"Manifest!"
At Yui Xuanyue's summons, the ground shuddered like shifting sand. From beneath the earth, a body long buried and forgotten for decades slowly rose to the surface, finally meeting his gaze.
Watching his own form from the outside was… unsettling. For a moment, it felt alien. Yet the longer he stared, the more he adjusted.
"Not going to lie," Xuanyue muttered, fingers brushing his chin, "I really do look good from this angle."
The true body beneath the black sealing runes remained obscured, its features hidden. But the silhouette was enough to remind him of his own face.
After carefully inspecting the slumbering form—handsome even in its sealed state—Xuanyue nodded in satisfaction. The forbidden technique had preserved it well. No flaws. No damage. The body was stable. He didn't immediately break the seal. Instead, he allowed himself to think.
Chakra is born from the balance of body and spirit. Likewise, a human being is a vessel of flesh and the soul that inhabits it. The two were never meant to be separated. Body and soul matched perfectly, uniquely, like lock and key. Swap one without the other, and collapse was inevitable.
That was why Xuanyue had never considered taking another's body. Even the infamous Orochimaru, the sole exception, could only escape mortality by leaping from vessel to vessel—at a cost. Every transfer twisted his soul into something broken. In the end, even one of Konoha's legendary Sannin had been snared by a single glance from Uchiha Itachi.
Xuanyue had no intention of mutilating his own spirit for temporary gain. He would take the proper path, the path that preserved his potential.
And that meant overcoming three obstacles to resurrection.
The first—the body—was already resolved. Thanks to the forbidden Breath of Eternal Sleep, his corpse had been preserved with its vitality intact. That hurdle could be skipped.
The second was the soul.
Keeping a corpse alive was one thing, though expensive in chakra and life force. But the soul? That was another matter entirely. Once a person dies, their spirit is pulled into the underworld. How could one drag it back? March into the underworld itself? Unless you were someone like Ōtsutsuki Hagoromo, it was nothing more than a suicide mission.
Yet the shinobi world had always bred monsters of ingenuity.
Senju Tobirama and his spiritual descendant Orochimaru had devised the Impure World Reincarnation—an obscene ritual that clawed souls straight out of the underworld. A loophole in the natural order, and one that, thankfully, existed in a world where the underworld lacked a true god to enforce its laws.
If it had, those two would have been condemned to the frying pan a hundred times over.
Still, Edo Tensei worked. Too well. Souls dragged back, bound in immortal shells, forced into the present.
And Xuanyue himself—if not for Edo Tensei's time limit—would already be something beyond mortal definition, a living bug in the system.
The body and the soul—two hurdles cleared. The final one remained: fusion.
If his spirit could return to his original body, he would be the first in history to claw his way back from the grip of death itself. But theory was not reality. The real danger lay in the pull of the underworld.
Xuanyue gazed at his Edo Tensei shell. Every technique had its price. Edo Tensei recalled souls, but it also bound them, chaining them inside those false vessels. Even Uchiha Madara, Senju Hashirama, and Uchiha Itachi—monsters who bent the technique to their will—could never truly free their spirits. At the moment of release, their souls had been devoured once more by the underworld.
The truth was clear: Edo Tensei was nothing more than a contract. The underworld permitted these loans, so long as they were eventually returned. Orochimaru and Tobirama were clever thieves, twisting clauses and burying traps in fine print. But the rule remained: borrowed souls must be paid back.
Xuanyue was certain. The instant he tried to abandon his Edo body, the jutsu—and the underworld itself—would strike back.
Unless… unless one used the Rinne Rebirth. That was the only way to resolve it at the root.
But Xuanyue had no intention of waiting for miracles. The attempt had to be made.
Cautiously, he left the Breath of Eternal Sleep intact. The seal would keep his body alive while he experimented. If he failed, the body's vitality would continue to drain until nothing remained—and he no longer had the life force to cast the technique again.
Better to be careful.
He scanned the surroundings, ensuring no one else was watching, then pressed his Edo Tensei palms together.
"Soul—separate."
His eyes unfocused, and in an instant, his spirit slipped free of Edo Tensei's hold.
A pale light drifted upward from the top of his head. Xuanyue's soul, faintly human-shaped, slowly emerged, weightless and spectral.
Drawn by instinct, his spirit turned toward his preserved body. The pull was powerful. His body was his rightful home.
But then it came.
A crushing force descended, wrapping around his soul.
Xuanyue's expression hardened. He raised his gaze—and there it was. A fissure tore open in the air, oozing a suffocating darkness. The underworld itself, reaching for him.
The pull was overwhelming. If not for his willpower, he would have already drifted toward that abyss. The underworld did not wait politely—it demanded.
And when he resisted, the pressure grew. The further his soul strayed from the Edo body, the weaker his resistance.
Xuanyue clenched his teeth. He tried again, then again. Each attempt met the same wall. Finally, he drew his spirit back inside the Edo shell.
The instant his soul vanished, the fissure above sealed shut. The deathly aura dispersed as if it had never existed.
Xuanyue exhaled slowly. "Troublesome. More than I expected."
The Edo body was his shield. So long as his soul remained inside, the underworld could not touch him. But the moment he tried to leave, it dragged him back toward his rightful grave.
Death was not so easy to cheat.
(End of Chapter)