Flying Thunder God: Level 2 was a self-created technique that Minato Namikaze had improved upon, drawing inspiration from sealing arts.
It added a sealing jutsu to the original Flying Thunder God, allowing the formula to be inscribed onto objects in a way that it could not be erased or removed. For example, if he marked your stomach, you could never wash it off; you would have a permanent coordinate on you for life. At any moment, Minato could fly over via that formula and slit your throat. Of course, this was just a hypothetical. If you were marked on the arm, you could just cut off the arm.
There was another method: fighting fire with fire. You could use a sealing jutsu to counteract it, sealing the Level 2 formula so you wouldn't have to worry about a backstabber teleporting in front of you in the middle of the night to slit your throat. After all, sealing arts were the universal solvent; if they could seal even memories, a mere coordinate was nothing.
Uchiha Nagi was examining a three-pronged kunai. Although it was engraved with a formula, this was the one from the future, the one Minato had used to seal the Ryumyaku. Because over a decade had passed, a small part of the formula had been damaged, so he didn't have to worry about Minato flying to it.
However, the sealing formula used for the Ryumyaku was still intact. Nagi used his Mangekyo Sharingan to continuously analyze and deconstruct the formula, but it was a bit slow.
If his Sharingan was watching someone perform a ninjutsu in person, the copy process was incredibly fast; he could master it in just one or two viewings. But conversely, for something engraved on a kunai, he had to analyze and dissect it himself after copying, which was a bit slow. The copy process would halt at a certain point. It was like no matter how many books you read, it could never compare to having an old master guide you by hand for a few days.
"I guess I'll have to wait for the tall blondie to use his sealing jutsu," Uchiha Nagi sighed, putting the kunai back in his pouch.
He wondered if Minato would be too afraid to use his Flying Thunder God kunai now, for fear of being backstabbed himself. Heh…
That night, Uchiha Nagi, Kimimaro, and Yukihime stayed in a civilian house. The owner seemed to have been gone for a long time; a thin layer of dust covered the floor. Yukihime and Kimimaro were happily cleaning with rags.
To her, everything was novel. Leaving the daimyo's city, traveling across the desert, even time-traveling to the Roran of over a decade ago. Preparing her own food, cleaning up after herself—these were things she could never have imagined before. As a princess, a useless person who had food brought to her lips and clothes put on her back, it wasn't that she didn't want to do things, but that all sorts of rules and regulations prevented her. After escaping the mansion, she had completely let herself go.
Looking at Yukihime, who had gotten herself covered in dirt, Nagi said, speechless, "If you don't know how to clean, just let Kimimaro do it. You're only making it dirtier."
Yukihime shook her head like a rattle. "No! I want to do it myself. I'm not the daimyo's princess anymore. I'm Yukihime."
With that, she went back to scrubbing with renewed vigor.
Nagi shook his head and paid her no more mind. He sat at a table and read a book. It was one of the remnant Ninshu scriptures that Yukihime had written out for him from memory. No matter how Nagi looked at it, the text seemed no different from ordinary Buddhist classics.
But Yukihime had somehow, through years of reading, stumbled into a state of oneness with nature. That meant there was nothing wrong with the scriptures. The fault lay with the reader, who couldn't comprehend them.
However, Uchiha Nagi was patient. He wasn't in a hurry. It would be many years before Black Zetsu tried to rescue his mother. It was when Naruto was eighteen, wasn't it? In his own timeline, Sasuke was still an eight or nine-year-old kid, several years away from even graduating from the Ninja Academy.
Besides, all he had to do was prevent Obito from collecting the Rinnegan. Or just destroy the Rinnegan. Without it, he couldn't activate the Six Paths Mode, much less cast the Infinite Tsukuyomi to free Princess Kaguya.
After a while, Yukihime and Kimimaro finally finished cleaning. They wiped their hands and came over to Uchiha Nagi.
Yukihime asked curiously, "Right, at the festival during the day, there were so many people. Why does it seem like everyone is hiding at night?"
Uchiha Nagi said calmly, "Because anyone with chakra and a decent constitution has been secretly captured by Mukade and turned into a human puppet. Those without value as materials have been thrown into factories as slave labor."
"At the festival you saw during the day, most of the 'people' were puppets. They were already dead. They were only moving because of the chakra threads controlling them, which are invisible to ordinary people."
Hiss—
Both Kimimaro and Yukihime gasped. They had seen so many people in the city during the day, and they were all fake?
"Then… then didn't anyone here notice? The ninja here, the guards…" Yukihime stammered.
"I'm afraid the guards and ninja here were dealt with by Mukade long ago," Uchiha Nagi said.
"Sensei, if he can control so many people, why is he still hiding?" Kimimaro, on the other hand, was curious about a different question.
"He's probably wary of Sunagakure. If Mukade were to wipe out the entire Land of Roran at once, it would be strange if Sunagakure didn't go berserk." Uchiha Nagi smiled. "When you've been a rat underground for too long, you can't stand the sunlight. Even though he has obtained the Ryumyaku, he's still not confident in his own strength. That's because he's all too aware of his own weakness. As long as the Ryumyaku is severed, he's a plant without roots, blown away by the wind."
Mukade wants to be a king? In his dreams. Away from the Ryumyaku, he was just a Jonin. And from all indications, he had created something akin to Wi-Fi to draw energy from the Ryumyaku into his body. But in reality? The moment the Ryumyaku was cut, he was finished. That was why, even though he could have annihilated the small country of Roran, he didn't dare to make a move. He even used a majority of his puppets to put on a festival—who knew who that was for—and had to make Sara's assassination look like an accident. Truly pathetic.
"Then, sensei, are we going to kill that Mukade tomorrow? To avenge the people here?" Kimimaro asked.
"Tomorrow? We'll see how things go tomorrow. If that Konoha squad doesn't get in our way, we'll just defeat Mukade and go back. As long as he can't control the Ryumyaku, the repulsive force of time will automatically send us back to our own world."
The Land of Roran was neither large nor small. To accommodate its growing population, many tall buildings had been constructed to reduce the residential footprint. Tall buildings weren't uncommon in the ninja world; Amegakure, for example, was filled with skyscrapers. Roran, however, had built them because the area of the oasis covered by the Ryumyaku was limited, and most of the land was needed for agriculture.
The Konoha elite squad—Akimichi Choza, Aburame Shibi, and Kakashi, who had been on another mission—were all gathered together with Minato Namikaze tonight.
During the day, the twelve-year-old Kakashi had gone out to gather intelligence and had discovered a Wood Style user, Yamato, who had traveled through time with Naruto. He had secretly followed him, and after confirming that the other was a Konoha ninja, he hadn't made his presence known. After completing his mission of locating the Ryumyaku, he had come to report to his sensei.
Before a campfire, the four of them sat together, sharing their intelligence.
The food was nothing special. Besides water, there were only the incredibly bland military ration pills. When on a mission, this was what ninja usually ate.
"I see. So you've found the location of the Ryumyaku. Good. Tomorrow, we'll go defeat Mukade. Kakashi, you will secretly protect Sara and see if you can get her to find a way to sever the Ryumyaku."
"Understood."
After laying out all the plans, Minato still seemed preoccupied. He had retrieved his Flying Thunder God kunai—they were his bread and butter, and he couldn't fight without them—but as a precaution, he had placed them in his pouch and put a sealing jutsu on the outside of the bag. This way, even if Uchiha Nagi wanted to secretly fly over and slit their throats, he wouldn't be able to. The versatile sealing arts were just that game-breaking.
Everyone else was asleep. Minato was on watch, staring into the campfire with a heavy heart. Choza, who was also still awake, sighed, walked over, and tried to comfort him.
"Minato, are you still thinking about what happened during the day? Maybe what he said was a lie…" Choza said, patting Minato on the shoulder. "What he said might not be true. Maybe he just wanted to mess with your mind, to affect your judgment."
Minato gave a bitter smile. "Perhaps. But I have a feeling that what he said is true. And it was clear that when he was fighting me during the day, he had no real killing intent. It was more like he was learning something."
"So, what he said at the end… maybe in the future, something major really does happen in Konoha. And it's related to the Nine-Tails. And that's what leads to the Uchiha clan's destruction, and why he hates Konoha so much."
"But…" Minato raised his head with determination. "No matter how terrible things get, I will face them one by one. I will protect the Konoha and the people I love."
Most importantly, his girlfriend, because she was the Nine-Tails Jinchuriki. If something happened to the Nine-Tails, something would naturally happen to her.
If he had only heard Uchiha Nagi say that he would die for Konoha, he might not have been so upset. But to hear that his beloved girlfriend would die with him on the same day—he couldn't sleep.
Minato's intelligence analysis was top-notch, his intellect frighteningly high, and his talent immense. He had already deduced that Naruto was related to him in some way. That familiar feeling, the blond hair, plus the Nine-Tails chakra inside him—everything was telling him that what Uchiha Nagi had said was probably true.
Because only if Kushina died would the Nine-Tails be transferred to a new Jinchuriki. Although he tried not to think about whether the boy named Uzumaki Naruto was his and Kushina's future child, the more he tried not to know the truth, the more he couldn't control his wild thoughts.