Chapter 289: Mission; A Bountiful Harvest
Haruno Sakura ascended the stone steps of the mountain path.
This path was lined with the crooked, low-lying houses built by the bandits themselves. The bandits didn't know how to build houses, only how to destroy them. Therefore, even the rooms they lived in were a mess.
However, right now, what was also in a mess were the bodies of the bandits on the ground.
These bandits, who had burned, killed, and looted, and had committed all kinds of evil, Sakura had no pressure in finishing them off—not only was there no pressure in battle, but there was also no pressure psychologically.
According to the moral standards of the ninja world, for her to kill them so cleanly with one blow was already very merciful.
For these scumbags.
These people, they had at least three or four innocent lives on their hands. Perhaps a white crow could occasionally appear among the black ones, but Sakura clearly did not have the time or the effort to identify them one by one. Anyone who could mix in with a bandit's den couldn't be all that innocent.
Therefore, they all deserved to die.
At first, they had swarmed up. Then they had begun to scatter and flee.
But for the girl, it made no difference. A slash of her long sword, and a field of people fell. Her fingers danced nimbly, and the blood on the ground, under the control of her chakra, turned into ice shuriken, instantly annihilating those who had turned to flee.
In just a few short seconds, this group of bandits had been completely wiped out.
The girl raised her head. The leader of the bandits was standing at the top, indifferently watching as she casually killed this group of villains.
"You're not going to save them?" she asked, raising her head.
Judging from his chakra, he was a rogue-nin, at most at the level of a Tokubetsu Jonin.
"Those people deserved to die. Why should I save them?" he said.
"You're not much better than them," Sakura sneered.
"No, at least in one thing, I'm stronger than them," the leader said with a confident smile.
"Oh?" Sakura's eyebrow rose, and she looked at his figure and asked curiously.
From the girl's angle, the sun was right behind the bandit leader's body, and the sunlight cast a golden edge on his silhouette.
The leader's tall figure immediately looked even more imposing.
He slowly placed his hands flat in front of his chest. This was not the usual hand seal posture. Sakura's delicate brows moved slightly. While curious, she became vigilant in her heart.
A hand seal posture I've never seen before... could it be some secret technique?
Then, the bandit leader suddenly bent his waist and dropped to the ground, shouting, "Fierce Landing Pose!"
—And then he suddenly knelt down, prostrating himself on the ground!
"I surrender! I beg you to spare my life! I can give you one million! No, it's two million! My entire savings is only two million, I'll give it all to you!" he shouted, kowtowing like he was pounding rice.
So the so-called being a little stronger than them meant that he knew when to fold better than them?
Sakura immediately rolled her eyes.
The man rustled as he fumbled from deep in his clothes, from who-knows-where, and took out a bankbook and a piece of paper. He crawled over while still kneeling. "Look, all my money is here. As long as you're willing to spare my life, I'll tell you the password. There's over two million in the card!"
Haruno Sakura watched him crawl over with a half-smile.
She watched as he held up the bankbook in his hand and unfolded it under her eyes. Then, in the instant the bankbook blocked the girl's gaze, his figure shot up. "Die!" he roared, and at the same time, he flipped out a kunai hidden in his palm and stabbed at Haruno Sakura's heart!
As expected, it's this trick.
Haruno Sakura sneered.
The long sword in her hand had already pinned him to the ground a step earlier!
A clean and neat one-hit kill.
"Next time, before you surrender, please try to restrain your killing intent first, you idiot... if you still have a next time!" The bandit's body gradually stopped twitching. Sakura said coldly.
She checked and found that she hadn't missed anything.
"Hn, mission complete," she nodded. "I can report back to the original."
As she spoke, she dispelled the ninjutsu and turned into a pile of ice blocks on the spot. Very quickly, the ice blocks melted into water and disappeared into the soil.
At the same time.
Within a radius of several hundred kilometers from Sakura's temporary base...
The figure of the pink-haired girl was still active in various places, carrying out the various missions on her list.
Annihilation.
In a city in the Land of Fire. A long-established yakuza family was walking towards the final moment of its history.
Swish, swish, swish! The loyal family guards were cut down by the girl with a few slashes.
Clang, clang, clang! The few shuriken that had been randomly shot were casually parried by the newcomer.
Wherever the tip of her sword pointed, no one could stop her. The newcomer, at an extremely fast speed, had slaughtered them all.
In the blink of an eye, only the last core members of the family were left.
"You, you're a demon!" Seeing the ninja mercilessly slaughtering the outer thugs, the inner courtyard's death-sworn, and the clansmen around him, someone cursed as if he had lost his mind. "You bastard, you actually killed them all!"
A mocking arc formed on the girl's lips.
"Oh? When you were killing those innocent people, did you ever think of this sentence?"
A sword light flashed, and several heads flew up at the same time.
The next day, the entire city celebrated.
Assassination.
Somewhere in the Land of Rice Paddies, in the home of a nobleman.
The head of the household, who was leisurely taking a nap in a recliner, a figure suddenly appeared in front of him.
"A Konoha ninja?" He looked at the forehead protector on the girl's forehead and suddenly smiled with relief. "You've finally come."
The ice blade did not leave him much time and swiftly inserted into his chest.
In his dying moments, the scenes of his life flashed by like a revolving lantern: growing up in Konoha, becoming a ninja; becoming a deserter on the battlefield out of fear; fleeing to the Land of Rice Paddies, he found that a nobleman's son looked very much like him, so he had killed him and had taken his place...
Just like that, he had lived in fear and guilt. In these dozen or so years, he hadn't even had a peaceful sleep...
When Haruno Sakura had appeared in front of him, he had not chosen to struggle, but had calmly accepted his fate.
"I can finally get a good night's sleep..." he closed his eyelids, a peaceful smile on his face, as if he had fallen into a deep sleep.
The girl shook her head, put his body into a scroll, wrote the name "Rogue-nin: Fujiwara Aoi," and disappeared from the hall.
Escort.
"Thank you so much!" the client said, vigorously shaking the girl's hand, his voice full of excitement. "I heard that this road is difficult to travel and is full of bandits. I originally thought it would take three or five days, but I never thought we'd get here in just one day! The ninja of Konoha village are really amazing!"
Sakura pouted.
I, a ninja who ranks in the top five in the village in terms of combat power, am personally carrying out these mid-level missions. How can it not be fast?
What's more, the bandits inside have just been cleared out in the previous mission.
"Alright, the mission is complete. I should be disappearing now," she said, pulling her hand out and speaking calmly. Then she directly dispelled the clone.
She turned into a puddle of broken ice in front of the client's dumbfounded expression.
Reconnaissance.
Search.
And so on and so forth.
It had only been just over a year since Haruno Sakura had been promoted to Chunin. The number of missions she had completed had not even met the special approval requirements for promotion to Jonin. So these missions now were just a matter of rushing to complete them and make up the numbers.
With her strength, to do these missions, apart from the one related to the Akatsuki, most of the time it was overkill.
Fortunately, she could use ice clones to complete the missions.
Ever since she had started practicing the Yin Release nature transformation of chakra, by applying the Yin Release affinity to her ice clones, she could greatly strengthen their spiritual power and extend their duration. In a situation where they didn't go through too much combat, they could even last for more than twenty hours without dissipating.
The ice clones cast in this way, although their combat power had not increased much, their practicality had been greatly improved.
Ice Style was originally a fusion of the two affinities of water and wind. Now, with the addition of the Yin Release nature transformation, it had begun to show its miraculous side. It was just like the Wood Style—the Wood Style of Captain Yamato, and the Wood Style of the First Hokage back then, which had been integrated with the Yang Release nature transformation, the difference in their power was simply the difference between a Bronze-tier and a Challenger-tier.
Unfortunately, this was all she could do for now. Yin Release and the other five elemental styles were completely different things. Just by relying on her own research, the efficiency was too low.
If she wanted to continue to study Yin Release in depth, she would have to be able to read the inherited secret scrolls of the Nara and other clans.
As for now, the biggest use of Yin Release for her was to improve the efficiency of her research and missions, and that was all.
In Sakura's temporary base.
It had been thirteen days since the first time she had extracted chakra from the newborn hearts into the Yin Seal.
It had also been nearly a month since she had left the village to carry out her mission.
"Are they atrophying this quickly?" Sakura frowned, looking at the hearts in the containers, whose vitality had greatly decreased, and sighed.
Since yesterday, these hearts had begun to show signs of their life force dissipating.
However, the rate of dissipation had been extremely low. She had thought that at that rate, these hearts could still last for a few more days. She had never expected that today, just after she had extracted the chakra from the hearts, the situation would take a sharp turn for the worse and rapidly deteriorate.
Of course, this was also understandable.
After all, every day, she had to drain all the vitality of these hearts. No matter how much they recovered afterwards, the lost vitality could not be replenished. This kind of method of "draining the pond to get all the fish" was never going to be sustainable. Sakura had expected this long ago.
It was just one day earlier than she had expected.
"It seems it's really over," Haruno Sakura tried to use medical ninjutsu to reactivate their life force, but the result was still futile. The hearts, which had been born for no more than two weeks, the cells inside had already aged as if they had lived for eighty years.
Unless she had the Yang Release attainments of Hashirama Senju, she was powerless to reverse it.
These hearts were collapsing at a rate visible to the naked eye. Haruno Sakura was powerless and had no choice but to give up on treating them. She pulled the blue, slender rod, which was condensed from her spiritual power, out of her palm. It split into branches, like a tree trunk, and connected with the blue rods inserted into the hearts. This beautiful-looking rod could be converted between a virtual and a real state. Before, when Sakura had inserted them one by one into the hearts in the containers, the part that was inserted into the heart had been transformed into a virtual body, and had not caused any damage to those hearts.
And next up was...
The most exciting harvest time.
Sakura was going to extract the chakra that had been stored in the Yin Seals on these hearts over the past few days and transfer it into her own body!
This was a huge amount of chakra energy!
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