[please send some power stones]
Once Uchiha Feiyu realized exactly who was in that room, he immediately lost interest in looking for Pakura.
The Fourth Kazekage's soul alone was a massive prize.
Add in a maimed, power-drained Chiyo as a bonus…
That was a package deal he absolutely couldn't ignore.
The moment Feiyu stepped through the doorway, Chiyo finally sensed something was wrong. Her remaining hand snapped up, chakra threads flaring—
Several puppets at her side spat out volleys of poisoned needles, all firing toward the entrance where Feiyu had appeared.
Ding ding ding ding—
Sword-light shimmered.
Feiyu's blade danced in front of him, batting the needles aside in a clear metallic rain. He didn't slow down; chakra surged along the Grass Cutter Sword, turning it into a streak of icy white light that cleaved straight down onto one of the puppets.
In a cramped room like this, puppets had nowhere to dodge.
The target was instantly sliced cleanly in two.
But even a bisected puppet was still usable in Chiyo's hands. One sharp tug of her fingers, and the shattered segments whirred back to life—broken parts suddenly coughing out hidden blades and poison mechanisms that lunged at Feiyu in a tide of metal.
Behind the ruined puppet, the four remaining puppets under her control all moved at once, each taking up a different angle of attack.
Chiyo herself?
She retreated at top speed.
Missing a hand, she could now control at most five puppets. That put her around high-elite jōnin tier on a good day, and today was not a good day. She knew perfectly well she was no match for this "Ghost of Konoha".
By the time she was about to blow straight through the wall behind her, she saw something that made her heart jolt.
Feiyu let his invisibility drop and showed his real body.
His eyes were blood-red. Two tomoe slowly spun in each orb.
"Sharingan? This is bad…"
For someone of Chiyo's level, a two-tomoe Sharingan wasn't fatal in itself. At most it would make her spacing hiccup for a heartbeat—usually not enough to break through ten puppets of iron defense and reach her real body.
But this time…
She only had five puppets left.
With that many gaps in her defense, Feiyu could slip through with almost no effort at all.
By the time Chiyo shook off the genjutsu haze, what she saw was a descending arc of white light—
It came down right on top of her.
With a loud crack, "Chiyo" split diagonally in two under the blade—
Only to break apart into joints and wood.
A puppet.
"Puppet Substitution, huh? Heh. Let's see how many lives you can swap out."
Feiyu's tone was cold.
Chiyo's puppet craft was advanced enough that even shattered puppets could still move. But once a puppet was crushed to a certain degree, it could only be used one or two more times before becoming scrap.
With two more puppets destroyed in rapid succession, Chiyo's offensive strength was essentially gone. To Feiyu, she was almost no threat at all now.
"Run!" she shouted, hair disheveled, voice rasping. "Tell all Suna shinobi—and Pakura—the Ghost of Konoha is here!!"
One of her puppets blasted a hole in the wall with a concealed cannon. It snagged the medical-nin by the bed in a claw and flung him bodily through the gap.
While she was doing this, Feiyu carved another puppet apart and stepped through the debris, appearing directly in front of Chiyo.
His blade drew a perfect curve—
Crack.
"Chiyo" shattered again, falling to the floor as yet another puppet shell.
After using Puppet Substitution multiple times in a row, and losing so many of her tools to Feiyu's sword, Chiyo was down to a single intact puppet.
Her face finally showed naked despair.
Staring at Feiyu charging toward her again, she suddenly sneered, eyes flashing with a hard, fatal light. Deep within her thin body, chakra surged wildly.
"Brat… let me show you what true old-generation shinobi are like…"
The instant Feiyu felt her chakra spike and twist, his body blurred—
And vanished.
In his place—
Two shadow clones appeared with twin bangs of smoke.
"You… you coward…" Chiyo mouthed, stunned.
The two clones didn't answer. They barreled forward at full speed, blades thrusting as one, stabbing straight into Chiyo's chest.
The old puppeteer exploded.
Not figuratively—she detonated into a cloud of blood mist.
That blood was not normal blood. Corrosive and venomous, it ate into the room around her on contact, rotting wood and stone and the shadow clone that had stabbed her into writhing distortion before it puffed away in a cloud of white smoke.
A moment later, Feiyu's true body surfaced from underground with a soft rustle, emerging from the earth outside the contaminated blast zone.
He took one look at the warped and half-melted interior and felt a sharp stab of relief.
"So the old hag had that kind of trick up her sleeve, huh. Figures. Once they get old enough, every veteran shinobi has some kind of mutual-destruction move."
"If she hadn't opened her mouth to announce it, and I hadn't felt the chakra shift in time… I'd be dead right now."
Feiyu took that in, then forced himself to mentally chew on the lesson.
Throughout history, there'd never been a shortage of high-ranked shinobi getting taken down by lower-ranked opponents because of one tactical misstep.
At their core, shinobi were glass cannons. Their offensive output was dozens of times their durability. Even so-called "Kage-level" shinobi could still die from a single kunai in the right spot.
And Chiyo, while weaker than him overall, had eyesight and experience that far surpassed his own, plus some intel on his fighting style.
If she really gambled everything to drag him into the grave with her—
It wouldn't have been impossible.
Still, in the end—
He had won.
Feiyu turned his head and scanned the room.
Just in time to see the Fourth Kazekage take his last breath, his body collapsing as the corrosive blood ate away at the surroundings.
Feiyu's face lit up.
He stretched out a hand and beckoned.
Two confused, freshly separated souls drifted into his palm—Chiyo's and Rasa's. Their quality wasn't inferior to Hatake Sakumo's, which made Feiyu smile in satisfaction.
"Granny Chiyo's soul is… fine," he thought. "Good for rounding out medical ninjutsu and chakra control."
"But the Fourth Kazekage's Magnet Release—that's the real treasure."
Hatake Sakumo's strength was at least equal to Rasa's, maybe even beyond. But their fighting styles were completely different.
Rasa was a full-spectrum offense/defense mage-type, while Sakumo was a high-speed magic swordsman.
Two completely different archetypes—
And Feiyu planned to take them both.
With that, he could prepare for even more kinds of enemies.
He'd already learned from many different ninjas' memories that there was one rare but sure way to raise the ultimate "cap" of a shinobi:
Synthesize new kekkei genkai.
By itself, chakra had a very visible ceiling.
The chakra system didn't come with anything like a complete "inner cultivation" manual. It could only be improved indirectly through physical conditioning and mental development.
But no matter how hard you trained your body and sharpened your spirit, there was a limit.
And developing new kekkei genkai—combining natures to create bloodline techniques—was essentially the only true way within the chakra system to raise one's potential ceiling and rewrite one's "talent".
In theory…
If you could perfectly merge Fire, Water, Earth, Wind, Lightning, Yin, and Yang chakra—seven attributes—you could forge Truth-Seeking Orbs and stand at the level of the Sage of Six Paths.
At that point, even the Ōtsutsuki who just ate chakra fruits, knowing the "what" but not the "why", would be forced to take you seriously.
Of course, in practice…
The difficulty of merging seven chakra attributes into one was roughly a billion times greater than merging two elements into a single kekkei genkai.
It wasn't something any normal human could achieve through training.
But merging, say…
Wind + Earth into Magnet Release?
Or other dual-attribute bloodlines?
That was still on the board.
And Feiyu had just gotten his hands on a genuine Kazekage-grade template.
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