Eyes of Root

The Hokage's office was pitch-black.

Lin Feng slipped out of the shadows, his footsteps blending into the faint hiss of the night wind squeezing through the window cracks.

He dropped to one knee in a dark corner before Root's underground entrance, pressing two fingers of his left hand lightly against the ground.

Chakra threads.

Five of them.

Three horizontal, two vertical.

Shisui's intelligence had marked this as the first layer of security at Root's entrance—the "Spider-Sense Net." Any outsider who touched it with chakra above the minimal threshold would immediately trigger the alarm array.

The Three-Tomoe in Lin Feng's eyes slowly turned.

The chakra frequencies flowing through the threads were amplified, broken down, and reconstructed. He saw that one of the vertical threads would enter a decay cycle lasting a few hundredths of a second in three seconds.

That was the breathing gap in the barrier technique.

He held his breath. In that instant, he shifted his center of gravity forward, lifted his fingers from the ground, and silently slid through the security net.

The air instantly became thick and sluggish.

The walls of Root's lower corridor were cold gray. There were no windows, only faint chakra lamps embedded in the walls, casting an icy blue-white glow. Lin Feng pressed himself into the shadows at the corner and swept the path thirty meters ahead with his Sharingan.

There were six iron doors on both sides, all completely sealed.

A surveillance chakra eye mark was set into the ceiling every five meters.

Shisui had said that the blind spots of these eye marks lay in the color-temperature transition zones between every two lamps, only forty centimeters wide.

Lin Feng moved along the base of the wall, his shoulder brushing against the cold, hard stone. Every step landed exactly in the middle of the boundary between light and darkness.

The Three-Tomoe Sharingan simultaneously caught an anomaly at the entrance to the second passage on the left at the end of the corridor—

A figure.

Lin Feng abruptly stopped, his breathing completely still.

That was not one of the hidden sentry positions marked in Shisui's intelligence.

The black bodysuit of the Root patrol member nearly merged with the corridor shadows. There were no excess chakra fluctuations beneath the mask, and the person's stance was rigid and standard, like a carefully positioned puppet.

The tomoe in Lin Feng's eyes slowly turned, fully recording the trajectory of the other person's chakra flow.

Cycle period—seven seconds.

At the end of the seventh second, the sentry's chakra would briefly stagnate, as though some mind-control technique was refreshing its instructions.

A genjutsu window.

Lin Feng took a deep breath, and his Three-Tomoe Sharingan suddenly activated.

He did not choose direct hypnosis—that would leave abnormal traces in the other person's chakra. Instead, he implanted a visual suggestion, something more precise and concealed, like adding a nearly invisible stroke of paint to a complete canvas.

The sentry's body paused slightly.

Lin Feng stepped out of the shadows, his pace steady. At some point, he had already put on a mask, and his black cloak concealed his forehead protector. He walked up to the sentry and stared directly into the other person's pupils with his Sharingan.

"Look into my eyes."

His voice was kept extremely low.

"You see one of your own. There was no anomaly tonight."

A hollow reply came from beneath the Root member's mask.

"No anomaly..."

"Open the side door and let me pass."

"Yes..."

The sentry turned around and mechanically raised his right hand, pressing it against a spot on the wall. The chakra threads unraveled at once, and a narrow door disguised as part of the wall silently slid open.

Lin Feng passed by the sentry. As his left hand swept past the back of the other person's neck, he flicked out a chakra mark finer than dust—a small trick he had learned from Shisui. The mark would dissipate on its own after four hours, leaving no evidence behind.

The side door closed behind him.

The outer compartment of the drug laboratory was only ten square meters. Its four walls were cold metal plates, with a stone operating table in the center. Sealed bottles, labeled scrolls, and several sets of precision extraction tools were neatly arranged on top.

Lin Feng glanced at the chakra-sensing barrier in the corner—it was still in its dormant cycle.

He had four minutes.

With a flick of his left wrist, he took a small transparent crystal bottle specially made for the Bottle-Sealing Technique from his ninja tool scroll. At the same time, his right hand pulled open the third drawer beneath the operating table.

Shisui had said that Root's standard storage location for liquid samples was always the third cold-storage compartment.

The instant the drawer opened, cold mist spilled out.

Lin Feng's gaze locked onto a test tube of pale blue liquid. An encrypted talisman paper was attached to its wall, and its chakra fluctuations were clearly being suppressed.

That was it.

The Bottle-Sealing Technique activated. The mouth of the crystal bottle aligned with the test tube, while chakra threads precisely wrapped around the liquid's surface like an invisible membrane, completely stripping away, transferring, and sealing the sample.

There was not the slightest unnecessary tremor in his movements.

The test tube was returned to its place, and the drawer closed.

The crystal bottle dropped into his ninja tool scroll.

At the same time, Lin Feng's gaze swept across the wall behind the operating table—the Three-Tomoe Sharingan caught an area where chakra flow was abnormally dense.

A hidden compartment.

He quickly approached, running his fingers along the edge of the wall. Beneath the third metal plate, he felt an extremely subtle uneven pattern.

It was the outer tactile layer of a sealing technique.

Not an attack type, but a recording type.

Lin Feng bit his left thumb, drawing blood, then pressed it against the sealing node.

The Sharingan simultaneously analyzed the structure of the technique.

Three seconds later, the hidden compartment silently popped open.

Inside was a yellowed encrypted scroll. Root cipher marked its shaft with the words: "Ocular Technique Suppression: Phase Three Experimental Records."

Lin Feng's breathing stopped for an instant.

Ocular technique suppression.

He quickly pulled out the scroll, unfurled it, and scanned through it.

Dense chakra formulas, drug ratio charts, and human experiment data filled the page. Several annotations had been repeatedly altered, but he understood the most crucial line of cipher—

"Extracted from Outer Path Chakra. Suppression target: fourth stage and above of the Sharingan evolution chain."

Outer Path Chakra.

Those four words perfectly matched the records of Akatsuki's secret techniques that Lin Feng had read in the forbidden section of the ninja academy library.

His right hand simultaneously pulled out a blank ninja tool scroll, unfolded it over the experimental scroll, and formed a hand seal with one hand.

Transcription Technique.

Words, formulas, and diagrams were rapidly copied onto the blank scroll as though washed over by flowing water.

Ten seconds.

Twenty seconds.

Three—

Lin Feng's fingers touched a concealed trigger technique at the end of the scroll.

Chakra instantly exploded.

In less than a tenth of a second, the laboratory alarm went off—not as a sound, but as a chakra shockwave that directly struck the sensory network of the entire Root barrier.

Urgent footsteps immediately echoed from the end of the corridor, more than one set.

Lin Feng flicked his left wrist, sending three flash kunai flying in a fan shape. They embedded themselves in the seams between the ceiling and walls. At the same time, his right hand threw two smoke pellets, and thick white smoke exploded outside the compartment, obscuring the entire corridor.

He leaped backward and formed hand seals with his left hand.

The substitution talisman activated.

A wooden stake carrying his chakra signature remained where he had been standing, while his real body had already clung to the ceiling under cover of the smoke.

Three Root pursuers rushed into the smoke-filled area of the corridor and immediately surrounded the wooden stake.

Without hesitation, Lin Feng slid along the ceiling toward the end of the left passage.

There was a dead end there.

But Shisui had said, "The third wall brick in the dead end is a displacement-type hidden door. Activate its technique node with the Sharingan, and it will send you into an abandoned passage."

The Three-Tomoe turned.

The technique node on the wall brick lit with a faint glow, and the hidden door silently flipped open.

Lin Feng's body vanished into the wall.

Behind him, the pursuers' footsteps slammed into the outer wall of the hidden door, followed by angry growls and the sound of techniques bursting apart, but the wall did not move in the slightest.

There was only the sound of dripping water in the abandoned passage.

It was dim, damp, and smelled like a mixture of old rust and mold.

Lin Feng slid down the wall into a sitting position, his chest heaving violently.

His chakra consumption was already nearing the warning line. A familiar stabbing pain came from his left eye. It was not intense, but it was constant, as if something were lightly throbbing at the bottom of his eye.

He ignored his eye and took out the crystal bottle containing the pale blue liquid from his ninja tool scroll.

His Sharingan slowly turned as he concentrated his chakra perception on the wavelength of the liquid's flow.

Ten seconds later, Lin Feng's pupils suddenly contracted.

"The chakra is disappearing quickly..."

He muttered under his breath, his voice torn into fragments by the sound of dripping water in the cramped passage.

"This suppressive ingredient was deliberately designed to target the extraction system."

The drug's active properties in the liquid began rapidly degrading after contact with the air. Yet the residual chakra fluctuations released during that degradation were captured and analyzed by the Sharingan, revealing the core structure—an external suppressive factor that belonged to no conventional chakra system.

It was almost identical to the records of Akatsuki's secret techniques Lin Feng had read on the library scrolls.

Akatsuki.

Outer Path Chakra.

Ocular technique suppression.

The three were linked together at that moment by an invisible thread.

Lin Feng put away the crystal bottle and tucked the transcribed scroll close to his chest into a hidden inner pocket.

His physical exhaustion was severe, his chakra unstable, and the pain in his left eye had begun spreading toward his temple. Yet his mind was clearer than ever.

From suspicion to proof.

Root was not merely using drugs to suppress Sharingan evolution. The drug's core ingredient was actually highly similar to Akatsuki's Outer Path secret techniques.

That meant the connection between Danzo and Akatsuki was more direct than he had previously guessed.

Lin Feng took a deep breath and pushed himself upright against the wall.

Faint moonlight seeped in from the end of the hidden passage. It was the abandoned exit marked by Shisui.

He had to deliver the sample and scroll to Shisui before the information leaked.

There was not much time left.