The short answer was hair.

"Yeah, we know how stupid that sounds," Jei grumbled, leaning into his fist. "Killing people over the type of hair you have."

I blinked. I shook my head. That didn't sound stupid to me at all. Aoi had already taught me about the importance of hair.

My friends were pleasantly surprised.

Foreign visitors would usually describe the people of Kurohyou as very shallow. They liked to say that all that money and luxury had made the people dumb. That the people of Kurohyou were mean and gossipy, constantly judging people based on their clothes or their walk or their talk.

Of all the things you were judged for, hair was the most important.

All people in Lightning were obsessed with hair, but in Kurohyou, hair was everything. People spent all their time trying to transform them. Dyes were a big industry. Every day there was a new scandal of some celebrity having faked their hair, or two people of different hair colors marrying.

But to criticize Kurohyou for being shallow was to have a shallow understanding of Kurohyou itself.

To truly understand why the city was what it was, you needed the long answer. And the long answer… well, that went back to history, to geography, and to people.

Fire was at the heart of the known world, its land rich and fertile and easy to walk. All trade routes went through it. And so, many different groups of people would cross its borders, talking, trading, marrying. This led to the rise of thousands upon thousands of clans. Some roamed the lands. Some carved out territories. Each clan was unique, with their own history.

But Lightning was in the northern mountains. Travel was hard. Not everyone could survive that travel, and the people who did, they would settle down into a community with other people. Because everyone in a community had to work together to survive, the idea of separate family lineages was not a thing. Surnames were not a thing. Clans were not a thing.

These communities, called hubs, were isolated from each other. And so, as each hub grew, they developed their own way of talking and walking and dress. And over time, depending on how high a hub was to the sky, depending on the surrounding plants and animals and land, they adapted distinctive looks too. By chance, the most distinctive feature happened to be hair. Depending on the color and texture, you could immediately tell which hub someone was from.

And this was the world… until seventy years ago.

Until the day Senju Hashirama, Uchiha Madara, and Uzumaki Mito started their ninja revolution. And changed everything.

Fire, once a scattered land of thousands of ancestral lands, unified into one country and one military. Its borders expanded rapidly, all land and resources taken by the Fire daimyo, enforced by the new military village of Konoha. Even the hubs in the northern mountains, one by one, fell under Fire control.

To push back against the Fire invasion, the people of the mountains realized they, too, had to unite. Under the banner of Lightning, the hubs developed techniques that allowed them to support each other, everything from teleportation to telecommunication, sky towers to sky bridges.

The combination of brilliant minds from each hub allowed them to accomplish miracles. They not only successfully defended their lands, many of the inventions of the time, like broadcasting, gave us things like the televisions and radios we have today. And the center where all those scientists and architects and engineers came together—Kurohyou—would go on to become one of the most advanced cities in the world. It was a place where you could find people from every hub, where you saw all different types of hair.

But with this new wealth came a question of who received it.

Kurohyou, the old Kurohyou, was rooted in five hundred years of democracy. They were led by a chief and the Council of Eight, who encoded into law that all people were equal. Equal voices, equal rights, equal power. Absolute and unconditional. Under these customs, people had to strike fair deals with each other. All disputes had to be settled with equity and agreement.

For the natives of Kurohyou, things like warfare had been long forgotten. They had evolved beyond the need of violence hundred of years ago.

But the new Kurohyou had immigrants from all over, including those from the south and western borders. Hubs like the Ooji battled constantly. They battled constantly, because all their neighbors battled constantly, and so their people decided right by might. Under their customs, the strong took advantage of the weak, and the weak took advantage of the weaker.

When all the groups came together, it became clear they had very incompatible ideas of the future of the city.

To the Kurohyou natives and the hubs in the inner confederacy, wealth should be equally divided across all citizens.

To the Ooji immigrants and the hubs from the outer borders, wealth should be given to the leaders of the war effort.

For a while, it was not clear which side would win. History was not always predictable.

Ultimately, democracy won.

The leader of Ooji shook hands with the chief of Kurohyou, persuaded by the vision of an equal and just society.

As a result of that decision, many Kurohyou traditions were preserved. Not only that, they spread to other parts of the new country. The title of chief. The voting system. Ticket and election days. And the people of Ooji, many of them became the enforcers of the new unified society.

For a while, it looked like this was the future.

But history was not always predictable.

Konohagakure still existed. And soon, it became clear to the rest of the world that it had created a weapon of mass destruction.

The jinchuuriki.

"The jinchuuriki?" I echoed.

"Wait, how are you from Konohagakure and not know about the jinchuuriki?!" Jei asked, baffled.

"I… do." My mind spun. I did hear that word in passing. But… "We never made a big deal out of it," I said softly. It was just… a footnote. Nothing any more significant than any of the other hundreds of thousands of artifacts or techniques we read about. I sensed the word was a bit more forbidden than the others, and poking your nose into it was going to get you a disapproving look from our teachers. But it was certainly never described as some world-ending weapon. More like…

"We just called them gifts and moved on."

"Gifts?!" Emu and En simultaneously demanded.

I sweated. "Um… yes? Weren't the Tailed Beasts gifts by the First Hokage? To all the villages?"

My friends exchanged a look.

Jei inhaled sharply. "Girl, if by Tailed Beasts, you're talking about the Spirit Creatures, no, the Hokage didn't give them away as gifts."

"It'd be one lousy gift," Emu mumbled.

"The audacity," En mumbled.

"But he did," I said weakly. I tried to remember my homework from eons past. "He gave Lightning the…" I tried to think back, mentally counting. "... the Eight-Tails."

"Not possible," Emu deadpanned.

"Gyuuki has been living in our homeland for thousands of years," En deadpanned.

"Holy mother, I don't know what's worse," Jei said. "That Konoha thinks Gyuuki is some object you can own and give away. Or that Konoha thinks that invading our land, kidnapping a sacred life, then returning it… is a gift somehow. Like, what? Not even going into what a bogus lie that is?! Ayae, our military took Gyuuki away and sealed him inside a jinchuuriki. So that when the time comes, yours won't nuke us to the ground."

"That's not what I learned." I bit my lips. I was remembering it more clearly now, like the dust has been cleared from an old book. "The Tailed Beasts were rampaging the lands, and the Hokage was the only one powerful enough to stop them. So he sealed them away and gave it to all the villages as a gift… as part of a peace treaty."

"Peace?!" Jei laughed hysterically. "Spreading weapons of mass destruction… for peace?"

"You were lied to," Emu told me grimly. "None of that is true."

"Why would my teachers lie to me?"

"Why would we lie to you?" En growled.

"Are you really doubting us, and not your shady village?" Before I could interrupt, Jei reminded, "Who put a genjutsu in your brain without permission?"

Jei and I stared hard at each other.

"I believe you."

"And let's not forget—" Jei blinked. "Say what?"

"You're angry," I pointed out. I was angry too. But my anger wasn't mine. It was just a mirror of theirs. I looked at Emu and En. "You're all holding back right now, so as to not hurt my feelings."

I looked back at Jei. "I went to ninja school. They teach us how to tell when someone is lying. It's easy to fake words. It's hard to fake emotions."

Anger was a bad emotion to fake anyway. It was too easy to lose control. It put people on the defensive. It doesn't let you get your way. It was how I immediately knew my friends were good, honest people: what they said and how they felt and what they did always matched.

I wondered if that was what everyone back home noticed about me too, when they called me stupid, because I was no good at hiding my emotions like a proper ninja should.

I pouted.

"You don't have to hold back, you know," I said. "I'm sensitive, not fragile."

Jei was caught off guard. He slumped, his anger poofed away.

We talked more about the jinchuuriki and the Tailed Beasts—the Spirit Creatures, as they called them—trying to bridge our two sides of the story. Very quickly, I saw the story I was taught did not hold up. It sounded like what someone with a big ego would make up when drunk.

If Konoha wanted peace, they could have given many things: food, medicine, infrastructure. They could have revealed the secret ninja techniques they had been hoarding.

Yet they claimed to have gifted the Tailed Beasts, which could not have belonged to Konoha in the first place. The only thing Konoha did there was seal one for themselves, and gave the other military villages the idea to do the same.

"But if we leave the beasts out in the wild, that's not good either, right?" I pointed out. "They had to be sealed, or we'll be leaving people in danger."

"Spirit Creatures are some of the oldest beings alive," Emu explained. "Being on Earth that long, they shaped the land, the water… all of nature to the way we know it."

"And they've been killing people in all that time," I said.

"So have monsoons and thunderstorms," En countered.

"Right. You get smart and take shelter, not stop rain from happening. Because guess what else will kill a lot of people?" Emu deadpanned.

"Droughts and famine," En answered dryly.

"Taking the Spirit Creatures away from their homes has tossed nature completely out of balance."

"The weather is getting crazier."

"Plants and animals are dying everywhere."

"We don't know what it's like in Fire," Jei said, "but in Lightning, we have more and more hubs that are becoming unlivable, all because Kumogakure took Gyuuki away from us.

"We're supposed to live in harmony with other living beings, whether that's people or plants, animals or spirits."

"The world is created such that there is enough for everyone."

"More than enough…"

"There's an abundance."

"Because everyone gives out much more than they take in…"

"And we all share in that prosperity."

"But when you take extra that's not yours, when you steal from others…"

"Those you've stolen from will now suffer and wilt and die."

"And when they suffer, everyone who relied on them will now also suffer."

"And this effect will domino…"

"...all the way back to you."

"By stealing from others…"

"You robbed yourself in the end too…"

"By turning abundance into scarcity…"

"And life into death."

My friends looked tired.

"Our people forgot that," Jei grumbled.

To counter Konohagakure and the threat of their jinchuuriki, Lightning had created its own military village, Kumogakure.

Like Kurohyou, Kumogakure had people who immigrated there from all hubs. If Kurohyou was the brain, then Kumogakure was the brawn. They were supposed to be sister cities.

Except Kumogakure turned out to be nothing like Kurohyou.

My friends believed it was because, unlike Kurohyou, which was rooted in hundreds of years of history and wisdom, Kumogakure was created from uninhabited mountainland. It was built from scratch by a single generation, most of whom were disconnected from their families and homes.

The people in Kumogakure had no history and no culture. They had no ties to connect them, except the war. Lightning would soon realize the mistake of sending their strongest to such a harsh, barren place.

In the absence of a culture, war became their culture.

A coup d'etat removed the democratically-elected Second Raikage. The Third Raikage eliminated village elections, declaring his son as the heir.

Several shinobi wars later, the village grew more and more terrifying. They began bullying other hubs, threatening them, turning them into puppet states that served Kumogakure's goals. The power that once used to belong to everyone began to collect into the hands of a select few, mainly the ninjas and their inner circle.

"We messed up," Jei sighed. "Militaries by nature are anti-democratic. We thought we could keep it separate from the rest of the country, and turn a blind eye to what it was doing. But we were wrong."

In Kurohyou, a group of people came together and formed something called the Jouge party. Jouge meant "up-down". These people claimed to be descendents of the Ooji, the war heros who took independence back from Fire. They were inspired by the coup d'etat in Kumogakure. They worshiped the Third Raikage, seeing him as a pillar of strength and leadership who could crush any country who dared bully Lightning. They believed the Third Raikage had to be a descendent of Ooji, like them.

Ninjas in Kumogakure were stripped of identity. Not even the Raikage himself could tell you which hub he came from or who his ancestors were. Such talks were taboo there.

But for the people of Kurohyou, who were very proud of their ancestry, they saw the Raikage and his hair and immediately knew. Using the Raikage as an example, the Jouge claimed that the descendents of Ooji were built different. That their blood was thicker, their brains smarter, and their bodies stronger.

Which meant there was also blood that was thin, and dumb, and weak. That certain hubs tended to create people who were malformed and an embarrassment to the country.

And so, the Jouge spread the belief that there were upper people, who were superior, who deserved to live in the sky, who deserved to be masters. And there were lower people, who were inferior, who deserved to live in the underground, who deserved to be slaves. Who was upper and who was lower, you could tell by their hair, and there was science and history and all sorts of things that proved why people of one hair were better than people of another. They spread this belief hard and fast, through the news and TV, through the schools and textbooks, to the old and young alike.

"It's complete bullshit, of course," Jei said. "Your hair is connected to your hub, that's true. But all the upper and lower stuff is just a bunch of guys in a room coming together, thinking they and their buddies should own everything, and putting all the people who agreed with that idea at the top and all the people who opposed that idea at the bottom."

It was the same fight from a generation ago, reincarnated: the Kurohyou natives and the inner confederacy, who believed power and wealth should be equal across all citizens, versus the Ooji immigrants and the outer borders, who believed power and wealth should belong to a select few.

Only this time, democracy lost.

The Jouge won their first ever election and took control of the city. The very same day, eight hundred people in Kurohyou were killed in broad daylight. The rest of the city watched as enforcers dragged the bodies of adults and children alike. Every one of the victims had the same hair color.

Another purge happened four years later, and another a few years after that. It became so common, people started getting used to it. And anyone who protested were taxed or imprisoned or exiled.

To push back, different groups came together to oppose the Jouge. They formed the Sayuu party, the "left-right". But these groups were weak and scattered and had little in common with each other except for a shared fear of the Jouge.

That fear turned out to be strong. After campaigning tirelessly for votes, the Sayuu eventually took back control of the city, putting an end to the bloodshed. Temporarily.

Emu and En descended from a hub that had criticized Ooji-style politics for decades. It was people like Emu and En who led the counter-movement that helped Sayuu win.

The Jouge knew this. That was why the Jouge wrote them as "lower" and spread the lie about how people with hair like Emu's and En's were lazy and violent. The Jouge wanted others to distrust them and abandon them and ultimately look away when the Jouge killed them next.

And with them gone, the Sayuu would never again have enough votes to oppose the Jouge.

"Genocide has nothing to do with right or wrong, love or hate, truth or lies," Emu said tiredly.

"And everything to do with control," En said tiredly.

"It's the inheritance…"

"Of a broken society…"

"That allows for unchecked egotism…"

"To meet unrestrained power."

The twins looked at me.

"Be careful, Ayae."

"Adults who've never grown up will kill the kids who have."

"And they will ruin the world…"

"Before they let you ruin their fantasy."