"Lighting… check."
"Set… check."
"Cast… well, that's me. Check~"
Hanabi the construction worker gave a satisfied nod.
Building sets was physical labor.
But with Zhuixia now at her disposal, using Blood Rust to direct the ropes for excavation and earthwork turned out to be remarkably effective.
The rope itself was impressively tough—capable of spreading out like a giant hand to cover a wide area, or compressing down to thin wire that served as a surprisingly clean cutting tool.
"Phew, that actually wore me out."
Hanabi fashioned a rope hanging chair for herself and settled into it in the shade of a tree.
At rest, Asceticism kicked in automatically.
Her strength was suppressed to ordinary human levels—and in that state, the kimono pressed down on her like plate armor. Just standing upright under those conditions was already a real effort.
Naturally, the Curse Bind effect was especially potent right now.
The heavier the restriction, the greater the payoff Curse Bind produced.
Even for the construction work, Hanabi hadn't moved her own limbs. She'd simply extended Zhuixia from her sleeve and let the rope do everything in her place—like an extra set of hands.
She was even working on whether she could use the ropes to form hand seals. She'd already learned to seal with her feet; adapting the technique to rope wouldn't be a problem.
Jutsu was code. As long as the code ran correctly, it didn't matter what executed it. Orochimaru, Anko Mitarashi, Sasuke—all of them had formed seals through unconventional means before.
"No wonder those time-drama princesses spent all day sitting down."
Especially the ones in twelve-layered court robes—they rarely stood in those depictions, and now that Hanabi thought about it, that was probably exactly why. Twelve layers were genuinely, crushingly heavy.
After resting a bit, she felt her stamina return, tidied herself up, and took stock.
"And now—Summoning Jutsu!"
An ice-frozen "snow woman" materialized before her.
Before now, this summoned figure had only been able to follow Hanabi around like a stand-in—nothing more.
But earlier, in a dream-state resonance session, Hanabi had consulted Master Jingliu.
"Though it does come with some risk…"
Hanabi directed her attention to the ice crystal Jingliu puppet and opened the resonance again.
This time, she channeled the resonance power into the puppet itself.
The ice-crystal Jingliu began to shift. Still ice-blue—but now threaded with something that smelled of blood. And stranger still, flowers of ice bloomed along its surface, spreading outward until they formed something like layered armor, encasing the figure completely.
She had induced a Mara-Struck state in the summoned ice crystal puppet.
The state was sustained artificially, of course, running on Hanabi's own chakra.
But it was also risky—because even if the chakra supply was cut, the ice puppet could maintain that form for some time on its own.
Before she'd acquired Zhuixia, Hanabi never would have dared try this.
"I can still suppress it for a few more minutes. The script outline's been submitted. Time to shoot."
[Request approved.]
[Camera crew — standing by.]
[Sound crew — standing by.]
[Post-production — working like slaves.]
[Ninja's Path OVA — filming begins.]
The whole OVA production process was similar to recording an OP/ED—except that Hanabi was serving as screenwriter, director, series composition lead, and editor all at once.
The actual filming was more like a real movie shoot: shots and story beats were captured separately, non-linearly.
OVAs weren't broadcast live—they were produced in full and distributed separately—so while Hanabi was the lead, she'd only get one wave of revenue from the release, not the staggered double-dip of an early streaming release followed by the anime video version.
Everything was set. The OVA opening sequence was ready to shoot.
She hid the Jingliu puppet behind the rock face ahead, then stepped back outside and pulled on the Fool's mask.
"My, my. So this is the place. Coming out here was absolutely the right call."
Hanabi walked into the darkened structure.
Inside it was dim—but for someone who didn't rely on eyesight, that was fine.
She felt her way along the passage, moving deeper for a good while, until the path ahead suddenly lit up.
Torchlight ignited in a chain, one by one.
Film magic—she could cut what she needed.
"What a mess that woman left behind."
Hanabi paused. A red cord extended from her and pulled a nearby mechanism—
Bang.
From somewhere ahead in the passage came a sharp metallic clatter, and then a wall of shuriken filled the corridor, sealing the way forward.
Traps—everywhere. But all of them appeared to fall precisely within Hanabi's expectations, and she dismantled them one after another.
Of course they did. She'd installed them herself.
"The Uchiha clan insignia."
At that moment, she found a hidden set of scrolls.
"These are set apart—Uchiha… Nanashi? She wasn't only after the Nine-Tails? No—the Nine-Tails was a last-minute improvisation. So her original target was actually… the Uchiha clan itself?"
"Hmm?"
Just then, Hanabi sensed something ominous.
She moved forward, one step at a time.
Along the way, she "discovered" traces of someone having lived here—everyday details, small domestic remnants. Even a photograph: a couple holding a newborn. The upper half of the photo was completely black.
"The air is getting colder."
Ice crystals and frost dust scattered across every surface.
"What's this?"
She found more scrolls and picked one up, running chakra across the surface to read it.
"The Merciful Medicine King… hmm?"
On the surface, this was Hanabi exploring—using chakra to "read" text, the same technique she'd demonstrated for her audience before.
But this time, when her chakra passed over the scroll, it reacted.
The scroll was a prepared prop, of course. Once Hanabi fed chakra into it, it activated on cue.
Even so, Hanabi played it as though the chakra had inadvertently stirred something sleeping inside.
"This is a dark deity's covenant—"
She swept the scroll into her robes.
Almost simultaneously, the Jingliu puppet burst from its hiding place behind the rock face.
The puppet had gone fully feral. It had entered a mode of indiscriminate slaughter.
Hanabi threw herself back, swapped in a flash into the Shiranui ninja outfit, and started working the rope to sling her body through the space—maximizing her mobility to its limit.
"The avatar of a dark deity!"
Her heart was hammering.
This wasn't only performance. Hanabi genuinely wanted to take her own measure against this opponent.
The puppet was not even a ten-thousandth of Master Jingliu's actual power—and even so, the pressure it put out was something else entirely.
Then the fight opened—