The first year of Xuan Era should start from this.
Uchiha Xuan stood with his hands behind his hands and announced in a low voice.
Behind him, there seemed to be countless dead souls of ancestors wailing, but they were crushed to pieces by the silver light in his eyes that swallowed everything.
However, just as the first ray of morning light in this new era pierced the lead clouds over Hidden Leaf Village, a report that was so absurd and almost provocative was urgently sent to the top of First Sound Tower.
"Xuanzhu, under the tower... there is a tombstone."
Baba Tesshin knelt on one knee, his voice trembling slightly with a mixture of awe and anger.
His muscles were tense, like a ferocious beast ready to pounce on its prey.
Chiyo Saori stood aside. She stayed up all night, personally supervising the preliminary structure of "Civilization Cleansing Department". Those eyes that once contained wisdom and cunning were now filled with bloodshot eyes and a trace of hidden fatigue.
When she heard the word "tombstone", her heart sank suddenly.
In the early morning of the next day after Master Xuan had just announced that he would change the surnames of all the ancestors in the world, a tombstone appeared under his ruling center - First Sound Tower?
This is no longer a provocation, but a declaration of war against Uchiha Xuan, the god of the new world, in the most primitive and naked way!
Uchiha Xuan didn't look back, he just stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, overlooking the new imperial capital that was beginning to take shape.
The urban planning is as regular as a chessboard, and all buildings follow strict geometric aesthetics, cold and efficient.
"Go on." His voice was calm and there was no hint of emotion or anger.
"It's... a fragment of a tombstone that was erected in the center of the square in front of the tower at some time. The material is ordinary bluestone, with two words written on it... with charcoal." When Baba Tesshin said this, his voice couldn't help but grow lower, as if those two words were some taboo spell.
"What word?" Chiyo Saori asked for Uchiha Xuan.
Baba Tesshin's Adam's apple rolled and he struggled to spit out two words: "'Dad'."
The air solidified instantly.
Chiyo Saori's pupils suddenly contracted.
It's not the name of a certain hero, not the emblem of a certain family, or even a slogan of resistance.
Just "Dad".
The simplest way for a child to call his father.
However, these two words, at this moment and in this place, are sharper than any weapon. They accurately pierce the core of Uchiha Xuan's shocking declaration yesterday - to cut off the bloodline inheritance and only Xuan is respected.
This is a silent question: You can change the surnames of the ancestors in the world, but can you erase the existence of the father in the children's hearts?
Uchiha Xuan finally turned around slowly, the silver Rinnegan was neither sad nor happy.
He did not order the unsightly stone to be ground into powder, nor did he launch an angry purge.
He just took steps towards the foot of the tower.
When he saw with his own eyes the stone fragment standing alone in the morning light, he fell silent.
The handwriting is tender and crooked, as if it was written by a child who used all his strength to carve his longing for his father deeply into the stone.
"Seal this place, with a radius of ten miles, as a first-level restricted area." Uchiha Xuan's voice broke the dead silence, "No one is allowed to approach, and no one is allowed to discuss. Violators will have their souls removed."
"Yes!" Baba Tesshin immediately took the order and left with vigorous and resolute movements.
"Sir, this..." Chiyo Saori was puzzled.
Such a clear provocation, why not eliminate it?
If you stay here, wouldn't it become a different kind of monument?
"Clear it, and it will appear elsewhere tomorrow. Blow it up, and its fragments will scatter all over the city." Uchiha Xuan's eyes were as deep as an abyss, "This was not set free by humans."
He closed his eyes, and a huge amount of perception instantly enveloped the entire central area.
He retrieved the visual records of hundreds of puppet guards surrounding First Sound Tower at 360 degrees high and low.
A stream of data poured into his consciousness like a waterfall.
Soon, he found the anomaly.
"Last night, at three o'clock in the morning." Uchiha Xuan Open your eyes, reincarnation.
Chiyo Saori felt a shiver in his heart. "Thirteen seconds... could it be some kind of high-level Space-Time Ninjutsu or illusion?"
"No," Uchiha Xuan shook his head, "I checked the energy fluctuations, and there was no trace of chakra. The thirteen seconds of black screen was more like... signal interruption."
He remembered the girl who was the only one who made the system sound an alarm during the "Affiliation Reinforcement" ceremony - Ling.
At three quarters past midnight last night, it was the precise time when her brain waves emitted that abnormal signal.
"This is not artificially placed," Uchiha Xuan made the final judgment on Chiyo Saori, "This is a concrete product spurred by resonance."
Chiyo Saori's wisdom allowed her to immediately understand the terrifying logic behind this.
She took a breath and analyzed. "You mean... the orphan of a certain rebel who was exiled or executed by us. His strong yearning and unwillingness subconsciously bound the symbol of 'father' to 'resistance' itself. And First Sound Tower... no, it was the spiritual resonance force field of the Scarlet Eye Academy that inadvertently amplified this obsession, causing it to break through materialistic limitations and form a reality projection?"
"Very possible."
"I suggest starting 'Kinship Tracing Program' immediately!" Chiyo Saori said decisively, "Screen all children under the age of five in the jurisdiction, especially orphans whose parents have been judged as 'sources of pollution', and check their guardianship background and mental state assessment!"
"It's useless." Uchiha Xuan denied her again, "You are looking for a specific person, but it is no longer there. This is no longer the blood longing of a child, this is the 'ghost of memory', reviving the dead."
Before he finished speaking, his figure had disappeared from the place.
The next second, he appeared in Silence Room, the deepest part of the Scarlet Eye Academy.
The place is pure white and spotless, with only dozens of life-support devices operating quietly.
The girl Ling was lying in the sleeping cabin in the center, breathing steadily and closing her eyes, as if she was just an ordinary child sleeping.
However, under the observation of Uchiha Xuan and Rinnegan, her brain waves were continuously outputting low-frequency pulses invisible to the naked eye. The frequency was exactly the same as the energy dissipation frequency when the tombstone appeared.
The source was indeed her.
Uchiha Xuan stretched out a hand and pressed it on the glass cover of the sleeping cabin.
The Eternal Mangekyō pattern slowly rotated in his eyes, and the endless pupil power penetrated the material barrier and brazenly invaded the depths of the girl's sea of consciousness.
What he saw was not a colorful dream, but a wasteland made of ashes.
The sky is dead gray and the earth is burnt black.
On this wasteland, thousands of vague, tiny figures made of ashes were holding hands and forming huge circles.
They were silent and numb, but with an almost instinctive stubbornness, they used their fingers as pens to write the same word over and over again on the scorched earth.
--[Father].
Every time I write a stroke, a tiny crack opens on the ground, and wisps of black mist pour out from the crack. It is a collection of thoughts and resentments that have been suppressed and forgotten, but have never dissipated.
Uchiha Xuan's eyes flashed coldly.
He could easily use Amaterasu to burn this wasteland of consciousness into nothingness, but that would only make the girl brain-dead, and the "virus" hidden deep in the collective consciousness would still look for its next host.
He did not choose to forcefully interrupt her dream.
On the contrary, his pupil power turned into a torrent of information, injected in the opposite direction!
A forged memory was accurately implanted into the core of this wasteland.
Above the wasteland, the scene suddenly changed.
A tall man held a child tenderly and walked towards the blazing fire step by step.
The child's face was full of fear, but the man's voice was extremely firm.
"Don't be afraid, kid... daddy will take you home."
As soon as the words fell, the figures of the father and son were swallowed up by the fire and turned into ashes together.
Despair, destruction, pain... new cognitions spread crazily in this space of consciousness like a virus, covering the original obsessions.
The system prompt sounded in Uchi-Hai Xuan's mind.
[Ding!
A drastic shift in the target's cognitive model was detected, and the original emotional anchor point "Father-Guardian" was contaminated... The anchor point was weakened by 78%...]
He slowly withdrew his hand, and the silence returned to silence.
That night, under First Sound Tower, the word "Dad" written in charcoal on the tombstone fragment, without anyone touching it, seemed to be blown by invisible wind and sand, weathered by itself, rustled off, and finally disappeared, as if it had never existed.
Baba Tesshin reported, his tone full of fanatical admiration for Xuan Lord Kamui.
Chiyo Saori also breathed a sigh of relief.
Using the method of tampering with memory to contaminate the concept of "father" itself and bind it to pain and destruction is indeed much more advanced than simple physical removal.
However, she and everyone underestimated the emotional weight carried by those two words that spanned thousands of years.
On the third morning, at dawn.
A sharp alarm came from the old address of Hidden Leaf Village, deep underground in Naka River Shrine!
Commander Scarlet Eye Legion, who was left behind, reported urgently with a tone of horror and disbelief, "Xuanzhu! Nameless Cemetery... A skeleton in the cemetery sat up on its own!"
Uchiha Xuan's figure teleported over again.
The cold and damp underground cemetery was once the final destination of those early exiles who were stripped of their surnames and erased from their existence.
At this moment, in the deepest part of the cemetery, a decayed skeleton actually violated the law of life and death and sat upright from the dusty sarcophagus.
Its empty eye sockets faced the direction of the entrance, and its two bony hands held a newly carved wooden sign stiffly.
The wooden plaque was rough, as if it had been scratched out on rotten wood with finger bones.
Above, are two crooked words, but filled with endless obsession.
--Dad.
Uchiha Xuan's eyes fell on the corpse.
The system quickly gave the identification: [Invalid Data Unit].
This corpse had not received the later "Affiliation Reinforcement" during its lifetime. It belonged to the first group of people to be cleaned up, and its soul had long since dissipated.
But he noticed one detail.
There was an extremely weak, almost imperceptible red light on the knuckles of the corpse holding the wooden sign.
That's... the crystallized residue left behind by Yin Release Chakra after it was highly condensed and backfired on the host.
It was when he was promoting "Purification Hearing" that those people who had their emotions and memories forcibly stripped away had the last remaining energy before their souls collapsed!
Uchiha Xuan finally understands.
He can burn family trees, tamper with history, strip away the memory of living people, and even contaminate the cognitive model of a concept.
But he could not completely eliminate the emotional weight rooted in the origin of life carried by the concept of "father".
It has become separated from a specific person or memory, but has been sublimated into a prototype of resistance in the collective subconscious, a "ghost" that cannot be digitized or defined systematically.
Every suppression he makes is like hitting the water, only causing more unpredictable ripples.
This ghost is using everything he buried with his own hands in the past to counterattack him!
Uchiha Xuan stood in the center of the cemetery, surrounded by countless nameless bones.
He slowly raised his right hand, and the purple Divine Seed between his eyebrows, which symbolized absolute divine power, suddenly lit up, and the light penetrated the darkness.
His cold, unemotional will turned into a brand new oracle, which instantly spread through the minds of all Executors in the empire.
[From now on, in all newborn naming ceremonies in the empire, it is prohibited to use "father", "mother", "parent" and any related words as emotional guidance or identity reference.
The first cognitive object of all newborns must and can only be the "Xuanzhu".
Violators will be considered as a source of serious ideological pollution by the whole family and will be purified on site.]
This order is colder and more decisive than abolishing surnames and changing surnames, or changing ancestors' surnames.
It wants to completely obliterate the concept of "family" from the very roots of language from the first day a new life is born!
The moment the oracle was delivered, in the distant direction of the Scarlet Eye Academy nursery area, a loud cry of a baby suddenly stopped and turned into deathly silence.
And right at this moment.
In the Scarlet Eye Academy's Silence Room, the long eyelashes of the girl Ling, who has been in deep sleep, trembled slightly.
She slowly opened her eyes.
They were a pair of eyes that were so clear that they contained no impurities, yet were so deep that they seemed to reflect the boundless starry sky.
The corner of her mouth, imperceptibly, evoked a very faint smile.
That smile was innocent, but also had a hint of strange satisfaction.