Konoha: Superman template, the spoiled brat becomes strong.

"Lian," he whispered, his knuckles turning white from the force.

If he rushed directly to Konoha, his speed would allow him to provide timely assistance, but it would also expose his trump card of manipulating the earth's veins; but if he left it unattended... His gaze swept over the reviving vines at his feet, and he suddenly remembered the hint in Fujiwara Shizuka's Blood Ink Scroll from the other day: "The lamp of the Shige cannot illuminate the roots beneath the earth."

“Aoba no Kami’s remnant consciousness is still in the earth veins.” He quickly formed hand seals, and Wood Release chakra burrowed into the ground like a living thing. “Fujiwara Shuichi’s memory fragments… Yes, fuse them!” A muffled sound came from the depths of the earth veins. He forcibly fused Aoba no Kami’s remnant consciousness, which was obsessed with the truth, with Fujiwara Shuichi’s memory fragments of recording the shadow puppet’s secrets, and injected them into Konoha in reverse through the underground waterway.

In the underground waterways on the border of the Land of Fire, the ashes of the Blood Name Talisman, which had been deposited for twenty years, suddenly trembled.

They drifted with the current toward the leaves, and as they passed beneath the Pavilion of History, they suddenly rose up and coalesced in the air into a line of blood-red characters: "The officials are not guards, but controllers."

Inside the archives, the gray-robed keeper was approaching step by step.

The first person stretched out her hand, and the Wood Release chakra gathered at her fingertips resonated with the crystal ball fragment. Onodera Ren could clearly feel the fragment getting hot, as if it was trying to break free from her palm.

"The person in charge is not a guardian, but a controller—"

Suddenly, a sound of a stone slab cracking came from above.

A line of blood-red words pierced through the ceiling, like a sharp blade stabbing at the feet of the gray-robed man.

The two men trembled violently, their faces turning deathly pale beneath their hoods.

The first to speak staggered backward, knocking over the bookshelf behind him: "This is... the First Prohibition! He said back then that if anyone uses the name of the Keeper of the Codex to manipulate things, the Blood Name Talisman will manifest itself..."

opportunity!

Ren Onodera bit his tongue, and blood mixed with chakra sprayed onto the vines.

The vines suddenly grew rapidly, coiling around the neck of the nearest gray-robed figure like red snakes. She took the opportunity to crash into the left wall—behind that wall were the ventilation ducts of the archives, which she had explored with Aoba before.

Chapter 115 Number Eight, Already on the Way

"Bang!" Amidst flying stone chips, she fell into the narrow pipe, and the crystal ball fragment in her hand cracked open again from the impact.

By the moonlight, she glimpsed a figure rising from the center of the fragment—a girl in a dark uniform, whose features were seven parts similar to hers, but whose blood-ink mark on her forehead was a few parts deeper.

"This is... number eight?" She gasped for breath as she stuffed the fragment into her bosom. Vines grew wildly behind her, blocking the pursuers' path.

Only after confirming that she had shaken off the pursuers did she dare to touch behind her ear—the blood-ink vines there were burning hot, a location signal from Bai Ye.

Beside the broken pillar at Guiyuan Shrine, Byakuya catches the fragment thrown by Onodera Ren.

Under the moonlight, Number Eight's blurry face gradually became clear, and his pupils contracted slightly: "He looks a lot like you."

"Who is she?" Onodera Ren touched the fragment, the blood and ink on his fingertips touching the patterns on the fragment, creating a faint glow. "The First Generation said that the 'Alternatives' are descendants of experimental subjects erased during the First Generation's time... Could it be that I am with her..."

“The voice of the First Hokage.” Bai Ye suddenly pressed his hand to his chest, the core of his Wood Release pulsating erratically. “He said, ‘You are not the only one, the spark can be moved’…” His gaze passed over the ruins and landed on the distant, rolling mountains, where five faint blue lights echoed the starlight in the sky. “They want to change the wick?”

Suddenly, the green vines from the ground wrapped around his wrist, and chakra seeped into his skin, as if testing his will.

Bai Ye looked down at the vines, a cold, hard smile playing on his lips: "Then let them see that an old wick doesn't necessarily burn dimmer than a new one."

Before the words were even finished, the foundation of the shrine suddenly cracked open.

A blinding blue light shot into the sky, merging with the starlight in the skies of the five kingdoms, as if responding to some ancient call.

Meanwhile, in the water dungeon beneath the City of Fire, Fujiwara Shizuka's blood-ink scroll was slowly crawling along the stone wall.

At the bottom, in the blank space, a line of blood-red text slowly appeared: "Number Eight, is on its way."

The musty smell of the underground water dungeon of the Fire City, mixed with the stench of blood, filled his nostrils. Fujiwara Shizuka curled up on the damp straw mat, her eyes fixed on the blood-ink scroll that was writhing on the stone wall.

The last line, which had just emerged, read "Number 8, on its way," and before it had fully solidified, it began to ripple with the cold water seeping from the cracks in the stone.

The blood ink on her fingertips suddenly became hot, like some kind of warning—just like three years ago, when the Keeper of History first used "Memory Purification" to erase the truth of the "Shadow Replacement" she had recorded, the blood ink also burned to remind her that danger was approaching.

Beside the broken pillar at Guiyuan Shrine, Baiye's fingertips dug deeply into his palm.

He could clearly sense the tremors in the core of the Wood Release technique—an abnormal signal coming from the earth's veins.

The "Blood Name Talismans" of the five nations were originally a resonant flame set up by the First Hokage to commemorate the blood and tears of the "Shadow Substitutes." But now, they are like candle flames whose lifeblood has been seized, gradually extinguishing in a certain pattern.

The first place to be extinguished was the mountain god temple outside the Hidden Cloud Village in the Land of Lightning; the second was the hot spring inn in the Hidden Stone Village in the Land of Earth; the third… He closed his eyes and concentrated, his Wood Release chakra spreading along the earth's veins. Suddenly, he encountered an extreme cold, which, like an ice snake, roamed between the inns of various countries. Wherever it passed, the fragments of people's memories remaining in the earth's veins were being gnawed away and shattered.

“Ren.” He turned to look at Ren Onodera beside him, whose blood-ink vines behind her ears had turned a ghostly blue—a sign that her consciousness was about to leave her body. “Go and find the source of that ice serpent. Remember, don’t let him discover your blood-ink properties.”

Ren Onodera's breathing suddenly quickened, and she could feel her consciousness beginning to slip away from her fingertips, like a dandelion seed being blown away by the wind.

As she floated up in spirit form, the ruins of the Guiyuan Shrine rapidly shrank beneath her feet, and in the blink of an eye, she swept past the rooftops of the Fire City, speeding towards the Land of Lightning.

Under the moonlight, she saw a gray-clad man standing on the roof of the post station where the first "Blood Name Talisman" had been extinguished. His back looked like a crumpled, swirling shadow.

When he raised his hand, a cold light flowed from his fingertips. The moment it touched the talisman, the scarlet color that symbolized memory silently turned to ash, leaving not even ashes.

"Memory is sin, erasure is salvation."

The whisper suddenly exploded in Onodera Ren's ears in his spirit form, causing his consciousness to tremble violently.

She tried to get closer, but was knocked back by an invisible force field—the force field contained the suppression of Wood Release and a kind of purifying chakra she had never encountered before, like a piece of transparent ice, freezing the edges of her spirit body with white frost.

She recalled the crystal fragment in her arms, on which the face of number eight bore a striking resemblance to her own. At this moment, the fragment, in its spirit form, was also emitting a faint glow, as if responding to the presence of the gray-clad man.

In the hidden chamber of Sunagakure, Chiyo's fingernails dug deeply into the edge of the parchment scroll.

She had just turned to the last few pages of the "Blue Leaf Project," where, on the yellowed pages written in secret fire, were the words: "One Purifier, codename 8, duty: If the spark goes out of control, erase memories and return to silence. First Hokage, Hashirama Senju's seal." The old woman's pupils contracted sharply, her withered fingers tracing the words "Purifier," recalling Ebi's cold laugh from the other day in the cell: "You think abolishing the Shadow Clones can save Sunagakure? Some secrets, even the Kazekage has no right to know."

"Send a message to the Land of Fire." She snapped off the coral hairpin in her hair and stuffed the broken jade into the bamboo tube on the carrier pigeon's leg. "Tell Byakuya that Number Eight is the First Hokage's personally appointed memory cleaner. His chakra contains the essence of Wood Release, and ordinary sealing techniques cannot contain him." She turned and walked towards the dungeon, followed closely by her puppeteer disciple carrying silver sand and thin steel wire. "Turn Ebizo's cell into a 'Memory Chain Array.' Mix the yellow sand with the silver wire, and I'll let that cleaner taste what it's like to be devoured by memories."

In the underground bookstore of the South Market in the Fire City, Tanaka Hisashi's hands were trembling.

As soon as he opened the newly copied "Collection of True History", he saw that the corner of the page with the words "shadow" was rolled up as if by an invisible hand, and the ink was like melting wax, slowly seeping into the back of the paper.

He hurriedly threw the book into the brazier, but the flickering flames did not contain the usual illusory images of erased memories; there was only a mass of dead ashes.

“Impossible…” He grabbed the blood-stained ink from the desk and splashed it on the wall. The dark red liquid had just revealed “Fujiwara Shuichi”—his deceased wife’s name—on the brick when it was frozen by a chill. The plaster peeled off with a “crack,” and tiny ice crystals were embedded in the fragments.

“The name won’t disappear unless we shut up.” He bit his index finger and wrote the sentence on the charred page, his voice trembling with anger.

Before he could finish speaking, a faint creak came from the roof beams above his head.

Chapter 116 Memory is a Crime

He looked up and met a pair of icy blue eyes—the gray-clad man was standing on the beam, moonlight filtering through the skylight and casting a long, narrow shadow at his feet, which just covered the blood-red words on the burnt paper.

“Memory is a sin.” As the man spoke, his breath condensed into white mist in the cold air. “You should thank me.”

At the same moment, behind the broken pillar of Guiyuan Shrine, Onodera Ren's spirit suddenly trembled violently and returned to its place.

She clutched her chest; the blood-ink vines behind her ears were growing at a visible speed, and the blood droplets seeping from the tips of the vines condensed into tiny runes in the moonlight—a plan she had come up with on the spot, using her own blood ink to disguise herself as a "blood name talisman."

She looked at Bai Ye, whose core of Wood Release had calmed down, but the cold light in his eyes was even stronger.

“He’s here.” Bai Ye looked towards the direction of the City of Fire, where a streak of pale blue light was flashing across the horizon. “But this time, it’s our turn to implant memories in him.”

Ren Onodera reached for the vine pouch at his waist, his fingertips touching the still-wet blood ink inside.

She knew that as soon as dawn broke, a string of "blood-stained names" would appear under the eaves of the South Market—names of her blood, her memories, and her resentment.

Moonlight spilled over the mottled eaves of the South Market, turning the bluestone pavement silvery-gray.

Ren Onodera crouched down against the wall, the blood-red vines behind her ears creeping up her collar and into her sleeves, the ends condensing into needle-sized runes in her palms—a "pseudo-fire seed" she had mixed with her own blood and the secret art of sand concealment.

Just as the sound of the clapper at three in the morning swept past the street corner, she heard footsteps, like a thin sheet of ice rolling over snow, so light it almost melted into the wind.

She held her breath, and the vines trembled slightly inside her sleeve.

The shadow of the gray-clad man climbed the wall first, colder than the moonlight. As he turned the corner of the alley, ice crystals from his hair fell softly onto the "Blood Name Talisman"—a string of talismans woven from vines that hung under the eaves, the blood ink on its surface still carrying the lingering warmth of her body.

“Memory is a sin.” Qingye Ba’s voice was like an ice pick. When he raised his hand, the cold light from his fingertips pierced the night and precisely touched the talisman in the center.

The change happened in an instant.

Suddenly, the vines sprang up, and the dark blue branches, covered with drops of blood, wrapped around his wrist. The blood ink climbed along the lines of his skin, leaving a pattern on the back of his hand that was exactly the same as the one behind Onodera Ren's ear.

Aoba's pupils contracted sharply, and he took a half step back, crashing into the brick wall. The vines on his wrist tightened more and more, as if a living thing was drilling into his veins.

“You’ve erased so many people’s memories,” Onodera Ren emerged from the shadows, the moonlight illuminating her tightly pursed lips. “But have you erased your own?” She raised her hand and pulled open her collar, revealing faint, matching patterns on her collarbone. “We are all ‘Aoba bloodlines’ cultivated by the First Hokage using Wood Release. Your so-called mission is nothing more than the shackles he carved into our bones and blood.”

Aoba Hachi's Adam's apple bobbed, and cracks appeared in his icy blue eyes.

He tried to break the vines with his purified chakra, but the blood ink seeped into his skin through the wound, outlining blurry images on his arm: the swaddling clothes he was carried into the secret room as an infant, the seal his mentor placed on his forehead, and the little girl who cried out "Mommy" when his memories were first erased.

“No…” He staggered backward, the cold light at his fingertips flickering. “I was just fulfilling a mission…”

A coded signal of Konoha-style short flutes came from the direction of Guiyuan Shrine, three long and two short.

Ren Onodera knew that it was a setup between Byakuya and Chiyo.

She gripped the vine tightly, and the blood-red ink suddenly burned—this was the pre-arranged signal to "close the net."

A sliver of sunlight shone through the ventilation shaft of the old Sunagakure mine, illuminating the nine terracotta golems.

Chiyo sat cross-legged behind the pile of stones, her withered fingers wrapped with fifty silver threads, each connected to a mechanism on the back of the puppet's neck.

When Aoba Hachi's figure appeared at the entrance of the mine, she flicked her wrist, and dark red liquid suddenly seeped from the eye sockets of the first puppet—it was the blood of the one whose memory had been erased, mixed with the lingering resentment before death.

"Purifier, taste what it's like to be devoured by memories." Her voice, mixed with the clicking of the puppet's joints turning, echoed through the mine.

As soon as Aoba Hachi's fingertips touched the first puppet, the other eight suddenly trembled simultaneously.

The cries of the "stand-in" boy he had erased, the sighs of the old woman whose name had been wiped off, and the unfinished poems in the destroyed historical records flooded into his mind like a tide.

He staggered to his knees, clutching his head with his hands, his fingernails digging into his temples until they bled: "Stop! This pain... isn't mine!"

"No, it's yours." Bai Ye emerged from the depths of the mine, his Wood Release roots spreading from his feet, wrapping around Aoba Hachi's arms without exerting any force. "The First Hokage used Wood Release to seal away the pain of the five nations, and then created you, the 'purifier,' to erase the pain. But he forgot that pain doesn't disappear, it only shifts—you bore the pain for all those who were erased, becoming the last spark."

The roots suddenly tightened, and Aoba's struggles gradually weakened.

He looked behind Bai Ye, where pale green Wood Release chakra was seeping from the eye sockets of the nine puppets, indicating that sealed memories were being reborn.

"So... I wasn't a cleaner, I was..."

“They are the ones who bear the pain,” Bai Ye said softly.

He raised his hand and placed it between Aoba's eyebrows. The Wood Release: Tree Heart burst forth from the ground and slowly enveloped the young man.

A newly carved name appeared on the tree trunk: "Aoba Hachi, the purifier, and also the one who bears the pain."

The broken pillars of Guiyuan Shrine cast long shadows in the twilight, and Baiye closed his eyes to sense the earth's veins.

The "Blood Name Talismans" of the five nations are burning anew. This time, the flames are no longer a fragile scarlet, but a vibrant blue-green imbued with the life force of Wood Release, burning more intensely than ever before.

Inside the water dungeon, Fujiwara Shizuka used her blood-ink brush to make the final stroke on the wall.

The newly drawn totem is eight intertwined vines, each topped with a flickering flame.

The blood-red words at the bottom are congealing: "The flame will not be extinguished, for the pain will not cease."

Onodera Ren stood beside him, holding a crystal fragment. A pale pink mist seeped from the cracks in the fragment—the last vestige of Aoba Hachi's memory before he was sealed away.

"Will the next candidate come?" she asked.

Bai Ye gazed at the horizon, where a flock of birds flew by, their wings stirring up a breeze that carried a faint, almost imperceptible, aura of Wood Release.

“Those who came were not the candidates,” he said, his voice carrying a tenderness he himself was unaware of, “but more people who were unwilling to remain silent.”

Suddenly, vines from the ground brushed against his ankle, as if saying goodbye.

He looked down and saw the blood-red vine that had once entangled him was slowly retreating into the soil, with several new shoots emerging from its roots, so tender they seemed to burst with moisture.

Chapter 117 South Market

On a distant mountain peak, a green shadow loomed faintly in the twilight.

The person stood in the wind, a newly sprouted vine leaf cradling in their palm. The veins of the leaf shimmered golden-red in the setting sun, and upon closer inspection, they faintly formed two words: "I...remember..."

On the broken pillar of Guiyuan Shrine, a new carving has appeared at some unknown time.

The evening breeze swirled up withered leaves, brushed past Bai Ye's shoulder, and carried his whispers to a farther place: "Pain will be passed on, memories will grow... and we are just beginning."

As the evening breeze carried fallen leaves past the broken pillars of Guiyuan Shrine, the vine leaves at Baiye's fingertips suddenly trembled slightly.

He looked down and saw that the leaf he had brought back from the mountaintop was shimmering with a golden-red light. Eleven faint chakra lines burrowed into his body through his palm—it was an unusual movement from the earth's veins.

"I see." He chuckled softly, his thumb slowly tracing the lingering words on the leaf: "My name is not recorded, but I remember."

The veins of the vines unfolded automatically as his chakra probed in, much like eyes that had been closed for a long time suddenly opening.

Unlike the oppressive life force of the First Hokage's Wood Release, this wisp of chakra was so clear and sweet that it subtly repelled the seal on the First Hokage's bloodline at the back of his neck.

“No mark.” He murmured, and the wood-elemental threads at his fingertips suddenly condensed into green buds, growing along the leaf veins.

As the bud tip touched the heart of the leaf, several muffled thuds came from afar—the Blood Name Talisman on the border of the Land of Fire was spontaneously combusting.