Chapter 174: Spatial Node
After eating and drinking his fill, it was time to sleep.
And this time, he meant actual sleep—not anything else.
Li Yao flew five thousand meters into the air atop his massive clay bird.
Sleeping in high altitude always felt safer. Who knew if White Zetsu might be lurking underground watching him?
"Uncle… how did my mom… die?"
Curled up against Li Yao's side, Yuzu suddenly asked about her mother's death.
She hadn't asked when she first met Li Yao three years ago—back then, she hadn't had the courage to face it.
Now that she had a relationship with Li Yao and someone to lean on, she could finally confront the truth.
"She was sealed by the Reverse Four Symbols Sealing Technique."
As he spoke, Li Yao raised his hand and condensed chakra at his fingertip, forming a black ink-like energy—the signature of the Reverse Four Symbols Sealing Technique. Within it, one could sense spatial energy similar to his Black Water Space. This technique, too, was a form of spatial sealing.
When Ayase had released the Reverse Four Symbols Seal and a droplet hit Li Yao's face, he had copied its chakra.
Now, he could use it himself.
But using the technique required a vessel.
That vessel acted like a spatial node—a marker that stored whatever the Reverse Four Symbols Seal sealed within.
In theory, both Kushi and Ayase weren't truly dead… but it was almost the same.
Because Ayase—the spatial node for the seal—had also been sealed within that same space. Even if Li Yao could open the seal, he wouldn't be able to locate the correct node containing Kushi and Ayase.
Yuzu , who had studied Uzumaki sealing techniques from a legacy site over the last three years, clearly understood this.
Her heart darkened, and she fell silent.
Li Yao gently patted her shoulder, offering hope. "Any sealing technique can be undone. If you can thoroughly understand the Reverse Four Symbols Sealing Technique, I'm sure you'll find a way to save your mother."
"Really?" Yuzu immediately propped herself up, the weight on her chest pressing against him. Under the moonlight, her eyes sparkled as if she'd grasped a thread of hope. Her entire being radiated energy.
"Really," Li Yao nodded.
After all, even something as absolute as the Reaper Death Seal had been undone by Orochimaru through a loophole, reviving the Hokage Four from the belly of the Shinigami.
The Reverse Four Symbols Seal, too, had to have a way to locate the spatial node and break it—rescuing Kushi .
"Uncle, give me the scroll with knowledge about the Four Symbols Sealing. I want to study it—I want to save my mom!"
Receiving Li Yao's confirmation, Yuzu 's enthusiasm soared. She wanted to study Uzumaki sealing techniques right away, even in the middle of the night.
Li Yao pulled her down. "Sleep. Study tomorrow. Listen to me."
It was cold sleeping alone at night. With a beautiful woman he could trust beside him, why wouldn't he cuddle?
"Okay, hehe." Realizing Li Yao's fondness for her, Yuzu obediently hugged him tighter. To her, Li Yao's needs came first.
As for her mother… sorry, Mom—I'll wake up early to save you tomorrow.
The next morning—
Yuzu woke early—but instead of studying the Reverse Four Symbols Seal, she was investigating the natural "reactions" of early morning biology.
Li Yao was relatively calm—it wasn't really him who initiated—but Yuzu had already tasted the forbidden fruit and took the initiative.
After an hour, they finally descended from the sky.
"Here."
Li Yao tossed her a scroll from his Black Water Space. It contained all his knowledge related to the Reverse Four Symbols Sealing Technique.
It belonged to the same family as the Four Symbols Eight Trigrams Sealing Technique, with the same base formula—just a different configuration.
Once she fully understood the logic behind these formulas, she might be able to create a technique to unseal the spatial node.
Yuzu caught the scroll and began reading, even conjuring sheets of paper with Paper Release to experiment with formation and arrangement of the base symbols.
Li Yao wasn't idle either. After stripping down, he created three shadow clones to inscribe the Devouring Seal Array onto his body.
Over the past three years, Li Yao's clones and Yuzu had successfully managed to transfer the seal array to the human body.
The black inscriptions took shape across Li Yao's skin like tattoos—but more than that, they seemed fused with his flesh, impossible to distinguish where flesh ended and ink began.
Soon, the Devouring Seal Array was complete.
With a thought, Li Yao channeled one-third of his chakra into the seal for storage.
"It's huge. Should be able to store at least a full Nine-Tails worth of chakra."
The array opened a special chakra space inside his body—like a dantian, but far larger.
His current chakra core could already store several thousand "cards" worth of chakra.
The Devouring Seal Array's storage could hold over 100,000 cards—possibly even a million—with ease.
"With this, I'll never worry about running low on chakra again."
Li Yao smiled faintly, then reclined on an ink-formed chair and began refining his spiritual chakra.
He kept the three clones active.
One focused on refining genjutsu chakra—making it more elusive, more subtle, and harder to detect or resist.
Li Yao firmly believed that high-level genjutsu was nearly unstoppable, so he wouldn't give up developing it.
Another clone refined his storage chakra, the Black Water Space's unique chakra.
After copying the Reverse Four Symbols Seal chakra, Li Yao saw the possibility of turning Black Water Space into a black hole-like sealing realm.
His idea was to use the Reverse Four Symbols' sealing logic and assign the Black Water Space as the target node, so the seal could swallow anything directly into that space.
If he succeeded, Black Water Space would need to be large and strong enough to withstand chakra-based attacks from whatever was sealed inside.
So its chakra needed to be much stronger.
The last clone was experimenting with using an ink bird as a substitute node.
It first summoned a bird, then infused it with the Reverse Four Symbols chakra.
Li Yao aimed to use the ink bird as the carrier of the seal. Once detonated, it would act like a black hole bomb—sealing everything within a ten-meter radius.
If developed successfully, and combined with his massive chakra reserves, not even Madara or Hashirama would be safe from it if caught off guard.
It would be his trump card.
Li Yao would never use it lightly. The clone would continue developing it in secret.
Given his current chakra sensing and sealing technique mastery, creating a new spatial node to replace a human body was entirely possible.
Each clone had its task—each worked to raise his strength.
Li Yao himself focused on perfecting the Transformation Technique.
(END CHAPTER)
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