In the quiet forest, a faint flash of lightning suddenly lit up the gloom.
A figure wrapped in crackling electricity tore through the trees at incredible speed. One massive trunk after another—each easily over a meter thick—fell in cleanly severed chunks.
The light and motion cut off at once, leaving Uchiha Feiyu standing there.
He glanced back at the trees he'd sliced through. The short blade in his hand shimmered faintly, a condensed edge of chakra extending from it like a blade of light one foot long.
The weapon itself was nothing special.
It wasn't chakra metal—Feiyu couldn't afford gear like that.
This was just a standard issue short sword. The reason it cut like that had nothing to do with the blade, and everything to do with the user: exquisite chakra control forming that razor-thin edge.
"You pick things up fast… I haven't even taught this to Kakashi yet."
Hatake Sakumo's voice echoed faintly in Feiyu's mind.
Chakra Edge—forming a cutting edge purely out of chakra—was one of the deepest techniques in the White Fang Blade Style. Even his own son hadn't reached that stage yet.
Feiyu had learned it in two or three days.
And it wasn't just the chakra blade.
The lightning-style body enhancement.
The advanced Body Flicker.
The paired sword techniques.
Feiyu had already grasped them all—only lacking polish and battle-experience.
Part of it was his solid foundation. Part of it was his two-tomoe Sharingan, which sharpened his perception and made fine control easier.
But the true reason he'd improved this quickly was the Soul Marshal's possession ability.
With Sakumo riding his body and drilling the techniques personally, every training session was worth ten or fifteen days of normal practice. A single day of work equaled two years of bitter self-study. Two or three days with Sakumo were like five years of one-on-one teaching.
At that pace, Feiyu had already absorbed most of the essence of the White Fang Blade Style. What remained was:
live-battle experience
deeper nature transformation
perfecting his chakra shape manipulation
Even if he stopped progressing right now and just walked the path Sakumo had already paved, he would still end up inheriting seventy or eighty percent of Konoha's White Fang's strength.
And that was without factoring in his Sharingan.
Why only eighty percent?
Because Sakumo's nature transformations were lightning and wind.
Feiyu's natural affinity was lightning and fire.
It wasn't impossible to develop a wind affinity after the fact—especially with Sakumo guiding him. At most it would cost him a year of focused training.
But with war about to break out, Feiyu chose the smarter option and poured everything into lightning nature transformation.
"By the way, Sakumo-senpai," Feiyu asked, lowering his blade, "did you ever leave behind any ninjutsu scrolls?"
"My swordsmanship and ninjutsu still feel like they've got room to grow. I was planning to leave a proper legacy once my style fully matured in a few more years… Why do you ask?"
"Because all this stuff I'm learning needs an origin story," Feiyu said. "I can't just pull high-level techniques out of nowhere. You really didn't leave anything?"
"I gave Kakashi the basics," Sakumo admitted. "But the advanced material… I was planning to wait until he turned ten and his body was more developed before passing it on."
Feiyu went silent for a beat.
"You do realize you already decided to kill yourself, right, senpai? You were planning to take your sword style with you to the afterlife? Didn't it occur to you to leave something for your son?"
"…I really didn't think that far."
Sakumo's suicide had been an impulsive act, born of obsession and despair. The idea that he'd carefully planned things out beforehand was laughable.
Any normally functioning man, thinking even briefly about the future of his eight-year-old son, wouldn't have taken his own life over a barrage of rumors.
If he hadn't considered Kakashi at all, there was no way he'd thought about legacy.
Now that he looked back on it, regret was all he had.
Never mind anything else—he should at least have left his son a proper inheritance.
People admired Kakashi for graduating at five and becoming a Chunin at six, a once-in-a-generation genius of Konoha.
But half of that was Sakumo's work.
Give that same talent to a civilian boy with no foundation, and his growth curve would be much slower.
Without Sakumo's guidance and with no legacy scrolls to rely on now, there was no way Kakashi could maintain that kind of pace. In the worst case, he might literally die in the Third Great Ninja War.
"All right then, Sakumo-senpai," Feiyu said at last. "Why don't you control my body and write a legacy scroll? Then we find a way to get it to Kakashi."
"…That might be the only way."
When Sakumo controlled Feiyu's body, he got to enjoy all the benefits of the Sharingan.
Once those eyes were open, an Uchiha's physical control shot through the roof. Without that, they wouldn't be able to copy jutsu so easily.
With the Sharingan's assistance and Sakumo's original soul guiding the hand, the characters he wrote were identical to his handwriting in life—down to the little quirks and pen habits no one else would know.
When the scroll was finished, Feiyu looked it over and then glanced at the hovering soul beside him.
"So how exactly am I supposed to give this to Kakashi? Hide it somewhere only you two would know and let him 'discover' it?"
"Just hand it to him directly," Sakumo said. "I've already included an explanation inside. No one will suspect anything."
"You're sure, senpai? You and I didn't have much of a relationship before. Me suddenly showing up with your personal legacy scroll is… a bit abrupt."
"It's fine." Sakumo chuckled softly. "Since my mission failed, you've been the only one to visit me more than once. Giving you my legacy is reasonable enough."
"In that case, I'll deliver it and hope it helps him crawl out of the hole he's in."
Feiyu stopped arguing.
Even if people did get suspicious, it wouldn't matter much. The techniques in the scroll were real. That alone would crush most doubts.
It was hard to imagine anyone's paranoia stretching far enough to think:
"Maybe Uchiha Feiyu secretly imprisoned the White Fang's soul."
At worst, they'd just think he'd gotten unbelievably lucky.
And once Feiyu "returned" Sakumo's legacy to Kakashi, any White Fang-style techniques he used in the future would have a perfect explanation.
On top of that, the delivery was a ready-made opportunity to close the distance between himself and Kakashi—another excuse to approach, talk, and slowly pull him back from the edge.
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