The Boy Who Poached Souls

In the depths of winter, all was silent. Aside from the ninjas on duty, there was hardly anyone to be seen anywhere in Konoha.

In the forest outside Konoha, the thick white snow had nearly buried every trace. The cold wind swept through the trees, shaking snow from the branches and scattering it across the ground in tiny drifts.

"This weather is freezing... but that's fine. If it were the height of summer, I wouldn't dare enter the Death Forest!"

A boy of twelve or thirteen, dressed in white, moved through the woods like a ghost.

As Konoha's training ground, the Death Forest contained not only ferocious beasts captured by ninjas, but also numerous surveillance devices installed throughout the forest. Even though no events such as the Chunin Exams were currently being held and most cameras had been shut down, there was still a chance of being discovered.

But during a heavy winter snowfall, there was no need to worry about that. The snow naturally covered every camera.

Although there was not much about the boy's training that needed to be concealed, he had no doubt about the ninjas' ability to notice subtle clues. To avoid arousing suspicion in the future and to keep some cards hidden up his sleeve, he had chosen to act in winter.

"Roar!!"

Amid a thunderous roar and earth-shaking tremors, a Giant Bear crawled out of a tree hollow. Even on all fours, it stood three meters tall.

Such giant animals had been nourished by chakra, making them Fierce Beasts somewhere between Ninja Beasts and ordinary animals. They lacked the near-human intelligence and chakra control of Ninja Beasts, but could crudely use chakra to strengthen their bodies. Their Battle Power also far surpassed that of ordinary wild animals.

Large predators such as lions, tigers, bears, and boars were already formidable to begin with. Once enhanced by chakra, they became incomparably savage. In a cold-weapon era without supernatural elements, the Giant Bear before him could have destroyed several villages by itself, perhaps even wreaked havoc on a small town.

"Now that's something. As expected of the Naruto World's wildlife—this thing hasn't fully gone into hibernation?"

The boy looked at the beast with great interest, casually drawing a kunai from his pocket.

Perhaps sensing the boy's threat, the Giant Bear gave two muffled growls and rose straight up from the snow.

Even on all fours, it had been nearly three meters tall. Once this massive Fierce Beast stood upright, it reached six or seven meters—almost the height of a three-story building.

Against such a colossal monster, an ordinary person would have virtually no chance without firearms. Yet the boy showed no hint of tension. Instead, he raised his head and met the Giant Bear's gaze directly.

In an instant, the boy's eyes turned blood-red. A tiny Tomoe appeared in each eye. The enormous Giant Bear met his gaze for a moment, and its body shuddered as its mind went blank.

The moment the Giant Bear lost focus, the boy threw his kunai without hesitation. With a sharp hiss, it struck the bear's throat and sliced open its windpipe.

"Roar—hiss..."

Jolted awake by the intense pain, the Giant Bear let out a strange roar through its ruptured windpipe and lunged fiercely at the boy.

However, the boy no longer had any intention of fighting it. A ruptured windpipe was a fatal wound for the Giant Bear. With the Fierce Beast's vitality, it could still retain its full Battle Power for at least several minutes, but he had no desire to engage a dying beast in close combat.

In terms of raw strength and physical endurance alone, even an ordinary Chunin might not match such a Fierce Beast. Moreover, this Giant Bear had become even more vicious in its dying frenzy. As a ninja, he naturally avoided meaningless battles whenever possible.

His figure flashed, and with the aid of chakra, the boy leaped onto a large tree in an instant. As the Giant Bear crazily rammed the trunk, he waited until the swaying tree was about to topple before jumping onto another.

After leading the Giant Bear around for several minutes, the massive beast finally crashed to the ground with a boom. Its bellows-like breathing gradually weakened before disappearing completely.

The boy stood on the tree for a while. Once he saw that the Giant Bear had finally breathed its last, a faint smile appeared on his face. He extended one hand.

"Come to me!"

As soon as the words left his mouth, faint lights invisible to the naked eye appeared over the Giant Bear's body. They eventually gathered into a sphere of light visible only to the boy, which shot into his hand with a whoosh.

The light sphere was not large, about the size of a ball. Inside it, the Giant Bear he had killed poked out its head, twisting and roaring with its mouth open.

Looking at the sphere, the boy slapped his chest and narrowed his eyes slightly. Feeling the roaring soul within himself and the power it granted him, he sighed helplessly.

"There's barely any improvement. It only raised my strength and physique a little, along with a tiny bit of chakra..."

"This spirit's aptitude is far too poor. Aside from serving as consumable material to increase chakra, it's practically useless!"

As he spoke, the boy pulled the Giant Bear's soul sphere back out. After examining it twice, he opened his mouth and bit into it!

The soul sphere trembled, giving off chaotic mental fluctuations like a shrill scream. The boy paid it no mind and swallowed the entire sphere in a few bites. A warm sensation spread from his abdomen. He clenched his fist and felt the chakra within him increase by another trace.

"The losses from the Spirit Binding Method are really huge. That Giant Bear had no less chakra than I do, yet after conversion, the chakra I gained was less than a few hundredths of my own!"

"At this rate, who knows when my chakra will turn into chakratons!"

Aside from increasing the chakra in the boy's body, the Giant Bear's soul also left behind threads of resentful hatred that wound around his mind. But as the Tomoe in the boy's eyes spun, that foreign hatred and resentment were quickly worn away, instead becoming nourishment for the growth of his Sharingan's power.

However, the resentment and hatred of wild beasts were clearly limited in both quantity and quality. Those tiny, chilly emotional fluctuations were not entirely useless to the Sharingan in the boy's eyes, but they were little more than a drop in the bucket.

It was precisely because he had repeatedly used the Spirit Binding Method and allowed the resentment entwined within him to exceed a certain threshold that he had awakened the Single Tomoe Sharingan. To evolve the Sharingan further, he would clearly need far more resentment.

After dealing with the Giant Bear's soul, the boy glanced at the huge corpse below him. After thinking for a moment, he prepared to cut off its two enormous paws. Just then, a voice suddenly came from behind him.

"Uchiha Feiyu, you came to the Death Forest to poach again!"

The boy named Uchiha Feiyu turned around and saw a white-haired child around eight or nine years old standing on a tree branch, looking at him with a speechless expression.

"The animals in the Death Forest were all captured through the hard work of other ninjas! Some are used for ninja training, while others are even used to cultivate Ninja Beasts and ninja insects! They aren't here for you to slaughter however you please!"

Uchiha Feiyu rolled his eyes and snorted.

"Of all people, Hatake Kakashi, you're the last person who should be saying that to me... The damage you've caused in the Death Forest isn't any less than mine!"

Kakashi shrugged without answering. In truth, he often trained in the Death Forest and did not care much about such things himself. He had merely found an excuse to criticize the other boy.

Kakashi jumped down from the tree and looked over the Giant Bear lying on the ground.

"Even an ordinary Genin squad would probably struggle to deal with this thing! Yet you took it down alone, Feiyu. In terms of strength, you're probably no weaker than a Chunin!"

"I really don't understand. With your strength, why are you still studying at the Ninja Academy? Why not graduate early and become an official ninja?"

Uchiha Feiyu rolled his eyes again and replied irritably.

"Forget graduating from the Ninja Academy. I don't even want to be a ninja in the first place, alright? I was dragged into this!"

"I was living perfectly well before this. Just because I awakened these Sharingan, I was forcibly dragged over, made to join the Uchiha Clan, and forced to attend the Ninja Academy to become some kind of ninja!"

"My goal is to do less and get more, to reap without sowing—not to go to war and kill people!"

Kakashi was rendered speechless. This guy had none of a ninja's mindset; he was more like an ordinary villager.

Their values were completely different. Under those circumstances, anything he said would simply be talking past him.

Thinking that, Kakashi sighed helplessly.

"I really can't understand it... Why does someone like you have such good talent? Logically speaking, none of your ancestors awakened the Sharingan. And with only one-quarter Uchiha blood, awakening the Sharingan should have been nearly impossible..."

Uchiha Feiyu touched the corners of his eyes, immediately recalling the time when he had first awakened the Sharingan.

Not long after he had transmigrated to Konoha, he had also awakened his golden finger—a black book in his mind called the Demonic Path Inheritance Compendium.

Though it was called the Demonic Path Inheritance Compendium, Uchiha Feiyu had actually only obtained one ability from it: Spirit Summons and Subjugation, one of the Eight Wonders from the world of Hitori no Shita.

This extraordinary technique allowed him to control the souls of others and even directly devour souls to increase his cultivation. Thus, although Spirit Summons and Subjugation was known as one of the Eight Wonders, its inclusion within the Demonic Path Inheritance did not feel out of place at all.

After relying on Spirit Summons and Subjugation to devour many animal souls, Feiyu had unknowingly awakened a pair of Single Tomoe Sharingan.

However, there had been no mirror at the time, so he had not seen the change in his eyes and had no idea what had happened.

Because he had been completely unprepared and made no effort to hide it, news of his Sharingan awakening spread. In the end, he was taken to the Uchiha Clan.

After all, he had not originally been a member of the Uchiha Clan. He had not known that his grandfather's generation carried Uchiha blood, so when he noticed changes in his eyes, the Sharingan had never even crossed his mind.

As a result, this commoner became famous throughout Konoha. Without another word, the Uchiha Clan took him back to their compound and gave him the Uchiha name.

In truth, while the bloodline clans of Konoha mostly married within their own clans, some members who did not become ninjas still married outsiders. However, once someone awakened a Kekkei Genkai, they had to return to their bloodline clan.

Of course, such cases were extremely rare. Those who married outside the clan usually had weak bloodlines, little strength, or were not ninjas at all. After another generation, their bloodlines would grow even more diluted.

Someone like Uchiha Feiyu, who had only one-quarter bloodline yet still managed to awaken, was a freak occurrence rarely seen in a century even across the entire Uchiha Clan. Naturally, they had to bring him back into the clan.

As for what Feiyu himself thought about being brought into the Uchiha Clan, that was completely unimportant.

"There was nothing I could do about it... Who told my bloodline to awaken? Otherwise, I wouldn't need to come to the Death Forest to build up my courage now!"

"Build up your courage? Most Ninja Academy students who enter the Death Forest wouldn't be building courage. They'd just die here!"

"If you want to train here in secret, then just train in secret! Why make up such an excuse?"

Hatake Kakashi looked at Uchiha Feiyu with utter disdain.

Although this strange Uchiha was completely incompatible with ninjas in terms of values and, fundamentally, was even less suited to being a ninja than that oddity Might Guy, Uchiha Feiyu's strength was anything but poor.

This so-called courage training was merely an excuse. When Kakashi had first entered the Ninja Academy, the only person he had been unable to defeat was the boy standing before him!

Of course, although the two had joined the Ninja Academy at roughly the same time, there was a considerable age difference between them. Feiyu had never wanted to become a ninja in the first place. Only after awakening the Sharingan had he been forced to join the Uchiha Clan and become a Ninja Academy student.

As a result, among the many overachievers who had entered the Ninja Academy early, this student who had joined at the advanced age of ten was truly an oddity.

Therefore, neither the Ninja Academy teachers nor students at the time considered it a blemish that Kakashi and Uchiha Feiyu had fought to a standstill. After all, Kakashi had only been five, while Uchiha Feiyu was already ten.

But Kakashi, who often sparred with Uchiha Feiyu at the Ninja Academy, understood very well that while Uchiha Feiyu might have been much older, Kakashi himself had already trained under his father for two years, while the other boy had practically started from scratch. The difference in their circumstances was not as great as it appeared.

Uchiha Feiyu was a genius who was not much inferior to him at all!

In Kakashi's eyes, Uchiha Feiyu's lazy behavior was merely a disguise. Since he frequently entered and left the Death Forest, he was obviously an overachiever just like Kakashi himself!

"Yes, yes, sure, sure."

Uchiha Feiyu replied perfunctorily, making a vein pop out on Kakashi's forehead.

"You bastard... If you really want to train, why waste the animals in the Death Forest? Why not let me be your opponent instead?"

Uchiha Feiyu showed a somewhat troubled expression.

"Say, Kakashi, that's what you really wanted to say, isn't it?"

"Of course... I've wanted to spar with you again for a long time! I'm far stronger now than I was back at the Ninja Academy!"

"I've heard you're quite famous now. The youngest Genin since the village was founded, and also the youngest Chunin... Aren't you embarrassed to fight a Ninja Academy student like me?"

Kakashi was speechless after hearing that. In truth, he often ran into Feiyu after graduating, but whenever Kakashi showed any desire to challenge him, Feiyu would immediately change the subject and refuse to fight no matter what.

However, Feiyu's tone suddenly changed.

"But if you're willing to introduce me to your father, I wouldn't mind exchanging a few rounds with you!"