Konoha: Superman template, the spoiled brat becomes strong.

Speaker Shige paced back and forth on the charred ash, while twelve Fire Release Jonin stood in a fan shape, the flames in their palms burning brighter than ever before—those "heretic pages" that should have turned to ashes were now sprouting emerald vines from the ashes, each vine bearing a name written in blood.

"Add more fire!" The speaker kicked over the charcoal bucket at his feet, sparks flying onto the vines, which only made the green shoots grow even more wildly. "Burn until there's not even ashes left!"

A faint rustling sound came from the darkness.

Bai Ye squatted on a dead tree on the east side of the incineration site, his fingertips touching the inscribed spore remnant in his palm.

He could clearly sense the trembling of the ley lines—the purifying pool beneath the Stone Tower was being eroded by the spores he had injected, and every drop of groundwater had become a breeding ground for the seeds.

As the last Fire Release ninja channeled chakra into his palm, he smirked and formed an extremely slow hand seal.

Green mist suddenly seeped from the bottom of the incinerator.

The vines climbed up the furnace wall, blooming into fluorescent flowers amidst the flames, each petal bearing the name of the one whose name had been erased.

As the speaker looked up, he saw his own shadow reflected in the fire—the shadow's mouth opened and closed, its silent words piercing his eardrums like sharp blades: "You are a substitute too."

He staggered backward, his boot heels sinking into the still-steaming coals.

On a distant mountaintop, Bai Ye gazed at the green mist rising from the direction of the incineration site and said softly, "The more fiercely you burn, the deeper your roots will grow."

The night wind swept across the mountain ridge, carrying green mist with it.

Bai Ye suddenly closed his eyes, and fine beads of sweat appeared on his forehead—a faint but continuous pulse of chakra emanated from the depths of the earth's veins, as if something sealed away was awakening.

He reached for the puppet strings at his waist, his fingertips touching the cold, hard gears, but a smile crept onto his lips: "So... there are still living beings hidden on the third level of the underground vault."

Byakuya's knuckles tightened slightly on the gears of the puppet strings, and the faint pulse of chakra from the earth's veins was drilling into his palm along the Wood Release roots.

The pulse was too weak, like a firefly soaked in ice water, but its frequency perfectly matched the resonance frequency of the spores he had secretly planted in Fujiwara Shizuka's hair three days ago when she was taken to the basement—she was still alive, imprisoned in the water dungeon on the third floor of the basement.

He knew all too well what kind of methods Shi Ge used.

When they assassinated the daimyo of the Land of Earth last time, they used the same method: the captured ANBU ninja did not leave his name in any official documents, and the wanted poster only said "the gray-clothed man wearing a bamboo hat". In less than half a month, even the name on the shrine stone at the entrance of his hometown village was chiseled off.

Now, Fujiwara Shizuka's name should be locked in the deepest bronze box in the history cabinet, and even the ink on her name in the historian's register will be eaten clean by the erasers.

He closed his eyes, and the bloodline of the first generation surged in his veins like a warm stream.

The roots of the Memory Tree spread outwards from the underground water veins to all corners of the Land of Fire, each hair-thin vine wrapped with his chakra. "If you don't call me by my name, I'll create a shadow for you," he whispered to the mountain wind, his Adam's apple bobbing as if he were swallowing something burning.

Meanwhile, in a snow-covered village 300 miles away.

The north wind whipped up a corner of Kazama Shin's coarse cloth scarf, revealing his ear tips, which were red from the cold.

He squatted at the door of the woodshed, watching three children holding pine torches and casting the shadows of rabbits and foxes onto the snow wall with their hands.

The youngest girl suddenly tilted her head and crossed her hands into a cross shape: "Teacher, teacher, doesn't this look like the character 'quiet' that you taught?"

The pine branches crackled and sparked.

Kazama Shin's fingers unconsciously dug creases into his trouser leg—"Shizuka" was the "Shizuka" of Fujiwara Shizuka, a name he had secretly written on his sleeve when he was a copyist at Shige.

Three days ago, he received a letter from the "Songjing Society" saying that someone was writing the erased names with green mist at the incineration site. At this moment, looking at the swaying hand shadow on the snow wall, something suddenly made a "ding" sound in his temple.

"Ah-He, go and bring out all the old lanterns from the ancestral hall." He stood up abruptly, his sheepskin boots leaving deep imprints in the snow. "Ah-Mei, borrow ten sheets of oil paper from your father, the biggest ones." The children shrank back in surprise at his suddenly raised voice, but then he squatted down and drew in the snow with his frozen fingers: "Tonight we'll play a big shadow play, using a hundred lanterns to spell three words on the gable wall—" He pressed his fingertips heavily into the snowdrift, "Fujiwara Shizuka."

Chapter 984 This shadow resembles the way he looked when he bowed his head.

When the first lantern was hung on the old locust tree at the village entrance, beads of blood had already seeped from Kazama Shin's palms.

He climbed the ladder and stuffed cotton wool soaked in cassava flour into the lantern, so that the firelight would be softer and the shadows wouldn't flicker.

Villagers from the foot of the mountain arrived one after another, carrying lanterns. There were hunters carrying wine jars, women holding swaddled babies, and even blind Granny Chen, supported by her grandson, brought over her ancestral bronze lamp.

“Teacher, what if the people from the Shige see these words…” The hunter’s voice caught in his throat.

Kazama Shin didn't turn around, continuing to add cotton wool into the lantern, the firelight making his eyes look red: "They burn paper, we burn shadows."

The ashes of paper can be swept away, but the shadows can climb all over the entire gable wall.

The mountain wind at night whipped up snowflakes that stung my face, but it couldn't extinguish the light of hundreds of lanterns.

When the first row of hand shadows formed the character "藤" (vine) on the gable wall, Granny Chen's bronze lamp suddenly swayed—a few green lights floated out of the lamp oil, like stars scattered by the wind.

Kazama Shin didn't notice that he was raising his hands, together with twenty villagers, using their shadows to spell out the final stroke of the character "静" (jing, meaning stillness).

The words on the gable wall are crooked and twisted, yet they are clearer than any name carved on a stone tablet.

At the same time, on the third basement level of the Fire City History Museum.

Fujiwara Shizuka scratched blood marks on the stone wall of the water prison with her fingertips.

She had been submerged in neck-deep ice water for three days, her eyelashes covered in ice crystals, yet she could still see the green mist seeping from the cracks in the rocks above her head—those were the spores of the White Night.

Suddenly, ripples spread across the water around her feet, and something crawled up her ankle—a thin, almost transparent vine—and gently touched her frozen, purple wrist.

She suddenly opened her eyes wide.

The green light on the vine flickered, and images of the shadowy words on the wall and the rising and falling voices in the snow flashed through her mind: "Fujiwara Shizuka!" "Fujiwara Shizuka!"

The ancient well in the City of Fire is said to be haunted at dawn.

It was the first time Ah Fu, who sold soy milk, had gotten up so early. He squatted by the well to draw water, and as soon as the wooden bucket sank, he heard a "thump".

Ripples spread across the water, but instead of his face, they reflected a crooked "藤" (vine) character.

He loosened his grip, and the wooden bucket fell into the well with a clatter.

Old Zhang from the rice shop next door rubbed his eyes as he came out to empty the chamber pot. Just as he placed the copper basin against the wall, he saw shadows crawling all over the brick wall, as if someone had used countless hands to spell out the two characters "Yuan Jing".

The secret agent from the Shige Pavilion knocked on the Speaker's door at dawn. "There are shadow characters on all twelve ancient wells in the city, even on the broken walls of the dilapidated temple in the West Market..." The agent's words were interrupted by the Speaker's slamming of the table.

The speaker loosened his collar, his Adam's apple bobbing: "Investigate!"

Take away everything that can reflect a shadow!

Lanterns, bronze mirrors, water basins—"He suddenly stopped, his gaze sweeping over the 'Detailed Tax Records of the Land of Fire' on the desk," and "and these official documents sent to various places, making the tax officials examine them page by page!"

Ren Onodera paused on the ledger with his pen.

She crouched behind the innermost wooden shelf in the archives and, using the light from the ventilation window, copied the "Nanjun Tea Tax List" onto the back with invisible ink.

The ink was made with firefly powder, so it was invisible during the day but could be seen as pale green characters under moonlight at night.

She copied quickly, ink stains under her fingernails, but her ears were perked up like a cat's—the sound of leather boots came from the corridor; it was the Sternberg inspection team patrolling.

"Is the third truckload of official documents ready?" The supervisor's voice rang out from outside the door.

Onodera Ren's hand trembled, and the ink smudged onto the words "shadow double" with a small dot.

She quickly closed the ledger and stuffed it into the bottom of her briefcase—it was to be sent to the most corrupt tax office in the North.

Those officials only looked at the total number; once they stamped it, they stuffed it into the warehouse, which served as a coffin for the tattered scrolls.

As the last ledger was sealed into the wooden box, Onodera Ren touched the silver hairpin hidden in his hair.

The hairpin head was empty, and there was still half a tube of invisible ink left inside.

She watched the briefcase being carried away, a very soft laugh escaping her throat: "If you want to erase her name, I'll sew it into everyone's accounts."

As the night wind of the Land of Fire swept through the battlements, Byakuya sat on a withered tree in the burning field.

He gazed at the green mist drifting from the direction of the City of Fire and sensed that Shin Kazama's shadow play had already penetrated the underground water veins through spore signals.

The chakra pulse in the underground water dungeon suddenly intensified, as if someone had tapped on the stone wall underwater in response.

He reached for the puppet strings at his waist, his fingertips touching the newly carved patterns—marked on the gears with kunai, like a blank human silhouette.

The sound of the night watchman striking the gong came from the foot of the mountain. He looked at the lights shining from the bookstore in the distance and said softly, "It's time for the truth to grow bones from the shadows." The withered branches at the burning site made a soft cracking sound under Bai Ye's feet.

He lowered his eyes to stare at the green light dancing on the vine in his palm—it was Fujiwara Shizuka's response coming through the stone wall of the water prison, the chakra pulse wrapped with an icy tremor, but it was three times clearer than it had been three days ago.

The puppet strings at his fingertips suddenly trembled slightly. He listened intently, and a faint scent of osmanthus drifted in the wind, coming from the direction of the East Market Bookstore in the Fire Capital.

"That Tanaka guy has finally made his move." He chuckled softly, leaping onto a withered tree with his toes, his gaze piercing through the night to the scattered lights within the city walls.

The charcoal stove in the back alley of the bookstore was crackling loudly.

Tanaka Hisashi's rolled-up sleeves were covered in sawdust, and the knuckles of his right hand, gripping the chisel, were white from the force. His left hand rested on half a grayish-blue city brick—a blurry human figure had been carved in the center of the brick, like ink washed away by rain, with the words "There used to be a name here" crookedly carved below.

"Shopkeeper, Uncle Zhang has brought his daughter." The apprentice lifted the curtain, and a cold wind swept in half a withered leaf.

Tanaka looked up and saw a hunched old man standing at the alley entrance, holding a faded cloth bag in his arms, followed by a young woman in a coarse cloth skirt, with tear stains still hanging at the corners of her eyes.

“This is my Ah Hui.” The old man shakily opened the cloth bag, revealing a half-chipped wooden plaque. “Ten years ago, her husband was labeled a traitor by the Shi family. His grave was plowed up three times, leaving not even a tombstone…” The woman suddenly knelt down, her fingertips gently tracing the human figure on the brick. “Every night I dream of him standing at the gate of the courtyard, but no matter how I call him, he doesn’t respond… This shadow looks like the way he looks when he bows his head.”

Tanaka Hisashi's chisel fell to the ground with a "clang".

He knelt down, took the woman's trembling hand, and pressed it against the brick: "Tomorrow the moon will be full. Hold the lamp up to the wall—the shadow will move."

The commotion in the back alley woke up the secret agents patrolling the night.

Three men in black darted out from the street corner, their short knives clanging against the brick wall: "Gathering to carve contraband!" The lead agent swung his knife at the pile of bricks, sending shards of gray dust flying, but each shard made a soft "hiss" as it hit the ground—from the cracks in the bricks, thin green vines, each tipped with a tiny bud the size of a grain of rice, burst open with a "snap" in the wind, revealing the tiny characters "Fujiwara Shizuka" inside.

Chapter 985 An Examination of Contemporary Morality

"Sorcery!" The spy took two steps back, knocking over the charcoal stove. Sparks landed on the vines but failed to ignite.

Tanaka Hisashi bent down and picked up half a brick with vines attached, smiling softly at the moonlight: "What you're smashing isn't bricks, it's people's hearts—with each smash, the truth takes another root."

The cold wind from Thundershadow Cliff whipped up snowflakes that lashed against Bee's headband.

He leaned against the rock wall with one hand, looking down at the huge silhouette carved into the stone by the ninja with his chakra blade. A cold, hard smile appeared on his lips: "The cowards of the Land of Fire are afraid of being called out by name, so let's call out the shadows."

"Lord Raikage, it's finished." The Jonin in charge of carving stepped back two steps. The figure on the stone was ten feet tall, and the edges of the outline still had the starlight left by the chakra blade.

Bi waved his hand, and the prepared ANBU lit ten chakra lamps. The dark blue beams shone directly on the figures, casting pale blue shadows on the clouds.

The anomaly occurred at midnight.

The first to exclaim was the medical ninja on night duty: "Look at the clouds!" Everyone looked up and saw that the originally single shadow was splitting, layer upon layer, gradually revealing eyebrows, eyes, and clothing patterns from the blurry outline, and finally gathering into a dense mass of human figures, like dandelions scattered by the wind, yet stubbornly clustered above Raikage Cliff.

"It's...it's them." A sob suddenly came from the crowd.

A retired ninja with graying hair knelt in the snow, covering his face with his hands, tears seeping through his fingers. "Back then, I participated in the shadow puppet experiment and burned three copies of the historian's register... But I remember, there was a girl who always bit her pen when copying books, and an old man who liked to add osmanthus to his ink..." He raised his head, the tear tracks on his face frozen into ice crystals. "These shadows in the clouds are exactly the same as the faces in my dreams."

As he gazed at the group of figures in the clouds, his Adam's apple bobbed.

He reached out and caught a snowflake, the chakra in his palm slightly warm—those shadows clearly contained fragments of chakra that did not belong to any ninja, like a sigh suppressed at the bottom of a history book, finally breaking through the pages.

More green mist seeped from the stone walls of the Fire Country's underground water dungeon.

Fujiwara Shizuka dug her nails deep into her palms, watching the water stains slowly gather into a line of small words on the wall: "Outside, someone is speaking up for you." Her eyelashes were still covered with ice crystals, but she laughed out loud. The laughter crashed against the walls of the water prison, startling the spores in the cracks in the stone above her head, causing them to fall down in a flurry.

She touched the stone wall and used her frostbitten, cracked fingertips to carve "thank you" stroke by stroke.

Before the ink was dry, ripples suddenly surged at her feet—it was Bai Ye's vines that had crawled in along the underground water veins, gently wrapping around her wrists and drawing the inscription of the two characters into the vines.

The next morning, the water carriers of the Fire City screamed by the well.

Ah Fu, who sells breakfast, looked up while wiping his copper pot and saw that the watermarks on the rim of his pot formed the word "thank you." Old Zhang, who sells rice, lifted the rice jar and found the same words imprinted on the pile of rice at the bottom. The most outrageous thing was the high wall of Shige, where watermarks seeping from the gray brick seams formed the words "thank you" neatly, as if someone had drawn them stroke by stroke with a brush dipped in dew.

At this moment, a thin crack appeared in Speaker Scott's crystal mirror.

He stared at his distorted face in the mirror, and suddenly felt a chill on the back of his neck—at the edge of the reflection in the mirror, a pale white female figure had appeared, her long, wet hair plastered to her back, her fingertips slowly rising and pointing to the jade pendant on his chest.

"Who allowed you to exist!" He grabbed a paperweight and smashed it against the mirror, shards of glass scattering all over the floor.

But when he shakily picked up the broken piece of mirror, he saw a drop of blood on the mirror surface, which revealed a line of small words: "If you don't name names, I'll keep following you."

The dead trees at the burning site rustled in the dead of night.

Byakuya sat cross-legged among the branches, and the dangling puppet strings suddenly became heavy—it was Fujiwara Shizuka's chakra pulse, flickering like a candle flame blown out by the wind.

He squinted and looked towards the basement, sensing that the ice in the water prison was thickening, and the cold poison was seeping into her heart and lungs from her ankles.

"Can it still hold on?" he asked softly to the wind, his fingers unconsciously tracing the humanoid markings on the puppet strings and gears. "Don't rush, wait until the shadow has grown enough bones..."

A few withered leaves were swept past his shoulder by the wind, carrying a faint scent of blood—it was coming from the direction of the basement, mixed with the smell of ice shards and rust.

Byakuya's knuckles tapped softly on the puppet strings' gears, a metallic taste rising in his throat—a warning that Fujiwara Shizuka's chakra pulse had completely shattered into stars.

He looked down at his palm, where vine-like chakra throbbed beneath her skin like snakes; it was the ice from the water prison drilling into her heart along her blood vessels.

The people at the Smithsonian were faster than he thought; what they wanted was not a corpse, but complete annihilation, crushing even the last sigh beneath the frozen ground.

He removed the original wrist guard from his wrist; the bronze patterns gleamed coldly in the moonlight.

The original spore crystals embedded on the inside of the wristband had shattered into pieces the size of fingernails. These were the last living things cultivated by the First Hokage using the essence of Wood Release. They could take root and grow in any medium, including the ashes of history books, the cracks in stone tablets, and even the wrinkles in people's hearts.

“This is the only thing we can use.” He breathed out white mist onto the crystal, his fingertips tracing the fine lines on its surface as if caressing the back of some living creature, “to plant the words into the soil for her.”

The ceramic bell was made from fragments of pottery left over from the incinerator. He sealed the crystals into the bell's core and then used puppet strings to carve a crooked "no" on the bell's surface—this was the sharpest response he could think of after Fujiwara Shizuka carved "thank you" in the water dungeon.