Going Home Means I Have to Burn Incense at My Own Grave?

Night swallowed this dead, scorched land along the Fire Country's border.

Xuan Jing stood amid the shattered ruins. Beneath his feet lay the former site of the Uchiha Clan's once-sacred Naka River Shrine.

The moonlight was ghastly pale, casting mottled, ghostlike shadows over the collapsed stone pillars and the dead vines wrapped around the altar.

Three tomoe slowly spun within his right eye before converging into a sharp triangular pinwheel. The perception of the Myriad Phenomena Return to the Eye was pushed to its limit.

Everything in his vision became trails of flowing chakra.

His gaze swept across the cracks in the ground, catching a faint chakra echo buried a hundred meters underground, so weak it was nearly gone.

That frequency, and the grief and resolve contained within it, matched perfectly the emotional fluctuations of the father-and-son silhouettes he had seen countless times in his dreams.

"This place has already been designated an S-rank forbidden zone by the Hidden Leaf Village," Saori's voice came from behind him, carrying a trace of wariness. "The Anbu patrols responsible for surveillance rotate every three hours. We don't have much time."

A cold curve touched Xuan's lips. "What they sealed away is the memory they fear. What I'm going to dig up is the root of all this."

He took a fragment of a map copied from the Shadow Flow Secret Scroll from his robes. It was made of animal hide, its edges long since carbonized.

Comparing the positions of the stars overhead with the hidden flow of the earth veins, he precisely located an underground palace entrance directly beneath the altar, one that had never been marked in any official records.

"Tesshin."

"Here!" Baba Tesshin answered deeply from the distant shadows, both hands already pressed against the ground.

An invisible magnetic field spread outward from him, forming an enormous Magnet Release sensing network. Any abnormal vibrations that might reach the surface would be absorbed and smoothed out by the network.

Everything was ready.

Xuan walked to the center of the altar without resorting to brute force.

He formed hand seals, and the chakra flowing from his fingertips began to mimic an ancient, complex frequency. It was the unique fluctuation only the chief officiant could master when the Naka River Shrine held its highest-level sacrificial rites.

A handful of black iron sand emerged from his palm and flowed along the rune-carved grooves in the altar base like a living thing, eventually gathering at the center.

"Pfft."

He bit his fingertip, and a drop of crimson blood fell into the central groove, instantly merging with the iron sand.

In that instant, it was as though some colossal beast that had slept for decades had been awakened. The entire earth shook violently!

A bottomless black fissure tore open from the center of the altar. A foul gale reeking of blood and resentment surged up from underground, carrying billions of broken souls' cries and furious deathbed roars.

Without the slightest hesitation, the three of them leaped into the fissure.

As they descended, the ancient murals lining both sides of the passage gradually became clearer.

The images were crude yet tragic, depicting an unimaginable era.

A one-eyed divine general in heavy armor wielded twin blades burning with black flames as he battled a gigantic beast that connected heaven and earth.

Beside him stood a youth with shoulder-length hair and a sharp gaze, fighting shoulder to shoulder with the divine general.

Behind them were burning villages and stars falling like rain.

Xuan's pupils suddenly contracted.

The youth in the mural bore a seventy-percent resemblance to him!

What shook him even more was the bloody, vicious vertical eye clearly appearing in the center of that one-eyed divine general's forehead!

"You finally came..."

An aged, hoarse voice suddenly rang out from the shadows ahead, as though it had been squeezed through the cracks of a tombstone.

The three of them immediately went on guard.

An old shamaness with a hunched back slowly emerged from behind a huge stone, leaning on a candlestick whose wax had completely burned away.

Her face was lined with deep wrinkles, yet her murky eyes held a piercing clarity.

"The name 'Xuan' should not belong to these forgotten ashes." She looked at Xuan, her voice carrying a sigh of fate. "I am the last tombstone keeper. Thirty years ago, I watched that child named Shisui kneel here with tears of blood streaming down his face, begging his clansmen not to take that path of no return."

Xuan stared at her with an icy gaze and asked word by word, "So you also know that the fire that exterminated the clan that night was not set by Madara Uchiha?"

"Someone used 'Amaterasu' to ignite the earth veins beneath the shrine, framing that legend who had long since defected. And the person who gave the order and personally carried it out... wore a white tiger mask. He came from 'Root.'"

Before her words could fade, the entire underground passage was suddenly dyed blood-red!

Resentment a thousand times more immense than when the fissure had opened erupted from the deepest part of the underground palace!

The resentment materialized into black mist and swept toward them with unstoppable force.

Within the mist, a figure with hollow eyes and pale flames burning over his body slowly emerged—it was the remaining consciousness of Uchiha Sōen, an elder of the Uchiha Clan from back then!

"Shisui's eyes... should not have been taken..." He murmured as if in a dream, every word steeped in hatred fierce enough to burn souls to ashes. "The Uchiha Clan's fate... must... must be ended by us alone!"

Sōen's consciousness violently controlled the resentment accumulated in the earth veins over decades, forcibly activating every despairing memory the Uchiha clansmen had left behind at their deaths, sealed within the murals and stone walls!

In that instant, like a breached torrent of blood, countless scenes of clansmen dying gruesomely flooded madly into Xuan's mind!

The cries of newborn babies amid the flames, mothers wailing as they watched kunai pierce their children, white-haired elders roaring as they detonated themselves to perish alongside their enemies, helpless children torn to pieces by cold ninjutsu... every image, every sound, every emotion was pure, absolute despair!

"Urgh—!"

Xuan let out a pained groan. Crimson blood slowly flowed from both ears as his nerves neared collapse beneath the tsunami-like mental impact.

"Xuan!" Saori cried out and tried to rush forward, only to be violently thrown back by an invisible resentment field and slammed heavily into the stone wall.

Life and death hung by a thread!

Just as his consciousness was about to be swallowed by endless despair, Xuan suddenly opened his eyes!

The Mangekyō in his blood-tear-streaked right eye spun madly at an unprecedented speed. He abandoned all resistance and instead pushed the Myriad Phenomena Return to the Eye to its absolute limit. Facing the surging flood of memories, he unleashed a roar that shook the soul:

"If I don't take your pain, who will?!"

In that instant, something unbelievable happened!

All the negative emotions crashing into his spiritual world, all the memory fragments of despair, sorrow, and fury, seemed to find an outlet. They transformed into streams of black-red data and, like rivers flowing backward, were all sucked into his spinning Mangekyō pupil!

Buzzz—!

The system within him shook violently at that moment, and a cold notification exploded in his mind:

Warning! Detected an ultra-high-intensity, high-density emotional energy cluster! Unknown mutation protocol triggered!

Protocol executing... spinal crystal structure reorganizing... new module generated...

New ability—[Soul Devourer] unlocked!

[Soul Devourer: Can actively absorb and devour a designated target's intense emotions, converting them into a temporary chakra boost or condensing them into a high-intensity psychic shockwave.]

Boom!

A scarlet chakra flame surged upward from within Xuan, brutally burning through the thick ceiling of the underground palace. Above the ruins of the entire Naka River Shrine, a massive scarlet pillar of light shot into the sky, tearing through the night and piercing the clouds!

Beneath the pillar of light, all the black resentment mist vanished instantly like first snow beneath the sun.

Uchiha Sōen's figure, wreathed in pale flames, appeared once more, but it had become nearly transparent.

A trace of clarity seemed to return to his hollow eyes as he quietly looked at Xuan.

"You did not come to inherit hatred... You came to settle all of this." His voice was surprisingly calm. "Be careful of that masked child... He is not Madara... He is... an earlier failure."

As his words fell, his soul turned into specks of fluorescent light and completely scattered between heaven and earth.

Xuan stood amid the ruins, the bloody glow in his right eye still unextinguished. He muttered in a voice filled with bone-deep cold, "So Danzō isn't just a thief... He's an executioner too."

At that moment, a black wall in the deepest part of the underground palace, one that had not been destroyed even in the great fire of that year, suddenly made a cracking sound and slowly split open.

Beyond the crack, the outline of the second sealed object of "Xuan" emerged—it was a shriveled, desiccated eyeball embedded deep within the heart of the stone.

What was terrifying was that the eyeball twitched slightly in the darkness, as though... it was still breathing.

Deep within the underground palace, the air stood still. Xuan walked forward over heaps of white bones.