Warning from the Crow Mark

The slanting afternoon sun streamed through the broken lattice windows of the watchtower.

Lin Feng sat cross-legged beside Shisui, the underground layout of Root spread across the stone slab before his knees. His finger moved slowly along the thinnest route on the map—the optimal infiltration route he had selected from more than thirty pipelines. He would enter through the third drainage outlet, pass seven turns, and reach the outer wall of Danzo's laboratory.

His fingertip stopped at the mark for the pipe entrance.

The Crow Mark on his palm suddenly grew hot.

The heat surged up from beneath his skin, as though someone had pressed a red-hot branding iron into the center of his palm.

Lin Feng jerked his hand back.

The temperature kept rising.

He lowered his head to look at his palm. The black, three-legged crow mark gave off a faint dark glow—not the light of chakra, but a deeper, more ancient black. The air around him did not distort, and his chakra sensory network detected nothing unusual, yet the heat on his skin was so real that it burned.

"Your mark is heating up..."

Lin Feng turned to look at the unconscious Shisui.

Shisui's face was pale as paper, his breathing weak but steady. Dark red blood had seeped through the bandages around his shoulder wound. His hands rested quietly over his abdomen, his right palm facing down, the identical Crow Mark hidden between his fingers.

Lin Feng spread open his own right hand, his palm facing Shisui.

The temperature changed again.

This time, mixed within the scorching heat was some vague information. It was not language, nor writing, but an almost instinctive sensation—as though someone had pressed a hand onto his shoulder in the dark and silently pointed in a certain direction.

"...This isn't chakra resonance."

Lin Feng lowered his voice, as if speaking to the unconscious Shisui, yet also as if questioning the mark in his palm.

"Shisui, what are you trying to tell me?"

The temperature of the Crow Mark shifted accordingly.

The searing heat receded, becoming a steady, sustained warmth.

That vague sensation surfaced again.

This time, a distinct image appeared in Lin Feng's mind—a dark pipe, damp stone walls, and something hanging from the ceiling at the end of the pipe. It was not the glow of a technique, nor the pattern of a seal, but an entirely different shape.

Circular.

Like an eye.

But not a living eye.

Colder.

Lin Feng closed his eyes and focused with all his strength.

What the Crow Mark conveyed was not Shisui's consciousness. Shisui's chakra fluctuations had nearly vanished after he lost consciousness, yet this mark was operating independently, like a preset defensive mechanism. It had sensed something and was issuing a warning in the most primitive way possible.

That blurry image appeared again.

This time, it was clearer.

The circular device hanging from the top of the pipe rotated slightly. There was no chakra flowing across its surface, no nodes for a technique, no traces of a sealing formula. Its internal structure operated by an entirely different set of rules.

Lin Feng's eyes snapped open.

"Root has surveillance methods that don't belong to chakra."

This was not words.

It was a feeling.

As if something was inside the pipe.

Not a technique.

Not a seal.

Something he had never sensed before.

Lin Feng stared at the fading glow in his palm, his breathing growing heavier. His memories from his previous life held far too much knowledge about surveillance technology—cameras, infrared sensors, motion detectors, voiceprint recognition—but those things should not exist here.

The technological path of the Naruto world was built upon the chakra system.

But Root was not made up entirely of ninja.

Root was Danzo's private army.

Danzo had never trusted purely ninja methods.

So he had deployed a surveillance network within the Root base that existed beyond chakra.

Lin Feng pressed his hand back onto the map.

This time, his gaze no longer lingered over the locations marked with barrier techniques. Instead, he reexamined every symbol on the entire map.

Shisui had used different strokes when drawing this map.

Most of the marks were standard ninja cartographic symbols—red triangles represented barrier nodes, blue circles represented chakra reaction zones, and black dotted lines represented Anbu patrol routes—but Lin Feng now noticed a set of symbols drawn in finer strokes near the drainage pipe route.

He had previously mistaken those symbols for ordinary barrier technique markings.

His finger moved over.

To the right of the drainage pipe entrance.

Shisui had drawn a hexagon with an almost invisible thin line.

Three horizontal lines lay inside the hexagon.

This was not a common symbol in the ninja world.

It was a mark Shisui had created himself.

Lin Feng's pupils contracted.

The Crow Mark pulsed once more in his palm.

This time, the sensation it conveyed was clearer—something embedded in the inner walls of the pipes, numerous in number, arranged in a grid that covered the entire area from the third drainage outlet to the seventh turn.

If he followed the original infiltration route, he would enter the surveillance zone directly at the third turn after entering the drainage pipe.

It was still sixty meters from the first barrier technique node.

An ordinary ninja would reach that point with no warning from chakra sensing, nothing in sight, and footsteps concealed by the sound of running water—everything would meet the criteria for "safe."

Then they would step into the very center of the surveillance grid.

They would be discovered.

The sealed defense mechanism would activate.

Both ends of the pipe would be blocked.

There would be nowhere to retreat.

Cold sweat seeped across Lin Feng's forehead.

"So that's why you were injured..."

He turned to look at the unconscious Shisui.

"You thought you had bypassed Root's Anbu Sensing Barrier, only to run into something that didn't rely on chakra. It didn't care whether you were a ninja."

Shisui's breathing remained steady.

But Lin Feng could now reconstruct what had happened that night from Shisui's injuries—Shisui had used the Body Flicker Technique to bypass every barrier node and successfully entered deep into the pipes, only to be detected by that unknown surveillance method. The alarm had been triggered, and Root's Anbu had sealed both ends of the pipes at once, leaving Shisui to face a siege in an enclosed space.

He had escaped because of Kotoamatsukami.

But he had still paid a price.

Because that surveillance method had not given him any time to react.

It did not care about genjutsu.

It did not care about the Body Flicker Technique.

It did not care about changes in chakra nature.

It simply waited in the darkness, then captured moving objects.

Lin Feng's finger moved away from the map, and the entire infiltration plan collapsed in his mind. Every plan based on chakra countermeasures—avoiding the Sensing Barrier, countering sealing techniques, deceiving Anbu patrols—was rendered useless.

He had to get in another way.

A way that could bypass that thing.

But there was nothing in his knowledge reserves.

Chakra theory could not explain it.

The ninjutsu system could not fight it.

Sealing techniques could not interfere with it.

This was a blank area neither of his two lifetimes' memories had ever touched.

Lin Feng leaned his back against the cold stone wall. Outside the window, the setting sun moved westward, the light shifting from yellow to dark gold and casting long shadows over the stone floor. Shisui's breathing was especially clear in the silence.

"If I follow the original plan and take the drainage pipe route, I'll be discovered the instant I reach that marked area. This isn't infiltration. It's walking straight into a trap."

Lin Feng's voice echoed through the empty watchtower.

Shisui gave no response.

The temperature of the Crow Mark had also faded away.

Lin Feng closed his eyes and rapidly worked through alternative plans in his mind—the ventilation ducts were all covered by barrier techniques, Anbu sentries rotated shifts at the main entrance, and the underground passage's backup exit had been sealed for years. Every route appeared in his mind, then was rejected.

Time passed second by second.

The clan extermination plan would begin tomorrow at the Hour of the Boar.

The infiltration had to be completed tonight.

The plan had now returned to zero.

Lin Feng opened his eyes. The Three-Tomoe of his Sharingan rotated slowly within them. He forced himself to calm down and reorganize the information he knew—Shisui had left him a map, Kotoamatsukami, and the Crow Mark.

He could not possibly have left only a map without leaving a way to overcome the surveillance.

That was not Shisui's style.

When Shisui had handed over the kunai, he had said, "If I don't come back, everything you need is here."

There was a map in the kunai.

There was the Kotoamatsukami Transfer Technique.

What else was there?

Lin Feng's gaze fell on Shisui's ninja tool pouch.

The leather pouch was slightly open. He could faintly see the grips of kunai, the edges of explosive tags, and the blades of several specially made shuriken. There was also something else, hidden behind all the ordinary ninja tools, with only a small section of its metal casing exposed.

The dusk light happened to fall across the opening of the pouch.

That section of metal reflected a dim golden light.

It was not shaped like a ninja tool.

It was thicker.

Shorter.

Like a metal cylinder meant to hold a scroll.

But no sealing formula marked its surface, and there was not the slightest trace of chakra fluctuation. It lay quietly at the very bottom of Shisui's ninja tool pouch, like an artifact that did not belong in this world.

Lin Feng rose.

He walked over.

He bent down.

The instant his hand touched that metal casing, the Crow Mark in his palm gave one final pulse.

This time, it was not a warning.

It was confirmation.

Like the instant a lock met its key, the spring snapped free and metal struck metal with a crisp sound.

A deeply buried fragment of Lin Feng's memories from his previous life was suddenly triggered—it was a technology he had seen in another world.

Not ninjutsu.

Not chakra.

A purely technological creation.

One that could be used to interfere with another kind of technology.

He gripped the metal cylinder tightly.

The last rays of dusk outside passed through the broken lattice windows of the watchtower.

Darkness began to spread from the corners of the walls.

There was not much time left.