"Where am I? Wasn't I dead?" Chen Feng looked around and said.
It looked like outer space, dark all around, with countless specks of light orbiting him. Chen Feng clearly remembered that he had died—struck by lightning.
Chen Feng had lived two lives. In his first, he had been an assassin who killed many people. In the end, the woman he loved killed him, and only out of hatred: he had killed her parents.
As he lay dying, he'd learned just how terrifying human nature could be. A person could spend eight years living as husband and wife with the very person they planned to take revenge on. It was terrifying.
He'd thought death would end everything. Who could have guessed that after being reincarnated, he'd retain memories of his previous life? It made him afraid to trust anyone again—until she came along.
She was a girl who lived in a world of fantasy. They'd met at a business gathering. Her father, Huang Biao, did business with Chen Feng's company.
Huang Yun loved anime and romance stories. Ever since they'd met, she'd kept pulling Chen Feng into watching all kinds of moving anime, novels, and movies with her.
Whenever she cried or laughed at the stories in those movies, Chen Feng gradually let go of his emotional baggage. He began to laugh and enjoy himself with her. But just as they were preparing to get married, Huang Yun was kidnapped.
During the rescue, Chen Feng had nearly died. Huang Yun had thrown herself in front of him and saved his life, but she died in his arms. It drove Chen Feng mad. He did everything he could to find out who was behind it, only to discover it was Huang Yun's father. He'd set the whole thing up to take over Chen Feng's company.
Chen Feng had snuck into Huang Biao's home, planted explosives, and detonated them. As he fled by plane, the sky suddenly seemed to split open, flashing with lightning and thunder.
Seeing the storm, Chen Feng had looked for a suitable place to make an emergency landing. He barely managed to touch down, and by then the lightning had grown even more frequent. Chen Feng muttered, "Damn it, you're so noisy. If you've got the guts, strike me!"
Who knew he'd barely gone a short distance before he really was struck. In that instant, a thousand "grass-mud horses" stampeded through his mind. Then he lost consciousness. Just before blacking out, he felt himself being sucked into that opening in the sky.
Remembering how he'd been struck by lightning, Chen Feng muttered, "I must be dead. So I'm a soul now. But what are these specks of light?"
Chen Feng reached out and touched one. To his surprise, it shot straight into the space between his brows and merged into his body. Then all the other specks rushed toward his brow and streamed inside him.
With each speck that entered him, a scene flashed through Chen Feng's mind, and his soul grew stronger. He could feel it growing more powerful with every speck.
Once all the specks had merged with him, Chen Feng felt his soul had been elevated and become stronger than ever before. He also learned that the specks were fragments of the soul of someone called Otsutsuki Koshiki.
From the fragments' memories, Chen Feng learned that Koshiki was a prince of the Otsutsuki Clan. While traveling through space to find his older sister, Princess Kaguya, he had been ambushed by someone named Otsutsuki Momoshiki, fallen into a spatial storm, and died. Even his soul had been shattered.
At that moment, a fissure opened in the space between Chen Feng's brows, forming an eye. It emitted a white light, then opened a black hole. Before Chen Feng could react, he was sucked inside. He blacked out again, and the eye on his forehead carried his soul to the Naruto World.
After finding Asura, Princess Kaguya's blood relative and not yet born, Chen Feng entered Uzumaki Kushina's body and fused with Asura's soul.
It turned out that the Jutsu Formation Otsutsuki Koshiki had originally cast had activated. This Jutsu Formation used his bloodline to activate his White Eye and search for his closest relatives. It had been inside his White Eye, but he'd been ambushed and killed before he could complete it, leaving it dormant. But after Chen Feng devoured Otsutsuki Koshiki's soul and manifested the White Eye, the dormant Jutsu Formation began to function again.
It had pulled Chen Feng into the world where Kaguya Otsutsuki currently was—the Naruto World.
But even after devouring Otsutsuki Koshiki's soul fragments, Chen Feng still wasn't powerful enough to travel through space as a soul. At best, he could keep his soul from being destroyed by the spatial turbulence. Some damage was inevitable.
So, upon arriving in the Naruto World, the bloodline within the White Eye instinctively found Asura's reincarnation, who had yet to be born and was the closest to him in bloodline and soul. It fused with him to mend the damage to Chen Feng's soul and allow him to be reincarnated.
Kushina paused and muttered, "It almost felt like something just entered my body, but I don't feel any different. Hmm, it must be the Nine-Tails getting jealous because I'm going to be a mother. That has to be it. Forget it. I shouldn't pick a fight with a touchy fox. I'd better get dinner ready. Minato will be home soon, and I want to surprise him." With that, she went back to cooking dinner.
The Nine-Tails inside her: "..."
Actually, when Chen Feng entered Kushina, the Nine-Tails had felt as though someone had invaded her. But when it probed with its mental energy, it didn't detect anything unusual. The Nine-Tails figured the crazy woman Kushina must have messed with its senses.
The more it thought about it, the angrier it got. Its bad mood today was Kushina's fault. Its poor senses today were Kushina's fault. Even its chakra acting up was Kushina's fault. Whatever went wrong, it was Kushina's fault.
Though it was unwilling to accept it, there was nothing it could do. It could only curse, "Damn crazy woman!" Then, furious, it released its chakra to disrupt Kushina's.
But the Nine-Tails quickly realized that several more chains had appeared around it, released by Kushina. The seal around it had grown tighter, and its chakra had been forced back. Then it heard Kushina's voice: "Nine-Tails, what's gotten into you? Don't go crazy for no reason. You're disturbing me while I cook. Who did you get that bad-tempered streak from? Ah... it's already so late. I need to hurry and get dinner ready. Minato will be home soon."
Then Kushina said to the Nine-Tails, "That's enough, Nine-Tails. No more mischief, okay? I'm going to cook now. I'll come chat with you another time. See you." After that, she fell silent, while the Nine-Tails could only let out an unwilling roar beneath its strengthened seal.
When Chen Feng entered the fetus that was Asura's reincarnation, the White Eye between his brows fell dormant. That was why the Nine-Tails and Kushina hadn't noticed anything unusual.
Chen Feng's soul wanted to fuse with Asura's because it was too damaged to be reincarnated, and Asura's soul willingly fused with his as well, since it was also incomplete.
Between the two fragments of souls was a complete, tiny soul, though it was a new, blank soul.
For Chen Feng and Asura's souls to fuse, they had to enter that tiny soul together. So the two damaged souls merged into it.
Once the two fragments entered the tiny soul, the newborn soul quickly grew stronger.
As the soul grew stronger, the memory fragments buried deep within it began to merge and sort themselves out.
Among those fragments were Chen Feng's two lifetimes, and Otsutsuki Koshiki's thousand years of memories.
There were also Asura's thousand years of reincarnations and his thousand-year fate with Indra.
The fragments held sorrow, joy, hatred, and love... They had no consciousness, but the impact on Chen Feng was immense. His awareness shook violently, on the verge of being wiped out at any moment.
Just as Chen Feng was about to lose the struggle, the White Eye between his brows shielded his soul and consciousness.
It also extracted the emotions from the memories contained in the soul fragments: joy, being moved, saving others, killing, hatred, and more.
Once those emotions had been removed, only the memories remained. They no longer carried any feeling, and Chen Feng no longer experienced them as if they were his own.
Chen Feng absorbed only the memories, like watching a movie. They could no longer affect his awareness, which finally settled down and began to absorb the vast trove of memories.
After being extracted, the emotions split into two opposing groups and began to swirl together.
The positive, joyful emotions gathered on one side, giving off a faint white glow. The negative, resentful ones gathered on the other, giving off a faint, dark glow.
Once all the emotions had fused, they formed two tiny figures with the same appearance as the fetus, yet completely different from each other. One was refined and elegant; the other radiated viciousness.
By then, Chen Feng's appearance had changed completely. Once his awareness stabilized, it fused fully with the newborn soul, and his appearance and build changed to match the fetus's. The fusion was perfect.
The two little figures looked at each other. The refined one smiled and nodded at the vicious one, but the other wouldn't even give him the time of day. It turned away, then rushed straight into Chen Feng's soul and vanished. The refined one didn't get angry. He only shook his head helplessly, then followed, vanishing into Chen Feng's soul as well.
As Chen Feng's soul fused with the fetus, the fetus's body gradually changed too. First, a narrow fissure slowly appeared between its brows, and an eye began to form. As the fusion continued, the fissure widened, and the eye within grew clearer. It was a White Eye.
The cells in its body grew more and more active, filled with a powerful force of life. The fetus had the vitality of a strong young man. No, its life force was greater than that of a man in his prime.
Besides its extraordinary vitality, the blood cells in its body carried a powerful Sealing Power, which continued to grow stronger. Faintly, a chain was beginning to form.
As time slowly passed, the chain took shape and ran throughout his body. His blood flowed through his vessels like a chain streaming endlessly along them.
The vitality and activity of his cells were so powerful that even if someone stabbed him, he would recover quickly.
The White Eye between his brows had finished forming. At that moment, Chen Feng woke up, and a force began pushing him upward.
He knew that his new life was about to begin.