The three sides involved in the Land of Hot Water war all lacked the ability to launch an attack.
Yet each also possessed advantages that prevented the others from attacking.
Thus, the war paused.
Konoha shinobi suddenly became idle and began clearing out the bandits and wandering shinobi brought by the war.
But this had nothing to do with Uchiha Yoru.
He threw everything to Uchiha Shigenobu, while he himself leisurely began enjoying life.
This was the greatest benefit of being the leader of a small shinobi unit.
It wasn't that no one questioned him.
There were even shinobi beside Orochimaru who disliked him.
But Orochimaru didn't care.
The Uchiha little brothers of the Tiger Unit didn't care either.
So the doubts of irrelevant shinobi were completely meaningless.
He, Uchiha Yoru—
Was wholeheartedly devoted to cultivating immortality.
Of course, as a human being, before completing the final transformation of life, he could not ignore his social attributes.
He had to anchor himself to a suitable social position.
But he also had to give everyone a different kind of image in advance.
The persona Yoru chose was this:
At critical moments, he could shoulder responsibility, fight, kill, and endure.
At ordinary times, he was lazy, did not fight for power, loved food, hated work, and slept all day.
Whether he was secretly working hard when he seemed to be resting did not matter.
The image he showed the world had to be that of an idle person without ambition.
In the future, he could also seamlessly transition into an otherworldly man who dined on wind and drank dew.
Of course, Yoru was still trapped in the mortal world.
He was still struggling and rolling around in muddy secular matters.
He was still stirring up trouble inside the clan.
But he had to prepare for the arrival of that day.
Otherwise, he was worried that before he noticed, power would cover his heart, making him sink into the boring game of fighting for authority and erasing his courage to climb upward.
So Yoru being idle with nothing to do was only an illusion.
He truly was not busy with boring shinobi missions.
But he was busy researching Kaguya Ren's bones and bone beads.
When the two sides were confronting one another, Yoru had bravely—greedily—charged forward and snatched Kaguya Ren's corpse back.
Although he immediately handed it over to Nara Shikaku afterward, how could nothing be left behind after passing through his hands once?
Especially this aged corpse.
Loose skin.
Fragile bones.
And it had suffered a violent beating from the Third Raikage.
Yoru could inspect and take from it freely, without needing to consider disguise in the details.
So he could be called insane as he dug out a large chunk of flesh from the back waist, including three sections of spine.
Kaguya Ren's flesh was completely ruined.
It was practically like a mummy stored for ten years.
Rotten, soft, and almost no different from dust.
But from those few bones, Yoru separated three bone beads—
And a section of gray bone.
What he valued most was naturally that gray bone.
All-Killing Ash Bones.
As the name suggested, that bone was gray.
But after studying it for several days, it could be said that he gained nothing.
This section of vertebra, less than one millimeter thick, had no corrosive property.
Nor did it contain the slightest time attribute capable of erasing all matter.
Even after he injected chakra, natural energy, and senjutsu chakra, this gray bone fragment showed no reaction at all.
And the hardness of the gray bone was especially poor.
It was like the talc used for writing when he was young.
The ground bone powder was also extremely fine.
Feeding it to other animals produced no reaction either.
It was just like real talcum powder.
"Tsk. I can't find the special point at all."
In the end, after exhausting every method, Yoru could only temporarily give up.
He carefully put away the gray bone fragment and began researching the three bone beads.
This time, the effect was completely different.
After chakra was injected, Kaguya Ren's bone bead cracked open and sprouted.
A dandelion seedling grew out.
Yoru was so frightened that he quickly cut off the chakra supply.
Fortunately, after the dandelion seedling lost chakra, it obediently stopped at a height of thirty-five centimeters.
It did not grow in one breath into a bone sphere six meters wide, then produce a giant bone dandelion sixty meters tall, like when Kaguya Ren had attacked the Third Raikage.
If it really grew that large, he wouldn't be able to hide it inside Konoha's camp.
The matter of him stealing would become public.
Then he and Orochimaru would both be very embarrassed.
Yes.
Orochimaru knew he had stolen something.
No reason.
No evidence.
That guy purely guessed it.
When leaving the battlefield, Orochimaru had specifically walked in front of Yoru, pointed at the scroll sealing the corpse, and blinked three times.
The meaning was very clear.
He tacitly approved of Yoru's theft.
But any results had to be shared.
Seeing this dandelion seedling, Yoru knew.
These three bone beads were the core of the Dance of the Dandelion.
Dandelion seeds.
Bones could actually possess independent plant-like life.
Plant seeds sprouted when soaked in water.
Bone beads sprouted when injected with chakra.
Truly magical.
Yoru picked up the bone dandelion seedling and said,
"I'll give this to Orochimaru as the result."
"One of the remaining two will be dissected to examine its internal structure."
"As for the last one, I need to find a suitable place to plant it and see whether it can eventually produce new seeds."
Miwa Masayo walked over from the distance and asked,
"Yoru, have you grown restless after too much stillness, nya?"
Yoru smiled.
"Yes. I haven't moved for ten days. I want to go out to sea for a stroll."
"Rika-chan, has the matter been resolved?"
"No, nya."
"Hm?"
Yoru's expression turned serious.
He even stood up directly, picked Miwa Masayo up, placed her on his shoulder, and asked,
"Even you can't destroy this cult?"
Miwa Masayo shook her head helplessly.
"That so-called Evil God Church isn't troublesome to deal with at all. Little Brother Shigenobu and the others casually found the cult's nest. All the members were captured or killed, and the hostages and slaves were rescued too."
"But the evil god is truly troublesome, nya. I can't find any trace of His existence at all."
"But there will always be some believer who suddenly turns into His high priest, and within a few days, the church can be rebuilt."
"Too many to kill, nya."
Yoru became interested.
He thought for a moment and analyzed,
"I see. This behavior is very similar to a god 'enlightening' a favored believer."
"It looks like the gods of the shinobi world still have some power remaining."
"Interesting."
"Let's go. We'll see together what exactly is going on with this god."
"Yoru is happy. And excited, nya?"
"Yes. I'm very excited."
"Gods and immortals have always been mentioned side by side. Since the immortal path has yet to be fully explored, looking at the state of the divine path can serve as a useful reference."
When they arrived at the Tiger Unit's station, the first thing Yoru heard was the sound of interrogation.
"Speak! How did you become a priest?"
"It was God's guidance! God's revelation! Foolish, lowly shinobi, you cannot understand God's greatness!"
Then came a string of filthy curses, followed by the sound of flesh being struck.
It was clearly someone beating another person.
Yet the sound conveyed the interrogator's agitation and helplessness instead.
Yoru smiled.
He lifted the tent flap and walked inside.
Along the way, every Uchiha revealed expressions mixed with surprise and relief.
The previous looks of dejection, helplessness, and self-doubt were swept away.
This was Yoru's position in the Tiger Unit.
In the hearts of the Uchiha little brothers, as long as Big Brother Yoru arrived, there was no problem he could not solve.
Inside the tent, there was no scene of flesh and blood flying or whips swinging.
There was no thick smell of blood or burnt stench either.
Uchiha Shigenobu stared with a pair of two-tomoe Sharingan, working hard to use genjutsu to apply cruel punishment.
This was Yoru's requirement for the Tiger Unit.
On one hand, he disliked making living places bloody.
On the other hand, he didn't want the little brothers' minds to become twisted while torturing others.
After beginning their garrison mission, the Tiger Unit would inevitably encounter criminals and spies, as well as missions involving interrogation and imprisonment.
This was different from open confrontation on the battlefield.
This was the strong abusing those who could not resist.
Such tasks were very unfriendly to Uchiha clan shinobi.
So Yoru demanded that no one abuse captives.
No punishment of any kind was allowed.
When interrogation was required, they would forcefully grind them down with genjutsu.
If one genjutsu wasn't enough, use two.
If one Uchiha wasn't enough, have a group of Uchiha shinobi take turns.
No matter how strong the enemy's mind was, as long as the attacks continued without pause, there would always come a time when their mental energy was exhausted.
Then they could do whatever they wanted.
This imagined cruelty was still cruelty.
But for the caster, there was a layer of separation.
It was like playing a shooting game.
Very few people would harm others in reality just because they were used to shooting humanoid targets in a game.
Over the past twenty-plus days, the Tiger Unit's interrogation method could be called invincible.
They had dealt with many spies and villains and gained a reputation on Konoha's side.
As the saying went—
The taller the tree, the harder the wind shakes it.
The greater the fame, the easier it kills a man.
Once the Tiger Unit's reputation for invincible interrogation spread, true trouble came knocking.
Headquarters assigned them a cult task that other shinobi could not handle.
The Land of Hot Water was a country where cults flourished.
Because of the chaos of war and the Daimyō's complete inability to act, the entire Land of Hot Water had fallen into absolute anarchic freedom.
In this stateless Land of Hot Water, aside from the capital still possessing a bit of order, the entire country became a breeding ground for wandering shinobi and bandits.
On top of that, public services were zero.
Risk resistance was zero.
People could easily have their entire families die out because of a tiny matter.
This was a hellish country for civilians.
According to noble law, the neighboring countries of the Land of Hot Water did not allow civilians to flee.
They could only struggle and die in this despairing hot spring country.
When physical suffering could not be restrained, humans would seek comfort for the soul, hoping to live with slightly less pain, or at least a little hope.
Thus, faith became very easy to accept.
But where in the shinobi world was there any qualified religion?
So cults emerged naturally.
When no one managed them, cults grew savagely, and their numbers could be said to be quite large.
Originally, these cults had nothing to do with Konoha shinobi.
The two sides did not interfere with each other.
Unfortunately, cult leaders also had to eat.
When their believers had been squeezed to the limit and could no longer produce any oil, the cults all turned their eyes toward the resource-rich Konoha shinobi.
They did not directly attack Konoha shinobi.
After all, most cult leaders were very smart.
They would not challenge enemies they absolutely could not defeat.
But they attacked ordinary people working for Konoha in exchange for meager wages, robbing them of food and causing Konoha's army to lack manpower.
The cults also organized robberies against merchant transport teams, causing the cost of guards to rise sharply and threatening Konoha Village's transportation security.
Thus, after calculations, the staff officers discovered that protecting villages and caravans was too heavy a burden.
It was better to simply attack the cults directly.
No matter what, no matter how many cults there were, they could not outnumber villages.
The number of missions to destroy cults was two orders of magnitude lower than the number of missions to protect villages and caravans.
But after the suppression missions were issued, Konoha shinobi discovered that these C-rank missions were extremely troublesome.
Cults were very strange.
Even when they were unreliable to an absurd degree, they could still gather fanatics in greater or smaller numbers.
And secrets were often held by these fanatics.
The difficulty of interrogating these fellows was astonishing.
Often, even after being beaten to death, they would still believe they were about to go to heaven, the Pure Land, Eden, or the apple orchard, where they would enjoy endless wine, meat, and seventy-two holy virgins.
The Konoha shinobi doing the interrogation were exhausted half to death and angered half to death.
In the end, they could only use the stupidest method to search for cultists.
The results were extremely poor.
Later, these missions piled up in the hands of the Yamanaka clan.
Searching brains for intelligence was indeed efficient.
But for the Yamanaka clan shinobi, every search was torture.
Every cult fanatic was insane.
Going deep into the soul of a madman to search for intelligence was both exhausting and dangerous.
Fortunately, after Uchiha shinobi took over the missions, they swept through the cults like crushing dry weeds and smashing rotten wood.
In only five days, they killed cultists until heads rolled.
But yesterday—
They encountered huge trouble.
An evil god worshiped by one cult actually had power that could project into reality.
The minds of that evil god's believers were sealed by a strange power.
When hypnosis and genjutsu repeatedly squeezed their mental energy, most fanatics would simply die.
This was extremely abnormal.
Normal life had survival instincts.
To maintain the continuation of life, instinct would prevent the last bit of physical and mental energy from being lost.
But this evil god's believers could squeeze out even the last bit of mental energy to resist the Uchiha's genjutsu.
When their mental energy completely dropped to zero and they completely lost the ability to resist, the person directly died.
Just like a person could not rely on will alone to suffocate themselves without tools such as water or plastic bags—
During the process of fanatics resisting genjutsu, some powerful force had to be involved.
The Uchiha little brothers had no solution.
They could only ask Miwa Masayo for help.
Following the twisted chakra traces of these fanatics, they traced the vines to the melon and found the cult organization, wiping them all out.
But what followed was even more terrifying.
A child who at most counted as a shallow believer suddenly became a high priest.
And he possessed power different from that of shinobi.
Yoru walked in, patted the furious Uchiha Tadamichi on the shoulder, then crouched down and looked at the monster before him.
He smiled and said,
"Tadamichi, I have to admire your patience. You actually endured slowly using genjutsu to interrogate a monster like this."
The monster before him had the head of an eleven- or twelve-year-old boy.
But below the neck, his muscles bulged, his arms and legs were long, his nails were thirty centimeters long, and a layer of bony protrusions covered his body.
This was a true monster.
Yoru asked,
"When did he become like this?"
Uchiha Tadamichi answered,
"After we discovered something abnormal about him, during the capture, his body gradually mutated from a normal boy into this ghostly appearance."
"I see."
Yoru nodded.
"This is no longer human."
"His soul fluctuations no longer have the slightest human flavor."
"I don't know whether this is an ancient bloodline awakening, or a true foreign soul possession."
"Possession?"
"Mm. The body is like a house, and the soul is like the owner."
"Invading the house and driving away the original owner—that is possession."
"Big Brother Yoru, what do we do?"
"Go complete the mission. There's no need to report this monster."
"Yes!"
Yoru was very satisfied with Tadamichi's execution.
When he went to handle the mission handover, he absolutely would not report this monster.
Then this monster would belong to Yoru.
After the child left, Miwa Masayo asked,
"You're interested in this evil god's power?"
Yoru nodded.
He grabbed the monster's only human-like head with one hand and answered,
"That's right. This power goes beyond the scope of shinobi power."
"Although it isn't very strong, I think it has reference value."
Just by touching the human head, Yoru felt the monster's mental fluctuations.
Messy, ever-changing mental power was like tangled hemp thrown together chaotically, making one instinctively want to stay away.
Yoru smiled.
He no longer doubted that this monster was connected to the so-called god.
This was a precious sample.
A power that could turn an ordinary little boy into a pure monster was still somewhat interesting.
Of course, it was not very strong.
Otherwise, the ones ruling the world would not be shinobi.
And this world would not be called the shinobi world.
What Yoru was interested in was the ability to enlighten from afar, as well as the method of creating fanatics.
Quite fun.
He withdrew his hand and said to Miwa Masayo,
"Let's go. We'll visit the cult nest you found."
"I want to see what they have there."
Miwa Masayo stretched lazily.
"That place is an underground karst cave. What can be found are only ordinary living items. Maybe the altar is somewhat interesting, nya."
She looked at the monster Yoru had bound with suggestive shackles, now fallen unconscious, and said,
"In my opinion, the things there aren't as closely connected to the evil god as this monster, nya."
Yoru walked as he spoke.
"Mm. This monster is indeed more closely connected to the evil god."
"But I don't dare charge directly in."
"Better to investigate first, grasp some intelligence in advance, and then examine the monster's mind more deeply."
"That's safer, nya?"
"Rika-chan is absolutely right."
"But I still feel it isn't safe, nya. That's an evil god, nya."
"Rika-chan thinks the evil god's status is too high, and I might be invaded and contaminated by Him?"
"Right, nya. You told me before that the Dead Demon Consuming Seal, which is based on the Shinigami, is the most unsolvable sealing technique."
"What if this evil god is an existence at that level? If you investigate Him, wouldn't that be sending a sheep into the tiger's mouth, nya?"
"Relax, relax."
Yoru smiled cheerfully.
"I'll send a monster even more evil than the evil god."
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