Inside the ventilation duct, the cold smell of rust mingled with the faint chakra glow drifting from afar, creating an oppressive, heavy atmosphere. Mizuki Han clung to the bars like a lizard lying in wait, his dark pupils reflecting the enormous corridor, bright as day beneath the light of the Moonlight Stone.
And at the far end of the corridor stood a colossal iron gate, as if wrought by the gods.
The twenty-meter-tall gate was cast from a single piece of some unknown black metal. Pale blue chakra shimmered across its surface, and countless intricate sealing formulas, like a precision circuit board, formed an impassable barrier. In front of it stood two elite chunin in deathly white masks, motionless as silent stone statues. The concentrated chakra radiating from them formed an invisible wall with the surrounding air.
Any creature that tried to approach would be torn apart in an instant by the pure killing intent emanating from them.
"Brother Han..." Haku clutched Mizuki Han's clothes tightly, her little body trembling with fear. She didn't even dare peek out. The oppressive presence coming from the other side of the wall alone was enough to leave her nearly breathless.
Mizuki Han didn't look back. His gaze swept inch by inch over the impregnable sealed gate.
Break the seal by force? Impossible. A complex sealing technique of this level would take a dedicated seal-breaking team at least several days to undo—or a Kage Level powerhouse using overwhelming strength to destroy it outright. He couldn't do it.
Create a diversion and draw the guards away? That was even more absurd. The two elite chunin's presence was steady as a mountain, their will as firm as iron. They wouldn't abandon their posts over some minor disturbance. They were members of the Sharp Tooth Unit, the sharpest blades in Genji's hand. They knew only how to carry out orders, not adapt.
A ninja's way of thinking had been completely cornered at this moment.
But Mizuki Han's thoughts quietly unfolded along an entirely different dimension.
A basic fact from a physics textbook in his previous life surfaced in his mind: when water freezes, it expands by about nine percent. The process generates enough physical force to split rock and steel.
Ninjutsu was a supernatural power based on chakra. But it still existed in this material world, and so it had to obey the most fundamental laws of physics.
No matter how powerful the chakra seal was, it needed a physical "foundation" to support it. The metal engraved with formulas, the energy nodes embedded in the walls—they were all physical objects.
If he could get water to seep into the cracks in the seal's foundation...
Then use Ice Release to freeze it...
An utterly reckless plan, yet one that was perfectly feasible in theory, quickly took shape in Mizuki Han's mind. He didn't need to crack the chakra code, intricate as the stars. All he had to do was strike at the root—use pure physical force to crush the "hard drive" that stored the code!
Knowledge was power.
In this supernatural world, scientific knowledge from another dimension was the sharpest weapon in his hands, and the one least comprehensible to anyone here.
"Haku." Mizuki Han's voice broke the silence in the duct, cold and terse.
"Here." Haku answered at once.
"No matter what you hear or see, stay here. Don't move, and don't make a sound." Mizuki Han's command held not a trace of emotion.
Without another word to Haku, his body slid soundlessly from the other end of the ventilation duct like a slippery snake, vanishing into the shadows of a darker drainage channel along the edge of the corridor.
The gate was still nearly fifty meters away, beyond the guards' range of perception.
Cold, foul-smelling water rose above his ankles. He crouched and gently pressed his only intact hand into it.
Chakra extended from his fingertips like a precision probe, merging with the murky liquid. He didn't alert anyone. Carefully controlling a small stream of water, he sent it creeping toward the enormous iron gate along the shadows by the wall, like a thin, invisible snake.
This task demanded extremely precise chakra control.
The stream couldn't move too quickly, or it would make a sound.
It couldn't be too large, or the Moonlight Stone's light might reveal it.
The tiny stream took a full ten minutes to crawl the fifty meters. Fine beads of sweat appeared on Mizuki Han's forehead—not from exhaustion, but from intense concentration. His senses were fully attached to the stream as he carefully guided it around every obsidian floor tile beneath the guards that might reflect the light.
At last, the stream reached the base of the iron gate.
Following the water, Mizuki Han's "sight" took in the whole foundation of the seal. It was a massive block of granite, wedged between the obsidian floor and the iron gate. Countless tiny channels engraved with energy runes passed through the stone, connecting to the main formula on the gate.
Years of dampness had left hair-thin cracks, almost impossible to see with the naked eye, where the granite met the metal.
Right here!
A cold glint flashed in Mizuki Han's eyes. He guided the stream, making it seep into those tiny cracks little by little, as if it were alive.
The process was so slow, so utterly silent.
The two elite chunin remained standing before the gate like statues, completely unaware of what was happening in the shadows fifty meters away—something that could overturn everything they knew. One of them seemed a little bored and even rolled his neck, producing a faint crack of bone.
The water kept seeping in.
One minute.
Five minutes.
Ten minutes.
When Mizuki Han sensed that water molecules had filled every crack inside the seal's foundation, he slowly exhaled.
The preparations were complete.
Now it was time to witness a miracle—or rather, to witness "science."
He closed his eyes and focused his entire mind on controlling his chakra. He formed no hand seals. Instead, he infused the water that had seeped into the cracks in the stone with the nature transformation of Ice Release, in an exceptionally gentle and discreet way.
Cold began to spread through the microscopic world.
Under the influence of chakra, the water molecules' frantic motion began to slow sharply. They stopped colliding at random and began following a pattern, gradually arranging themselves into the most stable hexagonal crystal structure.
Time seemed to slow at that moment.
"Crk..."
A faint sound, like the cracking of ice deep within itself, came from the gate.
It was even quieter than the flutter of a mosquito's wings, but to the two elite chunin, it struck like a heavy hammer.
At almost the same time, both men snapped their gazes toward the foundation of the sealed gate!
Their eyes swept across the area, sharp as blades, but they saw nothing. No chakra disturbance, no intruders. Everything was just as it had been a moment before.
"Was that my imagination?" one of the chunin asked in a low voice.
"...Maybe," the other replied, though his hand had already come to rest on the hilt at his waist.
What they didn't know was that, deep inside the rock where they couldn't see, a force born of the laws of physics—the most unreasonable force of all—was rapidly building.
Countless ice crystals formed in the narrow cracks and expanded!
They pressed against one another, crushed against the hard granite walls, and unleashed terrifying outward pressure.
A cold smile curled across Mizuki Han's lips.
He increased the flow of chakra!
"Crack... crack-crack..."
This time, there was no mistaking the sound!
A clear, continuous series of fractures came unmistakably from inside the seal's foundation!
The elite chunin's pupils contracted to pinpricks! They watched in horror as a web of fine cracks suddenly appeared across the surface of the supposedly indestructible granite foundation, like a dried-up riverbed!
"What's happening?!"
"Intruders!!!"
Before the shrill alarm could be cried out, something even more terrifying happened.
The cracks across the foundation widened in an instant! Pale blue chakra light poured frantically from them like electric snakes strangled mid-strike. It flashed wildly several times, then went completely dark!
The physical foundation that sustained the entire sealing formula had been destroyed!
"BOOM!!!"
With a thunderous, muffled crash, the massive granite foundation could no longer withstand the terrible pressure from within and exploded!
Rocks of every size, mixed with broken metal channels engraved with runes, shot in all directions!
Every last trace of chakra light on the twenty-meter-tall iron gate went out at that instant. The awe-inspiring supernatural presence that had shrouded the gate vanished without a trace.
The deadlock had been forcibly broken!
The two elite chunin stood frozen. Their pale masks couldn't hide the utter shock and disbelief in their eyes.
They hadn't felt the impact of any powerful ninjutsu. They hadn't seen a single enemy. Yet the Mist Anbu's most prized S-rank seal had, right before their eyes, been... blown apart in a way they couldn't begin to understand?
"WOOO—"
The piercing alarm blared through the entire underground complex a second later!
The chunin snapped back to their senses. A violent killing intent erupted from them like a volcano, instantly locking onto the entire wide corridor!
Mizuki Han remained hidden in the shadows, but his heart was pounding.
He had done it.
Yet at the very moment the seal's foundation exploded, the immensely heavy iron gate, deprived of all support, let out a grating metallic scrape and slowly swung inward, opening a narrow gap.
Beyond the gate was not a warehouse piled high with weapons as he had imagined, but a fathomless, pure darkness.
And from within that darkness, a pair of eyes slowly lit up, glowing crimson and belonging to no human.
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