The Scarlet Eye Tower tip, the Eternal Mangekyō of Uchiha Xuan, reflect the synchronized whisper, "Where the ashes fall, the goalkeeper will open."
A torrent of data rushed wildly on his retinas, and the system used trillions of calculations per second to try to trace the source of this ghostly instruction.
However, the result was chilling to the bottom of my heart.
"Report: The transmission path cannot be traced." The electronic voice of the system was calm. "This information has not spread through any imperial spell network or spiritual link. Its recurrence pattern... is closer to a biological virus."
Viruses.
A mental virus lurking in dreams.
The further analysis report provided by the system made this conclusion more concrete: after entering the rapid eye movement sleep (REM) cycle of all 327 purged persons, their brain waves would spontaneously and with high fidelity reproduce the neural signals corresponding to this prayer.
There is no need for external instructions or any media. It is like an instruction implanted in the blueprint of life, replicating itself in the hotbed of dreams and passing it on from generation to generation.
What's even weirder is that when these people wake up from their deep sleep, they have no memory of what happened in their dreams.
However, the high-precision brainwave scanner captured the continuous weak oscillations - the frequency of the oscillations perfectly matched the ancient totem of <Gate-Opening Rite> in the intelligence database.
[Warning: Non-linear consciousness ripples detected.] The system issued an unprecedented alarm, [suspected group subconscious resonance phenomenon.
Pollution is deepening and logical boundaries have become blurred.]
The corners of Uchiha Xuan's mouth instead evoked a cold arc.
Being untraceable means it transcends existing technology.
Group resonance means that a brand new force is gathering.
In this absolute spiritual colony that he Teuchi created, crops finally grew worthy of his own harvest.
"Seal the third to ninth floors of Scarlet Eye Tower." His order was concise and cold, "Move sample 'High Risk-001' to 'High Risk-007', and transfer it to 'Inverted Dream Corridor'."
"Inverted Dream Corridor" is a closed dream space built by Uchiha Xuan based on the illusion of Rinnegan and combined with the empire's highest technology.
It can forcibly drag multiple conscious bodies into the same dream, and like observing bacteria in a petri dish, observe, intervene, and even rewrite every evolution of the dream in real time.
Half an hour later, the experiment started.
Seven individuals judged to be at the highest risk were injected with powerful sedatives, and their consciousness instantly sank into darkness.
Their dreams intersected in the corridor. At first, they were chaotic color blocks and noises, but after just a few seconds, all the chaotic scenes quickly converged into the same clear scene like hundreds of rivers returning to the sea:
A magnificent stone temple buried deep underground.
The style of the palace is ancient and depressing, and every boulder seems to have been soaked in endless years.
The closed bronze door was engraved with incomplete runes that exuded an ominous atmosphere.
In the center of the hall, there was no statue of the gods, no throne, only a spell base plate made of countless ashes, suspended in mid-air.
It is like a pulsating heart. Every time it contracts and relaxes, the light and shadow of the entire hall will light up and disappear.
"Stealth mode, start."
Uchiha Xuan Without any hesitation, his consciousness instantly turned into an invisible shadow, penetrating the barrier between reality and illusion, and descending on this palace of dreams constructed by the collective consciousness of seven people.
Eternal Mangekyō's power was fully activated, and the powerful pupil power instantly suppressed the instinctive rejection reaction of the surrounding illusion, making him feel like he was in no one's land.
He walked slowly towards the closed bronze door, and the incomplete runes on the door were analyzed and completed one by one in his eyes.
At this moment, a brand new line of text appeared on the lintel one stroke at a time, as if by an invisible carving knife:
"The fire is never extinguished because its roots are in the bones."
Uchiha Xuan's eyes narrowed slightly.
Fire... bone... this vaguely echoed the roar of the Iwagakure traitorous ninja before his death.
Just when he was about to further analyze the energy composition of this line of text, a sudden change occurred!
Among the seven subjects who were supposed to stand still like puppets in the dream, a former Hidden Cloud Village ninja code-named "High-Risk-003" suddenly turned his head, and his empty eyes "looked" directly at the location of Uchiha Xuan!
The next second, a mixed sound of several timbres came out of his mouth.
In that voice, there was both the clear mournful cry of the girl "Ling" and the vicious roars of the seventeen puppet masters including the burned "Ghost Cleaver".
"You said we were dreaming?"
The sound was distorted and weird, as if countless innocent souls were fighting for their voices in the same throat.
"No..."
"It was you who broke into our 'awake'!"
The moment the words fell, the whole Inverted Dream Corridor shook violently!
The boundary between dreams and reality begins to collapse and dissolve at an unprecedented speed!
The stone temple built by consciousness seemed to come to life, and the huge rocks on the wall turned into quicksand, squeezing crazily towards Uchiha Xuan.
What's even more frightening is that the reverse erosion of dreams has broken through the physical barrier of the corridor!
Scarlet Eye Tower In the main control room, the alarm sounded throughout the sky!
The three terminal screens responsible for monitoring vital signs were forcibly switched without any warning. After the screen jumped like snowflakes, it started to automatically play <Soul-Calming Variation> written by Chiyo Saori!
That weird melody echoed throughout the upper area of the tower through the internal circuits!
"Humph."
Uchiha Xuan let out a cold snort, and Tomoe in Eternal Mangekyō suddenly reversed course.
An unparalleled pupil power burst out, forcibly tearing apart the dream cage that was about to close.
His consciousness instantly pulled away and returned to his true nature.
"Cut off all energy supply to 'Inverted Dream Corridor'." He opened his eyes. There was no trace of embarrassment in his eyes, only growing interest. "Chiyo Saori, destroy all records of this experiment, and no backup is allowed."
"Yes."
Chiyo Saori's figure walked out of the shadows, she had been waiting here for a long time.
She took the instruction and started operating it on the terminal with clean movements. All the data streams related to "Inverted Dream Corridor" were imported into the high-level physical destruction program within a few seconds.
She respectfully presented a special data chip recording the destruction log to Uchiha Xuan.
Uchiha Xuan didn't take it immediately. His eyes were as sharp as an eagle, locked firmly on Chiyo Saori's face.
He saw that the report she submitted perfectly recorded every alarm in the system, as well as the strange <Soul-Calming Variation> leak incident.
However, one of the frames was marked by the system as "meaningless action" but was not specifically noted.
In that frame, in the real world, seven subjects who fell into deep coma, their fingers curled up due to nerve spasms, invariably positioned themselves at several specific and tiny angles at the same moment.
When the gestures of the seven people were superimposed and combined in space, two complete Chinese characters were spelled out -
Pay off debt.
"I only report content that the system determines is valid." Chiyo Saori faced his soul-piercing gaze and responded expressionlessly, with no wave in his voice.
She is lying.
Uchiha Xuan clearly sensed that under her almost steady heartbeat suppressed by "Silencing Seal", an extremely subtle but extremely tenacious emotional fluctuation flashed away.
He didn't point it out.
A completely obedient tool is useful, but a chess piece that knows how to hide its minions and tries to dance on the edge of the rules is obviously more valuable.
He slowly took the data chip and lightly touched her fingertips with his fingertips.
"Before burning next time," he said coldly in a voice that only two people could hear, "Remember to format the storage medium first."
Chiyo Saori's body stiffened slightly, then returned to normal, bowing his head deeply. "Remember your teachings."
That night, Uchiha Xuan personally adjusted the upgrade plan for "Silencing Seal".
He gave up the crude approach of simply suppressing abnormal frequencies, and instead did the opposite.
He implanted a miniature mental trap he named "Cognitive Anchor" into the new core spell.
Once the spell wearer's brain receives or generates any images, sounds, or even feelings related to the "Gate-Opening Rite" totem at the unconscious level, this "anchor point" will be activated immediately.
It will bypass the pain cortex and directly release a strong nerve impulse to the brainstem area, instantly triggering a severe but sourceless intracranial pressure sensation and a three-second-long illusion of suffocation.
He wants to use the most primitive fear to establish a conditioned reflex for the "door" in the brains of every citizen.
Let them learn physical hatred and avoidance before coming into contact with the truth.
The first batch of 500 new talismans equipped with "Cognitive Anchor" were immediately put into the furnace at the bottom of Scarlet Eye Tower for production.
However, at the final stage of smelting the core ashes and carving runes, a strange scene happened.
In the furnace, those tumbling and boiling ash particles that should have been randomly distributed spontaneously condensed toward the center the moment the seal carving was completed, instantly forming an extremely delicate miniature "door"-shaped structure.
The structure only existed for less than three seconds before it exploded with a dull explosion and turned into finer dust, evenly integrated into the spell base plate.
The whole process was so fast that the production line's monitoring system only judged it as a "benign material disintegration caused by energy overload."
On the high platform, Uchiha Xuan had a panoramic view of all this through the one-way observation window.
In his mind, he instantly deduced three possibilities:
First, it was the remaining will of "Ling". After adapting to the system, he learned to use the rules and dominated this backlash.
Second, the consciousness of Ghost Cleaver and others who were burned did not dissipate, but gathered in the ashes. With the help of the "bell" port, a new collective will with the purpose of revenge was formed.
Or...
Third, and the most interesting possibility - burning itself is not destruction, but a kind of feeding.
Every time he "purifies", he provides nourishment for some ancient mechanism that sleeps in the deepest part of the Uchiha Clan's bloodline, even beyond the Otsutsuki Clan.
At the moment when he was thinking, the "bell" on the pure white altar deep underground suddenly raised its head.
Her eyes shed two lines of shocking tears of blood.
Those empty eyes seemed to have penetrated layers of barriers at this moment, and saw the souls of those "companions" who were burned and reshaped in the furnace.
Her lips and teeth, which had never moved, slowly opened and closed, and she spoke an extremely clear sentence, even with a hint of relief:
"Teacher... I caught you."
Almost at the same moment, in the spell cooling area on the ninth underground floor, a tiny crack appeared on the surface of a brand new spell substrate that had just been packaged.
Immediately afterwards, more cracks spread like spider webs. Finally, they stopped expanding and together they outlined a new symbol--
A half-open door.
A new batch of 500 talismans has been distributed to various key nodes in the empire through the most efficient logistics network.
A comprehensive transformation aimed at eradicating the "virus" is about to begin.
Empire is about to welcome its latest "Grace".
And he, as the only master of the empire, will witness with his own eyes where the door leads to.