Interrogating Intelligence, Danzo's Poisonous Scheme

A cold, gloomy karst cave carved out over countless years by an underground river lay hidden deep within a primeval forest along the border of the Land of Fire.

Strings of water droplets seeped from the ceiling and fell into a pool below with crisp splashes. A weak campfire burned at the center of the cave, its flickering orange-yellow glow casting Uchiha Ye's cold, handsome profile onto the moss-covered black stone walls and drawing out a long, icy shadow.

Dressed in black nightwear without so much as a wrinkle, Ye leaned against the edge of a damp boulder. Feeling the faint warmth, he casually extended a finger and stirred the burning dead branches on the ground.

The Konoha ANBU member Ye had abducted from behind a tree had been jolted awake by searing pain on the ground less than two meters from the campfire. Several joints throughout his body had been dislocated by Ye's Sage Body Monstrous Strength, and thick, specially made chakra-sealing steel wires bound him to the ground in a humiliating posture.

The standard animal-patterned mask on the Anbu's face had been smashed in half during the ambush, revealing half a face with a knife scar on the chin. His first reaction upon waking was not to struggle, but to swiftly bite down on his own tongue, intending to end his life through self-mutilation.

Without even standing up, Ye picked up a slightly warm wooden stick from the ground with his right hand and, with an emotionless flick of his wrist, swung it down at incredible speed.

A crisp smack of flesh and bone echoed out.

The tremendous physical force instantly dislocated his jaw. The stick had struck precisely at the angle of the Anbu's jaw, and a stream of blood flowed from the corner of his mouth, forcing his suicide attempt to an abrupt halt.

Ye looked at the prisoner on the ground, his gaze utterly devoid of emotion.

"Trying to die in such a hurry? Looks like the Cursed Tongue Eradication Seal Danzo planted on you can only seal your tongue. It couldn't erase your fear of death from your brain."

The Anbu spat out a broken tooth mixed with blood, then let out a fanatical, wheezing sneer through his damaged throat.

"Uchiha traitor, so what if you caught me? Don't expect to pry a single word out of me. Lord Danzo planted seals in both our brains and tongues. The moment I even think about leaking information, the curse mark in my body will directly scramble my brain. Cursed clans like yours deserve nothing but to be trampled into the mud by the higher-ups like dead dogs."

Ye steadily walked over to the prisoner, bent down, and stared down at those mocking eyes.

"Sealing techniques?"

There was no unnecessary interrogation ritual here, nor any lengthy preliminary torture.

The change occurred in an instant within Ye's left eye. His black pupil rapidly spread outward into a scarlet crimson, and the three tomoe linked end to end before transforming into the strange pattern of a three-bladed pinwheel.

The left-eye technique Kuninotokotachi activated directly through the Mangekyō Sharingan.

An overwhelmingly powerful spiritual ocular force formed an invisible yet incomparably solid penetrating force, forcibly following the Anbu's optic nerves into the deepest regions of his brain.

The Anbu's body instantly went rigid as he felt the agony of his consciousness being violently torn open by an external force. The layers upon layers of curse seals and chakra restraints Danzo had meticulously arranged in his mind shattered and collapsed without resistance beneath that irresistible spiritual pressure.

Ye's voice rang out in the depths of the Anbu's mental world, where he had already lost his hearing.

"You're right. Cursed Tongue Eradication is indeed a fine method of keeping secrets. Unfortunately, before my eyes, it's fragile enough to shatter at a touch."

As Kuninotokotachi fully invaded, the Anbu's vision, hearing, touch, and all five senses were stripped away in an instant. His body, having completely lost its ability to perceive and react to the outside world, went limp, while decades' worth of secret Anbu archives stored in the gray matter of his brain rapidly flowed into Ye's mind through the optic nerves without reservation.

An enormous flood of visual intelligence came crashing in one after another.

A dark Root laboratory beneath Konoha appeared before Ye's eyes. Neatly arranged Sharingan soaked in nutrient fluid filled glass jars along the walls.

He saw Danzo using a large number of elite Root operatives to surround and kill Body Flicker Shisui by the cliffs of the Naka River. He had even secretly arranged for Shisui, whose right eye had been stolen, to throw himself into the river and commit suicide.

It was one of the deepest classified operation files in the Anbu's memories, and even more deeply buried layers of memory began to unravel.

The scene shifted to that bloody night four years ago when the Nine-Tailed Fox ravaged Konoha. Two Root assassins wearing fox masks had been hiding outside the Uchiha Clan compound. When Ye's biological parents prepared to head to the front lines to rescue ordinary villagers, those two cold, poison-soaked blades did not strike at the rampaging Nine-Tails. Instead, they viciously pierced the hearts of those two Uchiha Chunin from behind.

Then, with practiced ease, they used a sealing array on the fallen bodies to drain their last drops of blood essence and chakra, disguising their deaths as the result of chakra leaking from the demon fox.

Danzo and Konoha's higher-ups had long plotted a systematic, large-scale purge targeting the Uchiha's middle ranks. This was clearly no accidental sacrifice on a high-risk battlefield.

The three-bladed pinwheel in Ye's left eye spun madly once the moment he read this scene. The abundant Yang Release chakra of his Sage Body kept black blood from flowing from the corner of his eye, but the violently surging chakra pressure within him directly crushed the campfire on the ground and extinguished it.

The dark karst cave sank into utter blackness, with only Ye's left eye still emitting a terrifying scarlet glow.

"So that's how it was."

Ye murmured softly. The Will of Fire that the original owner had long regarded as an absolute creed, along with the belief that everything could be sacrificed for the village, now reeked of unbearable corruption and nauseating hypocrisy.

Ye grabbed the throat of the still-trembling Anbu prisoner, his palm slowly lifting with irresistible pressure.

With a crack that resounded through the stone cavern, the prisoner's cervical vertebrae and Adam's apple shattered simultaneously beneath the immense force. Ye casually flung the still-warm corpse onto the cold, harsh stone floor, where it landed with a dull thud.

The last faint trace of identification lingering in the original owner's heart was ground into nothing by the force that crushed this throat.

Danzo, Sarutobi Hiruzen, and that self-righteously clear-headed lackey, Uchiha Itachi, all had the tangible flesh and blood of his compatriots on their hands. All of it proved that Konoha's system was fundamentally beyond reform.

Since even its internal roots had rotted and died, the most sensible course was to erase and destroy the entire system through direct, decisive means.

Forming a Tiger hand seal with one hand, Ye coldly swept his gaze across the silent cave.

The deep-blue flames he exhaled did not trigger a violent explosion within the cave. Instead, they spread at extreme speed, covering the Anbu corpse, the bloodstains, and every trace of struggle across a wide area. As the high heat touched the damp rock walls, massive amounts of water evaporated, and scalding white mist completely cleared away and concealed every clue within the cave.

Ye withdrew his chakra and turned to leave the cave entrance, where heat waves still rolled outward.

The rain continued to intensify, changing from a lightly chilled drizzle into a torrential downpour beneath thunderclouds.

Judging from the routes in the Anbu memories he had just read, the northern reaches of this vast forest led to a lawless land plagued by endless war and chaos, a place where no rules held sway: the border where the Land of Rain met the Grass Land.

Acting alone was not only inefficient, but gave him no foundation from which to command the whole situation. It would not allow him to shatter Konoha's entire upper power structure in a short time. He needed to find an ungoverned territory where no one could interfere, overturn its existing rules of slaughter, and rebuild an armed force that answered to him alone.

Rainwater was scorched into white vapor by the Yang Release blood and vitality circulating automatically over his skin. When it fell onto Ye's pitch-black nightwear, it failed to seep through the fabric in the slightest.

His mind frantically calculating the optimal route from buying time against Kakashi to heading straight for the Land of Rain, he swiftly moved through the muddy forest paths carpeted with fallen leaves.

Just as Ye prepared to use a tree trunk as a foothold for a second long leap, a snake tail, deathly pale and gleaming with an eerie cold light, shot out from beneath the muddy fallen leaves without warning. The instant Ye's leading foot stepped onto a thick ancient tree root, it coiled around his left ankle.

A hoarse, chilling, strangely sickening laugh, laden with a deep, pathological desire, drifted through the curtain of rain amid the forest downpour.

"Oh? Let me see. A wild test subject that slipped out of its cage, completely unguarded."