Her smile was innocent, but with a hint of strange satisfaction.
This smile, like a stone thrown into a deep pool of deathly silence, set off silent ripples in Uchiha Xuan's consciousness.
He didn't show anything strange, but the gaze he cast on Chiyo Saori revealed a hint of unknown scrutiny.
For two consecutive days, when submitting the daily progress report of "Thought Purification", the former top puppet master genius of Sunagakure, the chief deacon of First Sound Tower whom he personally promoted, had an extremely slight tremor in his right hand.
It was a spasm originating from the nerve endings that even she was unaware of.
Not only that, Uchiha Xuan's pair of Rinnegan that reflected everything accurately captured a deeper abnormality: Chiyo Saori's pupils reacted to changes in light with a delay of eighty-eight seconds that ordinary people cannot count.
For ordinary people, this may just be a symbol of fatigue, but for a Kage Level warrior who has experienced many battles, this is a dangerous signal that the control of his body is beginning to slip away.
"Medical puppet, conduct a deep scan." Uchiha Xuan's command was conveyed silently.
Soon, an encrypted data stream was transmitted back to his mind.
The result confirmed his guess.
There is a slight but continuous chakra deposition in the hippocampus area of Chiyo Saori's brain.
The energy structure of these deposits is strikingly similar to the "Memory Ghosts" residue originally discovered in the brains of the Scarlet Eye Academy children.
She was eroded.
The silent tragic song named <Eternal Night Overture> has quietly penetrated into his core right-hand man.
Uchiha Xuan made no announcement.
He just calmly retrieved Chiyo Saori's action records for the past seven days, accurate to every second.
The ubiquitous micro-monitoring puppets in First Sound Tower presented him with the entire truth.
In the video, whenever midnight falls and Chiyo Saori enters a dormant state, it will wake up as if sleepwalking.
She walked silently through the cold metal corridor with bare feet, and finally stopped outside the heavy isolation door of the Imperial Nursery.
She would not try to enter, but would just stand quietly, no more, no less, for exactly thirteen minutes.
The monitoring puppet's pickup captured the unconscious vibrations in her throat. After analysis and amplification by the system, it was a lullaby that did not exist in any known music library.
Not a song, not a word, just a simple murmur full of some ancient tenderness.
She was on the verge of losing control.
"Master Xuan." On the third day, Chiyo Saori took the initiative to ask for a meeting. His expression was as capable and calm as ever, but the bloodshot eyes were getting thicker. "A new batch of 'Black Sun Dreamscape' infected people appeared on the eastern border. The scale is large. The local Scarlet Eye Legion requested tactical support. I request to personally lead a team to thoroughly clean up this source of pollution."
Uchiha Xuan looked at her, the silver Rinnegan was calm, as if she had already understood everything.
"Correct." He only said one word.
The moment Chiyo Saori turned around to leave and was about to step into the special elevator, Uchiha Xuan's fingertips flicked imperceptibly.
A Cursed Seal smaller than dust, with a trace of his Eternal Mangekyō's pupil power, silently blended into the seam of the spine on the back of her neck.
The eastern border, the former Fire Country forest area.
The moonlight was like frost, and an eerie silence filled the forest.
Dozens of figures in civilian attire, with dull eyes, wandered in the forest like puppets.
They repeated words of unknown meaning, "Home... go home..."
Chiyo Saori's figure appeared on the top of a giant tree like a ghost, his dark red combat uniform blending into the night.
Behind her, ten ferocious battle puppets were ready to go.
"Target confirmed, start the 'purge' procedure." She ordered coldly.
The swords and swords erupted instantly, and the puppets were like the arrival of death, accurately and efficiently harvesting those "sleepwalkers" who were mentally contaminated.
Chiyo Saori himself took the lead, with his fingers flying, Chakra Threads criss-crossed, and instantly strangled an infected person who tried to approach the village.
However, just when she was about to kill the last target, a girl who looked to be only about ten years old, her movements suddenly stopped.
The girl was stretching out her hands, facing the direction of nothingness, with an innocent smile on her face, and murmured, "Mom, hug..."
Chiyo Saori's right hand is frozen in mid-air.
"Don't kill her..." She heard herself whisper in a hoarse voice that was unfamiliar even to herself, "She just... wants to go home."
Before she finished speaking, a half-bloody Tomoe pattern appeared out of thin air on the white of her right eye, which was strange and twisted!
At this moment, Uchiha Xuan, who sent back this picture through the spine Cursed Seal, had already laid a dragnet.
At the top of First Sound Tower, he just looked at the scene in the light curtain indifferently.
Thousands of miles away in the eastern forest area, in the sky above Chiyo Saori, three huge purple sealing arrays lit up out of thin air, like shackles of gods, instantly blocking the space within a hundred miles!
A figure tore through the space, and Body Flicker Technique arrived, appearing behind Chiyo Saori.
It's Uchiha Xuan.
He didn't even look at Chiyo Saori, but casually reached out his hand and pressed his palm on the girl's head.
"Home?"
Poof!
The girl's head exploded like a watermelon, and red and white things splashed all over Chiyo Saori.
Uchiha Xuan's voice without any emotion, like the cold ice coming from Jiuyou, clearly reached her ears.
"Your home is only where I allow it."
Return to First Sound Tower, courtroom.
Chiyo Saori took off the blood stains on his body, put on a pure white prison uniform, and took the initiative to kneel on the cold ground.
She didn't defend herself, she just lowered her head and waited for the final verdict.
Uchiha Xuan sat high on the throne, overlooking the woman below who had high hopes for him.
Silence, like substantial pressure, enveloped the entire hall.
After a long time, he finally spoke, his voice terrifyingly calm. "In my plan, you are the only person who I am willing to waste a chance of 'rebirth'."
As soon as he finished speaking, the medical puppet standing beside him brought a tray, on which lay a syringe filled with a mysterious blue solution.
That is the adult enhanced version of "Soul Coding Project".
Its ingredients, in addition to high concentrations of purification factors, are even more horrifying by adding "resonance inhibitors" extracted from the girl's cerebrospinal fluid, as well as... several pieces of Uchiha Xuan's own Mangekyō Sharingan cell fragments that were naturally shed during the evolution process.
This medicine is extraordinary.
It can not only eliminate all alien consciousness in the most domineering way, but also forcibly encode the concept of "loyalty" into physiological instincts from the spiritual level, making it an existence as unshakable as breathing and heartbeat.
Chiyo Saori raised his head, there was no fear in his eyes, only a kind of decisive clarity.
She took the initiative to stretch out her left arm, revealing her smooth skin.
"If I'm not clean enough, please wash me clean." Her voice returned to its former calmness, "But I ask that you keep my memory - I want to always remember who made me stronger, and who... erased my weakness with your own hands."
"Okay." Uchiha Xuan nodded.
He stepped down from the throne, picked up the syringe himself, and without any hesitation, inserted the needle into Chiyo Saori's vein.
"Uhhhhhhh--!"
The moment the solution was injected, the unspeakable pain was like billions of steel needles, exploding from the inside of every cell in her body!
Chiyo Saori The muscles all over his body twitched violently, the veins bulged out like a horned dragon, and dark red blood slowly oozed from the seven orifices.
Her consciousness seemed to be thrown into a high-speed crusher, struggling repeatedly on the edge of collapse and reorganization.
Old memories, emotions, and even personality are all being forcibly dissolved, overwritten, and rewritten by a stronger will.
[Ding!
System prompt: High-level will resistance has been detected, and the target is undergoing subconscious resistance. It is recommended to enable the 'forced dissolution' mode, the success rate is 99.9%.]
Uchiha Xuan's mind sounded a system alarm.
But he raised his hand to close the prompt. Rinnegan just stared coldly at Chiyo Saori who was writhing in pain on the ground, exerting invisible pressure with his eyes.
"Hold on." He said calmly, "I don't want to change the knife that I have already used so well."
This sentence is more effective than any encouragement.
Chiyo Saori's body trembled suddenly, and the violent struggle miraculously eased a bit.
She clenched her teeth and suppressed the soul-rending scream back into her throat.
A full twelve hours.
When the first ray of morning light shined through the dome of the courtroom, Chiyo Saori on the ground finally stopped trembling.
She slowly opened her eyes.
What kind of eyes are those?
The former wisdom and cunning were gone, replaced by two pools of pure, bottomless dark red.
There are no Tomoe or lines in the pupils, but they can accurately capture the faintest chakra fluctuations in the dark.
She stood up, and every movement of her body was full of the ultimate beauty of strength and coordination.
The first thing she did was to go to her locker and take out the three puppets that had been with her for ten years.
She once regarded them as siblings and best friends.
Click! Click! Click!
With an expressionless face, she dismantled them with her own hands, took out the three core chips that carried countless memories, and threw them into the ultra-high-temperature furnace nearby without any hesitation, watching them turn into a plume of smoke.
Then, she walked up to Uchiha Xuan and presented a scroll with both hands.
It was an absolute oath written in her own blood <Old Self Funeral Book>, declaring that the old personality was completely over, and that the new self would only obey the orders of the Mysterious Master.
Uchiha Xuan took the document and his eyes stayed on her new pair of dark red pupils for a moment.
"Now, you won't have any more dreams."
Chiyo Saori bowed slightly, his voice was cold and pure, like a newborn weapon.
"I don't need dreams. You are my reality."
That night, Uchiha Xuan stood on top of First Sound Tower, overlooking the huge data flow in the empire's center.
In the red alert area representing "Black Sun Dreamscape" mental pollution, the transmission rate has dropped by 42% in the past twelve hours.
The peak efficiency of the blue data flow, which represents the "reverent response" of the people in the empire to the Xuan Lord, has steadily increased to 91.3%.
Transforming one core member is more effective than purging 10,000 infected people.
He was about to issue an order to advance the next stage of the "Ideological Unification" plan, but his expression suddenly moved slightly.
His eyes fell on the record scroll Chiyo Saori had just submitted regarding the destruction of old puppets.
At the end of all the formulaic report text, she wrote an extra line in extremely small fonts.
"Record: Today, Scarlet Eye Academy S-class experimental subject 'Ling' smiled. The way he smiled was very similar to what I remember when I was a child."
Uchiha Xuan stared at that line of text for a long time, but finally did not choose to erase it.
He slowly turned around and looked towards Echo Cage, the deepest part of the tower where the bell was held.
As if he had penetrated all layers of barriers, he saw the little girl looking quietly in his direction through the thick observation glass.
Her little mouth opened and closed silently, making a clear mouth shape.
"Thank you."
Uchiha Xuan had no expression on his face, but a cold command had already been issued in his heart:
[System, start preparing for the third phase of 'Soul Coding Project' - a covert penetration plan targeting Kage Level and above targets.]
In the distant sky, the night sky has been clear since Chiyo Saori was "purified", and thick dark clouds rolled up without warning.
Deep in the clouds, electric light flashed, as if countless pairs of prying eyes were slowly opening, and it seemed as if everything that had just been staged in this world was just the prelude before the conclusion of another great drama.