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[Goal 3: Reach 162/200 Collections and 2/10 reviews to receive additional chapter]
Dear 162 collections, the unspoken warriors, Thank you for being a part of the journey.
Hey, you there! Yeah, the one who marked this story with your seal by adding it your collection-now, take the next step like a true shinobi. Leave a review and let your voice echo through the ninja world!
[200 collections is right there—summon your inner power, my readers]
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moshi moshi
There—between the fifth and sixth neural relay point.
He injected a minuscule pulse.
No one noticed.
Neji gritted his teeth, tears flooding his eyes—not from the pain, but from the violation. A foreign chakra was now embedded into his brain.
"It is finished," the Elder said, rising slowly.
Hiashi nodded and offered a brief bow. "Thank you, Elder."
Neji sat up slowly. His forehead burned, and he could feel the mark—yet he didn't cry.
He looked at Hiashi with blank obedience. "Thank you, Hiashi-sama."
Hiashi observed him for a moment. Calm. No rebellion. No resentment.
Good.
He would make an excellent bodyguard.
Hizashi saw Neji emerge and ran forward, kneeling.
"Neji, are you alright?"
Neji gave him a smile, small and brave. "It didn't hurt that much, Otou-san."
Hizashi couldn't hold back. He pulled his son into his arms, guilt and fury flooding his heart.
But Neji? He held on for a moment—then whispered:
"It's alright. I planned for it."
Hizashi blinked.
Neji said nothing more.
The game had begun.
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The faint scent of incense lingered in the dim chamber long after the ceremony had ended. The Caged Bird Seal now rested—etched in black ink and chakra—upon Neji's forehead like a quiet curse. The branding had been done. The mark cooled against his skin, but the weight it represented was just beginning to settle into his soul.
At five years old, Neji Hyuga should have cried.
He didn't.
Instead, he sat in silence as the room emptied, the footsteps of the elders fading into distant echoes. The tatami mats were cold beneath him. He glanced at the elder who had performed the sealing, the man now reclining with a distant, tired expression. Neji looked away.
His father wasn't here anymore.
Hiashi had taken Hizashi out moments before the final seal activation. "Too painful to witness," the elder had said. Or perhaps too dangerous.
But Neji wasn't thinking about pain.
He was thinking about failure.
The silence of the Hyuga compound weighed heavily on Neji's small frame. The cold brand of the Caged Bird Seal was fresh on his forehead, still throbbing with phantom pain he dared not show. His plan—planting a tactical delay using the hidden pathways of his True Eyes—had failed.
But Neji Hyuga was no ordinary child.
That night, while the rest of the Hyuga Clan slept under pale moonlight, Neji sat cross-legged on the tatami mat in his small room. He activated his Byakugan and, layered beneath it, the subtle awakening of his True Eyes. A royal blue shimmer barely visible to the naked eye glowed softly under his closed eyelids.
Through his True Eyes, Neji could see what others could not—the structure of chakra at a microscopic level, the architecture of seals, the hidden mechanisms and recursive locks of the Caged Bird Seal.
"The seal is not a simple trigger... it's a recursive chain." Neji thought grimly.
The seal was built not on a singular "command" basis, but a multi-layered locking system:
The first layer reacted to outward aggression toward the Main Family.
The second layer stored pain commands ready to activate.
The third hidden layer auto-corrected tampering or delays, "healing" any small disruptions Neji might have caused.
His True Eyes, scanning deeper, revealed even more: the chakra networks surrounding the seal were rerouted subtly, binding themselves into the very nodes of his brainstem and heart pathways.
No wonder his slight interference didn't stop it.
The moment the seal had been activated, Neji had flared his chakra in a specific pattern he'd trained for months—a subtle internal maneuver, designed to disrupt the exact timing of chakra inscription. With the True Eyes, he had observed the mechanics of chakra layering within the seal—the scribing phase, the binding phase, the anchoring phase.
He had delayed the anchoring by 0.8 seconds.
That was his window.
He believed he had changed its root—redirecting the feedback pain anchor away from his cerebral cortex and toward a dormant junction in his upper spinal column. It would have, in theory, delayed the responsiveness of the seal, perhaps even weakened it.
But as he activated his True Eyes now—chakra flooding his visual perception, the world gleaming in soft royal blue hues—he saw it.
The delay hadn't stopped the seal. It had merely recalibrated.
The anchor had re-routed. The seal's adaptive properties had overridden his interference. He had underestimated its depth—a seal this ancient had a self-correcting chakra matrix, akin to a living circuit. His tampering had been detected and... absorbed.
"It seems to adapt itself," he whispered, horrified.
Like a venomous vine, the seal had coiled deeper into his nervous system, threading itself through multiple chakra nodes and creating a new contingency loop.
The True Eyes watched it all unfold: spiraling circuits of chakra, barely perceptible to a normal Byakugan. One loop now interfaced with his occipital lobe—suggesting future interference with perception. Another had latched onto the vagus nerve, no doubt allowing pain signals to trigger body-wide shutdowns.
Neji clenched his fists tightly, fingernails digging into his palms.
"I wasn't wrong. But I was... incomplete."
He needed to go beyond.
He needed more power, more knowledge—and more precision.
They weren't just controlling loyalty.
They were controlling who he could become.
That night, as moonlight bathed the Hyuga compound in silver, Neji sat in his room with the doors shut tight and a chalkboard of his own making scratched into the wall. On it, faint sketches of the seal glowed faintly, drawn in chakra residue he had traced with his fingers.
"Three anchors," he whispered.
He tapped them with a stick of pale chakra wax:
Cerebral Dominance Loop (CDL)
Pain Trigger Relay (PTR)
Monitoring Lattice Weave (MLW)
Each had sub-components. Interlocked, mutually compensating. And worst of all, reactive.
"If I sever one, the others will reinforce. If I suppress all, the MLW will send a feedback pulse to the Main Family."
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Sayonara