Content warning of a kind.

There is quite a graphic (somewhat stomach turning) scene described in this chapter that is not for the faint of stomach.

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Keeping her illusion she walked past towering bookshelves and an uncounted number of scrolls, hidden away no one knew what they were looking for, and she happily continued hiding in the shadows walking deeper and deeper into the debts of the public library. The further away from the entrance she got, the dustier the shelves became. 

Back in these places the only people you could find were Shinobi searching for stuff on things like sealing and other obscure or hard to learn knowledge, some useful, other things little more than glibberish no one understood or cared for, quite a bit was written in different languages. Languages no one spoke or knew anymore. 

The historic archives of Konoha were mainly three things, expansive, public and collecting dust. 

Hopping onto a window porch she enjoyed the sun coming through it and dissolved her Jutsu. 

Now I only have to wait

She looked around and looked through the titles that were barely readable due to the dust they were collecting, she did a quick Chakra sweep and found only unfamiliar signatures, huh, no one here yet. 

"Did you know that there are quite a few records on various Kekkei Genkais collecting dust here?", she heard a voice from the side and looked at Tsukiko, who came from behind a bookshelf. "It is rather interesting, and the history section too once you filtered through the land of fire, will of fire propaganda stuff." 

"How?", she had just checked if there were any familiar signatures around and found utterly nothing, she knew Tsukiko's chakra signature like the back of her hand, it was quite distinctive. 

"You mean how I and Seiyu avoided your small control sweep?", Tsukiko raised an eyebrow and Gene nodded. "Simple, lock your chakra, on one side you need a bit for reactivating it, on the other side no Shinobi will ever guess what you are because they can't identify you as a Chakra user." She explained and suddenly reappeared back on Gene's inner radar. "It's easy and quite a nifty trick, Seiyu got it on his first try."

"I didn't know locking Chakra like that was possible.", Gene said, and jumped down. "How?" 

"Lock it, like inside Pandora's box, it's all about imagination, imagine it like a river and make a dam blocking it inside your mind. Since Seiyu has average Chakra and I have very little for a Shinobi, it may be easier than for someone with your levels, but the principle shouldn't change." Tsukiko explained and Gene nodded, first thing she wouldtry once she was back home at the compound. 

"Where is Itachi?" Seiyu asked with worry in his voice

"Having trouble shaking off Haruto-sensei, it's a bit more complicated once a Byakugan gets involved, but he will manage." Gene told him, having utter confidence in her comrade in crime. Itachi was scarily capable and better than anyone at vanishing from plain sight, she loved his vanishing move with his crow summon Karasu. The latter was a funny fellow as well, a bit crazy in the head. 

"Mhh." Tsukiko jumped up with her book and started looking through it, showing Gene one of the pages. "From here on it gets real interesting, it's about the curse of the Yuki Clan." 

"Curse of the Yuki?", Gene asked, it wasn't the first time she heard about it, and she was blood related to them, but she didn't believe in curses of any kind. 

"Yeah, apparently males always die early, only woman survive beyond their twenties." 

"Only woman? I doubt that curses exist and if then it isn't something I have to worry about, I am female." 

"I assure you they do, back in our world they did, and I have no doubt in this to." Tsukiko said with a strange expression in her face, it was empty and blank, the kind of blank flatness that scared Gene more than her emotionless, I am in utter control expression, and you are about to be doomed.

"I saw the work of a curse back in our world.", she muttered in French, and Seiyu next to them gazed at the two of them puzzled. "It was the work of on old woman, she belonged to the nomad desert tribes, so old her teeth were about to fall out, she was the only survivor of a massacre caused by terrorists group holding the eaten by maggots body of a small babe in her arms. She spoke in some kind of obscure dialect, a provincial one that was probably only spoken by the old of her village, she cursed those men who destroyed the village, one didn't even need to know her language to understand that, to be eaten by maggots just the same way the child in her arms had been, only that they should be alive during the entire process until their black hearts were hanging out of their rotten bodies", Tsukiko seemed to be somewhere entirely else. 

"We found the terrorists, a mere week later, stormed their camp, but there was nothing to storm left anymore. Every single person in there woman, children, even the babies eaten. White maggots crawling everywhere. I crushed them underneath my boots the sound of those fat things, well nourished and all crawling in the same direction, to the center we followed those damn things. Only the leader, we found him at the center, was still alive, he had gone mad. We called the medic, but it was too late, two minutes after we found him sobbing, rambling crazy words and begging his god for mercy he died half of his body rotten, his flesh dark and infected falling from his bones. The medic told us he should have been death days earlier, he didn't even have lungs to breath with anymore when we found him."

Gene shuddered and noticed Tsukiko was still somewhere far, far away from here. "Tsukiko, Tsukiko!", she shook her friends shoulders and seconds later Tsukiko seemed to snap out of wherever she had been. 

"Sorry, flashback. I have started wars Genevieve, slaughtered, ruined civilizations, leveled cities and maybe even caused genocide once or twice in the name of humanity, but never in almost a sixty years working for various institutions of the united earth nations have I seen anything that frightened me more. Ever since I took to believe that there were things like magic in our world, unexplainable by modern science no matter how advanced it would get." She had returned from speaking French with her last words. "Don't be a fool and ignore the threat of there being a curse, regardless of it being scientifically possible or not, it affects you or not, because curses do exist" Turning towards the entrance, Tsukiko smiled. "It seems Itachi has successfully outwitted his opponent."

Back to her normal self pointed ahead where Itachi walked closer with silent steps and a small smile on his face waving hello to them.