Kazan Village sits at the edge of a fragile peace, and its council keeps the village neutral while the great villages test one another. Kiryoku flows through every living thing, and those who can shape it are trained, watched and feared.
Sixteen and newly promoted, Ren is short, athletic and stronger than he looks, with messy black hair, sharp amber eyes and a thin scar through his left eyebrow. He wears a charcoal shinobi jacket with burnt-orange trim, fitted combat trousers, fingerless gloves and a red cloth tied around his right arm bearing his clan's mark. Raised in Kazan Village knowing almost nothing about the Akatsume Clan, he is impulsive, competitive and fiercely loyal,
Traits
Inventory
Kazan jonin and Ren's assigned field instructor
Market Row merchant and village rumour keeper
Kazan chunin, Ren's rival on the mission board
Head of the Kazan Village Council
Border Outpost watch commander
Wandering medic-nin travelling the lowland roads
Young shrine keeper at the Sunken Shrine
Akatsume survivor living as a hermit in Ashen Valley
Frost Pass courier for the northern clans
Rogue shinobi camped in the Whispering Forest
A mountain village of red-tiled roofs and stone terraces, built around a hot spring that never cools. Its people are proud, poor and stubbornly independent.
Three packed-earth rings, a rack of worn practice blades and a row of scarred wooden posts. Instructors drill recruits here from first light until dusk.
A narrow street of cloth awnings where merchants sell rice, tools, paper tags and travel gear. Rumours travel faster here than anywhere else in the village.
Old pines grow so thick that sound behaves strangely between them. Trails shift, and travellers often report hearing their own names called from the dark.
A broken stone tower from the last great war, its upper floors collapsed inward. Fresh boot prints appear near the base, though no patrol claims the route.
An old arched bridge over a fast river, the main road between Kazan and the lowlands. Caravans stop here to trade news and check their papers.
A wooden fort of watch platforms and signal braziers marking the edge of Kazan's territory. Its garrison is small, tired and always short of supplies.
A half-drowned shrine in a marsh, its stone steps descending into black water. Offerings left on the altar are always gone by morning.
A scorched valley where nothing has grown for years. The ground is warm in places, and the air tastes faintly of iron.
A high, narrow mountain pass where the wind never stops. Only experienced shinobi cross it, and only in good weather.
Ren works the northern treeline with the outpost garrison, following the signs of patrols that never came back.
Ren traces the strangers who pay for silence, gathering the strange paper tags they leave behind.
Ren prepares to descend beneath the marsh shrine, testing the water and the wards before the rite can finish.
