Konoha: Superman template, the spoiled brat becomes strong.

Ren Onodera stopped in his tracks.

She crouched down and gently touched the lines on his palm with her fingertips.

The lingering warmth of the blood array crept up his skin, and Bai Ye suddenly shivered—among the overlapping heartbeats, one sound was particularly clear, like a wooden fish being struck on bones, “thump, thump, thump.”

“It’s Aoba Hachi,” she said softly. “The blood of those who bear pain holds all the erased memories locked within them, and you are awakening them.”

Bai Ye's Adam's apple bobbed.

He recalled the half-stone he had found in the underground water dungeon the day before, the blood-written words "My son Yeming" on the stone still burning hot.

A mother's warmth is hidden in the heartbeats of so many strangers.

He finally couldn't stay awake that night.

In a daze, I was pulled into a gray fog, where hundreds of shadows formed a circle, with a man in a gray robe standing at the front.

His face was like a painting washed clean, yet his features made Bai Ye's heart tighten—it was Qingye Ba, the cleaner who had once used his fingertips to poke into his temples and erase his memories.

“You don’t have to walk this path for me,” the gray-robed man said, his voice like sandpaper scraping against a stone slab. “But you must make this path so that it no longer requires sacrifice.”

Before the words were finished, all the shadows suddenly chanted in unison.

The prayer was like a fine needle, piercing directly into the top of Baiye's head—he understood it. It was the worn-down marks on the stone walls of the underground water dungeon, the sound waves that Fujiwara Shizuka poured into the water veins before her death, and the words Kazama Shin wrote in the "List of Lost Names": "We want to collect our debts."

"boom--"

Bai Ye sat bolt upright, his back soaked with cold sweat.

A sudden burning pain shot through his left shoulder. He ripped open his collar and saw that the plum blossom-shaped brand had somehow transformed into a vine-like coil, with dark lines moving beneath his skin like living earthworms.

He took out a short knife and pressed the tip against his skin.

As soon as the blood began to seep out, a strand of jet-black hair emerged from the wound—it wasn't his; the end of the hair was tied with a faded red string, it belonged to his mother.

When the hair was dipped into the blood-red ink of Onodera Renzo, golden patterns suddenly appeared on the threads.

It was a map of an underground palace, with the words "Site of the First Pain-Relieving Ritual" written on the corner, and a scarlet character "阵" marked at the deepest part.

“This is…” Onodera Ren leaned closer, her eyelashes brushing against the back of his hand, “a structural diagram of an underground water prison?”

But deeper, beneath the rock strata, lie three more layers. "Her fingertips moved along the patterns," she said. The ultimate form of the Memory Forging Eternal Inscription Array... requires seven people who have directly experienced memory collapse to perform the spell together, solidifying the memory into stone language.

“I’m going to Snowfield Village to find volunteers.” When she looked up, a fire burned in her eyes. “Kazama Shin said the villagers there have been gathering under the vines a lot lately; they might…”

The vines in Xueyuan Village are thicker than those at Guiyuan Shrine.

When Onodera Ren arrived, it was just getting dark. About twenty villagers were sitting around a vine, with a crackling bonfire in the middle.

The old woman's voice drifted over amidst the smoke from the firewood: "My eldest grandson's nickname is Gou Dan (Dog Egg). His name was erased by the street sweepers back then. Now I want him to be called 'Chen Nian' with dignity—remembering his ancestors and himself."

“Miss Ren!” Kazama Shin emerged from the crowd, holding a new copy of “The Lost Names”. “We’ve spontaneously formed a Name Preservation Society, and every night we take turns telling stories about our names.”

Look, this page is about Wang the blacksmith's daughter, and that page is about Li the hunter's father...

Ren Onodera reached for the array diagram in his arms.

She intended to unfold the blueprints directly, but the old woman suddenly came over and pressed her wrinkled hand against the back of her hand: "Girl, you are in a hurry to lock your memories into stone, but we have just learned how to live with pain."

The firelight reflected in the old woman's eyes, and within them was a flame just like her.

Onodera Ren suddenly remembered Fujiwara Shizuka's dying words, "It's warm to be remembered," and the vine pattern on Byakuya's palm.

She loosened the crumpled drawing and took out a charcoal pencil from her bosom: "Grandma, can you tell me the story of Dog Egg again?"

I wrote it down.

Inside the secret chamber of the Cloud-Hidden Tower, Bi stared intently at the painting on the table.

Saeki Hotaru's single eye was covered by a layer of white film, a wound left when her eye was gouged out years ago, but her hand holding the pen was as steady as a mountain: "The memory network diagram that Lord Kage wanted, marked with intensity according to the direction of the Blood Ink Vine."

The moment it unfolded, I gasped in shock.

The vines traced the outline of a giant human face, with its left eye in the Guiyuan Shrine, its right eye in the underground water prison, and its mouth facing the main blood ink node—where the memory sound waves that Fujiwara Shizuka had traded her life for were buried.

"Turn off the lights," Bi said suddenly.

The attendant blew out the candles, leaving only a small lamp on the table.

The face in the shadows suddenly moved—the corners of its mouth slowly turned up, like someone who had been asleep for many years finally waking up.

“This isn’t a map…” Bi pressed his finger to his brow. “This is a face that’s waking up.”

Outside the Burning Sutra Temple late at night, Tanaka Hisashi squatted down against the wall.

He carried rubbing tools he had smuggled from the underground bookstore, and the familiar smell of burning filled his nostrils—the smell of the family genealogy fragments being thrown into the fire.

At 11:45 tonight, the last batch of the "Tian Family Genealogy" will be destroyed.

He touched the short sword at his waist; the moonlight cast a long shadow, like a taut string.

The black tiles of the Burning Sutra Temple gleamed coldly in the moonlight, and Tanaka Hisashi's fingernails almost dug into his palms.

He pressed the paper against the old locust tree outside the courtyard wall, listening to the crackling sounds coming from inside the wall—the pitiful screams of tattered family genealogy pages curling up in the brazier.

The hilt of the short sword at his waist dug into his ribs, reminding him that he still carried in his bosom the "debt collection declaration" that Kazama Shin had copied overnight, the ink still wet and carrying the bitter scent of pine soot ink.

"Three, two, one." He counted softly to the blood-ink vine patterns on his cuffs, when suddenly a commotion erupted from the direction of the slums in the distance. "Give me back my father's calligraphy!" "Why are you burning our roots!" More than twenty young men rushed over, torches in hand, kicking over the stone lanterns at the courtyard gate.

Chapter 1043 Memory is Poison

The sounds of guards' swords clashing and night dogs barking mingled together. Taking advantage of the chaos, Tanaka Hisashi climbed over the wall. The sharp edges of the flagstones cut his knees, causing him to gasp in pain—but he smiled. The pain was much less than the pain of his family genealogy being burned.

The brass lock in the warehouse clanged under the short knife.

He rushed in in the dark, the musty smell mixed with the scent of sandalwood hitting him. The candlestick in the corner swayed as he bumped into it. In the dim light, stacks of family genealogies looked like trees stripped of their bark, the edges of the pages still bearing scorch marks. "Tian Family Genealogy... Li Family Records... Wang Family Records..." His throat tightened, his fingertips trembling as he flipped open the top book. The three ink characters "Tian Jiu'an" on the yellowed pages stung his eyes—it was his grandfather's name, erased by the cleaner with an eraser three years ago, leaving only faint dents.

"drop--"

A mechanical sound suddenly exploded overhead.

Tanaka looked up and saw two scarlet lamps lit up on the beam, and the sound of metal joints rubbing together came from all directions.

新型嗅觉傀儡！

He recalled the book "Record of Ninja Tool Improvement" that he had found in the underground bookstore the day before, and cold sweat instantly soaked his back.

The puppet's forked probe extended and retracted in the air, only three inches from the back of his neck—

"Ah!" He bit his tongue, and the sweet, metallic taste of blood sprayed onto his palm.

Following the coded rhythm recorded in "The Cleaner Paradox Notebook", he slapped the wall seven times in a row: light, heavy, light, heavy, light, heavy, heavy.

That was the frequency of the blood vessels in Aoba Hachi's arm throbbing when he performed the memory erasure, which was secretly recorded in a tattered page by an anonymous recorder.

The puppet's metal joints suddenly jammed.

The probe traced a distorted arc in the air, and a mechanical voice sounded intermittently: "Identify...K08...authority...access..." Tanaka Hisashi stared at the number on the puppet's eye—08, exactly the same as Aoba Hachi's "Eighth" scavenger codename!

He grabbed a stack of family trees and stuffed them into his clothes. As he burst through the wooden door of the storeroom, he saw the guards running toward him with torches in hand. The puppet, however, turned around and used its mechanical claws to knock down the nearest guard.

"Run!" he shouted toward the slums. The torches of the youths illuminated the family tree in his arms. Suddenly, someone raised his fist: "Look!"

Mr. Tian got it! The cheers of the crowd surged like waves, propelling him toward the alley entrance.

He didn't dare stop until he turned into an abandoned ancestral hall three streets away, where he leaned against a cobweb-covered pillar to catch his breath.

Moonlight streamed through the broken window onto the family genealogy. The three characters "Tian Jiu'an" glowed warmly amidst the bloodstains. He suddenly laughed out loud, tears falling onto the pages and blurring into a hazy circle.

The nights in the snowy villages of the north are much colder than those in the monastery where scriptures are burned.

Kazama Shin wrapped himself tightly in his coarse cloth cloak and squatted under the vines of the Name Academy.

The little girl with pigtails from earlier that day was squatting at his feet, writing on the frozen ground with the blood-ink vine juice. "Ah... Mother..." she wrote crookedly, and the vine juice suddenly seemed to come alive, extending along the strokes to form a line of small characters: "Don't be afraid of the dark, Mom is watching you from the bottom of the well."

Kazama Shin's breath hitched.

He remembered what the girl had said during the day: her mother "suddenly lost her voice" when she was three years old, and was later taken away by the cleaners and never returned. "The well..." He looked up at the abandoned well at the east end of the village, the moss on its edge gleaming a dark green in the moonlight.

The well water was bone-chillingly deep in the latter half of the night.

Kazama Shin gripped the tinderbox as he climbed down, his fingers numb from the water seeping from the cracks in the stone bricks.

The tinder went out with a "poof" when his toes touched the mud at the bottom of the well.

In the darkness, he touched a hard object—a skeleton, with a charred diary tightly clutched between its ribs.

“I am Chiho, the caregiver. I joined the company in 1924.” He read aloud by the rekindled tinderbox. “They say memories are poison and must be cleansed.”

But I saw an old woman crying while clutching her grandson's baby hair, and I saw a husband writing "Qingqing" on his wife's tombstone... How could these be poison?

I knew they would come to dig up my memories, so I planted myself here. "The last page's words were blurred with tears," if anyone sees this, please tell those whose memories have been erased—your names are remembered.

As Kazama Shin carried the skeleton in his arms and climbed upwards, dew wet his eyelashes.

He buried the remains in front of the school and made a simple tombstone out of vines.

The next day at dawn, he was squatting in front of the grave in a daze when he suddenly heard the little girl call out, "Teacher!"

The flowers are blooming!

It was a pale blue flower, with three words written on its petals in vine sap: "Thank you."

The mist from deep within the mountains dampened Bai Ye's bangs.

He stood before the stone gate sealed by vines, the veins on his palms burning hot, as if he were unlocking a door. With a "click," the stone gate slowly opened, and a damp wind carrying the smell of rust rushed out—inside was a dried-up ritual pool, the bottom of which was engraved with characters identical to the black hair in his body, each character seeming to breathe.

"white night!"

A familiar voice came from behind.

He turned around and saw Bi carrying the Cloud Village's lightning-patterned short sword, his forehead still damp with night dew; Onodera Ren's blood ink array swirling around his wrist, half a vine leaf wrapped around his hair; even Tanaka Hisashi, who had just escaped from the Burning Sutra Institute, still had his family genealogy book, which he hadn't had time to hide properly, tucked in his arms.

“We all dreamt of the same guidance.” Bi wiped his face. “We dreamt of a pool of blood, and someone said ‘the womb of memories.’”

Onodera Ren walked to the edge of the pool, his fingertips lightly tracing the engravings on the pool wall: "This is the core of the memory-forging array. All the erased memories settle here...like a fetus in the womb."

Before the words were even finished, the pool water suddenly surged.

Bright red blood seeped from the bottom of the pool, instantly covering everyone's ankles.

In the reflection on the water, Aoba Hachi's figure gradually became clear. His face was still like a painting washed by water, but it had gained a bit more warmth.

"Welcome to the womb of memories." His voice drilled directly into everyone's minds. "Now, it's your turn to choose—to be a clean cleaner, or a living person in pain?"

Bai Ye stared at the reflection on the water's surface.

In Aoba Hachi's eyes, there were the shadows of the millions of people he had seen eliminated in the underground water dungeon.

His fingertips gently traced the warm vine patterns on his palm, where the warmth of his mother's hair still lingered.

In the distance, ripples from the Blood Ink Pool reached his feet, spreading into a tiny flower at the tip of his shoe.

He suddenly reached out and drew a short knife from his waist.

The moment the dagger sliced ​​through his palm, Bai Ye heard his heart pounding like a drum.

The sound of blood droplets falling into the blood ink pool was amplified into muffled thunder, shooting out in all directions along the marks carved on the bottom of the pool—these were the vine patterns that his mother had wrapped around his wrist before her death, the memory codes that Fujiwara Shizuka had scratched out with her fingernails in the underground water dungeon, and the roots of the pale blue flower in front of Kazama Shin's grave.

Chapter 1044 Do You Know Your Crime?

"Are you crazy?" Bi's lightning-patterned short sword nearly hit the edge of the pool, the blade vibrating and sending sparks flying. "The Cleaner's ritual pool is stained with the blood of living people, it will turn the memories of the entire ninja world into mush!"

"So we have to let the paste settle on its own." Bai Ye clenched his fist, and drops of blood fell in lines, creating tiny whirlpools on the surface of the pool.

He gazed at Aoba Hachi's gradually blurring face in the reflection, recalling the skeletons in the underground water dungeon whose names had been erased—their memories should not be decided by a few cleaners. "Grandma's baby hair, her husband's 'Qingqing,' these things treated as poison should be chosen by those who remember them."

The blood-red ink suddenly boiled.

The dark red liquid swirled and solidified into a semi-transparent map of the five kingdoms. The forests of the Fire Kingdom, the sands of the Wind Kingdom, and the clouds of the Thunder Kingdom all floated in mid-air, with tiny specks of light dancing on every inch of land.

Onodera Ren's blood ink array suddenly began to flow spontaneously. She raised her hand to catch the speck of light that floated in front of her—it was a girl with her hair in two buns flying a kite. "This is... a memory of when I was three years old and got lost, and was found by the old man who sold candy?" Her fingertips trembled. "But I clearly remember growing up in an orphanage."

“Each point of light is a memory carrier that has been erased and then revived.” Bai Ye’s vines climbed from his palm to his arm, holding the map higher. “They are waiting for their owner to claim them.”

Before the words were finished, the Blood Ink Pool suddenly exploded into mist.

Crimson mist, wrapped in vines, bursts out of the stone gate, spreading along the mountain range, the river's course, and the roof tiles—like the kite string that Mother used to make for Little White Night with vines, trying to string together all the severed memories again.

Dawn the next day.

As Kazama Shin was adding fresh soil to a gravestone in the snowfield village, the dew in the corner of his eye suddenly stung.

He touched his forehead and felt a faint blue mark, like a curled vine leaf. "Teacher!" The little girl who had called him to see the flowers bloom yesterday ran over, her forehead also glowing with a blue light. "I dreamt of my mother last night. She taught me how to weave grasshoppers!"