After the last collision with Ion's father had ended, it seemed as if anything Mana did inside of his mind came with a far easier time. Every motion, every intent fulfilled to its fullest with perfect precision. Almost as if there was no opposition. Mana hadn't felt such ease to control one's mind this way ever before. Even when one allowed her to enter a mind and do whatever she pleased, even during mental training, there was still always a level of subconscious resistance, like how an eye closed out of instinct when a needle came closer to its surface.
The surrounding buildings were ancient, though well-maintained. A classical style district with long houses that had the upper sections of their walls lined with veils of silk, as if they would have had nothing to hide from the eye of an outsider. Of course, the fact that the Hyuuga didn't let outsiders anywhere near these parts of their district had a vital part to play in this openness. Mana phased through the wall, entering the building with the clearest image, knowing full-well what she'd find inside.
A young man of shoulder-long black hair was kneeling alongside his father in front of a line of other Hyuuga clansmen. The line must have been the main house of the clan while the kneeling bunch belonged to the branch that served and protected it. The entire life's purpose of these branch house members was centered on servitude to the main branch. They even branded the branch house members with Curse Seals that could inflict excruciating pain or outright kill them on the spot if the main house members preferred it.
It was a primal, brutish tradition but Hyuuga were proud of how conservative they were and Konoha was a village similarly chained by its conservatism and pride in its old and wooden ways which was why it didn't do a good job in advocating change amongst the Hyuuga. It didn't take too long for Mana to identify Ion's father. At this point in time, he was a young man, judging by his age he could have been a few years into his ninja service and out of the Academy, couldn't have been more than a few years added or taken from his mid-teens.
"Lady Hissho will turn three-years-old next week. It's been a most unorthodox time for young Rakugi, being a member of a branch house without a Curse Seal and the main branch heiress to serve. Thankfully, this ataxia is coming at an end," the eldest amongst of the lined-up bunch spoke with a voice choked by the age of its speaker. In the middle of the sentence, a pair of the main branch ninja moved aside to reveal a frightened young girl of curly, dark hair hiding behind the laps of the main branch members.
Ion's future father, now identified as Rakugi, turned his eyes up, casting a grumpy look at the little girl he'd be sworn to serve soon enough. An elder of the branch house grabbed hold of the boy's rising head and bent it down. It was of little use or subtlety as there couldn't have been any doubt that the main branch bunch had noticed it and grumbled a little, clearing their throats as an objection.
"We rarely brand members this old, it's an entirely unorthodox affair, this whole thing. Usually, the branch house members are all branded by the time they graduate from the Academy, though circumstances and tradition have both stuck out their legs to trip us up, I am afraid. Not that lady Hissho's birth was not a miracle in of itself, though… I expect that there will be no issues with this, Kanmeki?" the main house elder glared down with a judging stare at the kneeling branch house members.
"None at all, I assure you that my son will not bring you shame, elder!" the addressed branch house member pressed his forehead to the mat even harder, trying his darndest to sound as his most convincing self.
"Good. With a bit of solidarity and luck, we'll move past this disarray and breach of sacred tradition and a semblance of order shall accompany the Hyuuga again. This is the only matter that we intended to settle today, Kanmeki, you and your son may go," the elder released the two.
Mana stepped back, phasing through the wall as it rippled like its reflection on a still lake would have if one chose to belly flop onto it. She followed young Rakugi and his father, seeing how the memory dampened and grew staticky back at the main house building. No matter how hard Mana tried, she couldn't hear what had happened inside there once Rakugi and his father had left. A bratty lash made Mana twitch and jump up as she turned back to young Rakugi talking back to his father.
"Tradition? The tradition of branding toddlers, he means? Honestly. And did you see that precious heiress they're lauding as a miracle?" Rakugi turned to his father before receiving a firm smack across his cheek that sent him stumbling and then plummeting off the wooden platform and onto the sandy road in between buildings.
"What if someone hears you bad-mouth the heiress, foolish boy? You better begin practicing discretion for that young lady you badmouth can undo your entire self-described splendor with a hand seal. No one will remember how strong you declared yourself to be, how great your grades were, or how proud your sensei is of you," the angered father hissed.
"May as well curse my fortune now, while I still can…" Rakugi stroked his cheek that had a mean, blue bruising forming on it. "My fortune will be held hostage by a three-year-old starting next week. A three-year-old that can't even see right as we can."
"Do you think yourself the first little rebel against our creed, boy? These very streets would be littered with gravestones of cocky little rebels and punks, traitors of their clan traditions if we cared to bury them. They're buried in the graveyard amongst civilians, dismissed and forgotten like the rest of them." Kanmeki raised his arm up and pointed toward an undetermined location. Had Mana a clearer sign of where she was in her village. Maybe she'd known better which location the man had pointed toward, but anything outside the immediate range of the most important memories was too vague. Like a white sheet of paper with pointless, black scribbles on it, just static.
"Forgotten if you do, forgotten if you don't…" Rakugi sighed. "Maybe it's for the better that nobody remembers us. I want neither their pity nor the shame of someone else knowing the destiny we're bound to lead."
"Oh, poor boy… Member of the second most influential ninja clan in the world… Truly, your suffering must be legendary." Kanmeki put his nose up, waving his hand at his son as he began walking the streets back home.
Mana's eyes focused on something unusual, something that could not have happened at this time in Rakugi's memories. The boy had been cradling something in his hands, something that he had either fallen on top of or stumbled into by uncovering it from a layer of dirt he planted onto. Mana approached the boy as he cradled an emerald with a part of an incantation spelling out "Om". The gemstone had been polished into a long, finger-like shape and looked too pristine to have been discarded, and it gleamed with intense clarity and energy like only an object further down the timeline of memories and closer to the immediate present could have exhumed.
The magician's hand brushed away the star-eyed Hyuuga youth like a mirage of hazy mist as she took over the finger irradiating jade light from it and looked where she could have stored it. Mana snapped her fingers, realizing she was in the mental realm and in complete control of it. With a spin of her hand, as if stirring a kettle with a stew, she formed a hat and stuffed the jade finger with "Om" inside it, snapping it away with her fingers. As long as she remembered where she left it, the "Om" finger was hers.
Now the issue of finding the other bits and pieces with the rest of the incantation remained. It wasn't as simple of a matter as just following the timeline of the memories, looking where they'd all lead. These memories were from decades ago in the boy's life, and he had some of the most vivid older memories Mana had ever seen. The odds were that he had loads of memories stored up and all of them would have been just as vibrant as they were pointless to her.
"Hey," Mana muttered, snapping her fingers. "Where are the other bits of the artifact?"
A whirl of ethereal energy spun before her as silky strands shot out from the corner of every nearby house and formed a singular cocoon that burst, revealing another Rakugi inside it. The young man felt himself up and turned his eyes up to Mana. The boy's eyes were blank, rather, his look was blank. Gazing into the white of a Byakugan was one thing, but seeing it gaze entirely through you as if you didn't exist was a frightening and pity-seeding thing.
"This is useless…" Mana shook her head, waving her hand and dispelling the forced manifestation of Rakugi's mind. She must have done a real number on him during their last clash. Still, the man was alive as if he wasn't–she wouldn't remain inside of his mind.
She needed something drastic to locate another key aspect of Rakugi's memories with the other part of the artifact and the incantation symbol on it. The world as seen through Rakugi's memories began spinning uncontrollably as the jade light identical to the one from the broken piece of the artifact that Mana had uncovered drowned the night and the oriental Hyuuga district until the jade-colored world remained only as a green iris of a kitten that smacked a rubber ball around in between its paws, unraveling the timeline of memories while Mana patiently stared at the kitten playing from above. Having left the plane of memories, the magician floated in mid-air atop of a large, rotating cylinder that forced a streaming whirlwind out through its opening to keep itself afloat.
The rubber ball bumped, urging Mana to take off of her rotating, suspended platform and grab the rubber ball away from the kitten that only meowed pathetically a few times before the young woman that had manifested it waved her hand and undid it into a handful of ginger hairs. Mana forced her index finger inside the rubber ball and grabbed hold of the bump, pulling it like a pin of a hand grenade while allowing the entire void around her to submerge into the memory she yanked out that stuck to the dimensional space like the world's most impressive wallpaper.
"Sensei!" a feminine voice shrieked out while the pink-clad kunoichi with short, blond hair reached out toward a stone mausoleum that looked like a box slapped together from stone pillars shutting inward. A fleshy slurp gave the young lady something else to worry about as the hand she had extended toward her trapped mentor parted ways from the arm it had been stuck to since the kunoichi's birth.
With a frightened stare, the quivering young woman stared at the stump of her hand before turning to the masked ninja that had unarmed her. She looked so miserable that it was almost as if the girl accepted her fate and didn't even bother defending herself or substituting away. The second swipe of the ninja's blade beheaded her with one go. Further to the west of the slumping corpse laid a teenage boy about this girl's age. His eyes were open yet lifeless and way too much liquid drooled out of his nose and mouth to deny the conclusion that he had drowned in the middle of a continent, surrounded by miles upon miles of forest. Such was a potential job hazard for a ninja.
Mana browsed the grisly scene for the man of the hour. She wondered for a second if Rakugi might have been the sensei that had been shut into the stone mausoleum, but then he'd not have seen this gruesome scene so vividly. No. This had been etched into his memories. Everything but the exact nature of the murder of these two ninja had been greyed out, despite this memory being a world of pinpoint detail. It was a sort of aftereffect of the scene carving itself so vividly into young Rakugi's mind that despite remembering a whole other bunch of details, the intense focus on the scene of murder made the surrounding circumstances greyed out.
"Bayushi, Soshi…" what was undoubtedly Rakugi's voice cried out. The young man pelted a ninja he was fighting with thrusts aimed for, what Mana believed was his tenketsu, though the stalwart ninja opposing Rakugi did a fine job blocking the strikes, offering other limbs and vital points for the ones that Rakugi wanted to hit before answering the young Hyuuga back with violent chops and a roundhouse kicks that rocked the young man's world and sent him flying back.
Mana's eyes lustered as she stared at the intricate system of grey flesh lit up with a burning, azure liquid flowing through a network of vessels interconnected with burning dots. These torches of chakra light must have been the tenketsu, as Rakugi saw them. Because Mana was seeing his memories and because the assassin himself was so unwilling to put up any semblance of resistance–she was seeing the world in how he saw it right now. Through the eyes of the Byakugan.
"Brat, a human body has 361 tenketsu. There are six of us. That makes it that you need to hit us 2166 times to beat us all. Just accept it and take it like a man. Your friend there did. You can meet your friends in the afterlife, kick back and leave it to us rather than trying to connect 2166 punches when you failed to hit me once this whole time," the bald man with a taijutsu specialist's build and a white dogi underneath a flak jacket pointed his index finger before giving Rakugi a thumb down.
"You know what…?" Rakugi grunted as he peeled his busted face off the ground. "You're right. This fighting style is rubbish, the Byakugan, the Gentle Fist… All of it useless!"
The masked shinobi who had beheaded Rakugi's teammate earlier moved in for the kill, sensing their opportunity. Mana wondered if she had more experience than these thugs, as she'd have done anything but. Maybe it was just because she had just spent her entire evening fighting against this man, she just met today, but she saw through that Rakugi lit up with a second wind that roared like a whirlwind inside of him.
As the blade performed a silver dance in the air, searching for the blood that it was drawn to, it only saw air and then solid ground. Rakugi's thrust jabbed into the man's shoulder and then arced across his entire arm downward. Once the man's arm had had enough, Rakugi moved on to jab at his outer knee and his thighs, forcing the masked ninja to collapse on the ground with a grunt. The future assassin took the man's own katana from him and swiped it without looking at the head he was splitting off of the body, answering his dead teammate's call for being avenged, though not looking pleased about it himself.
With a face stained in blood, Rakugi turned to the rest of the stunned ninja, placing the sword over his shoulders. Another assassin charged him, the young man blocked the overhead strike, he answered each swing of the sword with a countermeasure but he lacked experience, skipping a dirty kick to the chest that left the desperate boy breathless, panting on the dirt.
"Did you see how cool those fucking eyes looked? We've just got to carve them out, it's like they glow or something when he gets pissed. So, fucking cool!" a voice of a ninja positioned on top of the stone mausoleum that had the team's mentor imprisoned inside it grumbled through the battlefield.
The other swordsman moved in for the kill, but Rakugi blocked his upper slash and skid under the sword for a strike. Despite holding a katana in his right hand, the boy struck his opponent instead, going rampant on the man's wide-open body with pinched fingers. The pummeled man screamed bloody murder and collapsed, puking up blood and pouring it out of every orifice while Rakugi claimed the second blade and crossed the katana out in front of him.
"What the fuck was that? That was no pansy-dancing, Gentle Fist shit…" the bald ninja who had just beat Rakugi down earlier pulled his lower lip down in surprise of the boy's breakthrough that resulted in him killing a second member of a far more experienced ragtag group of missing ninja.
"The tenketsu isn't the only thing that the Byakugan can see. The elders, my father… None of them told me this, none of them taught this to me, but… I've just now realized that I can see everything. Your blood flow, your heart, your suffering lungs, and drunkards' liver. I can shut each one of them down with just a pinch too." Rakugi proclaimed, aiming his crossed swords like open scissors in the direction of the ninja that had just struck him down earlier.
The man rolled back the sleeve of his white dogi and charged toward the psychotic Hyuuga kid who took it to the air, vaulting over his head as he left one of his katana embedded into the man's skull. Rakugi turned back to check up on his opponent, who pulled the sword out, splitting his head into two like an unraveled banana peel immediately after the sword had been removed.
"I can see where your skull had been split before and all I need is a little tap to remind you how that felt…" Rakugi muttered before turning to the rest of the ninja and placing the blood-soaked sword over his shoulders as he raised his hand up. "Why has our clan never produced first-rate assassins is beyond me. I prefer staining my hands a thousand times over than living to serve some obnoxious, self-important brat that's been told nothing, but that's she's a little miracle the entire three-years of her life."
"Dude, this little psycho's got issues, no way we'll finish him off before his nanny breaks out, we've gotta scram!" one ninja yelled out and disappeared without waiting for a vote of his comrades. One by one, all the enemy ninja employed their Body Flicker Jutsu to flee the battlefield. The instant that the hand of the Earth Release user left the sealed stone mausoleum, the stone pillars comprising it collapsed, freeing a man with a standard Konohagakure Jounin uniform and spiky, night-blue hair. Rakugi collapsed on his knees, forcing the sword in his hand into the ground to help him stay on his knees instead of completely collapsing.
"I can't believe that your bluff worked, Rakugi. We're incredibly lucky that it did. If it hadn't…" the Jounin mentor looked around the bloody battlefield, stopping his gaze at the fallen young Konohagakure ninja. Mana couldn't pull her eyes away either. No ninja deserved this sort of fate, no person deserved such a cruel end period or an end of any degree of cruelty at such an age.
It wasn't as if she hadn't faced situations just as dire throughout her life as a ninja. Too many times she was a thought or a failed motion away from meeting the same fate. Heck, if memory served, she may have been one of the very few versions of Mana all throughout the infinite fabric of different versions that survived this long. This memory was soon to die out on Mana as the magician blinked a few times, realizing that she was standing in the middle of a featureless, dark city street as rain poured down her face and not a single trace of the memory she was just looking at remained.
She's become too entranced by the death and loss, Mana extended her hand and pulled it back, as if pulling on a rope, returning herself back to the previous memory as she kept scrolling it with her hand, shoving the memorial space-time fabric like a laundry rope. There it was, the familiar jade flash from within the mausoleum which Rakugi's mentor broke free of. The horrifying sight of haunting, adolescent death had prevented Mana from noticing it the first time around.
The jade finger with the golden symbol of "Mani"–the second part of the incantation. Snapping her imaginary top hat back into being, Mana stored this finger inside it as well before undoing the memorial hat again. Both the knowledge of the basic anatomy of the human hand and the knowledge of the name of the Five Pillar Seal suggested Mana was two out of five fingers done with taking control over Rakugi's connection with the mythical sealing artifact. Thankfully, in here, she had all the time in the world.