Ronin had already torn through the Fourth Prince's hotel from top to bottom. Every possible storage space, every hidden compartment, every room that looked even slightly private—nothing. The Scarlet Eyes were not there.
That left only one conclusion. Tserriednich kept another residence, one most people knew nothing about.
Finding it would require long-term observation. The watchers could not be Nen users. Even a perfect disguise would not hide the bright Ten that sensing-types registered the moment they were seen. Looking away was not an option either; without eyes on the target, there was no surveillance.
Fortunately Ronin already possessed the answer: the Telescope Technique.
With the volume of chakra he now commanded, the technique could track a marked target anywhere inside a ten-kilometer radius. He had locked onto the Fourth Prince's unique aura during the earlier attack. Sitting in his own hotel room, he could open a crystal ball at any moment and watch everything unfold.
Lately Tserriednich had been unusually quiet.
Whenever the crystal-ball view drifted onto one of the passive bodyguards, the man would stiffen and start scanning the surroundings. The Telescope Technique still registered inside their detection range somehow. Distance, or the god's-eye perspective of the jutsu itself, kept them from ever locating the observer. Ronin watched in complete comfort while the bodyguards spent their days on edge.
The Fourth Prince himself remained blissfully unaware. He continued the only activities he seemed to enjoy—having women delivered so he could take his pleasure, then murdering them the moment they failed some private standard. Insufficient knowledge was enough of a reason. To him those women were not people. They were meat scraps.
After every killing, the man with the tattooed arms handled the cleanup. Women vanished across the city on a regular schedule. The disappearances raised no waves. Even the occasional missing-person search faded within days.
Ronin's verdict on the Fourth Prince required only two words: human garbage.
While he watched, he also finished mapping every ability user inside the bodyguard detail.
Ever since the summoning scroll had been completed inside the cavern, Ronin had turned his attention to crafting other ninja tools. Sealing scrolls interested him most.
The process proved simpler than expected. Because he already controlled sealing techniques, all he needed was to bind the desired object into the scroll itself.
The idea had come from the way Naruto once summoned shadow clones from a scroll to flood himself with sage chakra during the fight against Pain. Ronin could not use sage arts. His goal was different. He wanted to seal a portion of his own chakra—carried inside a shadow clone—into a scroll. Anyone holding the finished scroll could break the seal and release a fully functional clone on demand.
Preservation was the real problem. A normal shadow clone began burning through its chakra the instant it was created. When the chakra ran out, the clone simply vanished. Ronin needed the Four Symbols Seal to freeze that natural decay so he could stockpile large numbers of half-chakra clones and deploy them whenever required.
The experiments did not go smoothly at first.
He could not decide whether to apply the seal to the clone or to the scroll. Early attempts treated the scroll as a vacuum that would simply suck the clone inside. Instead the clone punched straight through the paper. Hundreds of ruined scrolls piled up before he found the correct sequence.
Two separate steps were required.
First the sealing formula was laid onto the blank scroll. Only after that was a second seal placed directly on the shadow clone. The two seals were then forced to fuse. Only that combined process locked the clone safely inside the paper.
A new difficulty appeared at once. Tearing the scroll open released the clone, yet the seal still bound the clone itself. Without that personal seal the "freshness" effect never took hold; the clone would begin decaying the moment it entered the scroll.
The final solution was a third, smaller seal written onto the scroll—containing a fragment of Ronin's own chakra. Activation required life energy. After further trial he discovered that even ordinary people carried that energy inside their blood. A single drop smeared across the paper was enough to wake the stored chakra and free the clone from its binding.
Once the system worked, other possibilities opened. The same scrolls might be able to store finished ninjutsu. Sealing techniques would be harder than sealing clones, but Ronin no longer minded the difficulty. The process of testing, failing, and refining had become its own quiet addiction. The moment a new method finally succeeded delivered a satisfaction he was starting to crave.
Because the Fourth Prince's sensing bodyguards focused exclusively on other ability users, the next plan was already settled between Ronin and Kurapika.
Ordinary people would carry the finished scrolls.