Uchiha Xuan ignored the crack and didn't even look at the two looming Chinese characters.
To him, the hatred of the deceased is just another energy source that can be utilized. Whether it takes the form of a curse or a prayer, there is no essential difference.
Reflected in his Eternal Mangekyō is another larger chessboard.
"The first stage goal of 'Soul-Burning Protocol' is not to cleanse, but to 'ignite'." He gave instructions to the empty main control room. His voice passed through the system and turned into countless data streams flowing to every corner of the empire.
"The system selects five targets. Criteria: Kage Level's strength, huge influence, the deepest ties to the old era, and a clear 'guilt' rift in his heart."
[Instruction confirmed. Start network-wide intelligence screening and psychological profiling modeling...]
[Target screening...]
[Sifting completed. Recommended list is as follows:]
[1. Hidden Leaf Village consultant, Togawa elder.
He once led the sanctions bill against Third Shinobi World War and later Sunagakure, which led to the economic collapse of Hidden Sand Village and indirectly triggered many rebellion incidents.
His guilt points towards: his debt to the deceased Hidden Sand Village.]
[2. Hidden Mist Village veteran, Minazuki Rin.
One of the survivors and promoters of the Kekkei Genkai family purge incident. Deep down in his heart, he feels guilty for the blood of his own clan.]
[3.Iwagakure...]
[4.Hidden Cloud Village...]
[5.Hidden Sand Village...]
Uchiha Xuan's eyes paused for a moment on the first message, and the corner of his mouth raised a cold arc.
What a wonderful coincidence.
"Just the five of them." He confirmed, "Now, tailor a dream for each of them. The theme and image of the dream must be unified: let them personally light the grave of the person they owe in their hearts, and the flame must be the thin blue flame when 'Silencing Seal' burns in the Scarlet Eye Tower alchemical furnace."
What he wants to do is not only mental pollution, but also a concept substitution.
He wants to forcibly bind the act of "burning the bones" with the concept of "atonement" deep in the target's subconscious mind.
[The dream scene is being constructed... Parameter calibration requires the in-depth participation of executive officer Chiyo Saori to ensure the accuracy of the emotional model.]
When Chiyo Saori was summoned to the main control room again, what greeted her was not a new mission scroll, but a cold nerve connection chair.
"Sit down." Uchiha Xuan's voice was without any warmth.
Chiyo Saori didn't hesitate at all and sat down as instructed.
The cold mechanical arm stretched out from the back of the chair and accurately connected to the interface on the back of her neck.
"In order to ensure the penetration effect of 'Soul-Burning Protocol', I need your help in calibrating the emotional parameters of the dream." Uchiha Xuan stood in front of the huge monitoring screen, and seventeen's were flashing across the screen. Hidden Sand Village's puppet master's life information was burned on "Master-Burning Ceremony". Except for Ghost Cleaver, there are other mentors of Chiyo Saori.
"The system requests Executive Officer Chiyo Saori to dictate the material and color of the clothes worn by the target 'Ghost Cleaver' when guiding him to complete the first S-class puppet 'Crimson Scorpion'."
Chiyo Saori's body froze slightly, but he still answered with a voice that was smooth and without fluctuations, "Black teaching uniform, cotton and linen blend, with light yellow traces on the collar that have been soaked with sweat."
"Very good. Request for dictation. When you want to give up because you cannot overcome the Chakra Threads synchronization problem of 'Performance of a Hundred Puppets', the first sentence that teacher Ghost Cleaver said to you, please recite the original words, including the tone."
This time, the silence lasted three seconds.
"He said..." Chiyo Saori closed his eyes, as if he was back in the dark practice room again, "He said: 'Trash, your hands were born to control death, not to wipe tears. If you can't do that, get out of Hidden Sand Village.'"
[The emotional parameters 'harsh', 'disappointment' and 'incentive' have been entered, and the model accuracy has been increased to 92%.]
"Now, look at the screen." Uchiha Xuan's voice was like a devil's whisper.
On the screen, the system rendered the 3D model of Ghost Cleaver with the highest precision based on the memory provided by Chiyo Saori.
Wearing the black clothes with a yellowish collar, he stood in front of the blazing blue flame. Every beat of the flame was completely consistent with the real data of the Scarlet Eye Tower furnace.
Then, the lifelike model slowly turned around in the flames and was swallowed up inch by inch by the blue flames.
There was no pain on his face, only a deep tiredness that seemed to have traveled through time and space.
Chiyo Saori's breathing suddenly stopped, and his heart seemed to be tightly grasped by an invisible hand.
She bit the tip of her tongue violently, and the sharp sting and the strong smell of blood instantly brought her back from the suffocating hallucination.
Her body was shaking violently, but her eyes were still staring at the screen without shedding a single tear.
Uchiha Xuan didn't look back, just looked indifferently at the heart rate curve on the monitoring data that instantly soared and then was forcibly suppressed.
"The pain can suppress tears, but not the heartbeat." He said softly, and then pressed the start button, "Preload the program, start. 'Dream Seed', launch."
Within seven days, the storm swept through the most secret power core of Five Great Nations.
Like an invisible plague, madness spreads in the spiritual world of the five retired elders.
Hidden Leaf Village.
At a top advisory meeting on the education policy for the new generation of ninjas, Elder Togawa was sitting upright. While listening to the report, he suddenly slid off his seat without warning, fell to his knees, cried in front of the empty place, and kept repenting. "The wrong person was burned... the wrong person was burned! It's me who should be burned! It's me!"
Hidden Mist Village.
Minazuki Rin piled up all the ancient scrolls about Kekkei Genkai in his mansion, poured grease on them, and tried to set himself on fire.
If the guards hadn't broken through the door in time, this once iron-blooded veteran would have turned into a wisp of smoke.
Similar scenes were staged one after another in Iwagakure, Hidden Cloud Village, and Hidden Sand Village.
Five old monsters who controlled the wind and rain in Shinobi World and had an iron will, suffered a collective mental breakdown within a week.
In Scarlet Eye Tower's main control room, the system's data flow refreshed like a waterfall.
[Target Elder Togawa, REM sleep stage monitoring: Level 12 emotional resonance appears, and the brain wave spectrum is highly similar to the emotional peak of the three thousand spectators at the 'Master-Burning Ceremony' ceremony.]
[Target Minazuki Rin, subconscious activity tracking: The three concepts of 'burning', 'atonement' and 'flame' have formed a strong closed loop.]
Uchiha Xuan looked at these reports with a look of satisfaction on his face.
What he wants is not simple mental control, but to distort the target's cognition from the root, allowing them to become the gravediggers of their own beliefs.
"Look," he pointed to the struggling, confessing, and collapsed figures on the screen, and said to Chiyo Saori who was standing aside, "Dreams are not hallucinations, they are another kind of reality. A reality that... is defined by me."
A few days later, Chiyo Saori was ordered to go to Hidden Leaf Village to hand over a batch of confidential documents regarding the former Fire Country Daming Mansion's submission to the empire.
The handover of tasks went incredibly smoothly.
But when she was about to leave Hidden Leaf Village, a Anbu stopped her and handed her a secret letter.
The meeting place was at the cliff edge of Valley of the End.
Elder Togawa stood alone on top of the statue of Madara Uchiha, the mountain wind blowing his aging body crumbling.
His eyes were red and bloodshot, and his whole body seemed to have been drained of energy, leaving only an empty shell.
"It's you... Hidden Sand Village's puppet genius." He looked at Chiyo Saori, his voice hoarse like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together, "Tell me, a question."
Chiyo Saori looked at him expressionlessly.
"You... really... really burned their bones?" Elder Togawa's voice was trembling, which was a kind of fear and despair originating from the depths of his soul.
Chiyo Saori was silent for a moment, no one could see her expression clearly under the cold mask.
She spoke slowly, and each word was like a knife tempered with ice, accurately piercing the other party's most fragile nerves.
"The ashes made a talisman, and the talisman wrote your dream."
Togawa Elder was stunned for a moment, then his wrinkled face suddenly distorted and burst out into a maniacal laugh.
He smiled, but tears welled up like a bursting dam.
"So... so cruel... Hahahaha... worse than war! Even worse than killing us... worse!"
Amid laughter, he turned around suddenly, used the last strength of his body, and slammed into the hard rock wall behind him.
"Bang!"
Blood and brains dyed the cold stone face of the Madara Uchiha statue red.
On the way back, Chiyo Saori stopped briefly at an inn.
The stress and running around over the past few days had made her exhausted, and she unexpectedly closed her eyes and fell asleep on the bed.
She fell into a bizarre dream.
In the dream, she returned to the puppet classroom of Sunagakure in her childhood.
But there was no one in the classroom. On the podium, seventeen puppets of different shapes were lined up, sitting together, using mechanical and weird voices to "teach" her a forbidden technique that she had never learned before - <Soul-Erosion Chronicle>.
Each puppet is the masterpiece of a teacher in her memory.
Suddenly, the puppet in the center that resembled "Crimson Scorpion" moved.
It raised its head and said word by word in Ghost Cleaver's unique, stern and hoarse voice:
"Betrayal... deserves death."
Chiyo Saori suddenly woke up from his dream, covered in cold sweat.
She gasped violently, her heart beating wildly.
She subconsciously touched her pillow and touched a piece of cold and hard paper.
It's not an illusion.
She tremblingly picked up the note and read the writing on it clearly through the pale moonlight outside the window.
"You're on the list, too."
The handwriting was strong and familiar, clearly her own!
An unprecedented chill shot from the tailbone to the sky.
Chiyo Saori could no longer keep calm. She activated the highest authority overnight and rushed back to Scarlet Eye Tower as quickly as possible.
She didn't even notify her and broke into the main control room at the top of the tower.
Uchiha Xuan seemed to have anticipated her arrival, and was standing quietly in front of the huge floor-to-ceiling window with his back to her.
"King Xuan!" Chiyo Saori's voice trembled slightly due to extreme emotional fluctuations, "My dream... was it you?!"
Uchiha Xuan slowly turned around, holding a latest data report in his hand.
He did not answer directly, but stated calmly. "The system's real-time physiological monitoring shows that your heartbeat will still accelerate 0.8 seconds faster than the normal state when silently reciting the word 'teacher'. This is a... loophole that cannot be erased by will."
He gently pressed a button, and the entire record of her nightmare last night appeared on the main screen behind him, including every frame and synchronized heart rate fluctuation chart.
Chiyo Saori's pupils suddenly contracted.
Uchiha Xuan walked up to her, the deep Eternal Mangekyō was like a black hole that could swallow everything. He smiled slightly, with a kind of cruelty and playfulness like appreciating a work of art.
"You know what's the best thing about this whole thing?"
He leaned close to her ear and spoke in a voice that only the two of them could hear.
"This dream... wasn't caused by me."
Outside the window, the night is like ink.
Scarlet Eye Tower, a new round of spell transport fleet has been assembled.
The lights of hundreds of heavy-duty trucks turned on at the same time, forming a giant steel snake, carrying countless nightmares that were about to be ignited, winding silently towards the direction of Land of Lightning.
And the end of that giant snake will be the starting point of judgment.