"Feiyu, your luck is really something. Across the whole Hidden Cloud Village, there probably aren't even ten shinobi who know that jutsu."
Hatake Sakumo's soul circled excitedly around Uchiha Feiyu's side, his presence fluttering like a pale flame.
"I thought of countless ways back then to pry into the secret of Kumo's Lightning Release Chakra Mode. I even managed to capture one shinobi who'd been taught a partial version of it… but in the end I got nothing out of him.
"The brutes from the Hidden Cloud might be rough around the edges, but their loyalty to their own village is famous. Add in the sealing jutsu and curses in their brains, and pulling intel out of them is incredibly difficult."
"Don't worry, Sakumo-senpai."
Feiyu casually stored the Cloud spy's soul away, his voice full of confidence.
"Forget this incomplete Lightning Release Chakra Mode—one day I'll get my hands on the complete version too."
Worst case, once I learn Impure World Reincarnation, I'll just go to Kumogakure and do some archaeological grave-robbing…
Hatake Sakumo couldn't hear Feiyu's inner commentary. He thought his successor was simply fired up for once, and said with some satisfaction:
"Don't rush it. You're still young. The Third Raikage isn't someone simple—he's the only monster I ever met who could smother even my fighting spirit."
"I've heard his son inherited his mantle as well—and learned Lightning Release Chakra Mode too. Maybe one day you can test yourself against him."
The Third Raikage's fighting style was extremely similar to Sakumo's, practically a buffed version of the White Fang—at least in terms of piercing power and personal defense, the Third Raikage far surpassed him.
Shinobi of the same type were the easiest to compare head-to-head, and unfortunately, compared to the Third Raikage, Hatake Sakumo was outclassed across the board.
Feiyu had more tricks than Sakumo, sure, but in pure hard combat power, he was about on par with Sakumo at his peak. There was no way he could beat the Third Raikage as he was now.
Feiyu just curled his lip at Sakumo's misunderstanding and didn't bother to explain. He only wanted to go dig up graves; he'd have to be brain-damaged to fight that "one-man-army" monster head-on.
Titles like "strongest Third Hokage" or "strongest Third Kazekage" were full of water, but the "strongest Third Raikage"… that one might actually be legit.
Whether compared against the other Third Kage of the Five Great Villages, or against all the Raikage throughout history, the Third Raikage's performance clearly stood a head above the rest. At Feiyu's current level, he wasn't even sure he could successfully run away from that guy.
After finishing off Hattori Ichirō, Feiyu sliced off the man's head and sealed it into a scroll. Then he looked up at the ruined church around him and caught the faint sound of sobbing.
Two children who had been hiding under the table were now covering their mouths, trying to stifle their cries. Compared to the two companions who'd been blown to pieces, these kids were undeniably the lucky ones, but the shockwaves of the battle had still left them covered in injuries.
Feiyu frowned and walked over. The two kids trembled violently, scared half to death.
He didn't say much. He simply stretched out his hand; a pale green glow of medical ninjutsu bloomed in his palm as he slowly healed the wounds on their bodies.
"This money is my compensation to you… It's not a lot—too much, and you'll just wind up robbed for it. Anyway, just do your best to live on."
He pulled out a wad of bills—tens of thousands of ryō—and set it on the rickety table, then turned and left without looking back.
As for what might happen to those two kids in the end, Feiyu felt he'd already done as much as could reasonably be expected. He had no intention of worrying about them further.
"I didn't expect that from you…"
Sakumo's voice sounded softly.
"Seeing how coldly you dodged those human bombs at the start, I figured not killing those children yourself would already be pretty generous."
Feiyu's mouth twitched.
"I am selfish and self-serving. I'm not a good person. But I'm not some final-boss demon king either. Why would I bother killing kids like that if I don't have to?"
"Lots of shinobi like to 'pull out weeds by the roots'… Especially ANBU and Root. Most civilians who witness their operations are silenced."
"Heh. I forgot—you used to be ANBU Commander, didn't you? So even in Konoha, where the Will of Fire is supposedly sacred, this kind of thing still happens a lot?"
Hatake Sakumo's response to that was silence.
Feiyu let out a low chuckle.
…
The mission took him only two days to finish. He spent the remaining dozen or so days using the Fourth Kazekage's soul to fully merge his Wind Release and Earth Release chakra, thereby awakening the Magnet Release kekkei genkai.
The instant Magnet Release manifested, Feiyu could clearly feel his body and chakra transforming again—very much like the impact that awakening the Sharingan had brought.
First, his physical toughness and chakra levels both ticked up a notch, and his growth rate in those areas entered another sustained "fast-forward" phase. It was no wonder practically all kekkei genkai users had abundant chakra.
Second was the change in chakra nature transformation. After fusing into Magnet Release, the underlying Wind and Earth chakra natures became notably stronger; any jutsu using those elements saw a significant power boost.
In a way, fusing two chakra natures into a new kekkei genkai was the best possible training for chakra nature transformation.
"So in the end, the Naruto world really is a bloodline-driven setting. Even so-called kekkei genkai are basically a kind of 'bloodline regression' back toward the original source."
"Ordinary shinobi really have it rough… Oh, wait, I'm also a kekkei genkai user. Never mind, then."
As he recalled the swirling sands around him, Feiyu drew all the floating gold dust back and muttered to himself, then set off on the road back to Konoha.
Along the way, he refined the sand gold once more—extracting the real gold contained inside and condensing it into a few chunks of nugget-like ore.
The "gold sand" produced by Rasa's Magnet Release wasn't actually pure gold, just a metal mixture with a high gold content. If you got one jin of actual gold out of a hundred jin of gold sand, that was already pretty good.
Even so, using his techniques to prospect like that—once he found a decent vein—he could easily make over a million ryō a day. That was equivalent to an S-rank mission payout, a sum big enough that no hidden village could ignore it.
No wonder that even after becoming Kazekage, Rasa still went out into the desert to sift gold sand to support his village. On one hand, the Hidden Sand really was dirt poor. On the other, this method of ninjutsu was simply too profitable to pass up.
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