The will of Uchiha Xuan is like an invisible and formidable giant net, cast down from the top of Xuan Tower, covering the entire empire.
Just seven days later, a special mission code-named "Bone Return" quietly left Scarlet Eye Tower and headed for the barren desert on the border of Land of Wind.
The team leader is none other than Chiyo Saori.
Her mission instructions are clear and cold: remember the deceased and collect the relics.
The wind and sand were like weeping, blowing against the three lonely ancient tombs.
Buried here are the three most important mentors of Puppet Technique when Chiyo Saori was a child, except Red Sand Demon Che.
They taught her how to carve emotional micro-expressions for the puppet, how to build the strongest Chakra Threads core, and how to integrate poison and mechanisms.
Chiyo Saori's face was covered with a thin metal mask, revealing only a pair of gray-white eyes, as calm as two pools of stagnant water.
She followed the oldest Hidden Sand Village etiquette and presented sand roses to each tombstone. Every move was impeccable and full of respect for the deceased.
However, when she knelt down and touched the cold grave soil with her fingertips, from the special metal box carried by the team behind her, a probe as thin as a hair with an ultra-high-frequency vibrating drill bit on the top stretched out silently.
It accurately penetrated the weathered rocks and decayed coffin, like a poisonous snake's fangs, piercing the already cold head in the coffin.
Extract, seal, and inject Hashirama Cells culture medium to maintain the final biological activity.
The whole process was completed within three minutes, silently, as if it was just an insignificant link in the worship ceremony.
The "remembering" of the first two graves went on without any trouble.
But in front of the third sarcophagus, Chiyo Saori knelt down in silence. When her eyes touched the rusty Forehead Protector used as a mark on the tombstone, a slight tremor that was imperceptible to the naked eye finally appeared on her fingertips.
On that Forehead Protector, the family crest of the "Red Sand" clan was clearly engraved.
This was a relic of her first teacher, the man who first praised her that "his fingertips were born for silk thread", and was the most cherished thing during his lifetime.
The trembling lasted only tenths of a second before it was forcibly suppressed.
She kowtowed slowly, her forehead pressed against the cold sand, and the skull drill behind her accurately completed the final puncture.
Forty-three brain samples from different instructors were transported to the core laboratory on the ninth underground floor of Scarlet Eye Tower like trophies.
The light here is dim, and the air is filled with the strange smell of formalin and chakra energy.
Uchiha Xuan stood in front of the main console with his hands behind his hands, personally supervising the process of "Dead Consciousness Extraction".
Each piece of brain tissue that Hashirama Cells barely maintained activity was placed in the center of a palm-sized miniature array.
On top of the magic circle, a phantom of Rinnegan, which was reduced hundreds of times and rotated slowly, was projected.
"Activate low-frequency chakra pulses to awaken deep memory circuits." Xuan's voice was emotionless.
As the command is issued, the Rinnegan projection releases energy waves invisible to the naked eye, gently but irresistibly penetrating into those fragile tissues.
Immediately afterwards, countless runes lit up on the walls around the laboratory, forming an invisible "Voiceprint Prison".
A strange sound mixed with metal friction and the low hum of Divine Tree began to reverberate. It did not act on the eardrums, but directly exerted pressure on the spiritual level, forcing the instinctive awe and fear of the concept of "Scarlet Eye Tower" to be imprinted on those remaining fragments of consciousness.
On the system screen, the data stream refreshes rapidly.
[Warning: Sample number A-04 (Red Sand Demon Tooru) was detected to produce a strong emotional resistance wave, which lasted for 19 minutes... Resistance mode: anger, protection, hatred...]
Uchiha Xuan's mouth curved into a cold arc, as if he was watching a boring drama.
"If you are disobedient when you are alive, don't expect to stay awake after you die." He whispered to himself softly, like the final sentence of a dead thing, "Increase the pressure of the voiceprint, target, and the consciousness will be fused."
That night, the ninth floor underground was transformed into a strange classroom.
Seventeen faceless puppets with smooth heads and no facial features were implanted with brain tissue domesticated by "Phantom Overwrite Protocol".
After they were activated, they actually sat in a standard ring, simulating the teaching scene of Sunagakure senior puppet master in the past.
Uchiha Xuan's order came through internal communication, "Let Agent Zero enter and receive 're-education'."
Chiyo Saori Step by step into this hall that exudes the atmosphere of death and obedience.
The moment she stepped in, the heads of the seventeen puppets all turned to her, and a hollow, electronically synthesized voice that perfectly replicated the timbre of a certain instructor sounded.
"Disciple Saori, you are here."
That tone of voice was exactly the same as she remembered it from twenty years ago.
One of the puppets slowly raised his hand and made a movement of tapping his forehead with his knuckles - it was Red Sand Demon Che's unique habitual movement when thinking.
"The path you are taking is too hard." The puppet said in a low voice like Ghost Cleaver, "If this continues, your heart will be broken as well."
Chiyo Saori's pupils suddenly contracted at that moment.
In the depths of her gray-white eyes, it was as if a tiny crack had cracked in the solid ice.
Her right hand raised slightly uncontrollably, as if she wanted to respond to the old master-student gesture.
However, the moment her muscles tensed up, an extremely sharp pain, like a red-hot steel needle, suddenly exploded from the depths of her spine!
This is Uchiha Xuan hiding in the dark, quietly activating the deeper pain anchor point in her body.
The pain was not punishment, but a mandatory physiological command, forcing her body to make the only allowed response.
"Plop!"
Chiyo Saori's knees softened, and she knelt down heavily on one knee. The severe pain caused all the muscles in her body to spasm, but her face was expressionless, as if she was not the one kneeling down.
Uchiha Xuan walked out of the shadows and looked at her condescendingly, his eyes as cold as a god's.
"Remember, they are not your teachers." He said slowly, "They are teaching materials now."
He raised his hand in the air and issued a new command.
"Adjust the program, overwrite the title. Start explaining <Soul Coding Project Basic Operating Rules>."
In an instant, the voices of all the puppets changed. They no longer called her "disciple", but uniformly shouted in a cold electronic voice, "Agent Zero."
Immediately afterwards, they began to explain those profound and cruel soul transformation techniques.
But the most horrifying thing is that in every gap between technical explanations, there will be an original sentence that she was scolded by her tutor for making mistakes in her childhood.
"... The deviation rate of chakra signal transmission must not exceed 0.01%. This is the same as when you couldn't control the strength of the silk thread and scratched your companion's arm. It's stupid."
"... When the soul fragments are peeled off, the seventh variation of 'Requiem' must be used for frequency suppression. Did you forget again? It's like the first time you failed to complete the maintenance of the puppet on time, causing the parts to rust. It is unforgivable."
When the puppet imitating Ghost Cleaver used his hoarse and majestic voice to say the words "Failure is not terrible, betrayal... is the death penalty", Chiyo Saori finally slowly closed his eyes.
The next second, she raised her left hand, her index and middle fingers joined together like a knife, and drew behind her right ear like lightning.
A biological nerve filament connecting the hearing and part of the memory center was cut by her own hands!
The blood snaked down her white neck, dripped into the grooves that had been carved on the ground, and eventually merged into the energy cycle of the entire "Ghost Classroom" system, becoming one of the driving forces for those "textbooks" to speak.
She used self-mutilation to actively isolate those voices that could shake her, and completed the final and most thorough self-domestication.
The ceremony is over.
Uchiha Xuan consulted the data on the console and saw with satisfaction that the threshold representing Chiyo Saori's emotional fluctuations had dropped to a terrifying 0.3% - "absolute obedience to the baseline".
"All remaining brain samples will be deep-frozen and sealed." He issued the order. "After the cleaning work of subsequent batches of 'teachers' is completed, they will be unified into the 'Repentance Forum' traveling device and displayed throughout the empire."
After the words fell, Chiyo Saori stood up, turned and left, his steps as steady as a sophisticated killing machine.
However, the surveillance footage at the exit of the laboratory showed that when she passed the purification incinerator at the end of the corridor, she stopped for an extremely brief time.
In her palm, she held tightly a small piece of wood that had been burnt black - it was the last fragment of the page that she subconsciously hid when she destroyed all her old diaries yesterday.
Uchiha Xuan stared at the still picture for a second, with deep eyes, and a new system optimization note was already generated in his heart: [It is recommended to add a real-time monitoring item of 'memory residue physical burning rate' for core members of the empire.]
Outside the window, the first ray of morning light struggled to penetrate the dark clouds that had shrouded Scarlet Eye Tower all year round.
The light did not bring warmth, but shone coldly on the new batch of Silencing Seal that had just come off the production line and were used for information blockade and ideological unification.
On the top floor of Xuan Tower, on another larger light curtain, countless tiny light points are converging into a network covering the entire Shinobi World.
Every point of light represents an independent consciousness, and every fluctuation of their beliefs and every emotional ups and downs are being quietly recorded, analyzed, and quantified.
An unprecedented grand plan targeting people's hearts is quietly brewing in the depths of this ocean of data.