll twice from beginning to end, and then put it down halfway through the third reading, stubbing out her fifth cigarette in the ashtray.

"Call Guy's team over." Tsunade's voice was very low, not intentionally, but because of the content of the information. "All of them."

Now."

Jingyin put down the tea tray, turned around, and went out the door.

Her footsteps faded into the distance in the corridor, eventually being completely swallowed up by the sound of the rain.

When the four members of Team Guy were summoned to the Hokage's office, their reactions were quite different.

Kai was pulled directly from the training ground. He was still wearing that tight-fitting clothes that were soaked through by the rain, his hair was sticking to his forehead and dripping water. When he entered the room, he left a trail of wet footprints on the floor.

Tenten came with Neji. She was helping Neji with chakra recovery training—not combat training, but some basic chakra circulation exercises. They were quietly doing it in a corner of the training ground. When Shizune found them, they were both still wearing their training clothes.

Chi Quan was the last to arrive. He walked from the direction of the hospital, leaning on his cane. The rain was so heavy that half of the hem of his white coat was wet, and his glasses were covered in rainwater. The first thing he did after entering the room was not to look at Tsunade, but to take out a dry cloth from his pocket and wipe his glasses.

"Close the door," Tsunade said.

Neji, who was at the very back, closed the door, the sound of the lock clicking into its groove being drowned out by a clap of thunder outside the window.

The lightning illuminated everyone's face in the office for a moment. Tsunade frowned, Guy's eyes appeared exceptionally dark in the reflection of the rain, Tenten unconsciously clenched her fists, Neji's Byakugan flashed briefly in the lightning before returning to normal, and a water stain remained on Izumi's glasses, which looked like a very thin, silver crack in the lightning.

Tsunade did not ask them to sit down, nor did she exchange pleasantries.

She pushed the intelligence scroll to the front of the table and tapped it twice with her finger.

"The Land of Water".

Three days ago, the Hidden Mist Village's Anbu detected a burst of chakra on an unnamed island in the eastern sea.

"The scale of the outbreak—" Tsunade paused, her fingers pressing a tiny indentation into the wax seal of the scroll, "—is on the same order of magnitude as the chakra density of a perfect Tailed Beast Ball."

Kai took a step forward and bent down to look at the scroll on the table.

His eyes darted rapidly through the dense text of intelligence reports, his lips silently uttering a few keywords: "sea area," "nameless island," "tailed beast-level chakra," and "unknown origin."

"Which tailed beast?" Kai asked, looking up.

"That's the problem." Tsunade leaned back in her chair, which creaked loudly. 66

All nine tailed beasts are on the register.

The Jinchūriki of the nine tailed beasts—Shukaku (One-Tailed) of Sunagakure, Matatabi (Two-Tailed) and Gyūki (Eight-Tailed) of Kumogakure, Isobu (Three-Tailed) and Saiken (Six-Tailed) of Kirigakure, Son Goku (Four-Tailed) and Kokuō (Five-Tailed) of Iwagakure, Chōmei (Seven-Tailed) of Takigakure, and Kurama (Nine-Tailed) of Konoha—are all under the supervision of their respective ninja villages. In the past three days, none of the tailed beasts have left their sealing containers.

After detecting the chakra burst, the Hidden Mist Anbu immediately compared the tailed beast chakra waveforms, and the results did not match any of the nine known tailed beasts.

The office was silent for about three seconds.

The sound of rain became exceptionally clear in the silence—the sound of rain hitting the glass, the sound of rain flowing down from the eaves, the sound of raindrops making bubbles and bursting in the puddles on the ground.

In the three seconds of silence, Chi Quan put his glasses back on and gently turned his cane on the floor.

"The waveforms don't match," Chi Quan said, his voice not loud, but each word seemed to squeeze through the gaps in the sound of the rain. "Waveform comparison is the gold standard for identifying tailed beasts."

The chakra waveforms of the nine tailed beasts each have their own characteristic frequency bands. The One-Tail has a large high-frequency oscillation component, while the Nine-Tail has the strongest low-frequency fundamental wave.

If the waveform doesn't match any of the nine tailed beasts, it means that the chakra released this time doesn't belong to any known tailed beast.

However, its chakra density reached the level of a Tailed Beast Ball. The only chakra sources in the entire ninja world that could reach that level were the Tailed Beasts.

"And the Divine Tree," Neji suddenly said.

He had been leaning against the wall by the door since he entered the office, his arms crossed over his chest. The white pupils of his eyes emitted a faint white glow in the dim office. "The chakra waveform of the Divine Tree is not in any known comparison sample library."

We've seen the chakra density of the main root of the Divine Tree underground—if all the chakra from that main root were compressed into a single point and released, theoretically it could reach the level of a Tailed Beast Ball.

Tsunade turned her gaze to Neji.

Her eyes shone brightly in the dim light, a kind of ominous brightness, as if she had heard the very speculation she least wanted to hear being spoken.

"Twenty-four hours after the first detection, the Hidden Mist Anbu detected a second burst of chakra."

This time, they pinpointed the exact location of the outbreak's source—an underground cave in the central area of ​​the nameless island.

A four-person reconnaissance team was dispatched to investigate the cave.

"The result—" Tsunade turned to the second page of the scroll, where a few lines of text were written in red ink. It was the handwriting of the Kirigakure ANBU commander, and the handwriting was very messy. Some of the strokes left deep grooves on the paper. "The four-man squad was wiped out."

Before all his men perished, the reconnaissance captain uttered a single word with his last ounce of consciousness.

She looked up at the four people in front of her.

"container".

He uttered only this one word.

container.

When the word fell in the office, no one spoke.

Kai's brows furrowed even lower, and his lips pressed into a thin line.

Every day she stared at the floor in front of her, where Kai's wet footprints were slowly spreading.

Neji's Byakugan pupils shrank the instant he heard that word.

Chi Quan's cane stopped on the floor; the hand that had been unconsciously turning the handle suddenly stopped moving.