In the darkness of Feiyu's inner world, a colossal black book floated slowly up and down.
It was pitch black, yet somehow still seemed to shine with black light—a presence you just couldn't ignore.
Beneath that black tome, on the altar, more than a hundred streams of black gas—some thick, some thin—were coiling and twisting. These were the spoils Feiyu had gathered over this recent stretch of time.
Some came from missions he'd carried out for Root.
Some came from the Cloud ninja he'd butchered on the current front line.
In sheer quantity, this haul couldn't compare to what he'd farmed on the Sand front.
But in quality? They were vastly superior.
Targets chosen by Root almost never had less than special-jōnin level strength. The Cloud vanguard also didn't field anyone below Chunin. Compared to the grab-bag of cannon fodder back in the Sand war, these souls were several grades higher.
Feiyu had long suspected that the Demonic Inheritance Tome didn't just care about how many offerings he gave it—but also how good they were.
Right now, with a handful of Cloud powerhouses staring his way, he felt far from safe. So he'd decided to trade this batch of sacrifices for something practical—another trump card to keep himself breathing.
At a turn of his will, the black gases beneath the tome surged wildly, then streamed upward into the book.
The massive black volume shuddered twice, and a surge of brand-new information poured into Feiyu's mind.
"Break-Evil Blade…?
This time it's giving me… a method to forge a magic weapon?"
This sacrificial request, Feiyu had been very specific.
Whatever he got had to deal with Lightning Chakra Mode–style defenses.
It needed to be something he could master quickly.
The result… was this weapon refinement method. Not a new secret art for himself, but a way to "upgrade his gear."
Stripped of the fancy explanation, the Break-Evil Blade basically boiled down to one thing:
You imbue a weapon with a "break-evil aura" that can damage energy and souls directly.
After studying it for a while, Feiyu realized something:
"So this so-called Break-Evil Blade is basically a knockoff of that famous demonic weapon, the Heavenly Net Blood-Melting Divine Blade…"
It was like this:
You're up against a master of Japanese iai swordsmanship.
Instead of teaching you some deeper ancient style, your "teacher" hands you a Glock and tells you:
"Go use American Iai and solve the problem."
Same vibe.
In practical terms, a properly forged Break-Evil Blade could ignore protective 'true energy'–type defenses. Any wound it inflicted would tear both flesh and soul, making recovery extremely difficult.
Was it strong? Yes.
Was it insane by demonic standards? Not really.
Among true demonic artifacts, this thing was pretty low-tier. Effect-wise, it wasn't leagues above some of the more famous ninja blades.
And "knockoff" was being generous, honestly. Compared to the Heavenly Net Blood-Melting Divine Blade, this thing was off by about… eighty thousand miles.
No "Heavenly Net" trickery.
No "Blood-Melting Divine" horror.
Just a practical, brutally specialized tool.
"I was hoping for a new cultivation path…
But yeah, anything that can solve Lightning Armor in a short time is probably way above what this batch of sacrifices can buy."
Still, its targeting was perfect.
This thing was practically hard-counter gear for any "chakra armor" style, especially Lightning Chakra Mode.
Exactly what he'd asked for.
With that in mind, Feiyu sank deeper into the forging method for the Break-Evil Blade.
As a classic demonic artifact, the core refining material was very simple:
Souls. Lots and lots of souls.
He just hadn't expected the Tome would hand him a full refinement method so cleanly.
To forge a Break-Evil Blade, the requirements were:
360 souls,
plus one high-grade weapon as the base.
Then you annihilated those 360 souls, using the malign aura produced at the moment of soul-destruction to condense a mass of "break-evil qi" and infuse it into the weapon.
And there you had it—a Break-Evil Blade.
Once you started using the blade to kill, the break-evil aura would continue to grow stronger, further amplifying its soul damage and its ability to cut through stronger and stronger "protective qi"–type defenses.
Of course, like any ordinary artifact, there was an upper limit. But for Feiyu's current problem—two Raikage wrapped in Lightning Armor—it was more than enough.
According to the description:
Even a freshly forged Break-Evil Blade was enough to easily pierce the Fourth Raikage's Lightning Armor.
And once it had been "fed" a few hundred lives and reached full power, even the Third Raikage's vaunted "strongest shield" would be about as sturdy as wet paper in front of it.
"Not quite what I imagined…
But once this thing is done, the Cloud's threat to me basically drops off a cliff."
"Best of all… it's actually not that hard to make."
He already had a top-tier weapon on hand: the retractable Kusanagi sword that Orochimaru had given him.
The Break-Evil method called it a "blade," but the instructions were clear: as long as the base weapon was of sufficiently high quality, it didn't matter whether it was a sword, saber, spear, or whatever. The break-evil qi would merge just fine.
So of course, Kusanagi qualified.
As for souls… that was a non-issue.
With Summon-and-Condemn the Souls under his belt, Feiyu's soul inventory had already blown past four digits. Sacrificing 360 was pocket change.
With both the method and the materials ready, Feiyu wasted no time.
In a single night, he had already reforged Kusanagi into a Break-Evil Blade.
Or well… "Break-Evil Sword" might be more accurate now, but the name was just a label.
The reforged Kusanagi didn't look particularly different at first glance.
It was only if you stared that you'd notice a faint, cold, chalk-white sheen sliding slowly over the blade, like a film of frost that made your heart twitch.
Feiyu narrowed his eyes, gathered a lump of pure chakra in his palm, and laid the blade upon it.
That thin white sheen flickered.
The chakra cluster melted like snow hitting boiling broth—gone in an instant.
Next, Feiyu activated the incomplete Lightning Chakra Mode he'd stolen from the Cloud spy, forming a thin Lightning Armor over his arm.
He brushed the Kusanagi's blade against it.
The Lightning Armor collapsed on contact.
"Earth Release – Earth Flow Wall!"
A solid wall of earth rose up before him. Feiyu swung the sword down.
The wall split open with a deep, jagged crack—but it didn't crumble entirely.
"So it only hard-counters pure energy defenses, huh?
Looks like physical Earth and Water barriers are still based on actual matter. Kusanagi can't just erase those."
"Next up… soul damage test. Summoning Technique!"
A puff of smoke—Feiyu summoned a large snake, then casually slashed its tail.
The blade carved a deep, bloody gash.
The snake screamed, body twisting violently, coiling up in agony as it thrashed. In the end, Feiyu had to lock it down with Sharingan genjutsu just to keep it still.
"So because it damages the soul too… the pain is way higher?"
With that hypothesis in mind, Feiyu switched to Medical Ninjutsu, laying his glowing green hand over the wound.
Normally, a cut like this would close up almost instantly.
This time, though, the flesh crawled back together slowly—then started to show signs of collapse again.
A wound that should have taken less than a minute to heal ended up eating over two hours of his chakra before it finally closed.
Even so, the big snake's body continued to twitch, its vitality visibly drained and weakened.
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