Woo...
A fierce wind howled as air rushed through the gaps around the door outside, sounding like ghosts wailing.
The Nara twins standing guard outside the chamber were the first to notice something was wrong. They slid out of the shadows at once. Their two crimson three-tomoe Sharingan met, and both looked a little at a loss.
They had originally been a pair of twins. From childhood, they had shown remarkable talent in manipulating shadows and had been considered somewhat famous within the Nara clan.
After the Second Hokage died, Danzo and Hiruzen joined forces with medium and small ninja clans such as the Nara and Yamanaka to resist the great clans.
Politically, the Nara became the Hokage's advisers and strategists. Economically, the taxes on their herbal shops were waived, and prime land at the heart of Konoha was given to them for free. With their pricing advantage, they crushed all their competitors into bankruptcy.
The two brothers became political sacrifices and were assigned to Root to serve Danzo. Their outstanding Yin Release talent caught Danzo's eye, allowing them to receive transplanted Sharingan.
Of course, that was only Danzo's explanation. The truth was that the laboratory lacked high-quality test subjects, so they were used as guinea pigs for "Sharingan transplantation experiments."
Whether because they were truly gifted or because the Sharingan had an unusually high compatibility with the Nara clan's shadow techniques, their control over shadows grew stronger and stronger under the enhancement of ocular power. Eventually, they no longer needed hand seals. As long as their sight locked on, they could control every shadow within view.
The price of transplanted Sharingan, however, was terrible.
The Nara clan had never been known for possessing large chakra reserves. Under the dreadful consumption of the Sharingan, the brothers, who should have had the potential to grow into elite jonin like Ryoma, ultimately stopped at ordinary jonin.
Later, because of how useful they were in lurking within darkness, they remained permanent fixtures as one of Root Base's most important defensive systems.
Their original names had long since been discarded.
Only the codename "Shadow Guard" remained, stripped of all humanity.
That was right. Though they were two people, they shared a single name.
In Danzo's eyes, they were tools. They looked identical, had identical abilities, and were never apart. Using one name for both of them was simply convenient for management.
At first, they had agreed with his philosophy and had not thought anything was wrong.
Until one day, a blind girl with her eyes covered had said matter-of-factly:
"How can two people share one name?
If you really can't remember what your old names were, then... how about the older brother being Nara Kage, and the younger brother being Nara Mamoru?
Uh... maybe I'm not very good at naming. If you don't like them, you can change them."
That was the first time they had seen the powerful Konome Taketori show an awkward expression.
It was also the first time they realized that they were not cold defensive installations inside the base.
They were flesh-and-blood human beings.
From then on, they quietly began paying attention to every move the girl made.
Until one morning, when their old memories and personalities were inexplicably awakened in their minds, they naturally merged into her shadow and allowed themselves to be commanded.
"Lady Konome Taketori is testing a jutsu."
"Can't... disturb her..."
Their speech was halting. After spending so many years as tools, even though Kotoamatsukami had awakened their former personalities, their language functions had already suffered irreversible degeneration.
Fortunately, they were twins whose hearts understood one another. They did not need inefficient speech to communicate.
Woooo...
The ghostlike howling in the doorframe continued.
The unchanging shadows in the corridor gradually crept up the walls. The hanging wall lamps burned brightly, only to warp and flicker under the gale roaring from inside the chamber, as if they might go out at any moment.
Two points of red light remained still while the orange flames floated and trembled.
At some point, Nara Kage and Nara Mamoru had manifested their physical bodies and taken up position by the door. Their crimson Sharingan spun faster and faster as a vast shadow spread, drowning the corridor in darkness.
Meanwhile, inside the dim stone chamber, Konome Taketori lay within the lightning pool with her eyes closed, undergoing a transformation that could only be called miraculous.
The so-called Sage Body was the special constitution of the Sage of Six Paths, later inherited by Asura. Its life force was terrifyingly tenacious. Even after suffering fatal wounds, one would not die immediately, and its chakra reserves were as vast as the sea.
As an Uzumaki, Nagato had first destroyed Konoha, then fought the Nine-Tails, and after that still had enough chakra to revive everyone in the village. The scale of his reserves was almost beyond imagination.
Princess Tsunade, after releasing the Yin Seal, could simultaneously heal every ninja in Konoha.
There was even less need to mention monsters like Senju Hashirama and Uzumaki Naruto. Setting aside the Nine-Tails, any other tailed beast looked insignificant in front of them.
Now, after five years of continuously devouring life energy, after absorbing every plant and animal in the Forest of Death through her Reversed Eight Gates, after even draining a huge portion of the Thousand Hands Tree's vitality, Konome's body had accumulated so much condensed life force that emerald crystals had formed within her cells.
Her weight had also skyrocketed from the sedimentation of life force, turning her into the hundred-ton monster she was today.
And now that a certain boundary had finally been broken, all that swollen life power was about to erupt at once.
She was about to enter the mature stage of the Sage Body.
Thump thump thump thump.
The heavy drumbeat sped up wildly, from one beat every ten seconds to seventy times per second, then two hundred times per second.
Her full chest rose and fell rapidly, white skin trembling faintly. The blazing white plasma and even the surrounding air vibrated with it. Anyone standing in the chamber would feel their whole body shaking with startled fear, as if standing on a trampoline or floating on clouds.
Hiss!
The chamber grew hotter and hotter. The core area surrounding the lightning pool had already exceeded one thousand degrees. In the distorted air of such infernal heat, not the slightest trace of moisture remained.
Yet in this environment, where ordinary people could not survive, Konome Taketori felt so comfortable she could practically soar.
That feeling was hard to describe.
It was like becoming an infant again and returning to the womb, growing anew amid boundless nourishment. All former deficiencies were being filled in, and her entire being was entering its most perfect state.
Her mind grew hazy as the Sage Body evolved. Her spirit floated as though borne by the wind, and under the catalysis of extreme life force, even her soul was climbing to a new summit.
Buzz!
Just as she was sinking into that half-dreaming state, the mutation came without warning.
The gray bones sealed by the flesh curse mark suddenly broke free under the stimulus of the Sage Body's advancement and began madly devouring chakra.
Konome Taketori snapped awake and looked inward.
The highly compressed life crystals within her burst like miniature supernovas. Her cells, already tempered by Lightning Release Chakra Mode to an extraordinary degree, lit up one after another like stars scattered across a night sky.
Her bones, covered in gray patterns, became even more lustrous. An ocean of deep violet chakra poured into them uncontrollably. The gray-white bone membranes were rapidly stained by dead ash, and in an instant the amount of energy they swallowed had already exceeded twenty tails worth.
If she had tried forcing the evolution of the Dead Bone Pulse back when her Sage Body was only in the first stage, she probably would already have turned into a gray skeleton stripped of flesh.
The Ash Bones were evolving on their own.
She realized it immediately.
As the Sage Body stepped into its third stage, the Shikotsumyaku was also being stimulated into transforming toward its own third stage.
As stated before, like the Sharingan, both the Sage Body and the Dead Bone Pulse had three stages.
The first stage of the Sage Body had brought Konome Taketori extreme weight increase, or more accurately, density increase.
The second stage had given her the fear aura.
The former made the density of her body far surpass steel and pushed her weight above one hundred tons, granting terrifying offense and defense. Taking most ninjutsu head-on had become easy.
The latter gave her direct pressure against the mind. Ninja with weak wills or frail bodies became lambs for the slaughter before her, and numbers had almost ceased to matter. It was also when she awakened that ability that her chakra reserves reached Kage level.
There was no need to elaborate on the Dead Bone Pulse.
Its first stage had been a relatively crude form of bodily control. The second stage was skeletal control. And after swallowing the Nine-Tails' chakra, she had unexpectedly entered an incomplete Ash Bone state, roughly equivalent, using Sharingan terminology, to the transition from Mangekyo to Eternal Mangekyo.
Once every trace of white in her pale bones had been completely dyed gray, her Dead Bone Pulse would formally enter its third stage.
Having been sealed by the flesh curse mark for so long, the Ash Bones now seemed determined to reclaim all the chakra they had been denied over the years, greedily devouring the deep violet sea.
She could hear the roar of waves in her ears. Her heartbeat grew ever faster, almost merging into one endless sound. She could no longer tell how fast it was, only that the chamber echoed with a relentless engine-like roar.
The key of life at her forehead turned ceaselessly. The three dazzling masses of life energy had already been fully consumed, revealing once more the three gates long hidden beneath them.
Clang!
Her bones, more rigid than steel, ground against one another with shrill metallic shrieks, as though peerless swordsmen were locked in mortal combat inside her body.
With the endless infusion of life force, the last remaining traces of white within her bones finally vanished.
Done!
Konome Taketori's eyes lit up, literally.
As her soul evolved under the extraction of life force, her mental energy and gray eyes were pushed forward as well. The pattern inside her irises began to grow clearer. The fetal stirring of her Byakugan was about to end prematurely under the push of the Sage Body.
It was not only her Byakugan. Every bloodline ability within her seemed to be setting off a chain reaction. Under the influence of the Sage Body, they all advanced together. Even the three-tomoe Sharingan in her palm began spinning and drawing chakra, as if it too might at any second connect into a unified pattern.
Squish. Squish.
Without hesitation, she tore the embedded Sharingan out of her palm and threw it away. Purple-red nerves and vessels dragged weakly behind it, like weeds casually ripped from the earth.
The training of her Sage Body was complete. Wood Release had already begun remodeling her flesh toward that of Senju Hashirama. She no longer needed that pair of unknown transplanted Sharingan.
And as for whatever Mangekyo they might evolve into, setting aside how much energy it would waste for her, who lacked Indra chakra, to advance them, these were foreign transplants. The Mangekyo Kakashi had awakened from Obito's eye had also produced Obito's Kamui. Even if these eyes manifested a Mangekyo ability, it would not reflect her own heart.
Now her Byakugan was nearing the end of its gestation. Her own ocular power was about to be born. There was no need for these extra eyes to add confusion.
They had once been sweet little darlings.
But if they dared compete with her Byakugan and Dead Bone Pulse for energy at such a crucial moment, then they could only be treated as expendable trash.
Clang...
Another metallic shriek rang out. The Ash Bones, now fully evolved, finally stopped devouring chakra, and their crystal-like surface quickly dimmed and receded inward.
Konome Taketori observed the bones in silence. Their pure gray color inside and out symbolized decay and death, already nearly indistinguishable from the All-Killing Ash Bones of the original story.
It ended that simply?
She found it hard to believe. The so-called All-Killing Ash Bones, said to reduce all things in heaven and earth to ash, had really just evolved that smoothly.
Aside from demanding an absurd amount of chakra, the process had not felt anywhere near as violent as the Sage Body's breakthrough.
Then, at that exact moment, a violent pain swept through her entire body.
Konome trembled and immediately ordered her brain to shut down her nerves.
"Hiss... no, something's wrong!"
The agony remained.
It was the kind of pain that seemed to well up from her marrow itself, racing through every inch of skin and flesh. It could not be blocked out. The nerves she had once controlled as easily as her own limbs had already slipped completely out of her grasp.
She had known it would not be that simple.
Her beautiful face twisted from the pain. Her spirit and flesh had both soared during the Sage Body's advancement, bringing indescribable pleasure in the process. With those two extremes combined, she felt as if her mind were being split apart, with pain and ecstasy fighting inside the two halves of her brain.
What was happening?
Enduring the sensation of her brain being wrung like a cloth, Konome forced her brilliant eyes to widen further, magnifying her view down into the microscopic realm.
Rustle...
The cells swollen with life force and covered in milky root-like tendrils were beginning to change shape. Gray-black patterns filled with rot and death started crawling over their surfaces.
Cell membranes, plantlike cell walls, cell nuclei, all were being invaded by the gray markings. The crystallized life energy within them fought fiercely against the deathly gray. Her body's cells had become a battlefield where life and death clashed.
Every second, millions upon millions of cells shattered and died, while even more new cells were reborn from their corpses.
It seemed that the Ash Bones and Sage Body were in conflict.
Konome Taketori could not say for certain whether this was normal. Judging from the killing power of the Ash Bones, a mere third-stage Sage Body should never have been able to withstand such thoroughly suppressive death force. This looked far more like some kind of selective evolution.
Just as Lightning Release Chakra Mode selected for cells that could endure lightning, the Ash Bones might also be selecting super-cells able to withstand death itself.
The only problem was that its selection method was much cruder.
Had this happened to anyone with weaker life force, they would already have turned into a pile of ash.
Buzz!
While she was observing the cellular changes, a needle-like pain suddenly pierced both of her eyes.
Then searing heat began to flood through them.
The gray markings of death were invading her brain and eyes.
Buzz buzz buzz!
The blurry pattern in her irises flashed madly. Her Byakugan, already in the final stage of its gestation, now absorbed chakra with frenzy under the stimulus of the Ash Bones, converting it into eye power to resist death's invasion.
Rumble!
The sound of a ship engine roared through the silent stone chamber.
The chakra seed in her heart flickered unstably.
Every one of her bloodline abilities was erupting into chaos. The Dead Bone Pulse and Sage Body were fighting while evolving at the same time. The Sage Body was pushing the Byakugan toward full birth. And the highly evolved Byakugan was in turn resonating with the Dead Bone Pulse.
Every ability in her body was triggering wildly, stepping on each other and drawing power upward in a vicious loop.
To Konome Taketori's horror, she discovered that even with her Sage Body having reached the third stage, she still might not be able to support this nest of energy vampires within her.
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