This Lightning, I Know Better Than You How to Strike It

The blizzard grew increasingly violent, as though it intended to devour heaven and earth whole.

Snowflakes as large as goose feathers, mixed with icy blades, lashed against their faces with stinging pain.

Yet in this northern valley of the Land of Lightning, ruled by death and bitter cold, three figures moved as though on level ground. They crossed the snow without leaving a trace, every step utterly soundless, as if they had become one with the raging storm.

At the front, Xuan's black robe snapped wildly in the wind, yet not a single snowflake could cling to it.

Behind him, Saori was petite, but moved with feline swiftness. Slightly hunched over, she lowered her voice and reported at a frequency only the three of them could hear. "Lord Xuan, Alik has confirmed that Azure Dragon did light a fire here last night. There are also extremely unusual chakra fluctuations left on the ground—high-frequency, oscillating lightning-nature chakra."

Xuan did not turn around. He merely gave a soft grunt.

His right eye—the strange, magnificent Mangekyō Sharingan—was slowly turning, as though a river of stars flowed in the depths of its pupil.

Within his sight, the entire world had become a flow of energy.

At the half-buried cave entrance ahead, faint ripples invisible to the naked eye spread through the air. They were traces left behind by electrical currents passing through a medium.

"He's using Lightning Skin to maintain his body temperature, stimulating his cells to resist the cold." Xuan's voice was flat, carrying an indifferent air that seemed to see through everything. "But this application is far too crude. It's like using a cannon to kill a mosquito. At least eighty percent of the energy is being wasted."

That casual assessment made both Saori and Alik tense.

Azure Dragon, the prodigy who had defected from the Hidden Cloud Village, was famed for his ultimate research into Lightning Release shape transformation. Yet his self-created chakra activation technique was, in Xuan's eyes, merely synonymous with "crude" and "wasteful."

Inside the cave, dim firelight illuminated a pale yet resolute face.

Azure Dragon carefully placed a scroll glowing with a faint blue radiance into a box fashioned from ice. His eyes were filled with reluctance and sorrow, as though he were bidding farewell to his most precious treasure.

Just as he was about to seal the ice box completely, a bone-piercing gust suddenly surged in through the cave entrance. The firelight swayed violently, nearly going out.

Alarm bells rang in Azure Dragon's heart. He abruptly looked up, and his pupils contracted.

At the cave entrance stood a pitch-black figure in silence, as if he had been there from the very beginning, merged with the darkness itself.

The wind and snow howled behind him, yet could not enter within three yards of his body.

Strands of iron sand, blacker than ink, drifted and coiled beside him like a living mist, radiating a dangerous aura that made one's heart tremble.

"Who are you?" Azure Dragon shouted sharply. Chakra surged through his entire body at once, crackling with faint electric light. "Were you sent by the Hidden Leaf Village? Or are you one of those assassins from the Hidden Cloud Village who refuse to let me go?"

Xuan did not answer his question.

Before absolute power, words were the most unnecessary decoration.

He merely slowly raised his right hand. His black sleeve slipped down, revealing a wrist so pale it looked almost sickly.

In his palm, a mass of distorted lightning rapidly condensed.

It was not pure Lightning Release. Visible wind-nature chakra was mixed within the lightning, spiraling and compressing together in an unimaginable manner until it formed a miniature sphere no larger than a fist, yet containing terrifying power.

"Your so-called theory of 'ultimate chakra compression,'" Xuan finally said, his voice seeming to rise from the depths of hell with a trace of mockery, "is only this much?"

Before his words had even faded, he sharply flicked his wrist!

The sphere containing the power of wind and lightning shot out like a meteor tearing through the night. It did not fly toward Azure Dragon, but struck the cave wall at his side from a vicious angle!

Boom—!

A deafening blast erupted instantly. The entire cave shook violently as shattered rocks rained down.

But what horrified Azure Dragon even more than the explosion was the chain reaction it triggered afterward!

A ring-shaped electrical shockwave suddenly spread outward from the point of impact!

This arc did not lash out randomly. It precisely locked onto the most active node of chakra flow in the air—the very Azure Dragon who was forming hand seals!

"Not good!" Azure Dragon was horrified. The hand seals for [Lightning Release: Swift Wolf Claw] that he had just formed were struck by the backlash arc, instantly throwing the chakra flow within his body into chaos. The technique he had only half-condensed collapsed at once!

He stared at Xuan by the cave entrance in utter disbelief, his voice distorted by shock. "You... you copied my technique?! No, that's impossible! You even changed its nature!"

A cold curve rose at the corner of Xuan's lips. "It's more than copying."

He raised his hand again. This time, he formed seals so quickly that only afterimages remained.

In almost an instant, wind- and lightning-nature chakra converged in his palm once more, but their form had completely changed!

They were no longer a sphere. Instead, they formed a high-speed, spinning conical electric drill. The energy condensed at its tip made even the surrounding space let out an overloaded hum!

[Spiral Lightning Sphere: Prototype]!

"Watch carefully," Xuan said coldly. "This is true compression."

The conical electric drill left his hand, moving at least a third faster than Azure Dragon's original Swift Wolf Claw. Only a pale blue afterimage remained in the air!

Wherever it passed, it plowed a deep trench through the rocky ground, and its penetrating power was more than three times that of the original technique!

Azure Dragon was so enraged that he laughed instead, madness flashing in his eyes. "What do you think this is? A toy for you to show off your strength with? This technique was meant to save people! Do you know how many shinobi have been left half-paralyzed after damaging their nerves while training advanced Lightning Release? I will never let someone like you turn it into a tool for slaughter!"

As soon as he finished speaking, he bit his finger and viciously pressed the blood onto the ice box!

This was the final safeguard he had set long ago. Using blood as the trigger, he would instantly detonate the chakra structure inside the scroll, allowing this knowledge to vanish completely from the world along with him!

At that critical moment!

Xuan's right eye, that mysterious Mangekyō Sharingan, suddenly flashed crimson!

[Ninjutsu Reverse Analysis]—activated!

To Azure Dragon's senses, the scroll was burning, and its knowledge was fading away.

But within Xuan's Mangekyō vision, an invisible, massive wave of knowledge burst forth from the scroll like floodwaters pouring through a broken dam!

In an instant, the system captured this torrent of information and, at unprecedented speed, forcibly stripped away and copied its most essential formulas and structural diagrams!

In the final instant before the scroll turned to ash, an invisible suction force burst from Xuan's eye, devouring the enormous stream of information that was about to scatter between heaven and earth and drawing it all into the depths of his mind!

Xuan closed his eyes.

One second.

Two seconds.

Three seconds.

When he opened his eyes again, countless crystalline neural pathways seemed to flash through the depths of those black pupils. They even spread across the surface of his eyeballs, flickering with the light of wisdom and taboo.

"So that's how it is... Adjust the oscillation frequency of Lightning Release chakra to ten to the fifteenth hertz, then use a miniature Wind Release vortex field to constrain and stabilize it, and the limits of shape transformation can be completely broken through..."

He murmured softly, as if savoring an unmatched delicacy. Then, he raised his hand again.

This time, he did not form a single seal.

A deep blue lightning sphere condensed out of thin air in his palm. It was even smaller than before, only the size of an infant's fist, but the power it contained was more restrained—and more terrifying.

A fine layer of web-like wind patterns danced across the surface of the lightning sphere, perfectly binding the violent force of lightning within.

[Spiral Lightning Sphere: Optimized Version]!

Its speed was another two-thirds faster than the prototype! Its energy consumption was reduced by forty percent!

Azure Dragon stared blankly at the perfect lightning sphere, then at the man looking down upon him like a god. The color drained from his face in an instant, leaving it ashen.

At last, he understood.

"You... you were never here to steal the scroll..." His voice was dry and despairing. "You came to... 'eat' it..."

At the same time, on the snowy ground outside the valley.

Darui, a jonin of the Hidden Cloud Village, was leading two subordinates forward through the storm with difficulty.

Suddenly, he stopped. His brow furrowed tightly as he sensed the abnormal chakra resonance in the air.

"Stop!" he shouted in a low voice. "Something's happening ahead. That fluctuation... doesn't resemble any ninjutsu we know."

He focused on the cave's direction. At that moment, he saw a sight he would never forget for the rest of his life.

A pitch-black figure stood atop the snow-covered mountain peak like a ghost.

The dazzling lightning sphere in his hand was slowly dissipating into nothingness.

The next instant, the entire cave collapsed inward without warning!

The violent explosion was muffled beneath thick layers of rock. Countless pre-buried iron sand charges detonated at the same time, utterly destroying the mountain's structure and burying every trace within.

Darui's pupils shrank. All he had time to see was a line of words on the snow at the collapse site, formed from melted snow that had instantly frozen again under the heat. They gleamed with chilling light beneath the moon:

"Next is the true meaning of your Raikage's 'Lightning Armor.'"

The wind and snow returned to silence, as if nothing had happened.

Only a cold, arrogant voice drifted faintly through heaven and earth with the wind:

"Knowledge should not be locked in a cage... It belongs in my stomach."

That pitch-black figure had long since vanished.

Amid the wind and snow, Xuan moved as swiftly as a phantom, each flicker carrying him several miles away.

That brief yet immensely rewarding "meal" had sent a vast torrent of data surging madly through his mind, colliding and fusing violently with his existing body of knowledge.

This enormous mass of information surpassed any ninjutsu he had analyzed before. At this moment, it was like an awakened beast roaring through his mental world.

He needed a place of absolute quiet, free from all disturbance, to thoroughly "digest" this feast.

A perfect "nest" where he could safely accept this power and turn it into the stepping stone for his next stage of evolution.