Chapter 193: You Sleep Beneath the Yellow Springs as Dust and Bone, I Dwell in the Mortal Realm with a Head Full of Snow
The Nine-Tails lay curled deep within the cavernous expanse of its nest. Its mountainous orange body was coiled tight, an imposing mass of fur and muscle, while its massive head rested heavily atop its nine sprawling tails. Slit-like crimson eyes stared blankly upward into the artificial sky of the seal space.
Today, it refused to wear the humanoid vessel Stelle had crafted for it.
It had left that shell back at the house, choosing instead to hide within its true, pure-chakra form. It had no other choice. The physiological reactions of that fleshy, humanoid construct were entirely too sensitive and impossible to control. The moment its consciousness slipped into that vessel, the tear ducts betrayed it. Hot, pathetic tears would stream down its face without end. It was absolutely infuriating.
It was the great and terrible Nine-Tails! The fearsome guardian beast of Konoha! How could a creature of its legendary stature just sit around weeping whenever it wanted?
Besides, Ida Stelle was just a human. A deeply annoying human who had captured it, locked it inside this cage, and refused to let it roam free. They didn't even share a deep, mystical bond. Why should it shed a single tear for her?
When the old man of the Six Paths passed away, it had only cried a little bit.
Who did Stelle think she was? It absolutely would not cry for her. Never.
She was a constant nuisance. She always found ridiculous excuses to dock its hard-earned salary. It was a primordial beast of chakra, yet she constantly insisted on sitting down and 'reasoning' with it. It wasn't human! Why was it expected to be so damn reasonable all the time? Couldn't a demonic fox just be unreasonable for once?
A low growl vibrated in its throat. Seriously, how could such an exasperating creature have even existed?
It could never out-talk her, and it certainly couldn't out-fight her. Whenever it threw a tantrum, she immediately threatened to use 'persuasion by fist'. It was pure, unadulterated bullying. It hated Ida Stelle. Yes, that was right. The person it hated most in this miserable world was her.
She hadn't even taken it with her to that final battlefield. She had simply looked down on its power, leaving it behind.
The Nine-Tails shifted, rolling over to bury its massive snout deeper into its tails. A single, enormous teardrop broke free, rolling down its coarse fur and splashing against the stone floor.
It swore to the heavens it would never befriend another human. They were too fragile. They broke too easily. Even a monster in human skin like Ida Stelle had died. Wouldn't ordinary humans die even faster?
From now on, it would be a cold, ruthless force of nature. It would not grieve for fleeting, mortal insects. It raised a massive paw and slammed it down, activating the barrier's rain shield and shrinking back into the absolute darkest corner of the seal. It didn't want to see anyone.
But the moment it managed to curl into a tight ball, a loud, agonizing wail pierced the silence from just outside the barrier. The Nine-Tails snapped its head up, teeth bared in sheer exasperation.
"Might Duy!" the fox roared, its booming voice rattling the seal. "If you are going to sob like a child, get the hell back to your own house! Do not howl in this Great One's presence! Believe it or not, I will blast you to ash with a Tailed Beast Ball!"
Outside, Might Duy lay slumped heavily against the shimmering energy of the barrier. He was crying so violently that his broad shoulders heaved, gasping for air between broken sobs.
"I... I don't dare go home to cry," Duy choked out, wiping his face with a trembling hand. "The neighbors will hear me. It will only make them sadder. Waaaah... Nine-Tails, please, just let me lean against the rain shield for a bit. Just for a little bit."
The Nine-Tails felt its own throat tighten, dangerously close to bursting into tears itself. It had hidden all the way down here, retreating to the deepest depths of its consciousness, and it still had to listen to this heartbroken wailing? Could a demonic beast not just be allowed to wallow in misery alone?
In the distant woods bordering the village, Kato Dan paused his steps. He had originally intended to visit the Nine-Tails for a quiet chat, but the echoing sound of Might Duy's uninhibited wailing drifted through the trees. Dan's shoulders slumped. He simply sank to the ground right where he stood, leaning his back against a thick oak trunk.
Reaching into his robes, he pulled out a small ceramic bottle of sake. He popped the cork, brought the rim to his lips, and tilted his head back, draining the burning liquid in one long, desperate gulp.
His hands trembled as he lowered the empty bottle. If only he had insisted on launching a rescue mission the moment the intelligence scouting had ended that day... The weather had been so clear that afternoon. Even the night wind had been gentle.
In the dead of night, a thin, solitary figure stepped through the wrought-iron gates of the Konoha cemetery. The crunch of his sandals against the gravel was the only sound for miles.
He knelt before a freshly carved tombstone. With agonizing slowness, he opened a polished wooden box and set it gently upon the cold earth.
The velvet-lined interior was filled to the brim. It held the most popular styles of hairpins from the capital, delicate silver necklaces, and an assortment of fine jewelry—everything a young woman might like. A whole box full of unspoken affection. Each piece was exquisitely crafted and cost a small fortune, clearly chosen with painstaking care over many months.
Gifts that had never been given. Words that had never been spoken. Both were now forever late.
Uchiha Kagami stared at the engraved characters on the stone. He had fantasized countless times about the look on her face when he finally presented this box. He had imagined the exact moment he would finally voice the feelings buried in the deepest, most guarded corners of his heart.
He had fully expected her to punch him. He imagined her sending him flying through a wall, laughing and telling him to stop making such terrible jokes.
And if she had? He would have simply stood back up, brushed off the dust with a smile, pretended nothing had happened, and continued to stand by her side for the rest of his life.
Yet now, as he finally laid these treasures at her feet, her eyes were closed forever. She would never see them.
He had always assumed he would be the one to die. He was supposed to die on the battlefield, falling in combat before he could even catch one last glimpse of her face. He had never, in his darkest nightmares, imagined that she would be the one to fall first.
Kagami's jaw locked. A bitter, self-deprecating laugh escaped his lips. After all these years, he was still nothing but a useless burden. When the 'best choice' scenario arose, he was still the one being evacuated. He lacked even the strength to cover her retreat.
His fist clenched tightly around the broken half of a hairpin resting in his palm. The metal was warped and blackened, deformed by the intense heat of Fire Release. The jagged edge bit into his skin, but he didn't care. His other hand reached out, his trembling fingertips gently tracing the carved name on the tombstone, over and over again.
Pale moonlight filtered through the canopy above, pooling upon the crown of his head. In the silver glow, his dark hair appeared completely frost-white.
You sleep beneath the Yellow Springs as dust and bone, while I dwell in the mortal realm with a head full of snow...
In the 35th year of Konoha, the Fourth Hokage, Ida Stelle, met her end on the battlefields of the Land of Lightning. She had chosen to stay behind alone, acting as a solitary shield to save her surrounded subordinates. For days, she fought a relentless war of attrition against thirty thousand elite shinobi of the Four Nations Alliance.
Before her body finally gave out, she claimed the lives of the Second Tsuchikage and the Second Mizukage. She slaughtered over ten thousand of the Allied Shinobi Forces. In the end, she did not fall to an enemy blade; she died of sheer, absolute exhaustion.
Later that same year, Hiruzen Sarutobi stepped up to become the Acting Hokage. Under his command, Konoha's ninja army mobilized to face the full wrath of the Four Nations Alliance.
The ensuing bloodbath spanned two grueling years. The Alliance had already sacrificed over ten thousand men just to bring down Ida Stelle. Now, facing the vengeful might of Konoha, the pressure upon them grew immense.
Realizing that Konoha could systematically dismantle them one by one, the Four Nations fully integrated their chains of command into a single, unified Allied Force. Bolstered by the military assets of numerous smaller nations that harbored deep-seated grudges against the Leaf, they marched upon Konoha's borders as a singular, unstoppable tide.
Desperation drove their tactics. They gathered the Tailed Beast Jinchuriki from across the continent, placing them at the vanguard of their armies. It was a clear declaration: if they failed to break Konoha now, their respective nations would cease to exist.
Aside from the Six-Tails, which had been previously captured, and the Seven-Tails, which remained missing, the remaining six Jinchuriki deployed to the front lines to protect their hidden villages. They unleashed the catastrophic power of the Tailed Beasts to its absolute maximum, devastating the Konoha ranks.
To counter the apocalyptic threat of the Jinchuriki's Tailed Beast Balls, Konoha's guardian beast took the field. The Nine-Tails personally descended upon the battlefield. Without being bound by a contract, controlled by a Sharingan, or ordered by any human, the great fox voluntarily unleashed its wrath, holding the line against the combined assault of its siblings.
Amidst the chaos of the front lines, Uchiha Kagami locked into a brutal, life-and-death struggle with the Third Raikage. Lightning clashed against fire, shattering the earth beneath their feet.
Just as the battle reached its most critical, desperate climax, the ground beneath the Raikage violently erupted. Sakumo Hatake burst from the soil like a phantom. The White Fang's short sword flashed with lethal precision, piercing directly through the Third Raikage's heart and ending the titan's life in a single, flawless strike.
This Great Ninja War was defined by its extreme, unyielding brutality. The Four Nations Alliance poured every ounce of their strength into fighting Konoha to the bitter end.
In their minds, they had already accomplished the impossible: they had eliminated Ida Stelle. If they could just endure this final wave of retaliation, they could rebuild their villages in peace, free from the shadow of the world's most terrifying expert. They would no longer have to live in constant fear. With that hope driving them, retreat was not an option.
They lacked the luxury of surrender. They could only keep throwing bodies into the meat grinder. By the war's final months, the Alliance resorted to deploying suicide squads. As long as a shinobi could take a Konoha ninja down with them, they gladly embraced death.
Finally, in the autumn of the 37th year of Konoha, the two-year nightmare came to an end. Konoha stood victorious. The Four Nations Alliance suffered a crushing defeat, forced to the negotiating table to pay exorbitant reparations.
The Great Nations had exhausted the foundations they had spent decades accumulating, fighting with such desperate fervor that they barely managed to secure the right to peace talks.
Konoha, bleeding from heavy casualties of its own, ultimately agreed to pull back its forces. The sheer breadth of the ruined landscapes and the staggering scale of the devastation left behind were sobering. The exhausted, battered Konoha army finally marched home.
Two years of total war had brought the global economy to a grinding halt. Konoha fared relatively better; thanks to Stelle's prior aggressive development, no foreign army had managed to set foot within the Land of Fire's borders. However, the war effort had completely stalled any domestic progress.
The Land of Wind and the Land of Water were not nearly as fortunate. Early in the conflict, Danzo Shimura had led a vicious assault into the Land of Water, plundering massive stockpiles of supplies and systematically destroying their most vital fortifications.
Meanwhile, Sakumo Hatake's relentless, hyper-aggressive offensives had driven the enemy forces straight to the very gates of the Hidden Sand Village. The Land of Wind was left in absolute ruins. Had the other three nations not feared they would be next to fall, prompting them to fight Konoha to the death, the Land of Wind would have been wiped from the map entirely.
When the treaties were finally signed, a collective sigh of relief washed over the Ninja World. Everyone knew that if the fighting had continued for another year, the entire continent would have been reduced to an uninhabitable wasteland.
A prolonged era of recovery began, with all nations dedicating the next several years to restoring their shattered economies and broken livelihoods.
Yet, occasionally, in the dead of night, the Kage and feudal lords of the various nations would sit awake in their offices. They would look over the ruined ledgers of their villages and think back to the complete plan for global peace that Ida Stelle had once drafted.
In the quiet dark, they couldn't help but wonder if sacrificing tens of thousands of lives to kill Ida Stelle had truly been the right decision after all.
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