Konoha: Superman template, the spoiled brat becomes strong.

"What a clever way to revise history." He chuckled softly, his knuckles tapping lightly on the tree trunk. "Using the breath of a living person as a seal, keeping the truth forever stuck in the gap between the dying and the dying."

As the moonlight was obscured by the clouds, he had already condensed three kunai in his palm.

One was marked with a Wood Release symbol, intended for the Anbu to provide backup; another was wrapped with an explosive tag, to be used to blast open the underground vault barrier; and the last one had the blood of the Senju clan on its tip, the key to breaking Shige's secret technique.

As he put the kunai into his ninja tool pouch, a mountain gust of wind suddenly swept up a few pieces of ashes—fragments of the "Contemporary Essentials" that Fujiwara Shizuka had burned the previous night, the four characters "Shadow Substitute Agreement" still gleaming with a charred light.

"It's time to go meet the historians." He brushed the pine needles off his clothes, and as he turned around, the sole of his boot crushed a dry branch, the crisp sound startling two owls into flight.

The morning mist in the City of Fire is thicker than in the mountains and forests.

Fujiwara Shizuka stood at the end of the archives corridor, watching seven or eight servants carry documents to be burned toward the woodshed, her nails digging deeply into her palms.

Chapter 976 People of Sunagakure, I Will Not Abandon You in Famine

The half-page of the directory she tucked into the broom handle last night was still hot, like a glowing ember.

As the foremost servant passed by her, she deliberately stumbled, and the copper ink box in her arms clattered onto the bluestone slab. The deep black ink immediately spread and soaked the top stack of "Edict for Disaster Relief in the Second Year of Yongren".

"The historian!" The head servant frowned. "This was ordered by the clerk to be burned this morning—"

"It was my slip of the hand." She bent down to pick it up, her hair falling to cover the reddened corners of her eyes. "These documents need to be dried before burning, otherwise the ink will stain the ashes and soil the floor of the history building."

The leader stared at the ink stains on the ground, then glanced at the Shige silver fish pendant hanging from her waist, and finally snorted: "You have to clean it up before Chenshi (7-9 AM)."

After the servants had gone far away, Fujiwara Shizuka squatted on the ground, dipped her fingertip in the still-wet ink, and quickly wrote a line of small characters on the edge of the stain.

Her hand was trembling, yet the strokes of her pen were as fine as spider silk—"Water Prison, Midnight, North Well."

After she finished writing, she deliberately rubbed the writing with the tip of her shoe to make it look like ink smudges.

As she straightened up, she caught a glimpse of a blue shadow flashing behind a pillar—it was the pattern on Onodera Ren's ANBU uniform.

"The historian is exceptionally diligent today."

In the afternoon, when Onodera Ren's voice came from the entrance of the archives, Fujiwara Shizuka was using bamboo clips to air out documents.

She looked up and saw the other person carrying a stack of "Land of Fire Laws," their sleeves smelling of Konoha's distinctive ninja tool oil.

The moment their eyes met, Fujiwara Shizuka gently touched the broom at her feet—the crack in the bamboo handle was the secret signal they had drawn with thin wire last week.

As night fell, Onodera Ren's sword clanged softly against his waist.

She carried the broom into her private room, bolted the door, and used a hairpin to pry open the crack in the bamboo handle.

When half a sheet of paper with ink stains fell into her palm, her breathing became slightly lighter.

After reading the handwriting by moonlight, she stuffed the paper into her inner garment and wrapped the broom handle again with a scrap of cloth—she had to make sure the clerk's eyes wouldn't notice anything amiss.

When the third watch gong sounded for the second time, she appeared at the bottom of the archives.

Dampness seeped from the cracks in the ventilation shaft's bricks. She took out a celadon bottle from her waist, poured out a drop of pale blue medicine, and smeared it on the shaft wall.

The dark yellow writing, like a snake awakened, slowly emerged from the cracks in the brickwork: "The entrance to the water dungeon is behind the drain valve, requiring a triple key." She quickly made a rubbing with the thin paper she carried with her, dabbed the original with medicine on her fingertips, and straightened up only after the writing had completely disappeared.

“Triple key…” she whispered to the rubbing paper, her ears suddenly burning – it was the mark of the Dark Guard’s communication.

When she opened the window, a kunai with wood-style patterns clattered to the windowsill, and the paper strip tied to its end fluttered in the night wind: "Midnight, Kitabayashi, see you."

At the same time, fine ripples appeared on the sacred pond in Amegakure.

Orihime knelt by the pond, the white veil over her blindfold dampened by the water mist.

She reached out her hand, and the moment her fingertips touched the water's surface, her whole body trembled violently—countless sounds surged up from the bottom of the pool: Fujiwara Shizuka's sobs from the previous night, Onodera Ren's heartbeat as he made the rubbings, and the crisp sound of a withered branch breaking in the mountains during the day.

These sounds, imbued with the scent of ink, condensed into a translucent spore in her palm.

“The lie is sinking,” she said softly, her eyelashes fluttering like butterflies beneath the white veil. “But the truth… is about to surface.” The mist at the Hidden Rain Pool was thickest before dawn.

The futon on which Orihime was kneeling was soaked through, and the white veil over her blindfold clung to her skin. She could clearly feel the temperature of the sacred pool rising—a sign that the "Silent Whisper Festival" was about to begin.

She pressed the translucent spores in her palm into the water; they were the words "lie" that had condensed from the flow of memories last night, now seeping into the bottom of the pool through her fingers.

"Go," she murmured, broken incantations escaping her throat.

The sacred pool suddenly churned into a whirlpool, the water carrying spores plunged into the underground river at the bottom of the pool, leaving a faint blue watermark on her palm.

This is the price; for every word she sends into the river veins, a piece of her memory is taken away—but it doesn't matter, as long as the people of the Fire City can hear it.

Three days later, in the northern district of the Fire City, the morning mist had not yet dissipated.

Seven-year-old Adou was squatting by an abandoned well playing with pebbles when he was suddenly choked by the fishy smell coming from the well and started coughing.

He stood on tiptoe and looked into the well. There was a layer of black oil-like substance floating on the surface of the water, and a wet mark was wriggling on the well wall—like words scratched out by someone with their fingernails.

"Father!" He collapsed to the ground, pointing his little finger at the well wall, "Words! Words that move!"

Dad ran over carrying a vegetable basket, and when he took a closer look, goosebumps instantly rose on the back of his neck.

The crooked watermarks on the bluestone slab were clearly visible: "Luo...sha...not dead." The last word "dead" was still dripping down, like a drop of blood that hadn't dried.

"Quickly call the village head!" someone shouted.

The crowd grew larger and larger, and an old man suddenly knelt down, pointing tremblingly at the writing: "Forty years ago, the Fourth Kazekage, Rasa, came to the Fire Capital to form an alliance. I saw him! This well... this well is saying that he is not dead!"

The ninjas from Shige arrived even faster than the village head.

Three men dressed as members of the Dark Guard swung their chains, smashing the well curb and sealing the well opening with earth magic. They failed to notice that the spores in the black water were crawling underground along the cracks in the bricks—it was Orihime's "lie" that had been traveling along the river for three days and three nights and was now crawling along the city's main drainage system toward the Shige Underground Vault.

At the same moment, at the west gate of the City of Fire.

Tanaka Hisashi squatted against the wall, scattering fallen leaves into the last stack of "Jiao Shi Tie" (a type of calligraphy book).

His fingers were worn white from engraving; the broken leaves were spores of the Mantra Vine, which, mixed with ink, could evoke memories.

"Here, read this to everyone you meet." He stuffed the note into the old beggar's arms. "Just say, 'The Shadow of Wind is imprisoned, but the true form remains,' remember that?"

The old beggar hunched his neck and nodded, but glanced at the street corner out of the corner of his eye—Steagall's patrol team was coming.

Tanaka Hisao had anticipated this. He patted his clothes, stood up, and deliberately threw the engraving on the ground.

The moment the wood chips flew, the patrol team's knives were already flashing, but he smiled and retreated into the alleyway: "Go ahead and check, every single sticker has grown legs."

Sure enough, when the patrol team grabbed the little beggar reading the note, the child suddenly widened his eyes, tears falling onto the note with a "plop plop": "I've seen it! Ten years ago at the border, Lord Fengying rode a sandstorm to deliver grain, and his headband had a tear..." He grabbed the patrol team's sleeve, "It's true! You're lying to us!"

The patrol team leader's knife froze in mid-air.

He clearly had never seen the Kazekage before, but suddenly an image flashed through his mind of golden sand sweeping across the desert, and a man wearing a Kazekage headband was saying, "People of Sunagakure, I will not abandon you to famine." His hand began to tremble, and his sword clattered to the ground.

Chapter 977 Falsifying Evidence of True Events

At this moment, in Kitajido, Byakuya was moving along the damp base of the wall.

His Wood Release roots burrowed into the sewers, extending along the flow of the black water—guided by Orihime's spores.

The moment his roots touched the Earthly Barrier, a pale green light emanated from his fingertips, and chakra seeped into them along the roots.

“Found it,” he whispered, his breath condensing into white mist on the wall.

The water prison is located directly below Shige, and the barrier is maintained by the chakra of living people. No wonder Kazama Shin said, "Use breathing as a seal."

He took out the last inscribed spore, which was cultivated with the bloodline of the Thousand Hands and could penetrate the barrier along the water veins.

"Dissolve." He pressed the spores into the sewage in the sewer.

The black water suddenly shimmered with golden light, and the spores, like small fish, "whooshed" into the cracks between the bricks.

Bai Ye took two steps back and hid in the abandoned waterwheel house.

Moonlight streamed in through the broken window, illuminating the kunai at his waist—the one wrapped with an explosive tag, which hadn't been used yet.

In the basement, the person sealed in the water dungeon suddenly moved.

His fingers, which had been soaked until they turned white, now seemed to be struck by an electric current, leaving a mark on the damp wall.

The chain of the water dungeon rattled as soon as the character "sand" was half-written.

The sound of the guard's footsteps came from afar, and he quickly retreated underwater, leaving only a fresh scratch on the wall, glistening wet in the torchlight.

“You can hide people, but you can’t hide your roots.” Bai Ye stood in the shadows of the waterwheel house, looking towards the underground garage, and said softly.

Array patterns appeared on his palm; it was the Thousand Hands Clan's "Memory Echo Array," which required the memories of living people as a catalyst—the weeping of the city guards and the trembling of the old man by the well were the best seeds.

At the top of the Shige Clock Tower, Fujiwara Shizuka watched the black smoke rising from the North District.

The tattered copy of "Contemporary Records" in her arms still smelled of ink; it was a document that the clerk had just approved as "needing to be burned" that morning.

She took out a tinderbox, lit a corner of the paper with a "snap," and watched the sparks shoot up the pages.

“Let’s go to the basement,” she said to the wind.

When the last page of the scroll was burned, she let go, and the ashes swirled and fell into the incineration tunnel—a tunnel in the History Pavilion specifically for burning discarded historical records, leading directly to the lowest level of the underground vault.

In the flames, the four characters "Shadow Replacement Protocol" were burned and curled up, but as they fell, they encountered spores that were crawling up from the drainage system.

Bai Ye stopped under the old locust tree outside the Kitajidao.

He looked up at the sky; the moonlight was half-hidden by the clouds, like a silver coin with a bite taken out of it.

He took out a wooden plaque engraved with array patterns from his pocket and gently pressed it onto the tree root.

The wooden plaque instantly merged into the tree, and pale green light patterns appeared on the bark—this was the trigger for the "Memory Echo Array." Once enough spores were collected, all the altered memories would travel along the tree veins and explode in every corner of the City of Fire.

"It's time to wake up." He turned and disappeared into the darkness, his boot crushing a withered leaf.

In the distance came the alarm bell of the Starr, long and urgent, like a taut string that could snap at any moment.

In the shadow of the old locust tree in Kitajida, Bai Ye tapped his knuckles three times on the tree trunk.

The wooden plaque inside the tree bark glowed faintly and crawled down the tree veins into the ground—that was the Senju clan's unique "memory grafting technique," which could inject fabricated memory waves into the city's main well.

He glanced down at his watch; the moonlight cast silvery lines on his cufflinks, pointing precisely to the third quarter of the hour of Chou (1-3 AM).

"Time to wake up." He chuckled softly, his Adam's apple bobbing in the night.

The sound of water surging underground suddenly became clear, mixed with the soft rustling of spores moving through sewage, much like the "memory resonance" I had heard in the Thousand Hands Chamber years ago.

At that time, Lord Hashirama said that the sharpest sword is never the one that cuts into flesh, but the one that pierces into the heart.

In a snow-covered village at the northernmost tip of the Land of Fire, Kazama Shin, wrapped in a faded coarse cotton robe, squats by a well.

He breathed into his palm, and the ice crystals floating on the well water suddenly cracked, revealing a line of watermarks slowly appearing on the well wall: "On the day I refused to sign the stand-in agreement, Speaker Shi personally delivered poisoned tea."

"Luo Sha's handwriting." His fingertips dipped into the well water, the coolness traveling up his neck through his veins.

But the tone was wrong—that iron-blooded Wind Shadow who could eat snake meat raw in the desert always spoke as if sandpaper was rubbing against rocks, how could he have such a blood-soaked sorrow?

He gazed at the birch forest bent by the weight of snow in the distance and suddenly remembered the secret files he had seen in the Shige before his exile: Luo Sha had indeed refused the shadow double three years ago, but in the original file, his angry roar as he slammed the table was "As long as I live, the Fengying will be Luo Sha's name," not the way he looked now, on the verge of death.

"Teacher! Words have appeared in the well again!" A little child with pigtails crawled out of the snowdrift, his nose red from the cold and snotty.

Kazama Shin wiped his face and picked up the baby, placing him on the edge of the well. "Go and call Grandpa and Grandma over. Let's talk about the real Kazekage."

A crowd quickly gathered in the snow. An old hunter wrapped in animal skin slapped his thigh and said, "That year I went to Sunagakure to sell furs, and I saw Rasa chase a rogue ninja through a sandstorm for three days. When he caught him, the kid's crotch was soaked!" A woman with a headscarf wiped away her tears and said, "My daughter works as a healer in Sunagakure. She said that the Kazekage gave every ninja a sand-resistant ointment, and his own hands were cracked like old tree bark."

Kazama Shin's pen flew across the parchment, the writing gradually spreading—he deliberately let the ink smudge so that the spore carrier pigeon's mark would appear more natural.

When the last sentence, "If there is any discrepancy, it must be a forgery," was uttered, he folded the paper into the shape of a dove and threw it into the brazier.

The paper pigeon flapped its wings and soared into the sky. In the snowy light, the gold dust on its tail feathers shimmered—the mark of the True Word Vine spores.

The wind from Sunagakure swirled sand and grit, hitting Chiyo's face.

She held the paper dove's claws tightly, her knuckles turning white.

The handwriting of the "Thirteen True Words of Wind Shadow" still carried the chill of the snowfield, but a cold smile curled at the corner of the old woman's mouth.

"True events fabricated with false evidence..." She handed the paper to Ebizo beside her. "Tell me, is it that Shige's rats are desperate, or is there an even more ruthless knife lurking behind?"

As Ebizo took the paper, half a detonating tag slipped from his sleeve.

He glanced at the flagpole swaying in the sandstorm outside the window and lowered his voice: "Lord Shadow was coughing up blood again this morning, and then this 'True Rasa' pops up..."

Meanwhile, in the Konoha Archives, Onodera Ren was crouching behind a pile of books.

Hearing footsteps in the corridor, she quickly stuffed the "Public Opinion Briefing" into her arms.

Just now she saw the Secretary of the History Pavilion, along with three members of the Anbu, take the "Secret Files of the Kazekage's Handover" down from the top-level iron cabinet—the key to that cabinet has always been held only by the Hokage.

"Lieutenant Ren?" A patrolling Chunin shone a torch over.

Chapter 978 People's Hearts Are Hard to Deceive