Three Throwing Knives

At night, Ye Yuexin lay alone and still on the rooftop.

He gazed at the stars overhead, lost in thought.

Anko still hadn't come by. Something must have held her up. But it was fine. Judging by the situation, this batch of new Genin would probably be sent to the battlefield to make up the numbers before long.

The night sky over Konoha was beautiful. Except when it rained, the skies were always clear, and the moon looked much bigger than it had in his previous life.

Ye Yuexin felt that his training had hit a bottleneck. It wasn't that he had no ideas; he simply lacked the relevant materials and knowledge.

That left him unable to test many of his theories.

For example, his favorite weapons: throwing knives.

The three knives at his waist, along with an empty slot in his knife pouch, were the culmination of all his wild ideas.

Why? Because each of the three knives was different.

First was the first one.

It was called Body Cutter. Ye Yuexin's goal for it was simple: make it indestructible.

Once he gained an affinity for Wind Release, Ye Yuexin began using the sharp nature of wind to slowly temper the knife, starting at its tip.

By now, it was more than halfway done. Even though it was only a tiny throwing knife, Ye Yuexin had spent a full two years tempering it.

Even inside its pouch, it gave off a faintly sharp aura. Fortunately, Ye Yuexin always kept it suppressed with chakra. Otherwise, it would have cut through the pouch long ago.

It wasn't indestructible yet, but Ye Yuexin had tested it against ordinary rocks. It sliced through them as easily as mud. The whole thing was effortless.

And the knife wasn't the only thing that mattered.

The throwing technique he'd worked out made it seem as though the knife had taken on the wind's intangibility and speed. He'd stumbled upon the technique while meditating on a cliff. It required a certain understanding of wind—and a vivid imagination.

Once thrown, the knife could ride the wind and pick up speed. Ye Yuexin didn't understand exactly how it worked, but he'd made it happen.

Sometimes, you just didn't know why something worked.

Then there was Ye Yuexin's second knife, an idea he'd come up with under Itachi Uchiha's influence.

Put simply, Ye Yuexin was always getting caught in genjutsu.

As it happened, his adult soul gave him a strong resistance to illusions.

With Itachi's current abilities, he could only make Ye Yuexin hesitate for an instant. But who knew how things would be when Itachi grew stronger?

Thinking about S-rank genjutsu like Tsukuyomi made Ye Yuexin's skin crawl.

After all, genjutsu was common in the ninja world. High resistance didn't mean complete immunity.

Since he didn't have much talent for genjutsu and couldn't learn to use it, Ye Yuexin decided to practice breaking it instead.

That was how his second knife came to be: Soul Cutter.

It was made specifically to counter genjutsu.

Ye Yuexin had put more effort into this knife than any of the others.

He had plenty of ideas, but no reference materials to study.

First, he had to find something that could store spiritual energy. At the time, his knowledge of the subject was practically nonexistent.

With no other choice, Ye Yuexin tried the simplest approach: testing materials one by one.

Edison hadn't known what to use for a lightbulb filament either. He'd tested more than three thousand materials before he found one that worked.

Ye Yuexin figured he could follow Edison's example.

And so he began experimenting.

Ye Yuexin was luckier than Edison, in the end.

He found the right material after testing only a few hundred. Thinking back, he'd nearly been driven to despair by the cost.

Buying materials took money. After school, he'd set up a stall to earn some. There was no way the snacks of his great homeland could lose to those of the Land of Fire. Business had always been good. The snack Ye Yuexin sold was the enduring favorite, grilled cold noodles.

Don't ask how he learned to make them. Back then, to practice making grilled cold noodles and draw in more customers, he and Anko had eaten so many they'd both felt sick.

Ye Yuexin had tested practically every somewhat hard material he could find. Near the end, he even spent two months' worth of savings on a diamond just a little bigger than a pinhead.

But none of them worked well. The diamond was especially useless. Not only couldn't it store spiritual energy, he couldn't even get any into it.

Spiritual energy was the foundation of a ninja, after all. Chakra was a combination of physical and spiritual energy, so Ye Yuexin was pretty good at handling it.

By then, Ye Yuexin had wondered if he should try a different approach. There were plenty of other paths to take.

But just as he was about to change plans, it happened again: success, all of a sudden.

It was crystal, a substance with an appearance and shape similar to diamond. At first, Ye Yuexin hadn't even planned to try it.

Crystal wasn't expensive, but it looked too much like diamond. That so-called diamond had already cost him two months of hard-earned savings.

So Ye Yuexin didn't want to buy it at all. But in the end, he tried it anyway—and it worked. It really did feel as if fate were playing a joke on him.

That's right: Ye Yuexin's second throwing knife, Soul Cutter, was transparent. It had been ground from crystal. It wasn't as hard as the first knife, but it was a deadly weapon. Its name made Ye Yuexin's ambition clear: he wanted to temper it into a blade that could sever souls.

He had plenty of ideas, but no clue how to put them into practice. He'd have to wait until later.

At first, the blade was transparent like glass. But after two years of tempering, it had turned translucent sky blue. If you looked closely, you could see tiny pinpricks of light drifting inside it, like a flowing river of stars. It seemed full of mystery.

In the knife pouch, it was easy to overlook unless you looked carefully.

Next came Ye Yuexin's third knife. It was called Void Shatterer. He'd designed it to erupt from within the body like hidden force, using the wind's intangibility and tearing power.

He'd come up with it by taking inspiration from the protagonist's ultimate technique in this world: the upgraded version of the Rasengan that Naruto Uzumaki kept using right up to the end, the Rasenshuriken.

Of course, it was nowhere near S-rank in power yet. Although Ye Yuexin had mastered both the nature transformation and shape transformation of Wind Release, his control wasn't refined enough, and he could only manipulate a small amount of chakra.

And since the knife was so small, the technique was even harder to perform.

It was while learning Void Shatterer that Ye Yuexin became Hui Yeteng's student.

The reason was simple: he was afraid of dying. That's right. He clearly remembered the injuries Naruto Uzumaki had suffered while training with the Rasenshuriken.

Ye Yuexin wasn't built like a cockroach, and he couldn't heal as quickly as Naruto Uzumaki.

So he had to use shadow clones to practice the technique. Otherwise, one small mishap could leave him crippled, missing an arm or a leg.

At the time, among everyone he knew, this teacher was the only one who might be able to teach him this B-rank ninjutsu.

After he demonstrated his talent, he learned the Shadow Clone Technique. That was also when his bond with the teachers and students at the academy began.

This technique didn't require any particular kind of throwing knife. Whatever the material, the knife would turn to dust after being thrown and hitting something. Compressing the wind's tearing, flowing power into something as thin as a throwing knife was incredibly difficult.

Ye Yuexin didn't know if he was a genius, but it had taken him a year and a half to master the third knife.

There were many reasons, but the biggest was probably that he didn't have enough chakra. He ran out after practicing for only a short while. This technique consumed an enormous amount of chakra.

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