Uchiha Xuan's fingertips lightly passed over the virtual light screen, and he closed the scanned image marked with the cuneiform word "Father", as if he had just dusted off an insignificant grain of dust.
His Rinne Sharingan reflected another torrent of data that had just been generated in front of him. It was an in-depth analysis report automatically generated by the system after Chiyo Saori completed its task.
Efficiency increased by 37.1%.
Energy consumption is reduced by 19.4%.
The consistency between the battle path planning and the theoretical optimal solution is 99.8%.
A series of cold numbers form a perfect picture of killing.
In the report, every action of Chiyo Saori, from the start to the end, was accurately captured by the system and marked as "unoriginal behavior pattern".
This means that the Puppet Technique she has been immersed in for twenty years, those personal habits and subconscious movement habits that have long been integrated into her flesh and blood, have been completely stripped away and erased.
Now, she is no longer a puppet master with her own pride and skills, but a pure living weapon that can perfectly transmit his will.
However, at the end of this nearly perfect report, a line of small red text labeled "Low Risk Anomaly" by the system caught the attention of Uchiha Xuan.
"Target 'Chiyo Saori' passed through the corridor outside the nursery on the seventh floor underground three times at 7:13, 15:02, and 22:47 standard time. Each time it passed, there was an uninstructed and autonomous shift in the chakra circulation in its body, which lasted for 1.2 seconds. The shift rhythm was completely synchronized with the base beat of the 'Cradle Chapter' of <Eternal Night Overture>."
A playful sneer appeared at the corner of Uchiha Xuan's mouth.
"Even the subconscious mind is struggling, trying to remember those useless things for her?"
Instead of feeling threatened, he felt a morbid pleasure like appreciating flaws in a work of art.
There is no fun in taming an empty shell. Only by completely crushing and reshaping a still resisting soul can one prove his supreme power.
He raised his hand and typed a new line of instructions on the console.
"'Shadow-Level Infiltration Pilot Program', start."
The moment the order was given, a specially-made prison cell was lit up in the deepest prison of the empire.
The captured Iwagakure Jonin Black Earth Workshop, a man who had participated in three border wars and contained a rare Dust Release blood inheritance potential, was picked up from his sleep by a mechanical arm.
His brain structure is stable and his will is tenacious. In the eyes of Uchiha Xuan, he is the most ideal adult soul encoding experiment sample.
Chiyo Saori received a new task - to monitor the entire "grafting" ceremony.
When she walked into the sober white preparation room, her eyes fell on the newly issued mission props around her waist.
It was a silver controller made entirely of high-density alloy, with a frosted surface and sharp edges and corners.
Her fingers unconsciously touched it, and the cold metal touch came through the gloves, but at the moment of contact, it seemed as if an electric current hit the depths of her memory.
This feeling... was exactly the same as when she first held the joystick of her puppet named "Scarlet Scorpion" when she was a child.
Her heart suddenly shrank, and she retracted her hand as if she was electrocuted.
Opening his palms, he discovered that the edge of the controller had cut his gloves and skin at some point, and a long and thin blood mark was slowly oozing out bright red blood beads.
This insignificant injury was like a needle piercing her seemingly calm appearance.
In the center of the laboratory, Uchiha Xuan is personally calibrating the coding solution that is about to be injected.
The pale golden liquid slowly rotates in the transparent container, emitting a strange and holy light.
He picked up another test tube, and inside it was more viscous, almost colorless cerebrospinal fluid, originating from the girl named "Ling" Scarlet Eye Academy.
He accurately dripped Ling's cerebrospinal fluid into the solution, raising the ratio from the standard 8% to 12%.
"This time, it's not clearing, it's grafting." Uchiha Xuan said to Chiyo Saori behind him without looking back, his voice as calm as if he was stating a fact, "I want him to wake up without any instructions. The instinct of his soul is to kneel down and worship Scarlet Eye Tower."
"Yes, Your Majesty." Chiyo Saori suppressed the sudden strangeness in his heart and replied respectfully.
She stepped forward and took the syringe filled with coding solution from Uchiha Xuan.
However, the moment her fingertips touched the cold syringe, the muscles in her entire right arm twitched violently and uncontrollably.
It was a purely physiological spasm, a low-level mistake that had never occurred in her past twenty years of precise body control!
Uchiha Xuan glanced over and said nothing, but the scrutiny in his eyes was more stressful than any rebuke.
Chiyo Saori immediately calmed down, held the syringe firmly in his hand, and walked towards Black Earth Workshop who was restrained on the experimental table.
The moment the needle tip penetrated the carotid artery, the Iwagakure jounin was like an ice cube being thrown into lava, and he burst out in a shrill scream.
The chakra in his body was completely out of control. The violent earth-attribute power formed a small-scale vacuum collapse around him, and the restraint belt let out an overwhelmed metal scream!
"Suppress him." Uchiha Xuan's command sounded.
Chiyo Saori rushed forward instinctively, his hands as fast as phantoms, and in an instant Hand Seals.
Yin-Si-Xu-Chen... the seals were completed one by one on her fingertips like a flowing cloud.
However, just when the last seal was about to be completed - the Hand Seals sequence that was enough to activate "Earth Release: Earth Prison Dome" - her hands suddenly stopped.
This jutsu... was the last defensive ninjutsu her mother used to protect her before she died!
The fragments of memory were like a flood that burst a dam, impacting her reconstructed nerves.
In her gray-white pupils, light flickered violently, as if there was another soul awakening and roaring in it!
"No!"
Chiyo Saori let out a suppressed growl from his throat.
She actually forcibly cut off this instinctive neural feedback at the critical moment!
She gave up on the Hand Seals that was about to be completed. She reached into the ninja bag with her left hand like lightning and took out a new sealing talisman given to her by Xuan, which was engraved with dark runes. In an almost rough gesture, she slapped the Tianling Cap of Black Earth Workshop hard!
Boom--!
The black runes spread instantly like living creatures, forcibly swallowing and suppressing all the rampant chakra.
The process is brutal and efficient.
Three days later, the subject named "Yan-01" woke up in the isolation room.
He didn't speak or move, he just slowly raised his head, as if he had crossed a thick wall and saw something.
Then, under the gaze of all the monitoring equipment, his knees bent very naturally, and he knelt on the ground, tapping his forehead deeply to the ground.
The direction he was worshiping was exactly at the top of the Xuan Tower tower.
On the monitoring panel, his brain wave map was completely in sync with the base frequency of <Eternal Night Overture>, and the "awe threshold" detected by the system exceeded an astonishing 95%.
Uchiha Xuan nodded with satisfaction and ordered, "Transferred to First Eastern Training Camp and appointed as recruit instructor."
That night, Chiyo Saori patrolled the ninth floor underground alone.
In the empty corridor, only her own footsteps echoed.
Suddenly, there was an undetectable vibration from the Silencing Seal in her ear canal, which was used to isolate noise.
It was as if there was a very soft and distant singing voice, trying to penetrate the blockade of the spell and sounding directly in her mind.
She immediately activated the visual enhancement mode, and her gray-white pupils scanned the surroundings. The energy flow, air density, temperature changes... all the data were normal, and there was no one around.
Is it an illusion?
She returned to the dormitory with a trace of doubt.
When she stood in front of the huge mirror in front of the sink, her whole body froze instantly.
The self in the mirror has an expressionless face and empty eyes.
But those lips were moving slightly unconsciously, humming a melody silently with an extremely subtle amplitude.
That... her mother's lullaby.
"No--!"
With an extremely suppressed roar, Chiyo Saori suddenly raised his hand and punched the mirror hard!
Wow!
The mirror was torn into pieces, and the sharp fragments scratched her knuckles. Blood flowed down between her fingers and dripped onto the smooth floor.
A pool of blood spread on the ground, eventually converging into a twisted and strange symbol.
That symbol is almost exactly the same as the numerous "Gate-Opening Rite" patterns that Ling carved on the wall with her fingernails, except for the final stroke of closing.
She stared at the blood on the ground, her body shaking violently with anger and fear.
And at the end of the corridor, in the shadows, Uchiha Xuan was watching all of this quietly.
In his hand, he was playing with a brand new, shiny silver controller.
"Prepare for the third stage." He spoke to the communicator on his wrist and ordered in a low voice in a voice that only he could hear. "The mental overwriting of the existing Kage Level target... is activated. In the first batch of target lists, add her former teacher, Sunagakure's advisor, Ebizo."
After the order was given, he turned and left.
Behind him, a breeze blew in from the broken vent and rolled up a piece of glass shards stained with Chiyo Saori's blood.
The fragment swirled in the air, and finally with a "ding" sound, it was accurately embedded in a gap in the wall.
It was stuck there, like a knife inserted in the wrong position, reflecting an ominous cold light in the darkness.