Chapter 174: Evil Little Uchiha Brat, I'll Take Care of You Myself—
Crescent Moon Valley lay in the northwest of the Land of Fire. The name came from the gorge that split through it — a deep cut in the earth, curving in the precise shape of a crescent moon.
Night.
"Naruto, stop dawdling. What are you doing back there?"
One day of travel. The four of them stood at the edge of the gorge now, looking down into the darkness below. This was the location from the records — the sealing site.
"I just picked some mushrooms on the way. Relax."
Naruto held up his find. Kushina ignored him.
Sakura was consulting the records against the terrain, working out where exactly the seal was located. Sasuke moved around the perimeter, examining the rock walls.
Dense vegetation everywhere — trees growing even from the cliff faces, pine branches jutting from the stone at intervals.
The gorge's shape wasn't right for natural formation.
He looked at it more carefully. Drew his sword and held it up for comparison.
This was cut.
Kakashi had given him the White Fang's kenjutsu. Sasuke was no master yet, but he knew blades well enough to read what they left behind. The angles, the smooth faces where the rock had separated cleanly — this entire gorge had been cleaved by a single strike.
What level of battle leaves a mark like this? Several hundred years later, still here, still sharp.
The thought lit something up in him.
"Should be around here," Sakura said, tapping the page.
The Uzumaki records indicated the sealing had been done on-site and quickly — the clan's typical approach, practical over elegant, get it done and move on.
"Kushina. Use your sensory ability — check if anything's off."
Kushina dropped the argument with Naruto and jogged over.
"Coming!"
She closed her eyes. The Kagura Mind's Eye spread outward — tens of kilometers in every direction, everything falling into her awareness at once. Wind moving leaves. Insects in the grass. Small animals shifting in the undergrowth. Nothing escaped it.
After a long moment she opened her eyes, brow furrowed.
"There's nothing around here. But the gorge itself is the problem. Below the surface — I can't sense anything. It's just... blank."
"Obviously that means it's down there," Naruto said helpfully.
The vein on Kushina's forehead made its opinion known.
SMACK.
"Now there's nothing to say, is there."
She shook out her fist. Naruto held his head.
Sakura had already moved on. Blank spot in the sensing range, confirmed location, no point discussing further.
"Stop it, both of you. We're going down."
She channeled chakra to her feet and dropped into the gorge. Sasuke followed immediately. Kushina was right behind.
Naruto, still rubbing the lump on his head, sidled up to Sasuke first.
"Hey, Sasuke — when we find the ultimate weapon, can I borrow it for two days?"
Sasuke looked at him.
"Fine. Two days."
"Yes! That's why you're the best, Sasuke!"
Kushina glanced at the two of them, decided this wasn't her concern, and jumped.
Hundred-year artifacts and whatever else. Not my priority. She was here for the journey, for moving through the world alongside people she cared about. The ancient treasure was incidental.
Sakura fell fast.
The night wind rushed past her, cold, snapping at her clothing. She was tracking her descent, gauging the distance to the bottom—
The Heaven-Covering Formation was already active. And then something caught her attention.
The blank space Kushina had described — she was passing through it. And then, abruptly, she wasn't. The sensing came back all at once.
A barrier.
One that's held for several hundred years?
That was impossible under normal conditions. A barrier seal required maintenance — either someone living here and tending it, or—
Natural energy. If natural energy was feeding the seal continuously, and the inscription had been carved well enough to survive the centuries, then yes. A sealed barrier could sustain itself indefinitely.
Behind her, she heard Sasuke and Kushina register it too — the moment they crossed the threshold and their sensing returned, a small involuntary pause.
Naruto felt nothing. This was not surprising.
The gorge bottom was a cold pool, still and dark, its surface catching faint moonlight from far above. At the center of the pool, a small island. On the island, a standing stone — entirely covered in creeping vines.
Sakura landed on the water's surface without sound, a slight ripple spreading outward from each foot. Four hundred years of chakra control refinement, and this was the result — a perfect landing at full descent speed.
"WOOOOO—"
SPLASH. SPLASH. SPLASH.
Three large impacts behind her, in sequence. She looked down at her soaked clothes.
She'd done everything right. It had been a flawless landing.
Three wet heads broke the surface behind her.
"That's probably our target," Naruto said, wringing out his hair as he stood.
"Let's look."
Sakura walked across the water to the island, pulled the vines aside with both hands, and the stone beneath emerged — covered top to bottom in dense Uzumaki script.
"What is all this?" Naruto leaned in, studying the incomprehensible symbols.
"Uzumaki sealing formula," Kushina said. "High-level, by the look of it."
Naruto went quiet for a moment.
Uzumaki. That's my name.
Sasuke had moved to the back of the stone. He read aloud:
"Year 654 of the Warring States Period — the Senju, Uzumaki, and Sarutobi clans suppressed the Uchiha weapon at this location. All who come after are warned to stay away. If it is released, the consequences are unpredictable."
A pause.
"Sealed by: Senju Tobirama. Uzumaki Mumei. Sarutobi Shinyū."
"Those three were probably the clan heads at the time," Sakura said from behind him.
She didn't recognize Uzumaki Mumei or Sarutobi Shinyū. But Senju Tobirama — that name had shown up enough times in her research to be familiar. The same man whose notes she'd been following.
"So do we open it?" Sasuke asked.
He'd come expecting some kind of legendary artifact. But the inscription's language — if it is released, consequences unpredictable — didn't read like a description of a sword or a mirror.
If it was released. Not if it is used.
Something alive.
Like a tailed beast?
"We came all this way."
Sakura waved her hand.
"Open it."
She knew perfectly well what was inside. Everyone else was guessing. She wasn't going to ruin the surprise.
Sasuke steadied himself. Visibly. Between Sakura and himself, whatever was in there — even the Eight-Tails, if it came to that — could be handled. Sakura had already beaten a tailed beast in open combat. He had a fresh Mangekyo.
"Start digging."
Naruto produced a shovel from his equipment scroll with the energy of someone who had been planning for this moment.
Four shovels, one iron coffin, no earth-style ninjutsu between them.
Sakura had the earth-release chakra affinity and precisely one technique — the Earth-Style Wall that Hiruzen had taught her. And she wasn't using destructive jutsu near whatever was down here regardless.
So: shovels.
The work went faster than expected. The stone was already loose from centuries of ground shift, and the four of them were not exactly lacking in physical capability. The monolith rocked, then fell — Sakura pitched it sideways into the pool without ceremony — and beneath the earth, caught in Naruto's next shovel stroke with a metallic clang, was iron.
All four of them accelerated.
The coffin emerged from the earth.
"A coffin?!" Naruto stared.
"Something's going to come out of that, isn't it." Kushina pushed her glasses up, uneasy.
"ZOMBIE!" Naruto took a step back. "A several-hundred-year-old zombie!"
"It's a fairy tale," Sasuke said flatly. "And even if it weren't — you think a zombie could beat us?"
He was already adjusting his expectations. A coffin meant a person. A person meant whatever was inside was biological, not legendary artifact. And several hundred years meant bones, in all probability — even a legendary shinobi would be nothing but a skeleton at this point.
His anticipation was cooling.
Sakura paid none of this any attention. She was already moving to open it.
Here we go. She'd traveled to find this, she'd dug up the coffin, she was not going to wait another thirty seconds.
My dear little Hikaru. Let your big sister have a look at you.
She was smiling slightly as she pressed her palms against the iron lid. It didn't budge under normal force. She applied a little more. The coffin's seals were built to last centuries and had; the lid came loose only when she stopped pretending to be gentle.
The contents came into view.
Black hair falling loose in long waves. Delicate features still carrying the roundness of youth, faint baby fat in the cheeks. A dark navy Uchiha clan uniform, the crest visible on the collar.
Moonlight had found its way to the gorge floor, and it fell across the girl's sleeping face.
She was peaceful. Completely still. Entirely clean, as though she'd been placed here yesterday.
The four of them, covered in mud from the dig, looked at her.
"She's beautiful..."
Naruto was staring. His hand had started moving toward her cheek before his brain caught up.
SMACK.
Kushina's palm intercepted his.
"What do you think you're doing."
"I was just checking if she was still alive—"
"By poking her face?!"
Sakura had already noted the answer to that question. With the coffin open, the girl's chest was moving. Shallow and steady, the rhythm of deep sleep.
The coffin. Not the seals, not some technique — the coffin itself had been keeping her. Preserved, suspended, alive and unchanged across several centuries.
That's coming home with us.
The girl's eyelashes moved. A barely perceptible flutter.
Sasuke went still.
A living clan member. A real one. Alive, here, right now.
Every time he went back to the Uchiha district — the empty houses, the silence, the way the whole place felt like a held breath — the weight of it was different from other kinds of grief. He wasn't just mourning people. He was mourning the last of something.
And now—
He wanted to reach out. To feel her hand and confirm she was warm.
We're not alone anymore.
"Hey, Sasuke," Naruto said. "Can I borrow her for two days too?"
...
Sasuke turned to look at him with an expression that communicated several things at once, none of them printable.
Naruto shut his mouth. He had simply said the words out loud as they occurred to him and now regretted it.
"...Who are you people?"
The girl in the coffin had opened her eyes.
She lay there for a moment, taking in the ceiling of stars visible far above, the moonlit walls of the gorge, the four strangers leaning over her.
A long dream. She felt it receding as she surfaced.
Father. Mother. Dead.
The grief had arrived like that, sudden and complete. And in the grief, something had opened in her — the power her clan spoke of in whispers. And then the same hands that had raised her, familiar hands, had held her down and taken the eyes she'd awakened and put them somewhere else.
The pain of that hadn't stopped, and neither had anything else. Battlefields. Blood. Her hand moving because it knew how to move, because there was nothing left but the moving.
And then three people sealed her away.
And the dark came.
And now—
She looked at the boy with the Sharingan.
"You — are you also of the Uchiha clan?"
Sasuke's voice came out unsteady.
"Yes. I—"
He was reaching toward her before he'd decided to.
"EVIL LITTLE UCHIHA BRAT—"
The girl sat bolt upright, grabbed for his throat—
"I'LL DEAL WITH YOU MYSELF—"
THWACK.
Sakura's hand came down on the back of her neck in a precise, unhurried motion.
Uchiha Hikaru, awakened after several centuries, lasted less than one second before collapsing back into the coffin.
☆☆☆
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