The Dead Puppet Blinks

The wind across the wasteland was scorching like blades, scraping over the cracked earth and stirring up fine dust.

The poisonous midday sun hung overhead, bleaching every inch of exposed ground.

A supply convoy made up of five heavy trucks crawled slowly through this silent hell like a clumsy steel beast.

Wherever the wheels rolled, the yellow dust they kicked up lingered in the air, obscuring the only route to the Allied Forces' frontline camp.

The metal walls of the cargo compartments gleamed harshly under the heat, and a conspicuous warning had been sprayed across their sides in scarlet paint—"Hazardous Materials, Keep Away: Tailed Beast Chakra Filter Residue."

This was a special type of waste that had only appeared in the later stages of the war. It contained extremely unstable energy, enough to cause a small-scale disaster if mishandled.

For that reason, even the escorting shinobi deliberately kept a hundred meters away from the convoy, relying only on sensory-type shinobi stationed at the front and rear for remote surveillance.

Yet no one could have imagined that deep inside the airtight cargo compartment of the third truck, the true "hazardous material" was not the layers of sealed filter residue.

In the darkness, a damaged puppet lay silently beneath a carelessly thrown piece of rough canvas. Its distinctive three-eyed mask had shattered, exposing scorched circuits and broken joints within.

It was Crow, Sasori of the Red Sand's creation, judged to have been "defeated and destroyed" during last night's clash with Hidden Sand Village elites.

A hundred li away, behind a dune eroded into a natural shelter by the wind, Chiyo Saori held a crystal-clear lens against her right eye. The moving convoy was reflected clearly in it, magnified enough for her to see every rivet on the cargo compartments.

Her brows were tightly furrowed, and a barely perceptible tension colored her voice. "Are you sure it can fool the camp's sensory barrier? Their scanning methods are becoming more sophisticated. If they detect any nonstandard energy fluctuations remaining inside the puppet, all our preparations will have been for nothing."

Beside her, Xuan sat cross-legged, looking as composed as if he were watching a boring play.

His left eye was not focused on the crystal lens. Deep within his pupil, a faint glow imperceptible to ordinary people slowly flickered.

In his vision, countless crisscrossing lines of energy covered the entire world. Among them, an extremely thin and faint purple signal line extended from the ground beneath his feet like a strand of spider silk, spanning dozens of li to connect precisely to the damaged puppet lying in the truck.

"As long as it doesn't move, it's just a pile of cold scrap metal, wreckage that meets every standard for disposal." Xuan's voice was calm, yet carried an unquestionable confidence. "And when it 'opens its eyes'—"

He paused, the corner of his mouth curving into a cold smile.

"—no one will have time to react."

The instant his words fell, his slender fingertip lightly tapped the sand before him.

A pulse of black mist, thinner than a strand of hair, silently traveled through the earth's veins. Like a stone dropped into a lake, it created only a faint ripple in the world of energy.

The convoy stopped before the checkpoint outside the Allied Forces' camp.

Two shinobi from the Hidden Cloud Village stepped forward with solemn expressions.

One of them formed hand seals and pressed both hands against a massive machine resembling an X-ray scanner.

"Routine inspection. Activate chakra scan!"

Bzz—

A pale blue curtain of light swept over the five trucks.

On the scanner's screen, the internal structure of every vehicle was clearly displayed.

When the light swept over the third truck, Crow's remains appeared clearly on the display.

The obvious fractures in its joints, the extensive destruction of its internal chakra circuits, and the hollow darkness where its core energy furnace had been—all of it perfectly matched the description in the battle damage report.

It was like a corpse drained of its soul, showing no signs of life and not even the slightest remnant of chakra.

"No problem. It's that Sasori guy's scrap." The shinobi in charge of the inspection waved a hand, his tone carrying a hint of disdain. "Send it straight to Furnace Zone Three and dispose of it with the rest of the waste."

Once the order was given, several logistics personnel used a crane arm to unload the puppet and roughly tossed it into a mountain of discarded materials.

There were damaged ninja tools, scrapped armor, and other wreckage that had lost all value on the battlefield.

Before long, Crow was buried beneath more "companions," quietly waiting to be thrown into the furnace and melted into iron.

Time passed. As the blazing daylight gave way to the gentle dusk, the noisy camp gradually fell quiet.

The furnace zone lay in the most remote corner of the camp. Apart from technicians making scheduled patrols, few people ever came here.

Night slowly descended.

Amid the utter silence, deep within that mountain of scrap, Crow's formerly dim left eye lens suddenly turned without warning.

Inside the glass eyeball, its gray-white deathly pallor rapidly faded, replaced by a speck of dark crimson as deep as blood.

—The activation signal from a hundred li away had arrived.

Every one of its movements was incredibly slight, making not the faintest sound.

It slowly pushed aside the scrap metal covering it with exquisitely controlled force.

Then it slowly raised its relatively intact right hand. Its five metal fingers silently transformed and reassembled, and a miniature diamond drill bit hidden within emerged from its fingertips.

Its target was an abandoned communications base station half-buried in the ruins beside it.

"Hiss..."

The drill bit precisely pierced the data port behind the base station, producing a sound so faint it was nearly imperceptible.

The next second, a strand of black mist lighter than a shadow flowed through the drill bit and into the base station's circuits.

This black mist was not chakra, but a more primordial and sinister form of energy. It bypassed every physical and energy seal, infiltrating the base station's core database like a virus.

Copying, downloading, transmitting.

One heavily encrypted file after another was swiftly cracked and packaged.

[A-3 to B-5 unit deployment maps... Copy complete.]

[Class-C medical resource and rare serum distribution... Copy complete.]

[Primary target locked—"Final Decisive Battle Weapon · Ten-Tails Jinchuriki Madara Uchiha · Daily Chakra Fluctuation Monitoring Report"... Transmission initiated.]

A massive stream of data traveled along that invisible signal line, crossing space toward its creator.

Just as the data transfer was about to reach ninety-nine percent, the sound of footsteps approached from afar.

A technician on night patrol passed by while yawning. Out of the corner of his eye, he happened to notice the abandoned base station.

"Hm?" He stopped, frowning in confusion.

This base station had clearly been powered down and abandoned for three days. Why was the casing around its port... strangely hot to the touch?

Curiously, he walked over and knocked on the base station's screen. The display remained pitch-black, showing no response.

Just as he bent down, preparing to unplug the connection and perform a complete power-down inspection, the pile of "scrap metal" behind him moved.

Crow's right arm shot out like a spring, fast as lightning!

Puff! Puff! Puff!

Three senbon coated in lethal neurotoxin silently fired from gaps in its arm guard, piercing the technician's carotid artery at an exceptionally tricky angle with flawless precision.

The technician's eyes flew wide open. A short choking sound escaped his throat before his body crumpled to the ground, unable to sound even a single alarm.

The instant his life signs vanished completely, Crow's left hand had already extended. Black mist surged from its palm as it pressed directly against his temple.

A cold energy entered the corpse's brain.

Devouring complete. Obtained short-term memory fragment +1. Unlocked [Basic Electronic Seal Anti-Cracking Knowledge].

The cold, emotionless system notification sounded only in Xuan's mind.

After handling everything, Crow dragged the still-warm corpse with one hand and tossed it into the massive furnace nearby like a piece of trash. The furnace had long been preheated, its opening flickering with a dark red glow.

Flames surged up, instantly swallowing every trace.

After doing all this, the red glow in Crow's eyes quietly went out, and all its functions shut down once more.

It returned to its original position, pulled several pieces of scrap over itself, and became that unremarkable pile of garbage again.

As though the swift, deadly hunt just now had never happened.

On the dune a hundred li away, Xuan slowly closed his eyes. An immense flow of information surged, analyzed, and reconstructed itself within his mental world.

A moment later, he opened his eyes, a knowing smile appearing on his lips.

"So that's how it is... Every day at three in the morning, Madara Uchiha's chakra enters a three-minute decline period. That's when his synchronization rate with the Ten-Tails is at its lowest." He turned toward Chiyo Saori beside him and added casually, "Also, the Rinnegan Obito took from Nagato has begun to show signs of deterioration from excessive use of Kamui."

Looking at the red point of light in the crystal lens that had now completely gone dark, he remarked, "After my modifications, your puppet is far more loyal than a living person."

Chiyo Saori's gaze was complicated. She stared at the silent ruins in the mirror, her voice low. "But it's still not human."

"In war, who cares whether it's human?" Xuan sneered, rising to his feet and brushing the sand from his clothes.

His gaze passed through the darkness ahead and settled on the distant night sky, reddened by the fires of war. "Anyone who does care is already dead."

The night deepened.

The distant Allied Forces' camp was brightly lit, like a steel city that never slept. Yet no one knew that the deadliest piece on the board had already infiltrated the heart of their camp, quietly waiting for the moment that would ignite everything.

Xuan said nothing more. He simply stood there in silence, as though waiting for something.

The wind began to change.

It was no longer the dry, scorching wind of daytime, but carried the coolness unique to the night and... a killing intent.

He raised his head, feeling the wind brush against his face as his black robe snapped loudly in the gale.

"Guard this place." He suddenly spoke to Chiyo Saori, but his gaze remained fixed on the distant battlefield. "The protagonist of that stage should be making an entrance."

Before his words had faded, his figure began to blur, turning into streams of pure black mist that merged with the increasingly violent night wind and sped toward the land shrouded in blood and fire.

The night wind howled, sweeping dust and ash from the ground. Across this vast scorched earth, it seemed as though black snow were falling.