The forest lived slow.
Morning again, thick with dew and fog. The kind of fog that pressed up against your thoughts like a soft whisper. Hako woke up to find Zassō already awake, sitting cross-legged on a stump in the clearing, head tilted toward the canopy.
"Shhh," Zassō said without looking at him. "The moss is speakin'."
Hako didn't ask what it was saying.
He just sat beside the man and waited.
Zassō smoked slow, as always. But today, the haze around him didn't drift away, it hovered. Unmoving, like it had its own thoughts. It curled around his body like incense around a shrine.
"Y'ever think about roots?" Zassō asked softly.
Hako blinked. "Like... tree roots?"
"Mmm. Deep ones. Quiet ones. Always growin', always reachin'. Never seen. But they hold up giants."
He tapped his chest.
"Humans got roots too. Just don't know where to grow 'em."
Later…
They wandered the Hollow, where trees arched above like cathedral ceilings. Zassō would stop at certain trunks, press a palm to the bark, close his eyes, and hum. Just hum. Low and long.
Sometimes the tree would creak.
Sometimes the wind would shift.
Once, a cluster of mushrooms bloomed at his feet in seconds, puffing out glittering spores that shimmered in the air like floating fireflies.
Hako said nothing.
He was starting to understand that Zassō didn't explain things.
He just was.
A Shrine Is Born, they built it without nails or plans. Just stacked stones, driftwood, branches curved like antlers, and bones, yes, bones, carefully arranged in a circle. At the center, a single stump carved into a throne, with strange symbols burned into the wood by pipe ember.
At its base: a crude offering bowl filled with:
Crushed sage.
Dried mushroom caps.
A single golden tooth from an unknown source.
And a scroll written entirely in weed stems, braided into kanji.
Zassō called it the Seat of Stillness.
"This the root of the village," he said. "Ain't about power. It's about-." Zassō deep in thought and finally remember the word " presence".
Haku just nodded.
.
Many seconds had passed in the center of Smokebush Hallow, Zassō sat beneath his willow, hand-rolling a scroll from parchment soaked in mushroom ink, crushed herbs, and diluted toad venom. He hummed low, a rhythm that wasn't a song so much as a vibration.
Hako watched from a distance, kneeling in silence as the man worked.
By now, the Hollow had a few more than two.
A mute wanderer who had stumbled in, stayed for the mushrooms, and now tended the shrine with obsessive precision.
A runaway girl from a nameless clan who spoke only in riddles, constantly chasing fireflies and painting faces on stones.
An old shinobi deserter, bones cracked and chakra frayed, who said the trees showed him visions of his dead wife. He built a meditation ring with bone chimes that sang in the wind.
They called themselves many things:
"The Rootless"
"The Smokeborn"
"The Blunted Ones"
But Zassō? He just called them homeless.
Each morning they gathered around the Seat of Stillness. Zassō would speak not in commands, but in metaphors, riddles, and odd lessons like.
"Be like water vapor, seen only when the light wants you to be."
"Fear not the shadow, it's just light hidin' behind your back."
"If the frog speaks in riddles, smoke until the riddle speaks back."
And then they'd go about the day.
The girl carved small clay totems and placed them at the forest edge to confuse spirits. The mute tended moss beds for rare herbs. The old shinobi floated in the creek for hours, mumbling.
And Zassō? He was deep in a trip.
The Trip That Wrote the Scroll
It began with the blue mushrooms. The ones that grew only beneath the stone cairn under the eastward-facing birch.
Zassō consumed three.
Sat beneath the willow.
'Let go.'
And the Hollow responded.
Smoke rose from his mouth in jagged spirals, then stopped, forming a perfect cube of haze. It didn't move. It waited.
From the mist came voices, his voice, echoing back things he never said aloud.
"Your sword is a conductor. Your mind is the current. The smoke... is the silence between lightning."
"Let your breath write jutsu, not your hand."
"Your enemy cannot fight what they cannot hold. Let them strike the fog, and drown in questions."
He floated for hours.
When he awoke, his pipe was still burning.
And beside him, the scroll was finished.
Cloud Style: Scroll I.
The technique was simple in concept, impossible in execution.
Step 1: The user exhales a special cloud, composed of chakra-imbued breath, mushroom-induced hallucination, and spiritual intent. The mist clings to surfaces and spreads like thought, erratic, invisible unless looked at sideways.
Step 2: Within this cloud, the user's physical form becomes intangible, not through space-time jutsu, but perception erasure. The target's brain fails to register the user's presence within the fog, even if touched.
Step 3: The user whispers a phrase, any phrase. That phrase becomes an echo-loop, feeding back into the enemy's auditory cortex. Doubt. Confusion. Guilt. Whatever truth lives in the phrase, the target will confront it.
Zassō called it "Vanishing Verse."
And the first time he demonstrated it, the mute caretaker dropped to his knees, weeping. Not because of the effect. But because, for a moment, he heard a voice say, "You did what you had to."
A New Rule is Made
That night, under the fire, Zassō unrolled the scroll before the gathered homeless now known as the Rootless. The ink shimmered faintly in the firelight, alive, unstable, breathing.
He tapped the parchment.
"This ain't jutsu you throw around," he said. "This is sacred breath. You don't use it to kill. You use it to *be seen when you wanna be, or not seen when you tired of bein' looked at wrong."
They nodded.
A new law formed in the Hollow, unspoken but felt.
A new era for Cloud Style jutsu began today with the development of the Vanishing Verse.