Dark Night Weeps Blood, Tearing Apart a Root Watcher

The deathly silence was instantly shattered by those words, inside this cramped single dormitory.

A muffled bang rang out.

The paper door was violently kicked apart from the outside. Wood chips and torn paper scattered through the narrow room; the door had never been sturdy to begin with.

Two black shadows rushed into the room in an instant. Fox masks covered their faces, and they made no unnecessary attempts or exchanges.

The two gleaming standard short blades had already precisely targeted Uchiha Ye's neck and heart the instant after they kicked down the door.

A sharp whistle cut through the air as the blades sliced forward.

These two Root shinobi had clearly sensed the immense blood vitality still not fully contained within Ye's body from outside the door. Trained by Danzo, their minds held no fear—only the most efficient orders to eliminate.

They were too close. The blade tips were less than five centimeters from Ye's skin.

He would have been killed on the spot, without even time to form the first seal for the Substitution Technique—if he had been the former Uchiha Ye.

But someone possessing both the Sage Body and the Mangekyo Sharingan stood here now.

Ye remained where he was without moving even a finger. He neither dodged nor evaded, not even bothering with the basic act of forming hand seals.

"This is way too slow."

A chill spilled from Ye's mouth. In one thousandth of a second, his right eye abruptly turned crimson, a pinwheel pattern formed from three connected tomoe emitting a distinct red glow in the darkness.

Right-eye ocular technique: Yomotsu Hirasaka, activate.

The air thinned in that instant. To the two Root shinobi, the very concept of time vanished completely.

The world's colors faded in the next second, becoming a space woven from dark red and grayish white. Just a moment ago, the short blades in their hands had still been thrusting forward.

Gravity vanished and sound dulled. The two Root shinobi found themselves firmly frozen in midair, their limbs unbearably heavy. They could not even blink.

Within this strange space, Uchiha Ye alone decided the flow of time.

Time within this space was forcibly stretched into a grueling seventy-two hours, while only 0.1 seconds passed outside.

Pain caused purely by spiritual force began spreading along their nerve endings, inch by inch toward the depths of their brains. This was not physical pain, but an assault directly upon the mind. Every second of agony was magnified hundreds of times.

For seventy-two hours, they could neither sleep nor rest, scream nor faint. They could only remain conscious as their minds were dismantled inch by inch.

The instant time began flowing again in reality.

Clang. Clang.

The two Root elites, so threatening a moment ago, now rolled their eyes back, blood-tinged fluid streaming from their eye corners. Their brains had completely collapsed during those three days of mental torment, leaving them as two bodies that still breathed.

The pinwheel pattern in his pupil was still turning. Ye showed no unnecessary mercy.

Only after watching his enemies fall did he raise his right hand. The Sage Body's immense vitality instantly transformed within his muscle fibers into tremendous physical strength. He did not even coat his fist with chakra; this was merely the release of pure bodily power.

Boom.

An utterly ordinary straight punch landed solidly on the chest of the Root shinobi to the left.

The clear sound of bones cracking echoed through the room. The man's chest caved deeply inward as the enormous force shattered every one of his ribs. The broken bones instantly pierced backward through his heart and both lungs.

Without a single scream, the Root shinobi lost control, was sent flying straight into the hard stone wall by that force, and went completely limp.

Driven by the instinct to survive, the other Root shinobi on the right, though mentally broken, still had his muscles twitch weakly.

But he no longer even had the chance to fall.

Ye's hand tightly gripped his neck. To avoid leaving future trouble, his five fingers suddenly tightened.

Crack.

The second corpse collapsed weakly to the ground, accompanied by the crisp sound of a broken neck.

From the door being kicked open to the complete deaths of the two Root elites, less than three seconds had passed. There was no complicated clash of ninjutsu, no evenly matched taijutsu exchange—only a pure gap in strength and one-sided suppression by power.

His gaze extremely cold, Ye glanced at the two corpses on the floor.

The failure of Root's operation would soon draw Danzo's full attention, but that was exactly the result Ye wanted. Konoha's higher-ups still assessed his combat strength as that of an ordinary one-tomoe chunin. This enormous information gap was his best bargaining chip for throwing Konoha into complete chaos.

However, before leaving, he still needed to deal with the traces in this room.

Ye took a deep breath, and chakra within his body began gathering in his lungs. Yet enhanced by the Sage Body, what had been ordinary fire-nature chakra underwent a dramatic change.

No hand seals were needed.

As he slightly opened his mouth, he exhaled a fist-sized fireball glowing deep blue.

The instant the blue fireball landed on the corpses, it did not explode violently. Instead, it turned into blue flames that silently enveloped both bodies.

The temperature rose to an extreme threshold. There was no choking smoke, only distortion in the air from the heat.

The blood on the ground was completely vaporized in an instant, along with the two uniformed corpses. Not even a trace of ash remained.

The faint smell of scorching and blood lingering in the air was swiftly scattered by the cold night wind, drifting through the broken paper door into the night sky.

Everything was spotless. Those two people had completely vanished from the world.

After seeing that the scene had been cleaned up, Ye found his original clothes somewhat cumbersome. He took off the thin garment he wore and changed into a set of pure black night attire from the bottom of the cabinet.

Then, with one foot on the windowsill and under cover of darkness, he leaped into Konoha's deathly silent midnight shadows.

The Sage Body's immensely powerful sensory range was fully released.

Konoha Village's Anbu patrol routes, the detection frequency of the sensory barrier squads, and the locations of barrier nodes were all clearly analyzed in his mind.

Every landing he made precisely avoided the barriers' detection blind spots. The power contained in his muscles made him incredibly fast. As he rapidly darted through the towering walls of Konoha, a few leaps carried him completely beyond that line of defense.

Without any hesitation, Ye plunged straight into the deep, dense primeval forest outside Konoha Village.

The forest was so quiet that only the occasional hoot of an owl remained. Moonlight filtered through the dense canopy, leaving patches of light upon soil carpeted in dead leaves.

Ye suddenly stopped just a few steps after landing.

An extremely faint rustling of leaves came from the bushes ahead to his right.

"Woof. Woof."

A pug wearing a Konoha forehead protector and a little blue vest slowly emerged from the shadows. It lowered its body, a wary, low growl rumbling in its throat as its canine eyes fixed tightly on Ye.

A ninja hound: Pakkun.

Branches swayed atop the crown of the huge ancient tree overhead. Before Ye could react.

A lazy yet cold voice then rang out in the night wind.

"Well, well... Where are you headed in the middle of the night instead of staying home and sleeping obediently, little brat from the Uchiha clan?"