Killing Intent Under the Moonlight!

The night was deep as water.

Less than a week remained before the official finals of the Chunin Ninja Exams. On the surface, Konoha was still peaceful and prosperous, but in the shadowed corners untouched by light, undercurrents had long begun to surge.

Cold moonlight spilled over the staggered rooftops, draping the entire village in a veil of silver.

At the edge of the village, atop a rooftop with a wide-open view, a hunched figure swayed slightly in the night wind.

Dosu Kinata.

The Genin from Otogakure stared fixedly at the full moon, his single eye bloodshot. Anxiety, resentment, and fear of the look Orochimaru gave him as though he were discarded trash gnawed at his heart like venomous snakes.

"Damn it... damn it!"

Dosu clenched the metal bracer on his right arm, his knuckles turning white from the force. "Why? Why is Lord Orochimaru so obsessed with that Sasuke? Even that sickly Ye Tian can make him spare a second glance... while we're just tools meant to test Sasuke's caliber?"

He refused to accept it.

During the preliminaries, he had defeated that fat guy, but the victory brought him no sense of security. Especially when he saw that his next opponent on the bracket was Ye Tian, that fraud who did nothing but pretend to be sick, a sense of humiliation from being looked down upon rose within him.

"If I can kill that monster..."

The image of the red-haired boy carrying a gourd surfaced in Dosu's mind—Sandstorm Gaara.

"As long as I kill the monster everyone acknowledges as the strongest, I can prove my worth! Then Lord Orochimaru will definitely see me in a new light!"

Driven by this almost pathological logic, Dosu hesitated no longer. His figure flashed as he leaped between the rooftops like a ghost, racing toward the inn where Gaara was staying.

However, he did not know.

Several hundred meters behind him, atop a tall camphor tree, someone had already been waiting for him for quite some time.

"Tsk, tsk, tsk. These days, people rushing to reincarnate really can't be stopped."

Ye Tian sat cross-legged on the treetop, light as a feather as he swayed with the branches. He still held that old cadre-style thermos cup he never went anywhere without, while his other hand held a handful of freshly roasted five-spice sunflower seeds.

"Crack."

Ye Tian cracked open a seed, looked at Dosu's frantic retreating figure, and helplessly shook his head.

"I was originally thinking about how to let you lose with some dignity in the finals, while taking your bracer in the process. Who knew you'd be in such a hurry to die?"

Ye Tian took a sip of Goji Berry Tea, a gleam flashing through his eyes. "But this works too. No reason to refuse a delivery that comes straight to my door. Saves me the trouble of acting during the finals. What a pain that would've been."

With that, Ye Tian's figure swayed slightly.

He did not use a Body Flicker Technique. Instead, relying on the lightness of the Wind-Controlling Technique, he silently followed after him.

On a secluded rooftop somewhere in Konoha.

Far from the bustle, the surroundings were eerily quiet.

Gaara sat alone on the roof ridge with his back to the moonlight, his red hair especially eye-catching in the night wind. He hugged his knees, seemingly talking to something invisible, his body trembling slightly from time to time.

"Mother... do you want blood too?"

"Soon... there will be blood soon..."

That low, hoarse muttering, seemingly mixed with the growl of a wild beast, sent a chill straight up Dosu's spine before he could even make a move after landing behind him.

"So that's Sandstorm Gaara..."

Dosu swallowed and forcibly suppressed the fear in his heart. He raised his right arm, the metal bracer reflecting a cold glint beneath the moonlight.

"Hey! You gourd-carrying freak!"

Dosu shouted, trying to bolster his courage with his voice. "I challenge you! Right here, I'll kill you!"

Gaara slowly turned his head.

What kind of eyes were those?

Heavy dark circles surrounded his pale green pupils. There was no focus in his gaze, only endless madness and bloodlust. When he looked at Dosu, it was as though he were looking at a buzzing fly.

"Who are you?"

Gaara's voice held no fluctuation. "Do you want to die?"

"Don't look down on me!"

Completely enraged by the dismissal, Dosu rushed forward. Every air vent on his right arm opened wide. "Once you hear my voice, you're finished! Resonant Sonic Pierce!"

Bzzzz—!

A piercing high-frequency sonic wave erupted instantly, carrying enough force to shatter stone as it shot straight toward Gaara.

Dosu had put all his strength into this strike.

However.

"Too weak."

Gaara did not even stand up.

Just as the sonic wave was about to touch him, a stream of yellow sand suddenly burst from the mouth of the gourd on his back. Yet instead of forming a shield as usual, the sand instantly transformed into a massive, vicious monster claw!

Boom!

Ignoring the sonic attack, the giant sand claw seized Dosu in midair with brutal force.

"What?!" Dosu's face drained of color. "My sonic wave... why didn't it work?!"

"Because your voice was drowned out by fear."

Gaara slowly raised his hand and clenched it in the air.

"Sand Coffin!"

The enormous sand claw instantly tightened.

"Aaaaargh—!!!"

A shrill scream tore through the silent night. Immediately afterward came a dense series of bone-crushing cracks, popping like beans in a pan.

A mist of blood sprayed out, staining the moonlit rooftop red.

The battle ended so quickly that it could not even be called a battle. It had been a completely one-sided slaughter.

"Boring."

Gaara released his hand, and the lump of mangled flesh and blood slipped from the sand claw, crashing heavily onto the roof tiles.

At the same time, from within that blood-soaked shadow, an immensely powerful, icy-cold Chakra filled with violent emotions slowly began to rise.

It was Shukaku's power.

"Mother... are you full?" Gaara clutched his head and let out a pained yet excited low laugh.

At that moment, Ye Tian's thermos cup trembled slightly behind a distant tree.

"So this is... the source aura of a Tailed Beast?"

Ye Tian activated the Heavenly Eye, staring intently at the phantom Tanuki within Gaara's body that was preparing to break free from its cage.

In the eyes of ninjas, this was Chakra.

But in the eyes of Ye Tian, a Cultivator, he saw something entirely different.

"What kind of Chakra aggregate is this? This is clearly a Great Evil Spirit condensed from countless resentments, curses, and the most polluted Spiritual Energy between heaven and earth!"

Ye Tian was deeply shaken. "A spirit entity of this level would be at least a peerless demon at the Nascent Soul Stage in the cultivation world! Without purification through a special formation, an ordinary person who touched even a trace of this aura would instantly suffer qi deviation and become a madman who knew only slaughter."

"No wonder this kid doesn't sleep... with something like this parasitizing his body, who would dare sleep? The moment he closes his eyes, he'd probably suffer Soul Seizure."

Ye Tian looked at Gaara with a trace of sympathy in his eyes, but even more than that was... greed.

"Sure, it's filthy, but the energy density is seriously high. If I could get some of Shukaku's Sand Gold or Origin Baleful Aura and use it to refine the Ten Thousand Souls Banner or the Shura Blade, the power would be..."

However, Ye Tian did not act rashly.

Now was not the time to provoke that crazy Tanuki. In a few days, during the havoc in Heaven... ah, no, the Konoha Crush Plan, there would be plenty of chances to fish in troubled waters.

At that moment, two people emerged from the nearby shadows.

One was Baki, the Jonin leading the Sand Ninja, and the other was Kabuto Yakushi, the bespectacled "helpful senior."

"Looks like we won't need to intervene." Kabuto adjusted his glasses and glanced at the corpse on the ground, a trace of indifference flashing through his eyes.

"Don't let him keep causing trouble. The plan comes first," Baki said in a deep voice.

After a brief exchange, the two left with Gaara, who was still on the verge of frenzy.

Once everyone had gone far away, the surroundings returned to deathly silence.

"Whew..."

Ye Tian, who had been concealing his aura with the Turtle Breath Technique, finally stepped out from behind the tree.

He did not immediately approach Dosu's corpse. Instead, he first threw out a Pathfinding Talisman and, after confirming there were no traps or surveillance nearby, slowly hopped onto the roof with his cane.

Looking at the pile of flesh that was almost unrecognizable as human, Ye Tian covered his nose with a disgusted expression.

"Honestly, young people are just too impulsive. A perfectly living person had to turn himself into a pile of mush."

Muttering to himself, Ye Tian pulled a pair of specially made gloves from his clothes and put them on before beginning to search through the "ruins."

"Ah, what a sin, what a sin... I did not kill him, yet he died because of me... Though you brought it on yourself, you were still my next opponent."

Ye Tian recited prayers for the dead under his breath—though he was actually reciting the periodic table—while his hands moved with remarkable speed.

Soon, from the pile of shattered flesh, he dug out the metal bracer. Though slightly deformed, its main structure remained intact.

Multi-Hole Resonant Sonic Bracer.

"Found it!"

Ye Tian's eyes lit up. He quickly used a Cleansing Talisman to remove the bloodstains from the bracer, then held it in his hands and examined it closely.

His Divine Sense penetrated inside as he carefully analyzed its internal structure.

"Wonderful... Although the alloy itself is average, the internal echo-hole design actually aligns with the formation principles of the Five Tones and Twelve Temperaments."

Ye Tian lightly tapped the bracer with a finger, producing a crisp ring. "As long as I modify it a little, carve in a Soul-Seizing Formation and a Bewitching Sound Curse, then nurture it with Spiritual Power for seven times seven, forty-nine days..."

"It won't be some sonic punch based on physical attacks anymore. It'll be a bracer version of the Soulfall Bell—one that can directly shatter an enemy's Divine Soul!"

Just imagine it: in the future, when fighting someone, he would not even need to lift a hand. He would only need to raise his arm and shake it, and the person opposite him would become delirious and foam at the mouth...

That image was simply perfect for his persona as a sickly warlock!

"This trip really wasn't for nothing. Not at all."

Ye Tian happily stored the bracer in his storage space, then casually took several scrolls and Dosu's money pouch as well. Even a mosquito was still meat.

After finishing all that, he stood and stretched lazily.

The full moon still hung high overhead, its cold light spilling over him and stretching his shadow long behind him.

"Dosu's dead, which means I get a bye in the first round of the finals..."

Ye Tian looked at the match bracket in his hand, a smile of having gotten away with a scheme curling his lips.

"This is what they mean by luck being part of strength."

"No fighting, a direct advance, and I even got a free artifact base... if only good things like this happened every day."

Humming cheerfully, Ye Tian picked up his thermos again and took a sip of the Goji Berry Tea, which had already gone somewhat cold.

"Next... it's time to go back and get some proper sleep."

"Tomorrow, I still have to get up early to watch that idiot Naruto summon a giant Toad. The oil on that Toad is top-grade medicinal catalyst for refining the Flesh-Regenerating Bone-Rebuilding Pill. Can't miss it."

Leaning on his cane, Ye Tian swayed with every step as he disappeared into the night.

All that remained on the rooftop was that unattended pool of blood, telling the sorrow of the weak beneath the moonlight.

The curtain had risen on the Chunin Ninja Exams, while the true "feast" had only just begun.