Konoha: Superman template, the spoiled brat becomes strong.

Before her lay a faded gavel, the silver bell on her wrist jingling with each movement: "Last time we talked about how the First Hokage, Hashirama Senju, erected a monument at the Valley of the End. The inscription on it wasn't 'The Name of the Victor,' but rather…"

"Shut up!" The constable from the Shi family kicked over the tea table below the stage, and the teacups shattered at her feet.

The fat man at the head of the group gripped a fire-and-water stick, the red tassel at the end brushing against the wooden hairpin in her hair: "You lowly slut, you dare to talk about the First Generation? Be careful you don't cut out your tongue!"

Kitahara Shizuku looked at the official badge on his waist and suddenly smiled.

She picked up the wolf-hair brush from the table, dipped it in vermilion ink, and wrote the four characters "Three Hundred Farmers" on the lantern paper: "Dear neighbors, these three hundred people are the common people who followed the first lord to open up the fields and control the water. The historian burned their memorial tablets, but he could not burn away the traces of their lives—" She picked up the brush and wrote "Li Ada, Wang Erniu" as well. Before the ink was dry, half of the paper was torn by the bailiff's stick.

"Throw yourself into the river!" She suddenly raised the lantern above her head, the silver bells jingling on her wrist.

As the constable lunged at her, she spun around to avoid him and threw the lantern hard into the moat.

The red lanterns swirled and floated downwards, and her apprentices threw dozens of lanterns one after another—they were made of bamboo ribs that she had worked through the night, with tiny characters carved on the inside of each bamboo rib with a fine knife.

"Look!" someone exclaimed, pointing at the river.

As the red lanterns floated across the stone bridge, the moonlight just happened to spill across the water, reflecting the small characters on the bamboo ribs: "In the spring of the first year of the first dynasty, an imperial edict was issued: The people may discuss state affairs together, but the historian may not record them alone."

In the cellar of Shufang Street, Tanaka Hisashi's hands were trembling.

He held the green membrane poured from the earthenware jar, the spores trembling gently between his fingers, like living things.

When he dipped the blank sheet of paper at the bottom of the urn into the ancestral inkwell, ripples suddenly appeared on the surface of the water. The ink seemed to move across the paper as if it were alive, and finally condensed into a line of words: "Use your knife to carve our history."

“Grandpa…” He touched the hidden compartment in the wall, where his grandfather had carved the engraving knife for the “Civil Code”.

The red lacquer on the scabbard has peeled off, revealing the sandalwood grain underneath—this is a carving knife personally bestowed by the first generation, which was used by my grandfather to carve the thousand wooden tablets that were burned by the Shige Pavilion.

The sound of the carving knife in the dead of night was even softer than the chirping of cicadas.

Tanaka knelt on the bluestone slab, the back of his knife against the wooden board, the tip of the knife slowly advancing along the words in his mind.

When the six characters “Fire Chronicles, Volume One” were finished being carved, the window paper had already turned white.

He blew away the sawdust and saw that the words on the woodblock looked as if they had grown out of the ground, carrying the warmth of the wood grain—this was a woodblock that had been stimulated by inscription spores. With each page printed, the spores would take root in the paper fibers, making the words indelible.

Three days later, at dawn, the first stack of "The Chronicles of the People of Fire" was stuffed into the porter's basket and carried into the city, mixed in with vegetables and tofu.

As the seventh vegetable basket turned into the seventh alley, a broken monument on a mountaintop somewhere in the Land of Fire suddenly emitted a bluish light.

Bai Ye stood on the ruins of Guiyuan Shrine, the wrist guard on his palm burning hot.

The First Hokage's chakra surged like a river in his blood. He gazed at the morning mist in the direction of the City of Fire and saw a few faint blue rays piercing through the mist—that was the signal of the awakening of the inscribed spores, the sound of the wood-carved words breathing on the pages.

"It's starting." He chuckled softly, his knuckles touching his lips, his gaze piercing the morning mist like a knife.

The wind lifted the corner of his clothes, revealing a fragment of a ceramic urn hanging at his waist—a keepsake that shared the same origin as the carving knife used by the Tanaka family.

In a village at the foot of the mountain, a child ran across the bluestone slabs carrying a newly bought copy of "The Chronicles of the Fire People." The pages were blown open by the wind, and the seven characters "Author: Anonymous Commoner" shone brightly in the morning light.

Bai Ye's fingertips trembled slightly, and the cries of returning crows echoed from afar.

When he looked up, he saw wisps of smoke rising from the direction of the City of Fire—not ashes from the crematorium, but the printing press of the bookstore burning new paper, the fragrance of ink mixed with pine smoke, writing their own history for the people of the world.

Chapter 974 The Historians Rebel

The broken monument of Guiyuan Shrine gleamed with a bluish-gray hue in the morning mist. Bai Ye's gaze, which was fixed on the direction of the Fire Capital, suddenly froze—he could clearly sense that seven extremely faint blue rays were winding along the bluestone paths of the seven alleys, the tremors of the spores of the "Chronicles of the Fire People" awakening within the pages.

"Half a day earlier than expected." He chuckled softly, his Adam's apple bobbing as the chakra surging within the First Hokage's bloodline seeped from his fingertips into the soil beneath his feet.

Tender green vines immediately sprouted from the crack in the ground, climbing up the fissure of the broken monument and solidifying in his palm into a piece of moss-covered well wall fragment—a sample he had peeled from the century-old well in the city center when he infiltrated the City of Fire yesterday.

With his fingertips gently stroking the rough surface of the moss, Byakuya closed his eyes and held his breath, channeling Wood Release chakra into it like a thin stream.

He could feel the tiny spores traveling along the veins of the moss, planting seeds of inscriptions within the damp cell walls. "Three days is enough for them to take root." He released his grip, and the fragment fell to the ground with a "thud," shattering into a few green dust particles.

Three days later, at dawn, a group of children surrounded the old well in the western market of the Fire Capital.

The little girl with her hair in two buns stood on tiptoe, reaching for the well wall, and recited in a clear, crisp voice, "The real historian—"

“Not in the palace!” The boy in the coarse cloth jacket quickly added the second half of the sentence. His index finger was poking at the moss growing wildly on the well wall. The originally gray plants had grown dark veins, which were clearly written in small characters: “The real historian is not in the palace, but in the alley.”

"In the alley—" The children clapped their hands and spun around, the nursery rhyme-like ending notes hitting the green tiles and white walls, startling the sparrows under the eaves into fluttering flight.

The old servant sweeping the street stood at the corner, broom in hand. Hearing the clear, childlike voice, his Adam's apple bobbed. As the children ran off and he bent down to sweep the fallen leaves, he softly hummed, "The true historian isn't in the palace, but in the alleyways..."

In the copying room of the inner courtyard of the Shige Pavilion, Fujiwara Shizuka's wolf-hair brush fell "slap" onto the Xuan paper, leaving a smudged stain of ink.

She stared at the revised edition of "The Story of the Fourth Hokage" on her desk, her fingertips digging deeply into her palms—when she turned to the "Shadow Substitute Agreement" chapter, she noticed that several ink stains were unusually thick. She tried to wipe them with developing solution, and the back of the paper revealed light brown writing: "Kazekage Rasa refused to sign the Shadow Substitute Agreement and later disappeared."

Memories from ten years ago suddenly flooded back.

At that time, she was a servant in the Imperial Archives. One rainy night, she was serving tea to the clerk on night duty when she saw a carriage covered with a black cloth drive into the underground garage.

The driver was wearing a straw hat, and the wind lifted a corner of the carriage curtain, revealing half of a sleeve adorned with gold sand patterns—a pattern exclusive to the Wind Shadow.

The following morning at court, Luo Sha announced that he was "in seclusion" and never appeared again.

“I see…” Her fingernails almost dug into the sandalwood table. Her gaze swept over the stack of proofs of “Contemporary Essentials” on the table. Suddenly, she grabbed the top copy, used a silver hairpin to open the interlayer, and stuffed the developed page inside.

As she turned around, she deliberately knocked over the bronze crane lamp on the corner of the table, spilling lamp oil on the ground. "Ouch!" she exclaimed as she crouched down, catching a glimpse of a moon-white skirt flashing past the door—that was the time when Onodera Ren patrolled the archives every day at 5 a.m.

Sure enough, a moment later, the woman in the moon-white dress stopped at the door of the sutra copying room: "Is Historian Fujiwara injured?"

Fujiwara Shizuka looked up and saw Onodera Ren bending down to help her pick up the proofs that had fallen to the ground.

Her fingertips lightly pressed on the cover of a proofbook—the one where she had just slipped the evidence. "Thank you for your trouble, Lieutenant Onodera." She lowered her eyes to straighten her sleeves, her earlobes slightly red. "The smell of lamp oil is too strong; I'll go and change it into a new lamp."

After Fujiwara Shizuka's figure disappeared from the copying room, Onodera Ren's fingers, holding the proofreading book, trembled slightly.

She turned and walked into the archives, moonlight filtering through the glazed tiles of the dome, casting a silvery glow on her palms.

She had prepared a special potion on her desk long ago, and last night, while on duty, she secretly smeared the key edges of dozens of forbidden documents—the smeared words were now showing blurry outlines on the pages as the moonlight grew stronger.

"Lieutenant Lian, look at this scroll!" Xiao Zhu, the clerk on night duty, ran over holding a scroll of "Minutes of the Five Kage Summit." "It says 'The agreement has been unanimously approved' here, and it seems to be below..."

"Shh." Ren Onodera put his finger to his lips and glanced at the third shelf of the file cabinet.

There was a copy of "The Tax Records of the Land of Fire" lying upside down, the gold lacquer on its spine gleaming faintly in the moonlight.

She nodded to Xiaozhu and then pointed to the location of the book.

Xiao Zhu's eyes lit up, and she turned around and gently placed the file in her arms next to the upside-down book.

Meanwhile, in the cellar of the bookstore street, Tanaka Hisashi was checking the newly carved woodblocks by the light of an oil lamp.

Suddenly, urgent barking came from outside the courtyard.

He blew out the oil lamp, climbed up to the attic in the dark, and looked through the broken window—the night watchman on the street corner walked by, banging his clapper, and the lantern light illuminated several dark figures squatting under the back wall of his family's seal shop.

One of them looked up, and the moonlight illuminated the bronze badge on his waist: Shige's Dark Guard.

Tanaka Hisashi's hand rested on the hidden compartment where the carving knife was concealed, his palms sweating profusely.

He heard them whispering, "The higher-ups said the smell of ink in this bookstore is too strong..."

"At midnight tomorrow, pour tung oil on the plants."

The night wind swirled shredded paper through the windowpane, and a fragment of "The Chronicle of the Fire People" drifted to Tanaka Hisashi's feet. The words "Author: Anonymous Commoner" gleamed bluish in the moonlight.

He bent down to pick up the pages, his fingertips tracing the warm, wood-grained characters, and suddenly smiled—even if the printing shop burned down, these characters had long since seeped into millions of sheets of paper along with the spores, impossible to burn or erase.

As the barking of dogs outside the courtyard faded into the distance, Tanaka Hisashi relit the oil lamp.

The engravings on the wooden block gleamed coldly under the lamplight. He raised the carving knife, the tip aimed at the new wooden block, and said softly, "Volume Two, it's time to write 'The People of Fire Resist'." The charred wooden beam crashed down in the front yard of the printing shop with a "crack," and sparks splattered onto Tanaka Hisashi's blistered hands, but he seemed oblivious, still digging through the ruins.

Three days ago, the woodblock printing room was filled with the fragrance of ink. Now, only half of the wall remains, blackened by soot. At the base of the wall lies the woodblock for "The Chronicles of the People of Fire," which he had been carving for ten years. It was made of century-old jujube wood and was carefully polished. Every engraving mark was soaked in pine soot ink.

"Shopkeeper!" Old Chen from the rice shop next door grabbed his arm, "If the fire keeps burning, it'll collapse!"

Your wife and youngest daughter are still at the clinic!

Tanaka Hisashi was pulled so hard he staggered, sweat mixed with dust streaming down the back of his neck.

He suddenly crouched down and pried half a woodblock from the rubble—the upper right corner still bore the faint outline of the four characters "Fire People Resist." The jujube wood was charred a deep brown, yet its edges were more pronounced than before. "Good riddance," he chuckled hoarsely, tracing the carvings on the charred wood with his fingertips. "Characters carved on charred wood are harder."

Chapter 975 What a clever method of historical writing!

While Old Chen was stunned, Tanaka Hisashi had already taken off his outer shirt, wrapped the woodblock fragment in it, and turned to run towards the cellar.

Last night, he had just hidden the newly engraved "Record of Resistance to Taxes" in a pottery urn at the bottom of the cellar. Now, the cellar door was scorching hot from the fire. He gritted his teeth and pushed it open. Amidst the strong smell of burning, there was also a faint fragrance of ink. The pottery urn was intact, and inside were three hundred newly printed pages neatly stacked, with the edges still sticky with undried pine soot.

"Uncle Chen," he said, grabbing half a jar of charcoal powder and pressing a fragment of the woodblock printing plate onto it, "find me some scraps of cloth."

Old Chen watched as he used charcoal to trace the marks on the charred wood. The edges of the tracing were blackened, but the center clearly read, "In the spring of the Dingwei year, seven households in the West Market refused to pay exorbitant taxes and were beaten to death by the Ministry of Justice." "This is called the 'Charred History Note'," Tanaka Hisashi said, stuffing the tracing into Old Chen's arms. "Go to the West Market and distribute it to everyone you see—stick it on doorframes, beside stoves, and even on coffin heads..."

Before he could finish speaking, a wail came from the alleyway entrance.

Grandma Wang, leaning on her cane, was helped in by her grandson. Her withered hand clutched half a piece of charred paper: "Manager Tian!"

"My son's name..." She pointed tremblingly to the third line of the page, "Does it really say here, 'Wang Tiezhu, twenty years old, fell off a cliff during a bandit suppression operation'?"

Tanaka Hisashi's eyes suddenly burned.

He remembered that three months ago, Granny Wang knelt at the entrance of the bookstore for three days, begging him and stuffing the last cloth sock her son had sent home into his hands: "Please make a note of this, my son is not a bandit, he was just taken away to fill a quota." At this moment, the loose thread of the cloth sock was still sewn into his pocket, and the charcoal powder of the three words "Wang Tiezhu" on the paper was spreading with Granny Wang's tears, like a brown flower.

“History cannot be burned.” He heard himself say in a hoarse voice, “After the woodblocks are burned, there are still carbon prints; after the carbon prints are burned, there are still human hearts.”

As ripples spread across the sacred pond in Amegakure, Orihime was kneeling on a straw mat.

Her blind pupils suddenly contracted—the “memory streams” drifting from the City of Fire carried the bitterness of charred wood and the stench of ink. “Silent Offering.” She fumbled for the copper bell at her waist. “Call a hundred men, bring clean water.”

Villagers quickly gathered under the camphor trees by the sacred pool.

The old hunter, the girl selling herbs, and the little beggar who was always soaked by the rain took off their shoes and stepped barefoot into the warm water of the sacred pool, and sat quietly with their eyes closed as Orihime had instructed.

Orihime's fingers brushed across everyone's foreheads, finally stopping on the blue stone in the center of the sacred pool—the medium through which she perceived the "flow of memory water."

“Recite the truth you know seven times in your heart.” Her voice was like silk threads soaked with raindrops. “The lies about the City of Fire, the disappearance of the Shadows, the names buried in the yellow earth…”

The water in the sacred pool began to steam.

Orihime could feel that the thoughts of the hundred people were like countless thin streams, flowing down her fingertips and into the bluestone, condensing into translucent spores within the stone's texture.

The wind blew from the north, and she opened her arms wide. Spore mist, carrying the scent of camphor wood, drifted into the sky, heading towards the City of Fire.

At the same moment, in the inner courtyard of the Shige, Fujiwara Shizuka was trembling in front of the stove.

She had just tossed the entire volume of "Contemporary Records" into the fire when the still-wet ink on the pages curled into black butterflies. But as the ashes rose into the air, they coalesced into words: "In the year of Dingwei, oppressive taxes resulted in the execution of seven people; Feng Ying Luo Sha died in a secret chamber; the Shadow Substitute Agreement, written in blood as proof..."

"It's a lie." She took two steps back, knocking over the candlestick. The candlelight flickered like a snake's tongue on the revised edition of "Naruto." "I wrote it according to what the official told me..."

"What you're writing isn't history, it's lies."

A female voice came from above.

Fujiwara Shizuka looked up and saw countless figures reflected on the window paper—an old woman with a cane, a ninja wearing a straw hat, and children dressed in coarse cloth.

Their mouths opened and closed, and they were saying the same thing.

She staggered to the table, grabbed the silver hairpin, and slashed open the cover of "The List of Shadow Stand-ins." From the inner lining, half a fragment of a cuff with gold sand patterns fell out—exactly the same as the one she had seen on that stormy night ten years ago.

"So I was the liar all along." She picked up the fragment and stuck it to her chest, then suddenly grabbed a broom, used a hairpin to pry open the crack in the bamboo handle, and stuffed the last page of the list inside.

The broom handle makes a soft click when it closes, like a hidden truth.

In the forests surrounding Konoha, Byakuya's fingertips suddenly felt hot.

He crouched down and picked up half a piece of paper from the moss—it was a piece of gold-flecked Xuan paper used by the Smithsonian, with scorch marks on the edges, and it was written in cipher: "Third level of the basement, there is a living shadow."

The wind rustled through the pine forest, carrying a faint scent of ink.

Byakuya pulled out a tattered page from his pocket, written in blood by Kazama Shin before his death: "They buried living history beneath the Shige Tower." At that moment, the blood-written words on the tattered page seemed to move, like seeds blown away by the wind.

“Now, even historians don’t believe their own writings.” He chuckled softly at the tattered pages, his voice broken by the wind. “The third basement level…”

In the distance, a few sparks rose from the direction of the City of Fire, as if someone had scattered ashes with words in them in the night.

Bai Ye stood up, the moonlight illuminating the Jiao Shi Tie hanging at his waist, the rubbings of characters fluttering in the wind.

He glanced at the tattered pages of the diary one last time, carefully tucked them into his bosom, and turned to disappear into the mountains—where a thicker fog and a darker truth awaited to be revealed.

As Byakuya's Wood Release roots crawled into the soil along the damp moss, the burning pain in his fingertips suddenly transformed into a faint, thread-like tremor of chakra.

He crouched under the pine tree, his palm pressed against the pile of decaying leaves. The brown roots, like countless translucent blood vessels, stretched along the earth's veins toward the City of Fire—the pulse he had detected was coming from the direction of Shige.

“It’s not a document, not an inscription.” He closed his eyes, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “It’s a living thing.”

The blood-written words of Kazama Shin felt hot in his arms, resonating with the ink marks imprinted on the Jiao Shi Tie.

The rumors of the shadow-substitute agreement from ten years ago, the furrowed brow of the Third Tsuchikage Onoki when he seemed about to speak but couldn't, the gold dust that Granny Chiyo of Sunagakure crushed in her teacup... all these fragments suddenly pieced together an outline in his mind: the third level of the History Museum's underground vault, which does not imprison books, but "living evidence" of a distorted history.

The death report for the Fourth Kazekage, Rasa, states "died suddenly in a locked room." But what if it was a stand-in who died suddenly, and the real Rasa was sealed in a water prison?