Konoha: Superman template, the spoiled brat becomes strong.

Kazama Shin's pupils contracted slightly as he pulled a palm-sized wooden plaque from his pocket.

The wooden plaque, pitted and uneven, was engraved with the number "K12," but had no name. "I found thirty-seven like this in the cracks of the orphanage walls." He pressed the plaque onto the blood-stained ink bead. The instant the blood touched it, a child's innocent voice suddenly filled the air, as if drifting from afar: "We are materials, not people..."

A chill ran down Bai Ye's neck.

He had seen the Otsutsuki's experimental log; "materials" was what they called the containers.

Kazama Shin's Adam's apple bobbed, and he pulled out a second wooden plaque. This time, the child's voice was clearer, tinged with tears: "My mother said I'm superfluous..."

Chapter 1038 'The One Who Bears the Pain'

"Enough!" Bai Ye grabbed his wrist, but the moment he touched the wooden plaque, all the plaques suddenly began to vibrate.

They sprang from Kazama Shin's arms, lined up in mid-air, and blood ink flowed across the cards, spelling out a line of words: "Find K08, he was the first to say 'no'."

Kazama Shin's breathing suddenly became rapid.

He recalled the old news from the purge conference twenty years ago—a cleaner tore up an execution order in front of thousands of people, shouting "I am not a tool," and then disappeared without a trace.

Later, all records were erased, leaving only the old people's private stories: "The child had a vine-shaped scar on his wrist, as if it had been gnawed by some living creature."

"I'm going to the North." Kazama Shin suddenly stood up, putting the wooden plaque into his inner pocket. "There's an old guard there who was in charge of destroying the K08 files. He said, 'That kid's scar will heal on its own.'" He patted Bai Ye's shoulder, his cloak catching a gust of wind. "Go to the dungeon and find Lian. She left a blood talisman in your pocket."

The third passage of the underground water prison was colder than I had imagined.

Ren Onodera's wooden clogs rolled through the puddles, the echoes striking the damp stone walls like someone crying.

She pulled out the map Tanaka had given her; the edges of the parchment were wrinkled from being damp and bubbly—to the left of the third passage, under the seventh brick lay a memory trap.

"Ding--"

When the sound of the copper bell exploded from above, Lian's breath hitched.

She looked up, and suddenly ink seeped through the wall, blurring into a picture of a little girl with pigtails, standing on tiptoe to tie the wooden clogs for the young boy. "Aya, the cherry blossoms at the shrine are in bloom today." The girl's voice was sickeningly sweet, but the young boy looked up, his eyes like two stagnant pools of water, unfocused.

Lian's fingertips dug into her palm.

She had seen photos of Bai Ye as a child, where he would cry because his candy was taken away, and he would secretly put wild berries into her teacup.

The "childhood" before me, with its empty eyes, is clearly a distorted memory.

"Be good, Aya." The girl in the picture (presumably young Fujiwara Shizuka) cupped the boy's face. "When you grow up, you can go to the altar in place of your brother."

“In place of my brother…” Lian repeated the sentence, when suddenly she tasted rust in her back teeth—she bit her tongue.

The excruciating pain brought her to her senses, and she immediately drew the blood talisman from her waist and slammed it against the wall: "Break!"

The moment the flames erupted, a crack appeared in the wall.

By the firelight, Lian saw the engravings on the stone gate: the left side was the bloodline of Fujiwara, and the right side was the blood of those who knew the truth.

She took out her hairpin and pulled off the small jade bottle at the top—it contained Bai Ye's blood from when she was injured half a year ago, which had long since congealed into a dark red hard lump.

"I'm sorry." She slashed her wrist with a dagger, and blood dripped into the left groove; then she dissolved the blood from the jade bottle in her saliva and smeared it into the right groove.

The stone door creaked open, and as it slowly opened, the stench of rotting blood assaulted the senses.

On the stone platform in the center of the blood pool, Fujiwara Shizuka lay on her back.

Her white dress was soaked in blood, and a fragment of a bronze bell was stuck in her chest, the same pattern as the brand on Bai Ye's left shoulder. "Kill him..." her lips moved, her voice like a leaky bellows, "Kill Ye Ming... and A-Ba will live..."

Lian rushed over and grabbed her wrist.

Fujiwara Shizuka's pulse was so weak it was almost undetectable, but her fingertips were burning hot, as if a fire was burning inside her. "Who is Hachi?" she asked, leaning close to her ear, only to see Fujiwara Shizuka's pupils suddenly focus, staring intently at something behind her—

"You came..."

The ruins of Guiyuan Shrine resembled a colossal beast in the twilight.

Bai Ye squatted by the Blood Ink Pool, the tattered swaddling clothes rippling across the surface.

He found this in the shrine's cellar; the corner of the cloth was embroidered with the words "Night Light," and it had been burned and carefully mended.

The blood-red ink suddenly boiled.

The image that appears on the surface of the pool is: a baby being placed into a glass tank, and another identical baby being carried toward the crematorium.

As the flames licked the second baby's feet, he suddenly turned his head, his eyes looking exactly like Bai Ye's.

"Live for me..."

The lip reading was so clear it was as if it were right next to his ear.

Bai Ye's tears fell into the pool of blood, shattering the images.

He then realized that his left hand had been pressed against the brand on his left shoulder—the temperature there was strangely similar to the crematorium furnace in his memory.

"Are you here to fulfill her wish?"

When the sound came from the mountain path, Bai Ye did not turn around.

He could hear the sound of leather boots crushing gravel and smell a faint scent of blood and rust, the distinctive odor of the Scavenger, mixed with the chakra corroded by blood ink.

The man in the gray robe stopped three steps away.

He wore a half-bronze mask, his exposed chin taut, and a section of skin slipped out from his sleeve—covered with vine-like scars, as if something alive was wriggling beneath the skin.

“She’s determined to kill you,” his voice was hoarse, with a metallic scraping sound, “because your survival proves that she killed her own child.”

Bai Ye's breath hitched.

He remembered Fujiwara Shizuka crying in the dungeon, saying, "You are not my child," and he remembered the entry in the diary he found: "The ninth experiment failed."

It turns out that the real Ye Ming was the one who was sent to the crematorium as a "failure," and he... was the substitute.

"And what about you?" Byakuya gripped the Wood Release seed tightly, but didn't release any chakra. "Who are you?"

The man in the gray robe raised his hand, his fingertips tracing the edge of his mask.

In the twilight, the vine-like scar on his cuff suddenly moved, as if vines were stretching out under his skin.

“I was the one who watched her push her own child into the crematorium,” he said, “and the first scavenger to say ‘no’.”

The wind blew in through the gap in the shrine ruins, lifting the hem of the gray-robed man's clothes.

Bai Ye saw the corner of his mouth move under his mask, as if he was smiling, or as if he was in pain.

You should call me...brother.

As the gray-robed man's fingers gripped the edge of the bronze mask, Bai Ye heard the sound of his own Adam's apple bobbing.

The moment the mask was lifted, the twilight seemed to be torn open—the face was covered with bluish-purple vine-like cracks, with a dark red tinge deep within the cracks, as if something alive was churning beneath the skin, and even the roots of the eyelashes were wrapped with tiny vines.

"Does it hurt?" Bai Ye was surprised to find that her voice was as hoarse as a rusty lock as soon as she asked the question.

Aoba touched his cheek, the tendrils trembling slightly at his fingertips. "It hurt at first, but now..." He twitched his lips, the crack opening and closing. "Like roots growing on bones, it doesn't hurt anymore." He sat down by the pool of blood ink, the setting sun casting their shadows together. "Thirty years ago, the Fujiwara twins, Yoru was the older brother."

Bai Ye's left hand uncontrollably touched the brand on his left shoulder.

Memories suddenly surged—the two characters "Yeming" on the swaddling clothes, the baby turning his head in front of the crematorium furnace, it turned out that his older brother was looking at him.

“The parents had to save one child,” Aoba Hachi’s knuckles pressed against the edge of the blood pool, “and they chose the younger brother.”

While the wet nurse was carrying me to the stove, I changed my swaddling clothes. "He lifted his sleeve, and the veins under his skin on the inside suddenly swelled, with densely packed small characters seeping out from the cracks," but Chiyo didn't let me die.

She planted the Blood Ink Vine into my bones, saying it was a 'Pain Bearer,' capable of enduring the backlash from the erasure of memories for her people.

Chapter 1039 This is not an inheritance, it's a curse

Bai Ye stared at the wriggling handwriting, and a few names suddenly burned his fingertips—they were "Experiment 07" and "08" that Fujiwara Shizuka had repeatedly crossed out in the dungeon's diary.

“They thought I was erasing my memories,” Aoba Hachi’s voice was as soft as a sigh, “but actually I was swallowing them.”

Before cleansing a target with chakra, he first infuses their memories into his veins. "He opened his hand, and a string of light suddenly floated up in the blood pool," he said. "Look, when your mother cried in the water dungeon, saying 'You're not my child,' I was three meters above her head, swallowing her cries of 'Amin' into my bones."

The blood pool suddenly trembled violently.

In the secret room, Onodera Ren's fingertips dug into his palm.

She stared at the vine veins in the monitoring crystal, her pupils reflecting the small words on Qingye Ba's arm—the frequency of those vine strands pulsating completely overlapped with the memory wavebands she measured at the roots of the Blood Ink Vine.

"It wasn't a container after all, it was a recorder." She slammed her hand on the array plate. "Memory Binding - Origin Tracing Array!"

Suddenly, the ruins of the underground water dungeon glowed blue, and countless points of light emerged from the cracks in the ground, forming images in the air: a figure in a scavenger's gray robe squatted on the scorched earth, his fingertips pressing into the soil, and vines sprouting from his sleeves and embedding themselves in the charred tree roots; in another scene, he stood in front of the burning ancestral hall, his arms outstretched, and vines covered the dying wooden plaque like a net, the two characters "Village History" on it curled up by the fire.

“He’s doing reverse storage.” Onodera Ren’s voice trembled as she grabbed the blood-ink pen from the table and scribbled wildly on the parchment scroll. “The Eighth Cleaner isn’t a Cleaner, he’s…”

"It's a crack."

The voice came from outside the door.

Tanaka Hisashi stood at the door, holding a stack of yellowed paper rolls. His eyes were red and his knuckles were still stained with ink. “It’s a letter from Kazama Shin from the snowfield. It says that K08 once used vines to protect the memory monument of the entire village.” He unfolded the paper rolls. The top page read “The Cleaner Paradox Notebook.” “I’ve pieced together all the clues—the real cleaner never cleans.”

Three days later at dusk, lanterns suddenly lit up at the entrances of alleys in the three southern cities.

The inspector's torch shone on the lantern, and the three characters "Qingye Ba" were written crookedly on the paper.

He pulled out a kunai and punctured the lantern, sparks flying onto the faces of the people. He saw that those who were burned just stood there woodenly, his chakra probing into their minds—there were no inflammatory memories, no residual waves of forbidden techniques, only a vague thought of "wanting to remember someone."

"What crime is this?" The old woman picked up the burnt lantern bones, her withered hand stroking the charred "eight" shape. "We don't even know what he looked like, can't we remember?"

Beneath the Hokage Rock in Kumogakure, Bi clutched the secret report that had just been delivered.

The edges of the parchment were still damp with snow, and the writing was blurred, making only the last sentence barely legible: "The high-level meeting mentioned the 'Ending Agreement,' implementation time..."

He looked up at the clouds dyed red by the setting sun, and a faint scent of ink wafted in the wind, much like the smell of newly copied notes in an underground bookstore.

The broken pillars of Guiyuan Shrine cast long shadows in the twilight. Baiye's fingertips hovered above the back of Qingye's hand, which was covered with vines, as if he wanted to touch it but was afraid of shattering something.

His Adam's apple bobbed. The stars he had counted on the eaves of the shrine over the past thirty years, the secrets hidden in the wood-elemental vines, and the word "Nightfall" that burned repeatedly in his nightmares every night—all of these suddenly flooded his eyes. It turned out that the shadow that had always been faintly visible on the edge of his memory, the one who had shielded him from the flames, had been here all along, living for thirty years in this body that was being gnawed by the vines.

"Brother." He finally spoke, his voice as soft as snow falling on unburnt ashes.

Suddenly, a warm light emanated from the veins of Aoba Hachi's vines, and the small, blood-stained characters jumped out in strings beneath his skin: "Night Light," "White Night," and "Younger Brother."

He raised his hand and touched the brand on Bai Ye's left shoulder with his fingertips wrapped in vines. "Back then, the wet nurse said that when 'Young Master' cried, it sounded like a cat meowing, and I knew I had made the right choice." As he smiled, a clear tear seeped from the crack in the vine at the corner of his eye. "Later, before each memory cleansing, I would first press my memories into the deepest part of the vine roots—afraid that one day the vine veins would break and I would even forget the name 'Bai Ye'."

A muffled sound came from underground, and spiderweb-like cracks appeared on the surface of the blood pool.

Inside the secret room, Onodera Ren's blood-ink brush snapped in two with a "crack".

She stared at the memory waves that suddenly surged in the monitoring crystal, her fingernails digging crescent-shaped marks into the array plate—the previously suppressed light points were now expanding outwards geometrically, like someone throwing boulders into a deep pool. "Shizuka!" She whirled around and flung open the door, only to see a ghostly blue light rising from the direction of Fujiwara Shizuka's cell. "It's a seal reversal!"

Deep within the dungeon, Fujiwara Shizuka knelt beside the pool of blood.

The bronze bell fragment on her chest had sunk into the mechanism slot, and the dark red chakra was flowing back along the engraving, tearing the incantation that had originally locked away her memories into pieces.

The maid's report still buzzed in her ears: "The lanterns at the entrance of Sancheng Alley are all lit up. The people say 'Qingye Ba' is a name that can walk..." She looked down at her reflection in the pond. Blood trickled down her cheeks and into her mouth, tasting of rust, but she laughed out loud. "So it's not the sacrifice waiting to be remembered, but the act of remembering itself that saves the sacrifice." She raised her hand, her fingertips tracing the countless "Experiment 08" marks she had crossed out on the wall. "I've been carving 'This name is invalid' for ten years, and now I understand—a name never needs to be valid; it only needs to be spoken to come alive."

At the top of the Hokage Rock in Kumogakure, his hand, clutching the secret report, trembled. The words "Final Agreement" were like red-hot nails driven into his retina. He could imagine the scene when the blood-ink nodes buried beneath the five countries were detonated: the memories of millions of people would be swept away like pages by a hurricane, leaving not even ashes.

He took a deep breath, suppressing his emotions deep within his chakra—at this moment, he was the proxy shadow of the Hidden Cloud Village and had to be calmer than anyone else.

When the door to the high-level meeting opened, he wore his usual serious expression: "Gentlemen, I agree to activate the agreement."

Sparse applause rang out in the conference room, and the elders' gazes swept across his face like searchlights.

Bi lowered his eyes to adjust his cuffs, the data from the reverse-tracking device on the scroll inside his sleeve was getting hot—he had stolen it using the Cloud Concealment Secret Technique "Lightning Pattern Copy" while his chakra resonated.

After the meeting, he bypassed all the guards and sneaked into the lowest level of the prison dungeon.

The old doctor's body had long been removed, but dark red bloodstains remained in the cracks between the bricks.

He stuffed the scroll inside and used a kunai to carve crooked words on the wall: "Go find the name that can walk." After carving the last stroke, his fingertip brushed against the brick surface, the blood mixed with the newly carved marks, like a twisted flower.

The tremors at Guiyuan Shrine grew increasingly violent.

Byakuya could feel the ground beneath his feet rumbling; it was the Wood Release seed awakening.

He handed the seed to Qingye Ba, and the vines sprouted from between his fingers, wrapping around the golden veins of the seed: "You said the vine veins are where the fire seed is hidden, now it's my turn to plant it."

Aoba Hachi's vine veins suddenly contracted, as if resisting something. "This isn't inheritance, it's a curse." He shook his head, drops of blood seeping from the cracks in the vine falling onto the seeds. "I've lived for thirty years, bearing the stigma of being a 'cleaner' for Chiyo for thirty years, just so no one else will walk this path."

Chapter 1040 Don't be afraid of pain, pain is proof that you've lived.

“But you’ve come out.” Bai Ye grasped his hand, Wood Release chakra flowing into the vine veins. “You turned the vine veins into a recorder, and the ‘scavenger’ into a crack, so why can’t I turn it into a bridge?” He gazed into the distance—Onodera Ren led the villagers running towards them, Tanaka Hisashi held up “The Scavenger Paradox Notebook” until his voice was hoarse; Bee’s black horse trampled the setting sun, and Kazama Shin stood on the hillside holding “The Lost Names,” the seal on the spine fluttering in the wind. “You see, you’re not the only one hiding names.”

Now that everyone has become a cleaner, who still needs to be cleaned up?

Aoba Hachi's eyes suddenly reddened.

He gazed at the surging figures, at the "Night Light," "White Night," and "Azure Leaf Eight" swirling within the vine veins, and suddenly smiled. "So pain really can be passed on..." His body began to transform into specks of light, and the small characters within the vine veins broke free from their restraints, drifting towards the sky, "For me... call out this name a few more times."