The realisation hit Renjiro not like a wave, but like a shard of ice driven directly into his brain.
'They're trying to seal my soul.'
The concept was so abhorrent, so fundamentally violating, that it momentarily overshadowed the lingering echoes of agony. His mind, scrabbling for a reference, latched onto the only similar technique he knew: the Reaper Death Seal. He remembered Hiruzen Sarutobi, old and weary, summoning the Shinigami to trade his own life for his students' futures.
But this… this was different. This was not a trade. This was a theft. A perversion. They were using the deaths of three hundred of their own men as a bloody battery to power the theft of his very essence.
The thought ignited a fury so pure and cold it was a catalyst. The fight-or-flight response, buried under layers of metaphysical pain, roared back to life. This was no longer a battle for survival; it was a battle for his very self.
The relief provided by the green flames was a lifeline. Each husk they consumed, each drop of residual chakra they devoured and fed back to him, was a brick in a dam holding back an ocean of torment. With a guttural, focused effort, he began to actively pour every shred of chakra he received back into the flames. He wasn't just letting them feed; he was stoking them.
The faint green ring around him erupted into a blazing, emerald inferno. It roared with a silent, cold hunger, actively seeking out the other corpses within the barrier, the ones that hadn't yet been drained by the masters' ritual. It licked at uniforms, at skin, at weapons, and wherever it touched, it feasted, growing larger, brighter, more potent.
The strain was immense. His Mangekyo Sharingan, already active, screamed in protest. Fresh, hot blood began to well from his eyes, tracing twin rivers down his blood-smeared cheeks, adding his own vital fluid to the pool beneath him. But this pain was sharp, localised, and understandable. Compared to the soul-rending agony of the seal, it was a mere prickle, a welcome distraction.
A hysterical, almost manic thought bubbled up through his focus. 'I didn't know cremating bodies could get me more chakra. Note to self: become a battlefield undertaker.'
The absurdity of it was a tiny anchor to sanity.
High above, Hiro's sensory abilities, which were intricately tied to the seal, shrieked a warning. "Something's wrong!" he barked, his earlier relief evaporating.
"The energy is fluctuating! The sacrificial fuel is being… consumed by his fire! It's destabilising the conversion process!"
Ogata's eyes widened, his maniacal laughter dying in his throat. "That accursed fire! If it destroys the corpses before the ritual is complete…" He didn't need to finish the sentence. The dreadful implication hung in the air. A failed forbidden seal of this magnitude didn't just fizzle out. It backlashed. The energy had to come from somewhere. And the only available vessels were the three of them. They would pay the price with their own bodies, their own souls, consumed by the hungry technique they had unleashed.
Panic set in. "Channel more! Pour everything you have into it! Now!" Toma shrieked, his voice losing its usual cold control. The three masters began pumping their chakra into the seal with desperate, reckless abandon. But they were trapped. Maintaining the barrier and the ritual rooted them in place; they were conductors in a circuit they could not break without ensuring their own destruction.
For Renjiro, the reprieve was brutally short-lived. The master's desperate surge of power hit him like a physical sledgehammer. A new wave of agony, a hundred times more intense than the first, exploded through his every cell. It was no longer a drawing sensation; it was a ripping. He felt as if hooks were embedded in the core of his consciousness and were being pulled in opposite directions by titanic forces.
A silent scream was trapped in his throat, his body seizing up, every muscle locked in a rictus of pure, unadulterated torment.
Then, the impossible happened. His body, wracked with convulsions, began to levitate. He rose several feet into the air, suspended within the centre of the purple pentagon, surrounded by the swirling, malevolent vapour and the roaring green inferno.
To the three masters, it was a sign of imminent victory.
"Yes! It's working!" Ogata roared, a desperate hope flooding back into his voice. "Don't stop! We are almost done! His soul is separating from his bodies!"
It was now a gruesome race against time. Renjiro, his mind fracturing under the pain, fought to keep the green flames burning, to consume the fuel faster than the seal could consume him. The flames raged, turning entire corpses to ash in seconds, but the masters' combined chakra was a flood, constantly creating more energy for the ritual to use.
He could feel it. His connection to the flames, the lifeline they provided, was beginning to fade. The well of chakra they offered was being outstripped by the seal's voracious appetite. He was losing. He was being erased.
In that final, desperate moment, a new plan, born of utter desperation, formed in his shattered mind. 'If I can't absorb more chakra… then I have to break the circuit. I have to destroy the conductors.'
With the last vestiges of his will, with a final, monumental effort that felt like tearing his own mind in two, he forced his hands together. The movement was jerky, alien. He formed a single, complex hand sign. He drew in a breath that felt like swallowing shards of glass.
"Fūton: Shinkūga!"(Wind Release: Vacuum Bullet)
He exhaled. Not a giant sphere of howling wind, but a compressed, hyper-dense orb of vacuum, no larger than a fist. It shot from his lips, silent and invisible, cutting a path through the swirling purple vapour. It wasn't aimed at the masters on the cliff. It was aimed directly at the shimmering wall of the purple barrier itself.
The vacuum bullet struck the barrier. For a heart-stopping second, nothing happened. Then, the point of impact imploded. The barrier flexed inward, the complex matrices of the Five Elements Seal distorting under the sudden, intense pressure differential. The green flames in that immediate area were instantly snuffed out, the oxygen necessary for combustion violently sucked away.
And then it exploded.
The vacuum collapsed, and the surrounding air rushed in to fill the void with the force of a thunderclap.
"BOOM!"
The sound was apocalyptic, a physical force that slammed into everything in the valley. The purple pentagon barrier, already stressed to its limit by the internal conflict of the seal and the external vacuum, shattered. It didn't fade; it detonated, releasing a catastrophic wave of pent-up chakra and pure concussive force.
Akira, Arata, Shoda, and the other Konoha shinobi, who had been frantically attacking the barrier, were caught completely off-guard. The blast wave picked them up and threw them backwards like ragdolls. They landed in a tangled heap dozens of meters away, ears ringing, bones bruised, their world reduced to a deafening roar and blinding light.
The explosion rippled outwards. The mighty waterfall seemed to stutter, its flow disrupted as a shockwave travelled up the river. The cliff statues on either side of the valley cracked and groaned. And then, the unthinkable happened. The two immense, headless statues of Madara Uchiha and Hashirama Senju, the eternal monuments to the valley's history and the founders of the shinobi world, took the full brunt of the blast.
The stone, ancient and powerful, could not withstand the unleashed energy of a failed forbidden seal combined with a point-blank wind explosion. With a sound like a mountain dying, the upper halves of both statues sheared away, crumbling into massive boulders that rained down into the turbulent waters below, forever desecrating the sacred site.
Silence. A ringing, oppressive silence descended, broken only by the resumed roar of the waterfall and the faint crackle of dying green flames.
Renjiro felt something wet. And cold. His awareness returned in flickers, each one a jolt of fresh, searing pain. He was floating. His body was submerged in the cold, churning water of the river, the current pulling at him. He slowly, agonizingly, forced his eyes open.
And saw nothing.
Not darkness. Not blackness. Nothing. A void. A complete and utter absence of visual stimulus.
His brain, addled by pain and exhaustion, struggled to process it. He blinked, over and over. Nothing changed. He raised a trembling hand, bringing it inches from his face. He felt the movement, felt the air displace, but he saw no hand.
A cold dread, far deeper and more terrifying than any pain, seized his heart. The burn wounds that covered his body, the salt of the river water stinging them raw—all of it faded into insignificance.
He was floating in the water, broken and bleeding, and the world was gone.
Uzumaki Renjiro was completely blind.