Konoha: The Absolute Justice of the Uchiha.

Chapter 445 Cloth Strips and Suspenders

Chi Quan lifted his eyelids and shone a flashlight into his pupils—the light reflex was normal.

Then I placed two fingers on his wrist and counted his pulse—68 beats per minute, with a regular rhythm.

He withdrew his hand and wrote a few words on the medical record.

All six people were simply under the influence of medication and were in a state of sedation.

Liver and kidney function are normal, and there is no damage to the nervous system.

You will wake up naturally after the drug is metabolized—it is expected to take another three to six hours.

"After waking up, you may experience temporary dizziness and dry mouth, and you will need to replenish fluids and electrolytes." He tore off a medical record and handed it to Tian Tian. "This contains everyone's basic vital signs and key points for care after waking up."

I'll go check on those jinchūriki outside.

Kai stood up from where he was leaning against the wall.

His right arm was slinged across his chest. Chi Quan used a simple splint made of aluminum strips from the culture tank support and bandages to fix his humerus very firmly. The skin above the fracture site returned to its normal color after the high-temperature steam from the Jingmen Gate dissipated. However, his entire right forearm was still trembling slightly due to prolonged chakra overload—not from pain, but because the metabolic waste accumulated after the muscles exerted themselves to the limit had not yet been completely eliminated.

He pressed down on Chi Quan's shoulder with his left hand.

"Look at your knees first."

"Don't worry about your knees."

The effusion sac has stabilized and has not continued to expand, indicating that there is no new tear in the joint capsule.

"We can do the fluid extraction anytime. But if we don't deal with the beads of those ten pillar spirits outside, there could be problems at any time." Chi Quan switched his cane from his left hand to his right and walked out of the passage.

It was already dawn outside the main gate of the former site of the Sound Village.

Unlike the slow-spreading, orange-red morning light of sunrise, the sky brightens quickly in the northern mountains of Ichita-no-kuni. The sun leaps out completely from behind the ridgeline, and the light changes from grayish-blue to blinding white in seconds.

On the gravel ground outside the main gate, the ten human guards still maintained the same formation they had used to blockade them the night before.

The beads on their chests went dark after Dou's conscious control was severed, and the dark red pulse became extremely slow.

The increasingly longer intervals between faint flashes resembled a backup power source that was still running automatically in a deep sleep state.

The ten people stood in place, each in a different posture—some leaned against the mountain wall, some squatted beside the pile of rubble, and some sat directly on the ground with their backs against the trunk of a short pine tree that had been uprooted after being affected by the Wood Release.

Their eyes were all open, the grayish-white light in their pupils had faded, revealing the blank and confused looks of ordinary people below.

A man in his thirties saw Izumi walking out of the main gate of Otogakure with a cane. He moved his lips and uttered a hoarse, almost inaudible syllable.

"—Water." His voice wasn't a request—it was an instinctive reaction from his body in a state of extreme dehydration.

Chi Quan walked up to him, took a small water bottle out of his white coat pocket, unscrewed the cap, and held it to his lips.

The man's hand froze halfway up—not because he couldn't move, but because his body's autonomous movement hadn't fully recovered after the remote control of the bead was disconnected.

Chi Quan put the spout of the kettle directly into his mouth, tilting the kettle at a very small angle, pouring in only a small sip at a time, and then pouring in another sip after he swallowed it.

After the man drank about half a pot of water, the muscles in his throat regained enough coordination that he was able to hold the pot by himself.

He took the kettle, held it with both hands, and his fingers trembled several times on the kettle before he could steady it.

"Thank you." As the man said these two words, he glanced down at the bead on his chest that was still faintly gleaming.

The bead was embedded in the center of his sternum, and the surrounding skin was charred black, but the charred area was slowly shrinking. After losing Kabuto's chakra supply, the bead's erosion of the surrounding tissue also stopped, and the skin's own repair mechanism began to start. New granulation tissue grew from the healthy skin at the edge of the charred area, pushing the necrotic tissue outward little by little.

Chi Quan squatted down, using his cane to support his weight, and checked the fit of the beads on the man's chest.

After the power supply stopped, the connection between the bead and the sternum loosened slightly—the gap between the base of the bead and the bone, which was originally filled with black chakra crystals, began to show extremely fine cracks. A few drops of clear tissue exudate seeped out of the cracks, which was the body's natural rejection reaction after recognizing the foreign object.

No surgery is needed; the beads will fall off on their own in a few days.

He then checked the condition of the other nine people who were in charge of the ritual, and the conclusion was the same—all ten beads had entered a dormant state, and the host's rejection reaction was starting naturally. All the beads would be expelled on their own within a month.

After the defect in the sternum is removed, it will take time to heal, but it will not leave permanent functional impairment.

He left each Jinchuriki a water bottle and some dry rations. The dry rations were taken from the storage room of the Sound Village by Tenten. They weren't Kabuto's things, but military compressed rations stored up from the Orochimaru era. The shelf life was ridiculously long, with the production date on the packaging being ten years ago. After opening them, the compressed biscuits inside hadn't even spoiled.

Tenten took a sniff, took a bite, chewed a few times, swallowed, and then gave Neji a thumbs up.

"It tastes like sawdust, but it's edible."

Neji sat on a flat stone heated by the sun outside the main gate, his right arm resting on his knee. The swelling on his wrist had shrunk to below the size of an egg after being repeatedly applied with cold water.

Every day, he would come over and hand him a compressed biscuit that had been broken in half. He would take it, take a bite, and chew for a long time before swallowing it.

It wasn't that the biscuits were hard to chew; rather, his jaw muscles were sore after repeatedly opening his eyes and finishing the Sixty-Four Palms. The chewing action was now also consuming his energy.

But he still ate the whole cookie.

After finishing his meal, he wiped his left hand on his pants and turned to look at the dirt road outside the main gate.

At the end of the dirt road, at the foot of the rock wall in the direction of the mine, a figure wearing a gray-blue short jacket was running towards this side.

They ran very fast, their straw sandals making a series of soft footsteps on the gravel road.

Early period.

When she reached the main entrance, she bent over and panted for a while, her hands on her knees, the bamboo basket on her back tilted to one side.

She looked up and saw Kai leaning against the door frame with his right arm in a sling, Neji with his right arm wrapped in bandages on his knee, Tenten squatting on the ground unpacking compressed biscuits, and Izumi standing stiffly between the Jinchūriki, leaning on a cane.

She looked at each of their injuries one by one, and then asked, "Did you win?" She heard the sounds of battle inside the mountain from the mine, the loud crash of Wood Release breaking apart, and the muffled explosion that pierced the entire mountain when the power of the Gate of Shock punch pierced through the spine of the cloak.

She knew it was over.

She asked, "Where's the tree?"

Kai pointed with his left hand toward the inside of the main entrance.

"Go to the end of the passage, and the first storage room on your right."

Fell asleep.

I'll wake up in a few hours.

Saki took the bamboo basket off her back, placed it at the door, and ran through the main gate.

Her footsteps grew fainter and fainter in the corridor, and then stopped.

The storage room was quiet for a few seconds, then a sob, barely suppressed but not quite, escaped. It wasn't sadness, but the uncontrollable physiological crying that came from the body reacting before the brain could process the most important thing.

The volume was kept extremely low, as if afraid of waking someone who was sleeping.

Every day after finishing his biscuit, he would brush the crumbs off his fingers and glance into the main entrance.

She didn't go in.

She sat on the sun-heated rock next to Neji and emptied all the kunai from her ninja tool bag to clean it.

Nine kunai stood in a row in the sunlight, the rolled edges of their blades being smoothed out little by little with a whetstone. The sound of the whetstone rubbing against the metal was very rhythmic, almost like the dripping sound of the water clock in the ancient riverbed.

By noon, the sun had moved directly above the main gate of the Sound Village, and the gravel ground was scorching hot.

After replenishing their water and food, the ten human guardians regained some strength and leaned against the mountain wall, talking to each other in hushed tones.

Their memories were suppressed after the beads were implanted—not erased, but suppressed to the bottom of their consciousness by the chakra field of the beads, like looking at their past experiences through a layer of frosted glass.

Now the beads have stopped, the frosted glass shatters piece by piece, and fragments of memory resurface. Each piece is incomplete, but enough to remind them of who they are.

Sawada Village, Sawashita Town, and a few others were captured from villages further north.

They introduced themselves by name and village name, like a group of people waking up from the same nightmare confirming each other's existence.

The six young people in the storage room also woke up one after another in the afternoon.

The first to wake up was a slender boy, about sixteen or seventeen years old, with an old scar on his left eyebrow bone.

When he woke up, the first thing he saw was the fluorescent light on the ceiling, and the second thing he saw was his sister sleeping next to his bed.

Saki had been leading Kai and the others through the ancient riverbed and mine since dawn, and hadn't slept since. She sat by the cot watching over her younger brother, but finally couldn't stay awake any longer and fell asleep.

Her head rested on her arm, which pressed against the iron edge of the cot, leaving a deep red mark.

He Shu didn't wake her up.

He lay on the pillow, turned his head to look at his sister, and after a while, he reached out and brushed away a strand of hair stuck to her forehead with sweat.

The movement was so gentle that Saki didn't wake up at all.

I saw this scene every day while leaning against the door of the storage room.

She didn't say anything, turned around and walked back into the passage, took out the last compressed biscuit from her ninja tool bag, broke it in half, put one half into her mouth, and placed the other half next to Saki's bamboo basket.

There were still a dozen or so sharpened bamboo tubes left in the bamboo basket. The plant toxins at the tips of the tubes had dried in the sun and turned into a dark brown powder.

She took out all the pointed bamboo tubes and placed them in the corner, emptied the bamboo basket, and then put in compressed biscuits, a few bottles of water, and a roll of extra bandages.

She helped Saki rearrange her bamboo basket.

By evening, all six young people had woken up.

The anesthetic injected into them was metabolized very well; no one experienced nausea, vomiting, or neurological aftereffects, except for a general feeling of thirst.

Chi Quan asked Tenten to go to the kitchen in the Sound Village to find salt and sugar. The kitchen was on the bottom floor of the facility. The stove left over from Orochimaru's time was still there. The ash on the stove was several centimeters thick, but the salt and sugar in the spice jars were still usable because they were well sealed.

Every day, I mixed salt and sugar into warm water according to the proportions written by Chi Quan, making the simplest oral rehydration solution, and gave everyone two cups to drink.

After the young people drank it, the color of their lips returned from pale to light pink within half an hour.

Around 6 p.m., the old man from Sawashita Town led two villagers to the former site of Otogakure.

The old man was still leaning on that wooden stick, which was much rougher than Chiquan's walking stick. He had walked all day on the mountain path, and the soles of his straw sandals were completely worn through, with his left big toe sticking out of the hole in the sole.

As soon as he entered the main gate, he went straight to the storage room. He saw six young men sitting on cots drinking sugar and salt water. He counted them one by one, and when he got to the sixth one, he let out a long sigh. Then he squatted down at the door of the storage room, leaning on a wooden stick, buried his face in his hands, and his shoulders trembled for a while.

Two middle-aged women—the mothers of the young men who had been arrested—squeezed in from behind him and each found their son.

One of them hugged her son and cried for a long time, resting her head on his shoulder. The other didn't cry, but repeatedly touched her son's face and the back of his hands, as if to confirm that this was not a dream.

The storage room was packed with people, and the aisles between the cots were so narrow that it was difficult to turn around, but no one felt crowded.

Kai stood outside the storage room, watching the family reunion inside.

He didn't go in because he felt that his height would make others feel even more cramped in an already crowded space.

He stood against the corridor wall for a while, then turned and walked to the main entrance.

The setting sun bathed the gravel ground in a warm orange hue.

The ten Jinchūriki leaned against the mountain wall, watching the sunset. The beads on their chests were almost invisible in the red glow of the sunset, not because the light overlapped, but because the pulse of the beads had weakened to the point that it was almost indistinguishable to the naked eye.

A person tried to stand up and take a few steps. He walked very slowly and his steps were unsteady, but he could walk.

He stopped in front of Kai, looked down at Kai's right arm hanging in a sling, then tore off a strip from his greyish-white robe and clumsily wove a simple sling with the fabric before handing it to Kai.

"Yours is better than mine." He pointed to the aluminum splint and sling on Kai's shoulder, then stuffed his own braided cloth sling into Kai's left hand. "But this one can be washed."

Kai looked down at the strip of cloth sling made of gray and white robe fabric in his hand.

The weaving is rough, the edges of the strips of cloth are not hemmed, and the loose threads are scattered, but the weaving structure is well thought out—it is the three-strand twisted weaving method used in the countryside of the fields to weave straw ropes. The resulting suspenders are soft and resilient, and more comfortable than medical bandages.

He put the strip of cloth suspenders into his ninja tool bag and nodded to the man.

After nightfall, a bonfire was lit outside the main gate of the former Otogakure site.

The firewood was made from the remnants of Hashirama's Wood Release techniques—wooden branches that had swelled up after being soaked in Water Release and then automatically cracked. After being dried in the sun all afternoon, the firewood burned with a pale blue flame and carried a very faint, indescribable fragrance, perhaps from pine resin or something else.