CHAPTER 218: REN’S GRAND TOUR OF THE CLAN THAT FORGOT TO LEAVE HIM ANYTHING

Ren and Yoshido stepped through the massive stone torii gate as Ren ignored the faint hum of the Fuinjutsu barrier that was still lingering after all these years. He’d sensed it the moment the gate came into view, though it was mostly dormant only a portion of the seal array remained active.

He didn’t know what the remaining portion was meant to do, but the moment his foot crossed the threshold, something shifted.

He felt the Fuinjutsu array respond.

It wasn’t hostile. Instead, it subtly rerouted its lines, almost like it had detected something familiar. The active array began tugging at his senses, pointing in a direction deeper inside the grounds.

Ren’s eyes lit up. ’Oh man... is it one of those things where only the heir’s blood unlocks a secret vault?’

The idea alone had him bouncing internally like a kid in a toy store. He tamped the excitement down before it leaked onto his face and walked on ahead, ignoring Yoshido who had paused at the gate, eyes misty again.

What came into view next nearly made him stop in his tracks.

A massive Japanese-style palace stood at the heart of the forested grounds. It was built in cream, deep brown, and green but time had dimmed the palette. The cream walls had dulled to an almost bone-white, and thick moss sprawled across the green-tiled roof. Despite that, the house stood tall and proud.

There wasn’t even a hint of damage. No collapsed tiles, no rotten beams and no structural wear. If anything, the place looked like it chose to age gracefully.

If Ren had to pick one word to describe it, it would be foresty.

Thick vines crept up along the wooden pillars. Great, gnarled branches served as supports for the upper floors, and some of them even split off near the windows, with healthy green leaves pushing through the frames like they belonged there. It didn’t look overgrown. It looked designed. Like someone wanted the house to grow with the forest around it.

A giant treehouse.

That’s what it felt like.

He kept walking, letting the quiet weight of the place sink in. All around him, faint Fuinjutsu signatures swept over his body, layered detection arrays, age-old chakra threads checking for danger, bloodline markers. All of them scanned him, flickered, and passed.

None of them attacked.

Ren didn’t suppress them. He just let them do their thing. The moment they realized who he was, or rather, what blood he carried they backed off.

He reached the main door and didn’t hesitate. Without even calling out to Yoshido, he slid it open and stepped inside and immediately blinked.

The interior was spotless.

Not in a showy, waxed-floor kind of way. But it was too clean to be abandoned. Either the Senju elders had been maintaining it, or, more likely, Hiruzen had quietly sent ANBU to sweep through the place and make sure there was nothing dangerous or valuable left behind.

Typical.

Still, that theory only lasted about three seconds. Because the moment Ren crossed the threshold, his chakra pulsed.

A slow thrum rolled through his body, and it wasn’t his doing. His chakra resonated, not wildly, not in panic, but in quiet harmony with something else. With this house.

Ren narrowed his eyes and slowly raised a hand. He reached out and pressed it lightly against the wall. Instantly, a wave of familiarity returned. The walls had chakra. So did the floor, the door, the ceilings. Everything.

There wasn’t a single piece of the house that was dead.

Every inch of it held a trace of chakra. It was not strong, but it was present, lying dormant.

His eyes flared faintly with chakra and soon he began to see it. Faint lines along the slopes and the curves all started forming in his mind.

A fuinjutsu array.

A massive one.

It took him a few seconds to realize the scale. The whole house was wired into it. Walls, doors, beams, and even parts of the tree branches were components. The array spanned every surface.

Ren’s excitement spiked, but then immediately dipped as he frowned.

"This... is a decoy."

He could see the complexity. This was easily a level 6 array. A monstrous creation, something even most top-tier masters would gawk at. But even as he traced the lines and nodes with his mind, something wasn’t adding up.

His chakra was pulsing again, but it wasn’t aligning with the array.

Instead, it was pointing somewhere else. And he trusted his chakra. He hadn’t mastered chakra stability, memory mapping, and Flow-awareness for nothing. His body was telling him that the array was lying.

Not outwardly hostile, but deceptive.

The direction the array pointed to was a beautifully crafted nonsense. But the direction his chakra kept nudging him toward was different.

That was most likely real and whoever made this place was a madman.

"Who the hell puts a level 6 decoy array across an entire house?" he muttered.

His chakra continued pulsing, subtly insistent. Like it had already recognized the blueprint buried beneath the fake.

There was something deeper. Something hidden and Ren wanted to find it.

He kept looking around as he walked slowly, half-focused on his surroundings, half-following that constant pull. The interior was massive, yet oddly quiet. The layout was traditional, sliding paper doors, lacquered wood flooring, faded wall scrolls lining each hallway.

Now that he knew what to look for, he realized everything had a quiet hum to it. Chakra. Not loud, not dangerous, but definitely there.

He kept ignoring the massive array that was practically screaming at him to follow it. The thing was obvious, too obvious. It felt like a giant arrow painted on the wall, pointing toward a hidden location like some kind of beginner level treasure hunt.

But Ren didn’t bite. He trusted his own chakra. It had been pulsing ever since he stepped into the house, reacting weirdly, almost like it was being led somewhere. Not forcibly dragged or compelled, just... nudged.

So instead of following the array, he followed the pull.

Along the way, he kept taking in the details of the house. It was honestly more beautiful than he expected. The place had aged like a relic, but it hadn’t rotted. No collapse, no broken beams, no wild overgrowth inside. It was clearly old, and yet somehow it still looked composed, like an aging noble who refused to fall apart.

It reminded him of the ancient palaces from back in his old world, feudal lords, royal residences, that kind of vibe. The whole house was structured in a giant square layout, but the most interesting thing was the middle being completely hollowed out forming a central courtyard.

He stepped up to the edge of the inner walkway and looked down at the courtyard below.

There was a small pond at one end, its water still clear despite the decades. A few worn wooden swings swayed gently in the still air, creaking faintly like they were waiting for someone to push them again. In the exact center of it all, standing alone, was a small tree. No taller than his waist. It looked like it was still growing, new, fragile even.

But the chakra it gave off was massive.

Even with the naked eye, Ren could see it. The entire area shimmered with dense yang chakra. Thick, glowing threads of life force drifted lazily around the plant like it was exhaling vitality with every breath.

Ren frowned slightly and crouched down. His eyes narrowed. That kind of life force... this wasn’t normal.

’Is this one of the plants made from Hashirama’s blood?’ he thought to himself as he scanned the area around the tree. ’Otherwise it doesn’t make any sense. No way a sapling holds this much life unless it was made from something ridiculous.’

His chakra pulsed again but not toward the tree, instead, he was being guided back to the house.

However since he was already here, he decided to check it out, especially because the giant decoy array was pointing to this location.

He squinted and noticed something. Right around the tree’s base, he spotted traces of Fuinjutsu. Broken arrays, smeared and shredded, like someone had forcibly dismantled them years ago. That explained why there were no active seals blocking this section. Whoever broke it wanted whatever was hidden underneath.

He glanced around once more, then crouched fully and moved closer. Just behind the plant, under the mossy layer of soil, he saw a slight crevice.

He dug his fingers under it and lifted the earth.

The patch of ground came up like a stone lid, revealing a hidden stairwell beneath.

Classic.

Without hesitation, he stepped down.

The stairs were stone and spiraled gently into the ground. Not too deep. Maybe twenty, thirty steps. At the bottom was a wide corridor, the air stale and dry. Dust floated in the shaft of light that spilled in from above.

There was a plaque above a second doorway barely hanging on.

[Senju Clan Treasury]

Ren didn’t even blink as he thought with a roll of his eyes, ’Of course it is.’

He pushed open the door and entered.

The hall was wide, massive, actually. Maybe fifty meters across. The walls were lined with notches where shelves used to be. The center had slots where display pedestals once stood. It should’ve looked like a treasure room.

But it was completely, pathetically empty.

Not even a single shelf remained.

"...Wow," Ren muttered as he stared blankly around. "Not even a decorative vase, huh?"

He let out a deep sigh and rubbed his temples. "What greedy pigs. They didn’t even leave the shelves."

He took another step and looked around with more focus now. Sure enough, he was right, there were faint signs on the ground where stands used to be. No dust rings, no cobwebs. Someone had cleaned this place thoroughly before clearing it out.

’If I had gotten my hands on just one of those and sold it in an auction...’ he shook his head. ’I could’ve advertised it as "original shelves from the Senju Clan treasury." The price would’ve gone through the roof.’

He didn’t need to think hard about who was behind this.

Only two people in the entire village would’ve had the authority, the shamelessness, and the Fuinjutsu skill to pull this off.

The Third Hokage.

And Danzo.

Ren’s eyes narrowed slightly as he scanned the walls. The place was carved with so many Fuinjutsu arrays, most of them level 6 complexity, that even a level 5 master would struggle to see everything clearly. Whoever broke in here wasn’t just skilled, they were on that level. And they hadn’t done it for fun.

They’d looted it.

There was a chance Orochimaru had come here, but Ren quickly ruled it out. Orochimaru would’ve taken a sample of the tree above, or tried to extract Hashirama’s cells but he wouldn’t care for gold, scrolls, or artifacts unless they gave him more power. This raid smelled too much like bureaucracy.

It was straight forward political looting.

Ren sighed again, deeper this time. This wasn’t surprising, but it still left a bitter taste.

He stepped further inside the hall, just to be sure.

No hidden compartments, no sealed scrolls, no clever puzzles or illusions. Just dust. And a faint, residual chakra that clung to the walls like the ghost of what used to be here.

His chakra pulsed again as it was still pulling him.

Not toward the vault but somewhere else.

He turned slowly, lips pressing into a thin line.

’Guess the real treasure was for the looters and I still have something I need to get.’

~

Since the treasury was already a bust, Ren didn’t waste time lingering. He simply climbed out and brushed his hands clean, muttering about the wasted trip and shelf profits. With that checked off, he moved on, now fully committed to exploring the rest of the house.

The estate, as massive as it was, actually had a sense of structure. A weird kind of balance that told him this place was designed with purpose. As he walked through the curved inner walkways, he began to map it out in his head. The whole house was like a square shell with an open courtyard in the center, but each of the four sides served an entirely different function.

One entire side was just a giant meeting hall, Ren counted at least three entry points and two upper balconies from the outside. When he peeked in, the room practically yawned at him. It was huge.

The kind of place where you could host clan meetings, weddings, or maybe even a small war. Definitely built to seat hundreds, if not thousands.

Another side was the logistics wing, kitchens, servants’ quarters, storerooms, armories. It was more functional than flashy, but he could tell from the size of it that the Senju hadn’t exactly lived frugally. Every hallway had reinforced flooring, and the armory still had weapon racks nailed into the wall. Empty, of course, whoever looted the treasury clearly cleared this out too.

The third side, the one closest to the front entrance, seemed dedicated to guests. Audience halls, elegant sitting rooms, large chambers with wide windows and faded cushions still neatly stacked in the corners. Probably where visiting dignitaries or allied clans were received back in the day. Even without the luxury on display, you could feel the old weight of hospitality.

But it was the fourth side, the final wing that caught Ren’s attention.

This was the side where his chakra had been pulling him all along.

The family wing.

~~~~~

{So, what do you think is calling Ren.

Spoiler- It’s definitely not the legacy of the primordial dragon.}

{Anyway, I need to do some things using the Senju base in the future and that is why I am explaining it in a slightly detailed manner otherwise I wouldn’t have put in so much effort in this.}

{One more thing, I’ll try and create an AI Image of the base so that it is better understandable. If I succeed in that endeavour then I’ll post it on discord and on pat so yeah, hope that I find one.}

{If you want, you can support me on pat-reon}

{ h t t p s : / / w w w . p a t r e o n . c o m / Z e e n o n }

{You know what else}

{280 Stones = Extra Chapter}

{STONES!!!!}