Konoha: The Absolute Justice of the Uchiha.

Chapter 408 A Voice

"In combat, 2.8 seconds is a long time," Kai said.

He walked to the folding table by the pool, picked up the water bottle, and took a sip.

His breathing hadn't completely calmed down, but it was no longer in the range of panting.

Three weeks of breathing training allowed his cardiopulmonary function to recover faster than his bones. One rib was still aching slightly, but his lung capacity had reached 95% of what it was before the injury.

When he put the water bottle down, he saw Chi Quan drawing a new chart in his notebook. The horizontal axis of the chart was time, and the vertical axis was resonance intensity. The three curves of different colors intersected three times at the same point in time.

He drew a small circle at each of the three intersections, and marked the duration next to the circle.

"Can you tell which resonance was triggered by your punch?" Chi Quan turned the notebook around for Kai to see.

Kai looked down for a few seconds, then pointed to the circle of the third resonance: "This time."

When the resonance occurred the first two times, my punching power was not even enough. The first time it was too light, and the pain in my ribs made me subconsciously reduce my strength.

The second one was too heavy; I wanted to make up for the shortcomings of the first one.

The third time was just right, not too fast, not too slow, with just the right amount of force. He slammed his fist into his palm, making a crisp cracking sound. "You can't be afraid of pain when you exert force."

If you're afraid of pain, you can't generate resonance.

"It's not that I'm not afraid of pain." Chi Quan closed his notebook. "It's that I incorporate pain into my sense of rhythm."

Your ribs will definitely hurt after you leave tomorrow.

"It's not a matter of whether or not it hurts, it's about how to maintain a consistent punching frequency even when it hurts." He stood up, his cane making a small dent in the hard ground. "That's enough for today."

The data from the two joint training sessions is enough for me to develop a final revised plan before departure.

Tonight I will write everyone's frequency parameters on a card and send them to you tomorrow morning.

The card is waterproof, so don't lose it.

On the morning of the departure, the "fire" flag hanging above the gate of Konoha fluttered in the autumn wind.

The sky was grayish-white, with thin but wide-spreading clouds that completely obscured the sky, making it impossible to see any blue.

The air was very humid, cool to the touch, and carried the sweet, fishy smell of decaying leaves.

The four of them, Kaiban, met at the main gate at six o'clock in the morning.

The sky was not yet fully bright, and the streetlights were still on, their yellow light appearing thin and weak in the gray morning light.

Kai changed into a dry, tight-fitting bodysuit, dark green, with a lightweight armor plate added to his right chest. It wasn't hard armor, but a simple chest protector that Kai made himself using bandages and a curved steel plate, covered with a layer of soft leather. It didn't restrict his movements but could distribute the impact.

He wore a black short-sleeved jacket over his chest protector, with the jacket zipped up only to his chest, revealing a green bodysuit underneath.

Tenten carried a ninja tool bag that was a size larger than usual, with an additional pouch on each side containing special ninja tools inlaid with fragments.

She marked each of the special ninja tools with a different colored bandage—red for frequency group number one, blue for number two, and black for spare.

The straps of her ninja tool bag left a shallow indentation on her shoulder.

Neji stood next to the stone pillar on the left side of the gate, with his eyes closed.

His clothes were the same as usual, a white robe of the Hyuga clan over a black ninja vest, but he had an extra pair of wrist guards made of fine steel wire on the cuffs. These were given to him by Chi Quan last night. Each wrist guard had a tiny fragment embedded in the inside, which was attached to the Yangchi acupoint on the wrist and could trigger the fragments to vibrate simultaneously when the palm was released.

Chi Quan was the last to arrive.

He emerged from the corner of Konoha Hospital, leaning on his cane. He had changed out of his white coat into a gray long-sleeved jacket, his pockets bulging with a medical kit, a notebook, and the black velvet cloth.

The knee brace on the right leg was replaced with a sturdier one, secured to the thigh and calf with two Velcro straps.

He carried a small backpack on his back, smaller than a regular ninja tool bag. Inside were portable medical equipment he had brought from Konoha Hospital: a Palm Healing Technique replacement kit, a hemostatic sponge, an adrenaline pen, and two bags of saline solution.

"What time is it?" Kai asked.

"5:58." Chi Quan stopped by the gate, took out four waterproof cards from his pocket, and handed them to everyone.

The front of the card shows each person's frequency parameters and correction values, while the back lists three contingency plans: Plan A is a resonance array attack used when the container's chakra waveform aligns with the main root of the Divine Tree; Plan B is a corrective resonance used when the waveform offset does not exceed 0.5 Hz; and Plan C is a retreat route used when all resonance plans fail.

"The coordinates of the contact point on Poche Island are at the bottom of the back of the card."

We'll first go to Poche Island to find that fisherman, have his blood drawn and tested, then cross the strait to the nameless island to meet up with the Hidden Mist Dark Division.

The contact from the Hidden Mist Division said they had set up a temporary camp on a group of reefs south of the Nameless Island, with basic medical equipment and communication devices. "Let's go," Chi Quan said, tapping his cane on the floor tiles by the gate.

As the four of them walked out of the Konoha gate, the two Chunin guarding the gate stood up.

One of them was the older brother of the genin whose shuriken throwing angle had been adjusted by Chi Quan on the training field that day. He gave a short nod to Chi Quan's back. Chi Quan did not turn around. The rhythm of his cane tapping on the sandy road was exactly the same as the rhythm he used when making rounds in the hospital corridor.

To travel from Konoha to the eastern sea area of ​​the Land of Water, you need to change ships three times.

The first trip involved taking a fast ship from the port of the Land of Fire to the Land of Waves, then transferring to a medium-sized transport ship to the main island of the Land of Water, and finally changing to a small speedboat from the Hidden Mist Anbu to reach Pokiri Island.

The three legs of the journey together take about a day and a night.

They arrived at Poche Island at dusk on the second day.

The harbor on Poche Island is small, with only two wooden piers extending into the sea. The wood of the piers is blackened by the seawater and covered with barnacles and seaweed.

The fishermen's boats are all moored in the harbor—mostly small wooden fishing boats, patched upon patched, with fishing nets and buoys drying on the sides.

Behind the port is a fishing village built against the mountain. The houses are made of stone, with stones weighing down the roofs to protect against typhoons. The smoke coming out of the chimneys is bluish-gray, which is blown by the sea breeze and clings to the rooftops as it climbs up the hillside.

Chi Quan stood on the pier for a while, the salty sea breeze fogging his glasses with a thin layer of salt frost.

He took out the dry cloth from his pocket to wipe his glasses, put them back on, and looked at the fishing village on the hillside.

The fishing village is small, with about forty or fifty households. On one side of the mountain, there is a terraced field. Instead of rice, sweet potatoes and taro are grown in the terraced field—rice cannot grow in the saline-alkali soil by the sea.

"The liaison station is on the north side of the village, at the foot of the mountain." Chi Quan put away the dry cloth and pointed to a gray stone house on the far left of the hillside.

A thin antenna was mounted on the roof of the house. Compared to the houses of ordinary fishermen on the island, that antenna was the only feature that made it different from ordinary dwellings.

They walked uphill along the main road of the fishing village.

The road was paved with flagstones, and short, fleshy grass grew in the gaps between the flagstones, making it slippery to walk on.

Fishermen and their families were collecting dried fish and kelp that they had laid out in their yards when they saw four people from another village walk by. They stopped what they were doing and followed them for more than ten meters.

People from other villages don't often come to Pochi Island. Those who do come are either seafood merchants or ninjas.

The metallic sheen of the ninja's headband reflected in the twilight light was no different from a sign of danger in the eyes of the fishermen.

The head of the Kirigakure liaison station was a retired ANBU member in his fifties named Hiruma.

His left arm was cut off below the shoulder, and the empty sleeve was pinned to his shoulder with a safety pin.

He opened the door with his right hand, glanced at the four people, including Kaiban, his gaze lingering on Chi Quan's cane for a second longer, before taking a step back to clear the doorway.

"Konoha's Kaiban".

The Hokage's secret letter arrived the day before yesterday.

Come in.

The liaison station looks larger inside than outside because the building is built against the mountain, with the back half carved directly into the mountainside.

The room was sparsely furnished, with just a table, a few chairs, and a nautical chart of the waters surrounding Poche Island hanging on the wall. The chart was marked with seven or eight dots in red—fishermen's fishing areas, reef locations, and areas where abnormal currents had been observed in the past month.

"We need to find a fisherman who had an accident in the eastern sea three years ago." Chi Quan didn't sit down. He stood in front of the nautical chart and drew a circle with his finger in the sea between Pochi Island and the nameless island. "Three years ago, he was rescued by the Hidden Mist Anbu while he was drifting in this sea and was sent to Konoha for a medical examination."

Subject number MW-037.

He said at the time that he lived on Poche Island.

Hiruzen touched the gray stubble on his chin with his right hand and thought for about five seconds.

Then he walked to the table and pulled out a yellowed resident registration book from a metal cabinet.

The register's pages were damp and wrinkled, the edges were curled up, and some pages were stuck together and had to be carefully peeled apart.

He used one finger to trace the names down the registration page, stopping at the very end.

"The subject's name corresponding to MW-037 is Akamatsu Kinpei."

I lived in the last house in a row of houses on the southern tip of Poche Island, right by the cliff.

"This person is still on the island. He stopped going to sea after the accident three years ago and started repairing fishing boats on the island instead." Hiruma closed the register. "He was acting strangely for a while after the accident—he kept saying he heard sounds coming from the seabed."

The villagers assumed he was just frightened and gradually stopped mentioning it.

If you need to have his blood drawn, it's best not to mention the sound of the ocean floor to him; he'll get angry if he hears those two words.

"What he heard was probably infrasound," Izumi said. "When the Divine Tree's chakra spreads across the seabed, it transmits mechanical vibrations through the seawater."

When a person is exposed to infrasound in seawater, the auditory system translates the infrasound into a signal that sounds like a buzzing or roaring sound. However, this sound does not actually exist; it is an illusion produced by the auditory nervous system after being stimulated by infrasound.

The sound he described from the seabed was likely the result of 7.3 Hz infrasound waves traveling through the seawater to his ears.

""

Hiruzen glanced at Ikezumi, then at Ikezumi's walking stick, and didn't ask any further questions.

His former occupational habit in the Dark Division had made him accustomed to not asking questions he shouldn't ask, but there was something new in his eyes when he looked at Chi Quan. It wasn't respect, but the kind of recognition that a veteran could understand another veteran in their professional field without needing to say much.

Kinpei Akamatsu's house is on a cliff at the southern tip of Poche Island.

The house was made of stone and was shorter than the other houses in the village. The roof was weighed down with twice as many stones as other houses. The wind was strong on the edge of the cliff, and if there were not enough stones, the roof would be blown off.

In front of the house was a makeshift shed made of driftwood. Underneath the shed was a fishing boat under repair, with cracks in the bottom still unrepaired and patches of half-scraped old paint left on the hull like half-healed scars.

Akamatsu Kinpei squatted by the side of the boat, scraping barnacles attached to the bottom of the boat with a scraper in his hand.

He heard footsteps and looked up. The expression on his face was that of a fisherman from a remote island—not hostile, but an instinctive scrutiny of all things outside, cultivated from a long period of living in isolation.

His face was rough and red from the sea breeze, and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes were indelible white marks of sea salt. His knuckles were large, and his fingernails were full of dried ship paint and rust.

"Akamatsu Kinpei." Izumi stopped three meters away from the ship, leaning his cane on the sandy ground. His voice was not loud but his words were clear. "Three years ago, when you were drifting in the eastern sea, you were sent to Konoha Hospital by the Kirigakure Anbu for a check-up."

I was one of the medical ninjas who participated in the inspection at the time.

There is something related to the safety of the eastern sea area of ​​the Land of Water that requires your cooperation in drawing a vial of blood for a rapid antibody test and meridian imaging.

It won't take more than twenty minutes.

Akamatsu Kinpei placed the scraper on the bottom of the boat, stood up, and wiped his hands on his clothes.

He looked at Chi Quan, a complex emotion flashing in his eyes. First, there was wariness, then something that had been suppressed for a long time and wanted to be confirmed. Finally, when he spoke, his voice was much hoarse than he looked, as if his throat had been worn down by the sea breeze and sea salt for a long time.

"Three years ago you did so many tests on me, but in the end you found nothing."

"You all say my body is perfectly normal, my chakra waveform has returned, and there's nothing wrong with me." He took a step forward, his rubber shoes crunching on the scraped barnacle shells. "But something has been left inside my body."

It's not an illness, it's not an injury, it's a voice.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I can hear it.

It didn't come from outside; it came from within my own bones.

It's buzzing, very rhythmic.

I asked the doctor on the island, and he said it was a problem with my ears.

There's nothing wrong with my ears—I've been fishing at sea for thirty years, and I can tell which sounds are coming from outside and which are coming from inside my own body.

The voice came from inside the body.

While he was saying these words, Kai, Neji, and Tenten stood behind Ikezumi without moving.

The sea breeze rushed up from below the cliff, blowing Tenten's hair sideways and making the colorful bandages wrapped around her ninja tools rustle.

Neji's Byakugan silently activated a chakra network. He wasn't looking at Akamatsu Kinpei's face; he was looking at Akamatsu Kinpei's chakra network.