The fallout from the White Fang's death was still spreading, but none of that had much to do with Uchiha Feiyu, a soon-to-graduate Academy student.
As the first outsider to discover Sakumo's suicide, Feiyu was interrogated through the night and then released without fuss.
In everyone else's eyes, this incident had little to do with him. No one knew what he'd actually gained from all of this.
Back home, Feiyu shut his door, heart pounding with excitement. He stretched out his hand.
Soft blue motes of light rose from his palm, then flared outward, taking shape as Hatake Sakumo.
The White Fang's figure was half-transparent, his eyes unfocused, expression dull and dazed.
Feiyu had already noticed that the Soul Marshal in the Naruto world worked a little differently than it did in The Outcast's world. Maybe it was the difference between chakra and qi, but when he first used the Soul Marshal to seize a soul here, the souls almost always ended up in a fogged, half-conscious state.
Given time, though—and with Feiyu running the art properly—those souls would gradually recover their awareness. The stronger the soul, the faster it bounced back.
Up until now, he'd only ever held animal spirits. He'd thought human souls might behave differently, but from the look of things, they followed the same rules.
Feiyu flicked his hand.
Under the flow of the Soul Marshal technique, Sakumo's hovering spirit dissolved into a stream of light and sank into Feiyu's body.
In that instant, Feiyu felt his chakra surge.
Sakumo had never been famous for having monstrous chakra reserves, but as a Kage-level powerhouse, even his "ordinary" chakra dwarfed Feiyu's by at least ten or twenty times.
Even without chakra attached, his soul carried enormous mental strength. Once it fused into Feiyu, his total chakra capacity nearly doubled.
Then again, Feiyu's baseline wasn't that high. At this point, he was only a bit above a standard Chunin. No wonder the jump felt so dramatic.
But the chakra boost was the shallowest benefit of possession.
What could truly remake Feiyu from the inside out… was the consciousness that came with Hatake Sakumo's soul.
The moment Sakumo's spirit fully merged with him, Feiyu's vision went black.
A flood of negative emotion crashed through his mind like a bursting dam.
Frustration. Collapse. Despair. Fury. Fear. Guilt.
The White Fang of the Leaf had killed himself. Of course his heart was full of resentment. To be driven to suicide by gossip and accusation alone—on some level, he really did count as a sort of mental patient.
If Hatake Sakumo had even a drop of Uchiha blood in him, Feiyu thought faintly, he would've opened a Mangekyo on the spot and let the Konoha higher-ups see what "awakening" really looked like.
The wave of emotion hit him like a hammer. Feiyu's eyes burned red as his one-tomoe Sharingan snapped open, the tomoe spinning rapidly.
As the speed reached its peak, the single tomoe split cleanly in two.
Two-tomoe Sharingan.
In that moment, Feiyu felt both the quality and quantity of his chakra rise again. The world in front of him sharpened; moving objects left cleaner, clearer lines in his vision, and he could faintly see the flow of chakra itself.
He didn't have time to enjoy any of it.
Clutching his head, he rode out the emotional storm, breathing hard until the flood finally receded and Sakumo's feelings settled down inside him.
Only then did Feiyu close his eyes and dive inward, sending his mind into his own inner world.
His spiritual sea.
There, in the center of that mental landscape, a figure wreathed in black smoke stood quietly.
The "smoke" wasn't really smoke at all. It was the resentment Sakumo had died with—condensed into a visible form. The animal souls Feiyu had collected in the past, with their low intelligence, had only ever carried a thin mist of gray resentment.
Sakumo, by contrast, had a powerful soul and a death saturated with bitter regret.
No wonder he looked like some kind of final boss in here.
Still, that haze of malice hadn't lasted long.
It had already fueled Feiyu's Sharingan from one tomoe to two, burning itself up in the process. After only a few moments, the black smoke had completely vanished, leaving only the man himself behind.
"Where… is this?" Sakumo murmured. "Is this the Pure Land?"
"Sorry, Sakumo-senpai," Feiyu said. "You haven't gone to the Pure Land. You're in my mental space."
The familiar voice made Sakumo look up quickly.
Standing in front of him was Uchiha Feiyu.
"You're… Kakashi's Uchiha friend. Uchiha Feiyu." Sakumo's expression turned complicated. "This is your mental space? You're the one who bound my soul?"
From the White Fang's perspective, Feiyu had always been an oddball Uchiha with a bit of "sober outsider" energy—a kid with decent talent, late to the Academy because of his age, with solid but unremarkable strength.
He was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the kind of person Sakumo expected to see after death.
"That's right, Sakumo-senpai," Feiyu said. "Souls as strong as yours are incredibly rare. I'm afraid I had no choice but to be… a little rude."
As he spoke, he gave his fingers the slightest twitch.
Sakumo felt it immediately—a crushing sense of restraint wrapped around him from head to toe.
The Eight Miraculous Arts were broken by design. In their respective domains, they played by rules of their own. In The Outcast, even household-spirits that had cultivated for centuries couldn't resist a trained Soul Marshal user.
When Sakumo had been alive, killing Feiyu would've taken him less than two swings of his sword.
Now that he was dead and only a soul, all Feiyu needed was a thought to clamp down on him completely.
Feiyu, however, didn't fully exercise that control. He only brought it out to show what he could do—then withdrew the pressure and let Sakumo move freely again.
It was like Edo Tensei: a tightly-controlled Edo body and one left to move with its own will might have identical "hardware," but in real battle—skill, experience, intent—the difference was massive.
Feiyu had no interest in puppets.
He wanted a Hatake Sakumo who still had his own mind.
Even so, Sakumo had felt that leash. He gave a small, bitter smile.
"So even in death, I can't get any peace," he said quietly. "All right then, Uchiha Feiyu. You've kept my soul. What do you want?"
"It's simple, Sakumo-senpai," Feiyu said. "I want to borrow your strength."
"My… strength?"
"Yes. My secret art lets me draw directly on the power carried by the souls I control. With a soul as strong as yours helping me, it's easy to boost my own abilities."
He met Sakumo's eyes.
"I could force your soul to obey," he went on. "But the art works best when the soul cooperates willingly. If you're willing to help, we can bring its full effect to bear."
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