The heart-rending roar cut through the late-night tranquility of the coalition camp, like a blunt knife tempered with poison, repeatedly scratching the tense nerves of every ninja.
Silver Crow·Yebeak, the Hidden Cloud Village elite jounin known for his calmness and speed, was like a rag doll with his bones removed, being pinned down on a stretcher by two medical ninjas.
His combat uniform had long been soaked with cold sweat and mud, and his eyes that were once as sharp as falcons were now filled with only scattered, bottomless fear.
"Scarlet Eye...Red-Eyed God is devouring the gods!" He roared inarticulately, spittle flew everywhere, and his whole body twitched violently, "No! No! The gods are biting themselves! Hahaha... It turns out that we are all sacrifices!"
"Tranquilizer! Increase the dose!" The chief medical ninja was sweating profusely, but no matter how much medicine was injected, Night Beak's mental state did not improve at all. Instead, due to the suppression of the medicine, his roar turned into a more chilling whimper squeezed from the depths of his throat.
"Let me go... I'm going to offer it... with my own hands... otherwise..." His words stopped abruptly, his eyes suddenly turned white, and he fainted completely.
Outside the crowd, Shikamaru Nara put his hands in his pockets, his brows knitted into a knot, and his eyes that always looked lazy were full of solemnity and confusion at this moment.
"Where are the test results?" He asked in a low voice to Inoichi Yamanaka beside him.
Inoichi shook his head with a pale face. "The spiritual world is a scorched earth, without any trace of illusion invasion. His memory is complete, but his perception of that memory... is distorted. This feeling... is not like being erased or tampered with, but more like being forcibly imprinted in the deepest part of his soul with an absolutely irresistible 'truth'. This is more terrifying than any illusion."
"Spiritual imprint..." Shikamaru murmured to himself, his eyes scanning the surrounding ninjas who seemed to be maintaining order, but in fact had their ears pricked up.
He keenly noticed that in the shadows of the crowd, there were at least three perceptive ninjas from different ninja villages, using their own secret ways to record Yebei's crazy words verbatim.
An invisible plague is spreading crazily towards the top brass of Five Great Nations using the information scroll as a carrier.
At the same time, at an abandoned supply transfer station hundreds of miles away from the main battlefield, Chiyo Saori's figure melted into the darkness like a ghost.
She deftly avoided several remaining traps and expertly pried open a supply box marked Hidden Leaf Village.
The box is filled with special military ration pills and medical scrolls.
She moved quickly and took out a dark puppet core that was only the size of a fingernail from her ninja tool bag.
The surface of the core is carved with densely packed micro-runes using a chakra carving knife that is almost imperceptible to the naked eye.
She gently stuffed the core into the deep layer of a pack of military ration pills, and then perfectly restored the supply box to its original appearance.
"Is this enough?" A low and hoarse voice came from the corner, and Baba Tesshin's burly figure slowly walked out, "Can a small core really make him and Madara turn against each other?"
"Senior Baba, don't you understand?" Chiyo Saori turned around, the moonlight outlined her cold profile, with a sarcastic smile on her lips, "The human heart is far easier to control than the most sophisticated puppet. You don't need to twist every thread of it, you just need to implant a tiny but fatal 'loophole' in its core logic."
She paused and lowered her voice, as if she was stating a truth. "When a person spends half his life chasing a so-called 'destiny' and does whatever it takes, you only need to make him have a trace of doubt - a suspicion that the fate itself is a complete scam, a suspicion that he is just a pawn in someone else's script from beginning to end... Then, he will tear up his original script more crazily and thoroughly than anyone else."
The "him" in her mouth is none other than Obito Uchiha.
In another battlefield ruins shrouded in darkness, Xuan Zheng plays another role.
He perfectly disguised his aura and form into a defeated White Zetsu remnant, with a shriveled body and twisted limbs, and slowly and stiffly sneaked among the gravel.
He did not try to get close to the temporary stronghold where Madara and Obito were hiding, which would immediately trigger Madara's perception.
He stopped about one kilometer away from the outskirts of the stronghold. This is the critical point of the perception range. It is full of countless chaotic Natural Energy and battlefield remnants of Chakra, making it the best blind spot.
Xuan stretched out his dry fingers, inserted them into the blood-stained soil under his feet, and quietly buried a small piece of Divine Tree cortex peeled off from the Ten-Tails crystal core.
This cortex, which he had soaked with his own power, contained an extremely weak but extremely pure aura of Kaguya's origin.
After doing all this, he lay quietly on the ground, like a real rock, and slowly released the trace of Kaguya at an extremely low frequency that was almost the same as the pulse of the earth, like the seeds of a dandelion.
One minute, two minutes...
In the stronghold cave, Madara Uchiha, who was closing his eyes and concentrating, seemed completely unaware.
But Obito on the side seemed to be hit by an invisible electric current. He suddenly opened his eyes and looked up at the dark sky!
His Mangekyō Sharingan contracted violently,
"This feeling... is 'her'?" Obito's voice was hoarse and dry, with a hint of trembling that he had not even noticed. "It's impossible... hasn't my mother been sealed by brother Sage of Six Paths a long time ago..."
"Concentrate your mind, Obito." Madara's cold voice sounded, without even opening his eyes, "It's just an illusion caused by the instability of Ten-Tails's chakra. Don't let such boring things interfere with your judgment."
Obito did not respond.
His hand, at an angle that Madara couldn't see, unconsciously clenched the Rinnegan scepter that symbolized Six Paths Power, and his knuckles turned white due to excessive force.
Doubt, once planted, takes root wildly.
At the frontline observation point, Torune Aburame's expression was uglier than if he had seen a ghost.
The sealed scroll in front of him recorded all of his observation data over the past few hours, but now, these data looked like the graffiti of a madman.
"Impossible... This is absolutely impossible!" He stared at the data absently, his body trembling slightly.
Ten-Tails The shrinking speed of chakra suddenly dropped off a cliff at a certain point in time, as if a large piece of chakra had been extracted out of thin air, but no trace of energy escape could be found.
Those White Zetsu who were used as cannon fodder, the sequence and power of their self-destruction completely disrupted the previously concluded rules and became illogical.
What made his hair stand on end was that, based on the cross-comparison of data from multiple observation points, the man codenamed "Xuan", the location where he last disappeared, and his energy response at the moment of disappearance, did not follow any Space-Time Ninjutsu wave law, it was more like... a piece of it was wiped out from the concept of "existence"!
"This violates the conservation of energy... It goes against all known laws of ninjutsu..." Torune's breathing became rapid, "Unless... unless someone... is tampering with 'reality' itself!"
This thought was like a black lightning that instantly penetrated his cognition.
He shuddered suddenly and glanced at the analysis scroll that he had just sorted out and prepared to submit to Hokage.
The next second, his hands quickly Hand Seals, a ball of black flame appeared out of thin air, and without hesitation, he burned the analysis scroll that condensed what he had learned throughout his life into ashes.
Late at night, in a secret underground cave, a bonfire danced, reflecting two calm faces.
"This is the latest information." Chiyo Saori handed a copied scroll to Xuan, "There is already a huge quarrel within the coalition. Hidden Leaf Village The think tank headed by Shikaku Nara advocates jointly encircling and suppressing you at all costs. Hidden Cloud Village has an ambiguous attitude, and Raikage seems to be hesitating. The most interesting thing is Iwagakure, that old stubborn Ōnoki, actually sent people to secretly contact several Xiaonin villages and proposed... to negotiate with you."
"Very good." Xuan chuckled lightly, took the scroll, glanced at it, and threw it into the fire. "A piece of loose sand is easier to deal with than a solid piece of sand. Let them fight, quarrel, and doubt each other. Fear and interests will become my best allies."
He raised his head, his eyes looking profound and unpredictable in Kakkō: "When the mutual trust between Ban and Obito completely collapses, that's when I will take the center stage."
As he spoke, he opened his palm, and in his palm lay a black crystal peeled off from the deepest part of the Ten-Tails crystal core. It did not reflect any light and seemed to be able to swallow everything.
"This is 'Seed of Negation'," Xuan's voice said with a hint of playfulness, "It can briefly simulate the purest Otsutsuki Clan bloodline fluctuations, enough to make it look real. Saori, send it to where it should go."
He paused, and the smile on his lips grew wider.
"For the next banquet, I want to ask Obito Uchiha to serve it to me personally."
At that time, Obito was standing alone on the edge of the cliff, letting the biting mountain wind blow his damaged Xiao robe.
The face under the mask has long been distorted, half struggling and half mad.
In his mind, countless images were intersecting crazily.
Lin's gentle smile under the sunset, the fleeting Scarlet Eye phantom on the battlefield that seemed to be able to swallow the gods, and Xuan's words like a curse - "I want you to offer it with your own hands."
Scene after scene, frame after frame, like countless poisonous needles, piercing into his already riddled belief.
"What if...Eye of the Moon Plan was a lie from the beginning?"
"What if everything Madara said was just to use me?"
"What if I spend my whole life creating a world with Lin, which is arranged and a bigger tragedy?"
He muttered to himself, his voice broken by the wind.
"Whose chess piece am I...?"
At the moment when this question emerged from the depths of his soul, an extremely subtle but clear "click" sound quietly sounded in his body.
For the first time, in the center of the purple Rinnegan symbolizing Six Paths Power in his left eye, there appeared a tiny crack that was almost imperceptible to the naked eye.