Ronin had already searched the Fourth Prince's hotel from top to bottom, and he hadn't missed a single place suitable for storing a collection.
But he hadn't found the Scarlet Eyes anywhere.
That meant there was only one possibility: the Fourth Prince had another residence, a place most people didn't know about.
To find that place, they needed long-term surveillance of the Fourth Prince.
But that surveillance couldn't be carried out by a Nen user. It had to be done by ordinary people. Even disguising a Nen user as an ordinary person wouldn't work.
That was what made the bodyguards around the Fourth Prince so troublesome. That sensory-type Nen ability would be triggered the moment the user was looked at, but even if a Nen user actively disguised themselves, the bright layer of Ten around their body would still be visible.
Unless they didn't look.
But if they didn't look, how were they supposed to track the Fourth Prince's movements?
Fortunately, Ronin actually did have a way to bypass that situation.
The Telescope Technique.
Combined with his massive chakra reserves, his current Telescope Technique could already observe targets within a ten-kilometer radius around him.
And during the previous attack on the Fourth Prince, he had clearly memorized the Fourth Prince's aura signature.
That meant that even while sitting inside a hotel room, Ronin could activate the technique at any time and observe the Fourth Prince through a crystal ball.
Recently, though, the Fourth Prince had been behaving himself.
Sometimes, when the crystal ball's view shifted with the Fourth Prince's movements and happened to land on that passive-type bodyguard, the man would instantly tense up and look around nervously.
Clearly, observation through the Telescope Technique was also being judged as falling within the activation range of his ability.
But he couldn't pinpoint Ronin's exact location at all.
Ronin didn't know whether that was because the distance was too great, or because the Telescope Technique's god's-eye-view style of observation interfered with it.
Either way, Ronin observed him with a perfectly clear conscience, while the Fourth Prince's bodyguard spent every day on edge.
Only the Fourth Prince had no idea what was happening and continued doing whatever he enjoyed—such as having his subordinates bring women to him for his amusement.
He would torture and kill those women during moments of pleasure, and the reason might be as simple as their knowledge not reaching the level he expected.
To the Fourth Prince, people like that probably weren't even human. They were just scraps of meat.
And every time he finished torturing someone to death, the cleanup work would be handled by the man with tattoos on both arms.
In a city this large, women often went missing.
But it never caused any real disturbance. Even when someone occasionally searched for them, the matter would soon quietly disappear.
Ronin's evaluation of the Fourth Prince could be summed up in two words:
human trash.
While observing the Fourth Prince, he also figured out all the Nen users in the prince's bodyguard team.
Ever since finishing the creation of the summoning scroll in the cave, Ronin had begun trying to make various ninja tools.
The thing he cared about most was the sealing scroll.
And making one turned out to be much simpler than he had expected, because he already understood sealing techniques.
As long as he sealed the thing he wanted into a scroll using sealing jutsu, the sealing scroll was complete.
The reason he was interested in sealing scrolls came from the technique Naruto used when fighting Nagato.
Naruto had used a summoning scroll to bring over shadow clones that existed in Mount Myōboku, providing himself with enough senjutsu chakra.
Ronin didn't know senjutsu.
But his idea wasn't to summon shadow clones.
Instead, he wanted to use sealing jutsu to seal part of his own chakra into a scroll through the method of the Shadow Clone Technique.
That way, when someone wanted to use it, all they had to do was open the scroll. The sealing technique on it would activate, releasing the sealed shadow clone.
The key part of this method was preservation.
Normally, from the moment a shadow clone was created, it continuously consumed the chakra inside its body.
Once that chakra was used up, the shadow clone would naturally disappear.
What Ronin wanted to do was use sealing jutsu to restrict that natural dissipation, allowing him to create a large number of shadow clones, each with half his chakra, and keep them ready to use at any time.
The sealing technique he used was the Four Symbols Seal.
But the whole sealing process did not go smoothly.
At first, he didn't even know whether he should cast the sealing technique on the shadow clone, or cast it on the scroll and have the scroll absorb the shadow clone.
So he could only keep experimenting.
Ronin eventually chose to cast the sealing technique on the scroll first, then activate the scroll's ability to seal the shadow clone.
But when he activated the scroll's ability, the shadow clone didn't go straight into the scroll.
It punched right through it.
During the entire sealing experiment, Ronin destroyed hundreds of scrolls.
It wasn't until he first prepared a sealing scroll, then used sealing jutsu to seal the shadow clone afterward, that he finally found the method for sealing a shadow clone into a sealing scroll.
That's right.
It required two steps.
First, cast the sealing technique on the scroll.
Then, cast the sealing technique on the shadow clone.
After that, fuse the two seals together at the same time.
Only then could the shadow clone be sealed into the scroll.
But that created a new problem.
Although tearing open the seal could release the shadow clone, it couldn't remove the seal on the shadow clone itself.
And if he didn't seal the shadow clone, then even if he sealed it into the scroll, he wouldn't achieve the "preservation" effect he wanted.
The solution Ronin eventually came up with was to leave another layer of sealing on the scroll, sealing part of his own chakra inside it.
The way to trigger that chakra was also simple:
activate it with life energy.
As for how someone who didn't know Nen could use their own life energy, Ronin found a method through repeated experiments.
Blood.
The blood that flowed out when someone bit their finger contained life energy.
Even ordinary people had life energy in their blood. As long as they smeared it on the scroll, the chakra Ronin had sealed inside would be triggered, helping the shadow clone undo the seal placed on itself.
After completing all of that, Ronin also thought of other possible uses for sealing scrolls.
Perhaps this thing could be used not only to seal shadow clones, but also to seal ninjutsu.
But sealing ninjutsu was clearly much harder than sealing a shadow clone.
Still, Ronin wasn't afraid of difficulty. On the contrary, through these experiments, he had come to enjoy the process of constant exploration and development.
Especially when he finally obtained results—the sense of accomplishment was almost addictive.
Since the Fourth Prince's Nen bodyguards mainly focused on detecting Nen users, then having ordinary people carry scrolls and launch the attack was the plan Ronin and Kurapika had agreed on.
~~~
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