[send some power stones please]
In truth, even creating a single elemental kekkei genkai was already an almost impossible task for most shinobi.
Especially for those without any inherited bloodline at all.
For a first-generation creator, the difficulty was easily ten times higher than it was for someone born with a kekkei genkai.
But for Uchiha Feiyu, who possessed Warden of Wandering Souls, the road to kekkei genkai was a lot smoother.
All he had to do was:
Kill a shinobi who already had that bloodline.
Use Soulbinding to possess them.
Force the body to repeatedly exercise that kekkei genkai.
Under that kind of targeted stimulus, his own body and chakra network would gradually "remember" the pattern—
Until it naturally developed the bloodline limit.
Feiyu was still quietly pleased with his haul when a flood of soul-signatures suddenly spilled into his perception, enclosing the entire house.
"Well, that was fast," he thought, lips quirking. "Did Pakura come too?"
A thunderous boom answered that.
A massive golden fireball smashed into the building from above, blowing it apart in a storm of sand and splinters.
As the blast wave rippled outward, Feiyu shot out of the ruins like a bolt of lightning.
Two Suna shinobi blocking his path didn't even have time to register his presence before his short blade cut cleanly across their throats.
Their bodies collapsed—
And promptly crumbled into dirt.
Earth clones.
Of course the reinforcements Sunagakure sent to surround the Ghost of Konoha weren't fodder.
Before Feiyu could press the advantage, another golden fireball dropped from the sky, slamming into his body and blasting "him" into a cloud of smoke.
"Shadow clone," Pakura snapped. "Be careful! He's definitely invisible—nobody break formation! Keep the encirclement tight!"
Her expression was grim as she spoke, hands never stopping. Golden flames bloomed like mini suns in her palms and rained down on the ruined house, pounding it into dust. She showed not the slightest concern for the bodies of the Fourth Kazekage or Chiyo.
Rasa and Chiyo, alive, had been the Kazekage and an elder of Suna.
Dead, they were just… corpses with research value.
That was the harshest reality of the shinobi world.
After a full barrage, the house no longer existed. The ground was cratered and blackened, with what was left of Rasa and Chiyo reduced to brittle, charred remains.
And still—
No sign of Uchiha Feiyu.
Pakura scanned the scorch-marked earth. Her gaze paused on a faint, damp spot where the soil had been disturbed.
Her lips twitched. A vein throbbed on her forehead.
"That damned brat… he went underground from the start. He's a total coward."
As she cursed, a scream suddenly cut across the camp.
Pakura's eyes snapped in that direction and she sprinted toward the sound.
By the time she got there, all that remained was a cluster of Suna corpses and pooling blood. Uchiha Feiyu was, naturally, long gone.
Moments later, another scream rose from a different quadrant of the encampment.
Pakura rushed there as well, only to be greeted by the same scene: dead Suna shinobi, no enemy in sight.
"Lady Pakura, we can't keep doing this!" a cool-headed Suna jōnin finally shouted, intercepting her as she prepared to dash off again. "We need to gather everyone together. It's the only way to defend against a formless assassin like the Ghost of Konoha!"
He hesitated, then gritted his teeth and added:
"And… Lady Pakura… we should surrender to Konoha."
Pakura's body went rigid.
Anger flashed across her face, then slowly faded, replaced by bitter resignation.
"I understand," she said quietly. "Get everyone together."
Sunagakure had only ever truly had three Kage-class fighting forces to begin with, and its Jinchūriki was a gentle monk who didn't like killing.
Now?
Rasa and Chiyo were dead.
That left only the weakest of the three—Pakura—still standing.
Their remaining power had basically fallen out of "Great Village" range. To be blunt, they might not even be stronger than Amegakure at this point. If they still refused to yield now, they really might become the first Great Village to be completely erased from the map.
Once Pakura's order went out, Suna shinobi began converging at the center of the camp.
In the process, Feiyu took another thirty or forty lives on the fringes—
But she didn't move.
She didn't chase. She didn't even look.
She simply let him kill, jaw clenched, until the last Suna squad reached the main cluster and their formation tightened into one dense, overlapping mass of steel and chakra.
When the entire camp had compressed into a single, solid block of forces, Uchiha Feiyu knew the fun part was over.
In a world where power levels hadn't yet spiraled into insanity, there wasn't a single shinobi who could single-handedly take on a massed ninja army head-on.
Sneaking around, assassinating, sowing chaos? That he could do.
Standing alone in front of an entire village's worth of shinobi and "soloing" them?
Not happening.
He slipped out of the Suna camp as quietly as he'd entered it, then headed back toward Konoha's base in very high spirits.
He reported everything to Orochimaru.
Once he'd heard the full picture of Sunagakure's current state, Orochimaru came to a swift conclusion.
"Suna won't be able to continue this war," he said. "It seems the fighting is finally over. Feiyu-kun, you've done an excellent job."
"This doesn't have much to do with me," Feiyu said, waving a hand. "You're the one who took down the Fourth Kazekage. Without that, things wouldn't have wrapped up so neatly."
He truly didn't care that much about war merit. He had no political ambitions in Konoha; titles and glory did very little for him.
Orochimaru, on the other hand, still had his eyes on the Hokage's hat. War achievements were his best stepping stone.
Orochimaru smiled softly.
Then, as if he'd just thought of something, he spoke.
"Feiyu-kun… have you ever considered becoming my disciple?"
Feiyu froze for a moment.
Then he started weighing it seriously.
Being Orochimaru's student—
Did that come with benefits?
…Absolutely.
As one of the Legendary Sannin, a Hokage candidate, and Konoha's premier forbidden-jutsu researcher, Orochimaru's arsenal of ninjutsu and kinjutsu was ridiculously vast—almost like a catalog of everything Konoha had ever developed.
And unlike most teachers, he didn't really believe in "gradual learning" or "age-appropriate teaching".
If he took you seriously?
He'd shove most things into your hands sooner or later.
As long as it wasn't directly tied to his own life and immortality, Orochimaru wasn't particularly stingy.
The downsides?
Well, once Orochimaru defected in the future, any disciple of his was guaranteed to be stained by association.
On top of that, there was the small matter of possibly being seen as a potential vessel for his Living Corpse Reincarnation.
But if Feiyu thought about it more carefully…
He was an Uchiha.
He'd never really expected Konoha to give him a bright political future anyway.
And if Orochimaru did set his sights on his body as a container…
Well, then Soulbinding Marshal would be happy to get properly acquainted with Living Corpse Reincarnation from the inside.
Even outright defecting alongside Orochimaru someday didn't sound that bad. Feiyu had honestly had his fill of Konoha already.
With his current combat power, even if he became a missing-nin, Konoha would, at most, put on a token chase.
No one was going to seriously hunt him down unless the village had a collective brain seizure.
Besides, Konoha really did have a stockpile of forbidden techniques that Feiyu had been drooling over for a long time.
Things like Edo Tensei (Impure World Reincarnation), Flying Thunder God, Spirit Transformation Technique—these weren't just "high-level jutsu", they were the real trump cards of the village.
As Uchiha Feiyu?
He basically had zero chance of legitimately learning them.
But if he moved under Orochimaru's wing, then the difficulty plummeted.
Given Orochimaru's personality, as long as it wasn't Eight Branched Serpent or Living Corpse Reincarnation—things bound directly to his survival—he was unlikely to guard most other techniques that tightly.
And that…
Was a very tempting proposition.
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