Chapter 1: The Boy Who Poaches Souls

In the dead of winter, all was silent; aside from the ninja on duty, one could barely see a soul in the entire Hidden Leaf Village.

In the forest outside the village, the thick white snow had covered almost all traces. A cold wind swept through the woods, shaking the snowflakes from the treetops and causing them to fall to the ground, forming tiny mounds of snow.

"The weather is truly cold... but that's fine. If it were the middle of summer, I wouldn't dare enter this Death Forest!"

A boy of twelve or thirteen, draped in white, moved through the jungle like a ghost.

As a training ground for the Hidden Leaf, the Death Forest not only contained many fierce beasts captured by ninja, but the entire forest was also equipped with numerous monitoring devices. Even if activities like the Chunin Exams were not currently taking place and the vast majority of cameras were powered down, it was not impossible for one to be discovered.

However, during the heavy snows of winter, there was no need to consider such problems; the snowflakes would automatically obscure all the cameras.

Although the training the boy was conducting did not actually require much secrecy, he did not doubt the ability of those ninja to see the big picture from small details. To avoid attracting unwanted attention in the future and to keep his trump cards hidden, he chose to act directly in the winter.

"Roar!!"

Following a massive roar and a ground-shaking tremor, a giant bear, already three meters tall while on all fours, crawled out of a tree hollow.

This type of giant animal had been saturated by chakra, making it a fierce beast existing between a Ninja Beast and an ordinary animal. It lacked the near-human intelligence and chakra-manipulation techniques of a Ninja Beast, but it could crudely use chakra to strengthen its body, and its Power Level was far superior to that of an ordinary wild beast.

Especially for large, fierce beasts like lions, tigers, bears, and boars, their base Power Level was already not weak. After being strengthened by chakra, they were even more incredibly ferocious. In a cold-weapon era without supernatural elements, this giant bear before him could have destroyed several villages or even devastated small towns all by itself.

"Good fellow, worthy of being a fierce beast of the Naruto World. It didn't actually fall into a complete hibernation?"

A look of keen interest appeared on the boy's face. He looked up at the fierce beast before him and casually pulled a Kunai from his pocket.

Seemingly sensing the threat from the boy, the giant bear let out two muffled roars in its throat and stood up directly from the snow.

When on all fours, this giant bear was already nearly three meters tall, but when this massive fierce beast stood on its hind legs, it reached six or seven meters—nearly the height of a three-story building.

Facing such a behemoth, an ordinary person would have almost no chance of winning without using firearms, but the boy before it felt no tension at all; instead, he raised his head and stared straight at the giant bear.

In an instant, the boy's eyes turned blood-red, and a tiny Tomoe appeared within his eyes. The massive giant bear met the boy's gaze for a brief moment, and its body trembled; the entire bear became somewhat dazed.

It was precisely while the giant bear was distracted that the Kunai in the boy's hand was thrown without hesitation. With a *shing* sound, it pierced the giant bear's throat, slicing directly through its windpipe.

"Roar—hiss..."

Amidst the sound of intense pain, the giant bear quickly regained its senses and let out a strange roar caused by its ruptured windpipe, lunging violently at the boy.

However, the boy no longer had any intention of fighting the giant bear. A ruptured windpipe was a fatal wound for this bear, but given the vitality of such a fierce beast, it would retain its full Power Level for at least a few minutes. He did not want to engage in hand-to-hand combat with a dying beast.

In terms of pure strength and physique alone, an average Chunin might not compare to this fierce beast, not to mention that this giant bear was even more ferocious in its death throes after being heavily wounded. As a ninja, such meaningless combat was naturally to be avoided whenever possible.

With a flash of his figure and the help of chakra, the boy leaped onto a large tree in an instant. Watching the giant bear crash crazily into the tree, he jumped to another tree just as the first one began to sway and fall.

After leading the giant bear on a chase for a few minutes, the massive beast collapsed to the ground with a *boom*. Its bellows-like breathing gradually grew faint until it finally disappeared completely.

The boy stood on the tree and waited for a moment. Seeing that the giant bear had finally breathed its last, a smile appeared on his face, and he reached out a hand:

"Come here!"

As the boy's words fell, points of light invisible to the naked eye emerged from the giant bear's entire body, eventually condensing into a ball of light that only the boy could see. With a *whoosh*, it flew into his hand.

The ball of light was not large, about the size of a ball. Inside the light, the head of the giant bear that had just been killed appeared, twisting and opening its mouth to roar.

Looking at the ball of light, the boy patted his own chest and narrowed his eyes slightly. Feeling the roaring Soul within his body and the power that the Soul brought to him, he sighed with a bit of helplessness.

"There's basically no improvement at all, it only increased my strength and physique a little, and grew my chakra by a tiny fraction..."

"The quality of this kind of Soul is truly too low. Aside from being used as a consumable to increase chakra, it is almost completely useless!"

While speaking, the boy pulled out the giant bear's Soul ball again, took two looks at it, and bit down on it directly!

The Soul ball trembled, emitting chaotic mental fluctuations as if it were a shrill scream. The boy ignored it, however, and swallowed the entire Soul ball in a few bites. A warm sensation radiated from his abdomen. The boy clenched his fist, feeling that the chakra within his body had increased by a sliver.

"The consumption of the Method of Consuming Spirits is truly quite large. The chakra within that giant bear was no weaker than mine, yet the converted increase in my own chakra is not even one-hundredth of my total!"

"At this rate, who knows when my chakra will ever turn into 'cha-tons'!"

Aside from increasing the chakra within his body, the giant bear's Soul that the boy had consumed also left a trace of resentment filled with hatred lingering on the boy's spirit. However, as the Tomoe in the boy's eyes rotated, that external hatred and resentment were quickly worn away, instead becoming the foundation for the growth of his Sharingan's power.

However, the resentment and hatred of a beast were clearly not very high in either quantity or quality. For the Sharingan in the boy's eyes, this tiny bit of cold emotional fluctuation was, if not useless, then a drop in the bucket.

It was precisely because he had used the Method of Consuming Spirits many times in the past, causing the resentment tangled within his body to exceed a certain threshold, that he had directly unlocked the One-Tomoe Sharingan. To advance the Sharingan, it was clear that more resentment was needed.

After disposing of the giant bear's Soul, the boy took another look at the massive corpse at his feet. After a moment of thought, he prepared to cut off the two giant bear paws. Just then, a voice suddenly came from behind him:

"Uchiha Feiyu, you've come to the Death Forest to poach again!"

The boy named Uchiha Feiyu turned his head and saw a child with white hair, about eight or nine years old, standing on a tree and looking at him with a speechless expression.

"These animals in the Death Forest were all captured with great difficulty by other ninja! Some are used for ninja training, and others are even here for the cultivation of Ninja Beasts and Ninja Insects! This isn't a place for you to just kill things for fun!"

Uchiha Feiyu rolled his eyes and snorted:

"That's one thing you, Kakashi Hatake, cannot say to me... The destruction you've caused in the Death Forest is no less than mine!"

Kakashi shrugged without answering. In reality, as someone who often trained in the Death Forest, he didn't actually care about this; he was just finding an excuse to criticize the other person.

Leaping down from the tree, Kakashi took two looks at the giant bear lying on the ground:

"Even for a regular Genin squad, dealing with this thing would probably be very difficult! You took it down all by yourself, Feiyu. In terms of strength, you're probably no worse than a Chunin!"

"I really don't understand, with this kind of strength, why are you still studying at the Ninja Academy? Why not graduate early and become an official ninja?"

Uchiha Feiyu rolled his eyes and said irritably:

"Forget about graduating from the Ninja Academy; I don't even want to be a ninja. When it comes down to it, I was dragged into this against my will, okay?"

"I was living just fine, but because I awakened these Sharingan, I was forcibly dragged over, joined some Uchiha Clan, and was forced to go to the Ninja Academy to become some kind of ninja!"

"My goal is to do less and get more, to reap without sowing, not to go to the battlefield to kill and set fires!"

Kakashi was momentarily speechless. The guy in front of him had no ninja mindset at all; instead, he was just like an ordinary villager.

Their values were completely different; in this situation, his words were naturally like playing the lute to a cow.

Thinking of this, Kakashi sighed helplessly:

"I really can't figure it out... You guy, why do you have such great talent? Logically speaking, none of your ancestors awakened the Sharingan, and on top of that, you only have 1/4 Uchiha blood. Awakening the Sharingan should have been almost impossible..."

Uchiha Feiyu touched his eye sockets, immediately recalling the scene when he had first awakened his Sharingan.

When he had just transmigrated to the Hidden Leaf, he had also unlocked his golden finger—a black book in his mind titled the Magic Dao Inheritance Compendium.

Although it was called the Magic Dao Inheritance Compendium, in reality, Uchiha Feiyu had only obtained the ability of Spirit-Binding and Soul-Commanding from the Eight Extraordinary Techniques of the *Under One Person* world.

The ability of this extraordinary technique was to manipulate the souls of others and even directly devour souls to increase one's cultivation. Therefore, even though Spirit-Binding and Soul-Commanding was called one of the Eight Extraordinary Techniques, its appearance within the Magic Dao Inheritance was not the least bit incongruous.

Relying on the Soul-Summoning Technique, Feiyu devoured quite a few animal Souls, and before he knew it, he had experienced an Awakening of a pair of single-Tomoe Sharingan.

It was just that there were no mirrors at the time, so he did not see the change in his eyes and had no idea what had happened.

Being completely unprepared and without any concealment led to the information about his Awakening of the Sharingan leaking out, which ultimately resulted in him being dragged into the Uchiha Clan.

After all, he was not a member of the Uchiha Clan at the start, nor did he know that his grandfather's generation still possessed Uchiha Bloodline, so when he felt his eyes changing, he never even thought about the Sharingan.

As a result, he, a commoner, suddenly became famous in Konoha, and the Uchiha Clan took him back to their clan grounds without a word and bestowed the name Uchiha upon him.

In reality, although the vast majority of Bloodline Families in Konoha practiced intermarriage within the clan, it was not unheard of for members who were not ninja to marry outside the clan; however, once one experienced an Awakening of a Bloodline Limit, they had to return to the Bloodline Family.

Of course, such precedents were extremely rare; those who would marry outside the clan were usually members with thin Bloodline, weak strength, or those who were not ninja at all, and after another generation of reproduction, the Bloodline would decline even further.

Someone like Uchiha Feiyu, who only had 1/4 Bloodline yet could still experience an Awakening, was a rare oddity encountered once in a century across the entire Uchiha Clan, so of course they had to pull him back into the family.

It was just that whatever Feiyu, who had been added to the Uchiha, thought about it was completely unimportant.

"I didn't really have a choice... who told the Bloodline to just Awaken like that? Otherwise, I wouldn't need to be here in the Death Forest building up my courage!"

"Building up your courage? I'm afraid the result for most Ninja Academy students entering the Death Forest isn't building up any courage, but dying right here!"

"If you want to train here in secret, then just train in secret! Why bother finding such an excuse?"

Regarding Uchiha Feiyu's words, Kakashi Hatake wore a look of disdain.

Although this eccentric Uchiha was incompatible with the values of a ninja and was essentially even less suited to be a ninja than that rare beast Guy, in terms of strength, Uchiha Feiyu was not bad at all.

This so-called building up courage was just a pretext; one had to know that when he first joined the Ninja Academy, the only person he couldn't beat was the youth before him!

Of course, although the time the two joined the Ninja Academy was similar, their ages were quite different; Feiyu had not wanted to be a ninja at all initially, and it was only after his Sharingan Awakening that he was forced to join the Uchiha and become a Ninja Academy student.

Because of this, among the crowd of overachievers who entered the Ninja Academy early, this old student who joined at ten years old could be called an oddity.

Therefore, neither the teachers nor the students at the Ninja Academy at the time felt that Kakashi and Uchiha Feiyu fighting to a standstill was any sort of stain; after all, Kakashi was only five, while Uchiha Feiyu was already ten.

But as someone who often sparred with Uchiha Feiyu at the Ninja Academy, Kakashi understood very well that although Uchiha Feiyu might be much older than him, he himself had already been training under his father's guidance for two years, while the other party was basically at zero foundation, so the gap in their conditions was not as large as one might imagine.

Uchiha Feiyu was a genius who was in no way inferior to him!

In Kakashi's eyes, Uchiha Feiyu's various displays of slacking off were just a disguise; frequently entering and exiting the Death Forest, he was clearly, like himself now, an overachiever!

"Yes, yes, yes, fine, fine, fine!"

Uchiha Feiyu gave a helpless, perfunctory reply, successfully causing a vein to pop on Kakashi's head.

"You guy... if you really want to train, why waste the animals in the Death Forest! It would be better to let me be your opponent!"

A look of finding it troublesome appeared on Uchiha Feiyu's face:

"Tell me, Kakashi, is that all you wanted to say?"

"Of course... I've long wanted to spar with you again! I'm much stronger now than I was back at the Ninja Academy!"

"I've heard; your reputation is huge now, the youngest Genin since the Ninja Village was established, and also the youngest Chunin... do you have the nerve to fight a Ninja Academy student like me?"

After hearing this, Kakashi was speechless; in reality, he often encountered Feiyu after graduating, but whenever he had any thoughts of challenging him, the other party would immediately change the subject, refusing to fight him regardless.

However, at this moment, Feiyu's tone changed:

"But, if you are willing to help me get an introduction to your father, I wouldn't mind fighting a few rounds with you!"

(End of chapter)