Chapter 148: Help, I've Been Imprisoned?
Jia stared at the plate in front of her, her facial muscles twitching with immense difficulty. A pile of plump, wriggling insects squirmed over each other, their segmented legs scraping against the porcelain. She seriously suspected Jiraiya had not invited her to a welcoming dinner, but rather to the first circle of hell: a torture session where the victim was forced to eat bugs until they burst.
Better to die than eat bugs.
She had an entire system space packed to the brim with reserve resources. Did this white-haired idiot honestly believe she wouldn't just pull out six thousand Explosive Tags right now and blow everyone to kingdom come? Let them all perish together in a glorious, fiery explosion.
Perhaps her internal screaming leaked too vividly onto her face. Jiraiya paused, blinking in surprise, before staring at her as if he had just discovered an entirely new continent.
"I have never seen such a rich expression on your face before," he murmured, rubbing his chin in fascination.
Jia refused to dignify that with a response. She simply extended a single finger and pushed the plate of still-twitching grubs as far across the table toward Jiraiya's side as physically possible. Just looking at the glistening carapaces gave her full-body goosebumps.
Fortunately, Jiraiya had only asked her to sit down and share a meal, not actually forcing her to consume the local toad delicacies. Chuckling at her disgust, he reached into his robes and produced a sealing scroll. With a quick burst of chakra and a puff of white smoke, a proper feast materialized. Plates of golden inari sushi, steaming sukiyaki, fragrant plum rice, and an assortment of Konoha's most popular contemporary snacks covered the wooden table.
Jia let out a long, quiet breath. The fragile boat of their friendship had not capsized just yet.
As long as she actively ignored the bowl of squirming insects sitting at the edge of her peripheral vision, the meal remained relatively harmonious. Jiraiya possessed a natural talent for keeping the atmosphere warm. Between bites of sukiyaki, he recounted the grueling details of his five years of senjutsu training at Mount Myōboku. Occasionally, he dropped familiar names, casually mentioning Tsunade and Orochimaru.
Jia did not interrupt his rambling. Instead, she chewed her sushi and mentally reviewed their recent clash.
The white-haired toad sage had clearly rehearsed that battle hundreds of times in his head. He had sparred with others, analyzed her combat style, and crafted a counter-strategy specifically tailored to dismantle her. His heavy taijutsu strikes had targeted her physical blind spots. The Bringer-of-Darkness Technique had perfectly neutralized her Sharingan's visual prowess. And knowing that her Susanoo was an absolute nightmare to break through, he had completely bypassed a battle of attrition. Unable to find a clean way to capture her without mutual destruction, he had simply reverse-summoned her directly to Mount Myōboku and slapped a high-level seal on her chakra network.
It was a flawless, bloodless strategy. She almost wanted to give him a slow clap. In the shinobi world, whenever a Susanoo manifested on the battlefield, rivers of blood inevitably followed. Yet Jiraiya had managed to defuse the walking natural disaster without a single casualty.
Seeing Jia sitting there in absolute silence, her gaze distant and absent-minded, Jiraiya did not show a hint of discouragement. If anything, her quiet compliance only fueled his enthusiasm. When Jia absentmindedly reached out toward the center of the table, he proactively picked up a piece of sushi and gently placed it directly into her open palm.
Once the meal concluded, he gently grasped her wrist and led her through the lush, oversized foliage toward a small wooden cabin nestled beside a roaring waterfall.
"This is the shelter I built during my initial training here at Mount Myōboku," Jiraiya explained, pushing the creaky wooden door open. "You will stay here tonight. It is a bit messy, so please do not mind the clutter."
He stepped back, his eyes sweeping over the surrounding clearing before pointing toward a massive, ancient tree a short distance away. "Tomorrow, we can clear that spot and build a brand new cabin over there. What kind of architecture do you prefer? We can build it together."
Jia blinked, the gears in her head grinding to a halt. Did he just imply she was going to live here on a long-term basis?
She could not have heard that correctly.
"Are you not taking me back to Konoha?" she asked, thoroughly tired of playing guessing games. "What exactly are you trying to accomplish here?"
Jiraiya's warm smile immediately fractured into something deeply bitter.
"Before I answer your question," he began, his voice dropping an octave, "tell me something. Why did you not kill me back then? Your sword was steady. Your aim was precise. A strike like that absolutely would not have missed a fatal vital."
Jia shot him a deeply weirded-out look. Intuitive people were truly terrifying creatures. That deliberate miss had not even been a visible flaw in her acting, yet his gut instincts had still picked up on the discrepancy.
"You are welcome to unseal my chakra right now," Jia replied flatly. "I will gladly stab you a second time. I guarantee that, without the Anbu Interrogation Department torturing me first, my blade will not miss."
"Then why did you pull your punches at the very start of our fight today?"
Jia stared at him. 'Is staying alive not a good enough reason? Do you seriously need me to murder you just to prove my mental state is perfectly fine?'
Seeing her refuse to answer, Jiraiya suddenly let out a low, hollow laugh.
"I knew it. My intuition was right all along. There is far more to what happened back then than what you let on. I will uncover the truth, no matter what it takes. But until I do... I am sorry, but you will have to remain here at Mount Myōboku."
Jia furrowed her brows. Something about his tone felt incredibly off.
"This is the absolute best solution I could come up with," Jiraiya continued, turning his gaze toward the rushing waterfall. "You have killed so many people. If I drag you back to the village, you will face horrific interrogation and endless torture. The families of the victims will never let you walk free."
Over the past five years, Jiraiya had buried himself in hellish, mind-numbing training. Occasionally, he would return to Konoha just long enough to find strong opponents for practical combat experience, only to immediately rush back to the mountain to refine his ninjutsu.
When he finally felt his strength had reached the necessary peak and returned to the village for good, he was hit with the crushing reality of what had transpired in his absence. Five years was an agonizingly long time. It was more than enough time for a tragedy to spiral completely out of control.
He learned that Jia had slaughtered countless people. Civilians within the Land of Fire, her own Anbu comrades, and loyal shinobi returning from border missions. All dead by her hands.
In that moment of realization, Jiraiya had experienced a suffocating, unmatched panic. He had desperately tried to pull her back from the edge of the abyss, only to watch her plunge headfirst into hell. One wrong step had cascaded into a hundred more. Everything had seemingly crossed the point of absolutely no return.
Even after gaining all this overwhelming strength, he realized there were still things utterly beyond his control. Human power had its absolute limits.
Because he stood with his back facing her, Jia could not see his facial expression. She could only hear the heavy, suffocating layers of self-blame and guilt weighing down his every word. It was a dark, twisted mixture of resentment and obsession, forged under half a decade of emotional suppression.
"Five years ago, I always thought there was still room to turn things around," Jiraiya whispered into the damp air. "I naively believed I could just reach out, grab your hand, and force you to turn back toward the light."
He slowly clenched his fists. "Five years later... I have finally grabbed your hand. But I still do not know what to do. I do not know how to face the grieving families of the deceased, yet I absolutely refuse to let you continue walking down this path of self-destruction. So, bringing you to Mount Myōboku was my only option."
He turned his head slightly, his voice dropping to a fierce, deliberate whisper. "I am going to hide you away. This way, you will not die, no one else will get hurt, and everyone will be fine."
Astonishment flashed clearly across Jia's eyes. She was genuinely shell-shocked by the sheer leaps in logic Jiraiya's brain had just performed.
This protective, borderline-yandere direction was infinitely stranger than if he had simply drawn a kunai and tried to execute her on the spot.
Was she not supposed to be following Orochimaru's villainous script? Or perhaps Sasuke's rogue avenger script?
Wait, no, that comparison was entirely inaccurate. Neither Orochimaru nor Sasuke had ever actually allowed themselves to be captured. Only she had been careless enough to hold back her lethal jutsu, landing herself squarely in this ridiculous mess.
So now she was officially locked in a little dark room.
Bah, scratch that. She was a political prisoner trapped in the sacred world of Mount Myōboku.
First, she had endured a lovely ten-day torture tour in the Konoha Interrogation Department. Now, she was unlocking a secret Mount Myōboku Imprisonment route? Just what kind of cursed, tragic heroine attributes had this specific alias managed to trigger? The universe was throwing every dramatic trope at her all at once.
Deep into the night, while resting on the stiff wooden bed, Jia suddenly felt the distinct prickle of a probing gaze washing over her skin.
Her eyes snapped open. Pinpointing the exact direction of the hostility, her body vanished from the mattress, instantly materializing in the dense forest outside.
Silence greeted her. The rustling leaves revealed no one. Technically, aside from herself and Jiraiya, there were no humans residing on Mount Myōboku.
But her sensory perception was never wrong. Just a second ago, there had absolutely been a toad observing her from this exact distance. The very moment she had forcibly unsealed two of her blocked chakra points and gathered a sliver of energy, the owner of that spying gaze had turned tail and fled in a panic.
Who was it?
Jia closed her eyes, allowing her heightened perception to ripple outward through the humid air. Finally, at a specific coordinate near the mountain's peak, she caught the distinct chakra signature of Fukasaku Sage sprinting frantically away from her position.
She frowned. During their afternoon dinner, the elder toad had acted perfectly normal. He had treated her as an honored guest and companion of Jiraiya, enthusiastically introducing the scenic spots of the mountain and even bragging about his adorable son.
Why was he suddenly acting like he had just seen a ghost?
Realization struck her like a physical blow. Gamamaru. The Great Toad Sage of Mount Myōboku possessed the ability to peer into the future. The ancient amphibian must have received a prophecy the moment she set foot in this realm, and he had immediately relayed the terrifying truth to Fukasaku.
This game was officially no longer fun.
Currently, she was operating inside a clone, not her original body. Without the main system directly anchored to her soul, she only had access to the shared inventory warehouse and a handful of basic passive skills. Her advanced firewall functions were completely offline. She had absolutely no way to block high-tier divination probes, especially prophetic visions cast by an entity as ancient as the Great Toad Sage.
If that senile, big-mouthed toad prophesized the true nature of this clone alias and accidentally leaked her core secrets to the world, her carefully constructed survival game would collapse into chaos.
Jia scratched the back of her head, a dark, dangerous aura bleeding into the night air.
Was the universe actively trying to push her into a genuine killing spree?
Honestly, letting this clone alias go on a rampage seemed perfectly fine. No matter how much blood she spilled here, the karmic backlash would never trace back to her original body hidden far away., the Great Toad Sage's divination could not possibly calculate the existence of her true self.
Her cold gaze drifted toward the towering peak where the Great Toad Sage resided. In the pitch-black shadows of the forest, her eyes shifted. The complex, bladed pinwheels of the Mangekyo Sharingan spun to life, glowing with a sinister pale purple light for a fraction of a second before fading back into an abyssal black.
She needed to discuss this variable with her original body first. If an assassination was truly necessary, it would be infinitely safer for the main body to execute the strike. This current clone only possessed roughly eighty percent of her total combat strength. She could not afford to be reckless in a realm overflowing with senjutsu energy.
Acting too rashly here would just be digging her own grave.
"Consider yourself lucky. For Jiraiya's sake, I will not pursue tonight's little espionage incident," Jia whispered into the chilling night wind, her voice laced with absolute, chilling certainty. "Gamamaru, you had better keep your giant mouth firmly shut. Otherwise, I will personally ensure that Mount Myōboku is permanently erased from the map."
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