"Hold a sharp weapon in your heart, and the urge to kill rises on its own."
Feeling his strength leap again, Uchiha Feiyu was already toying with the idea of breaking away from Konoha outright… maybe even turning around to bite it back.
Not yet, though.
I still have two bloodline limits I haven't absorbed. The techniques themselves aren't that important, but fusing them lets my base physique climb another rung.
Right now, what bottlenecked Feiyu wasn't jutsu, or chakra control, or combat experience.
It was his raw foundation—his own body and chakra quality.
Once his physical baseline rose again, his Lightning Release Chakra Mode would scale with it. If things went well, he might truly merge what he'd stolen from the Third and Fourth Raikage—gaining the strongest spear, strongest shield, and fastest speed in one body.
That was, in the short term, the fastest route to power. He'd already fused one bloodline limit before; fusing another wouldn't take long. Seven or eight days of adaptation at most.
By the time Feiyu returned to the Konoha frontline camp, the battlefield was already cleaned up. Apart from a small contingent left behind to keep an eye on the Land of Lightning's border, the rest of the shinobi had started marching home.
Only Minato Namikaze led a small force straight toward the Iwa–Konoha front, to reinforce Jiraiya.
Orochimaru didn't think too much of it. Minato was Jiraiya's disciple and had Flying Thunder God—sending him as support was perfectly reasonable.
Feiyu, however, felt the shift immediately.
So they're going to stack more achievements on Namikaze Minato now?
In the pitch-black spiritual space, Feiyu casually started another sacrifice.
Chasing and butchering Cloud ninja all the way back had earned him over 400 strands of black qi—enough to shop around properly.
In an instant, all 400 strands vanished.
The black book shuddered lightly, pages rippling as a new line of information floated into his mind.
Most suitable ability: …Five Senses Control.
This genjutsu ranked among the high-tier illusions even in the broad catalog the book had shown him. It might not hit as absurdly hard as Uchiha techniques like Izanagi, Izanami, Tsukuyomi, or Kotoamatsukami, but it was far more universal.
It wasn't some single, specialized kill move—it was a complete system for hijacking all five senses.
On second thought, that checked out.
The easiest jutsu for him to learn were always the ones from this world.
Anything from other worlds, Feiyu had to interpret, translate into chakra logic, and retrofit. But a ninjutsu or genjutsu born in the Shinobi World? He could slot it almost directly into his existing skill tree.
And after this war with Kumo, the difference between Orochimaru and Minato was already crystal clear, no matter how many excuses people might invent about "bad luck" or "enemy too strong".
Orochimaru: crushed Kumo's main force and killed two Raikage.
Minato: his command was annihilated.
However you decorated it, Orochimaru was the one who won, Minato the one who lost.
The ability Feiyu had just asked the book for was exactly what fit him best at this moment, and also what was easiest to learn. He hadn't expected the demonic grimoire to respond by handing him a Kurama-clan style, high-end genjutsu on a silver platter.
Unless Orochimaru pulls something absolutely insane out later, Minato is never catching up in real merit.
Yet the Konoha leadership still wants to push his reputation up anyway…
The taste of that was… subtle.
Feiyu wasn't sure if Orochimaru hadn't noticed, or simply didn't care.
But he had no intention of walking into that mess unprepared.
"Kurama clan's Five Senses Control? It actually pulled a bloodline-limit genjutsu from this very world? That counts as demonic arts too?"
Strictly speaking, Five Senses Control was a Kurama bloodline ability, but all ninjutsu—even bloodline ones—ultimately boiled down to chakra usage patterns.
In other words: even a bloodline-limit ability could, in theory, be reverse-engineered and written as a technique.
It was just that, to do so, you had to solve a truly stupid number of technical problems.
Here, the grimoire had already done the reverse-engineering for him. Feiyu just had to learn it.
And with my Uchiha blood already mutated upwards, digesting this kind of genjutsu is even easier…
He put in a bit of effort, and Five Senses Control settled into his repertoire almost lazily.
Right now, having just learned it, he could only reliably take over one or two targets.
Running a quick mental estimate, Feiyu gauged his ceiling:
Once he completely mastered it, he should be able to control around ten regular shinobi at once without the genjutsu straining.
Of course, the stronger the target, the fewer he could handle simultaneously.
A standard Kage-level shinobi, even on the weaker side, might eat up the equivalent of seven or eight "slots" all by himself. Up against truly powerful Kage, he might not be able to fully control them at all—only distort or interfere with some senses.
But if the targets were ordinary civilians… controlling seventy or eighty at once would be trivial.
On the surface that sounded pointless—what was the use of puppeteering normal people?
But if you turned that into public opinion manipulation, infiltration, rumors, staged "eye-witnesses"…
That was terrifying.
I just happen to be heading back to Konoha. Perfect time to field-test this little toy.
After spending the 400 strands of black qi, Feiyu glanced at the 80-odd remaining.
For those, he didn't plan to specify anything.
He'd made a rule for himself:
Most of his black qi went to targeted purchases.
A small fraction every time would be used for pure gambling—no request, just draw and see what fate handed him.
The remaining qi vanished in a blink—over eighty strands, including one particularly thick one belonging to the Third Raikage.
The black grimoire trembled again.
Feiyu skimmed the new entry—and his eyes immediately widened.
"Hehuan Manual (Pleasure Harmony Manual)?!"
Just from the name he knew this wasn't anything upright.
In every wuxia, xianxia, and fantasy world, any manual called "Hehuan" was guaranteed to involve dual cultivation, yin-yang harvesting, "nourishing the body" in very "interactive" ways.
In those stories, people who practiced this kind of thing were almost always elite cannon fodder—colorful but doomed. Building your path to invincibility entirely on bedroom arts… yeah, no.
"Seriously? You give me this? What am I supposed to do with it, use it as a pillow?"
He grumbled aloud even as he carefully read through every line of the manual, face wearing a deeply "upright and serious" expression.
In truth, a technique that cost over eighty strands of black qi—including one from the Third Raikage—was never going to be pure trash.
The Hehuan Manual was absolutely not from some low-powered wuxia world—this was a proper xianxia/immortal-dao level system. At full completion, the cultivation method could reportedly stand up to beings on par with Six Paths level for at least a few moves.
Of course, that was theory.
Different worlds, different ceilings.
In the Shinobi World, the cultivation system was completely different, and there were no readily available "high-quality furnaces" the manual assumed.
Here, if he tried to follow the manual literally, the realistic upper limit would be something like Hashirama / Madara tier at best—and even then only in raw energy scale, with actual combat power significantly below theirs.
Still, as a side-system to refine body and spirit in parallel, it had value.
Once Feiyu had memorized the entire Hehuan Manual word for word, he closed the grimoire and let the spiritual space fade.
Back when he'd been deployed to the front, everything had been rushed.
The return trip, on the other hand, didn't require that kind of urgency.
Three days later, the frontline shinobi finally marched back through the gates of Konoha.
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