Boruto was feeling kind of sick.
He had just arrived home of an exhausting mission through a deep jungle in the East.
It was a low risk, D-level mission, to the point Konohamaru actually said they could do it alone, but the heat, the insects, and the vines made it more difficult than it looked.
The Uzumaki didn't understand archaeology. What value was in finding bunch of old things? Specially from a religion that was long extinct?
The archaeologist talked a lot about how he was excited and how little was known of the civilization that built that temple they were searching for, but it all seemed confusing to the Uzumaki.
Mitsuki was more easily fascinated. Boruto guessed that was because his "father" was a scientist too.
Sarada, otherwise, seemed to be as annoyed as Boruto, but in a different way. The archaeologist described the ancient civilization as "reverse amazons", a society where only men were allowed to speak and talk, and woman weren't much better than living cattle. He talked with so much enthusiasm about it, that Sarada told him what was the big deal about a misogynistic society, and the archaeologist said he didn't mean he genuinely liked their values.
The temple seemed complex and detailed, so detailed some images on their walls made Sarada sick. There were images of amputated women, reduced to limbless instruments of pleasure for men, and images of old woman being slaughtered, deemed useless by their society, between many other illustrations, some so simplistic they seemed to be done by children.
There was also a dinner room, a sleeping room, and a bathroom. To Sarada's shock, the archaeologist showed her some partially destroyed ropes and explained some women were used as "toilets for sperm", used for men to satisfy their sexual urges.
There weren't any skeletal remains or signs of war in any place, what led Boruto to finally ask how exactly this place disappeared.
Sarada arrogantly said it was probably "because men can't keep house, it was probably natural", but the archaeologist balanced his head, saying "there was no proof. Believe me, if the reason was that, maybe we would have signals of bloodshed. It's weird how you accused me of sexism for being a too little happy about my work when you're so sexist you think of men like dumb animals".
Sarada grunted, and didn't apologize. The scientist apparently only pissed her off more by pointing out her flaws.
Finally, they reached the centre of the temple, the human sacrifice room. The man began to take photos and make annotations, but Boruto and Mitsuki were weirdly attracted to a cauldron on the centre of the room, at the very centre of the temple, filled with a red-purple liquid.
Sarada, annoyed, sitting on a bench there that seemed to be for the elders and didn't even pay attention when the two boys dipped their fingers on the liquid.
The archaeologist turned around and scolded them.
"Hey, don't touch the liquid!After so many years, it may be toxic for humans!"
Boruto cleaned his finger on his clothes. Mitsuki was a little more "higienic" and cleaned it by rubbing his finger on the cauldron itself.
"What's in there?" asked Sarada.
"A mix of blood with a lot of other things. They just didn't sacrifice humans. They also cooked the blood to make a special soup. I was searching for this temple specifically to see if any proof of human sacrifice existed. The other temples have empty cauldrons. The blood is fundamental".
"You really need proof of this?" wondered the Uchiha.
"Well, we didn't saw any skeletons or corpse remains here, did we? It's a complete mystery how this people disappeared. There are chains and a table of human size there, but my fellow professionals say they may have just sacrificed animals and only covered the woman with blood, to say she was sinful. I have an alternate theory. I think they fed on them if they were considered unusable, like infertile or too old, and used it to feed children. In that way they could make her 'useful'".
"Urgh!" exclaimed Sarada, in disgust.
"And what if you are wrong?" asked Boruto.
"Well boy, errors are a part of science" said the man, taking out a flask from his bag and collecting blood from the cauldron, and then closing it with a cork.
"I think I took enough photos of this place. Honestly, it's less dangerous than I expected. Like, I expected for some big black jungle panther to attack us or something during our path. I think I didn't need to call you guys"
"Oh, all we need to hear now is that our work was useless" said Sarada, raising from the bench.
They left towards the same path they used to leave.
But when the solar eclipse happened three months later, something happened inside the cauldron,motivated by the darkness of the sky, and also because a little portion of the liquid it was supposed to be there was now lacking.
In that moment, all men of the world felt like lightning hit them. An worldwide sickness hit them, old and young, from fetuses to old men.
It was so sudden and unexplained, and so omnipresent that Boruto had to spent that horrible night in his bed, while he sweated like an animal, because there wasn't enough hospital beds for the males.
In his nightmares, while he trembled and sweated, the men saw visions of a disturbing past: a past where were women were beaten, whipped, humiliated, amputated, raped and finally killed when their menopause arrived. A past where only men were humans, and the only privileges women received was more food if they were more fertile or had more curvaceous bodies. And often, men raped their own mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters or cousins to breed the best possible female specimens. The greatest sin of them all was ugliness: a woman who didn't have beauty was, at best, an anal hole; at worst, meat to be slaughtered.
It was a cruel, misogynistic past. And it made all of the dicks on the world hard, no matter how small. And even on the embryos who had only an XY chromosome, a violent idea was seeded into their souls, to be followed through their lives.
To hate and despise women. To rape and torture them. To reduce them to cattle. And, when they became useless, kill them.
It was just a question of time. Until their eyes opened...
"Big bro, wake up! C'mon, your fever ended, you must be fine now! Big bro!"