After leaving Konoha's camp, Uchiha Yoru and Miwa Masayo quickly arrived at the cult's secret base.
Just as Miwa Masayo had said, this place was extremely crude. The so-called daily necessities were only a few cups and bowls, plus a hundred or so filthy blankets.
Dirty yellow-white filth was everywhere.
The sour, rancid stench was dizzying.
Miwa Masayo covered her nose and said in a muffled voice,
"At first, following the chakra traces was really troublesome, nya. Later, I discovered every cultist had this smell, and only then did I find this place quickly."
Yoru stuffed two clumps of grass into his nose and said in a muffled voice,
"You really worked hard."
At the center of this filthy underground karst cave stood a very conspicuous stone platform.
It had been polished smooth and flat, completely out of place compared to the surrounding environment.
Miwa Masayo introduced,
"This is the ritual altar. When we rushed in, those cultists were holding a ritual, nya."
"A live sacrifice."
Yoru jumped onto the altar in one step.
In that instant, he discovered that the stench surrounding his nose had vanished.
Clearly, some power around the altar isolated the filthy odor.
Not only that.
He also felt a warm, peaceful atmosphere.
Like lying on a cotton quilt that had been dried beneath bright sunlight.
Yoru asked curiously,
"There's actually the smell of sunlight here. Can sunlight reach this place?"
Miwa Masayo pointed with her paw at a crack in the cave ceiling and explained,
"It can. Every day at noon, sunlight shines down from that crack, nya. It feels very sacred, nya."
Yoru looked it over and confirmed that the crack's traces were completely natural.
He couldn't help clicking his tongue and sighing.
This evil god really did have some skill.
He did not believe there could be such a natural cave cathedral here.
It had to have been shaped by the evil god's power.
But it was indeed done without any flaws.
Think about it.
Living in this filthy cave, if one was fortunate enough to participate in the ritual, one could step onto the altar and enjoy fresh air, warm sunlight, and that bodily sensation.
Wasn't this a real miracle?
And every noon, a sacred pillar of light descended from the sky, illuminating the altar until it shone brightly, filling the sacred atmosphere to the brim.
Inside such a sacred atmosphere, how could believers' faith not become firm?
Aside from the matter of live sacrifice, this set of methods used by the evil god was already no different from religion.
Thinking of live sacrifice, Yoru asked again,
"Rika-chan, what happened to the person being sacrificed at the time?"
"We couldn't save him in time. When we entered, his organs had already been dug out. He couldn't be saved, nya."
"Then afterward, you cleaned the altar?"
"Cleaned? No, nya. We only moved the corpse away, nya."
At this point, Miwa Masayo realized the problem.
She jumped down and carefully checked every crack on the altar.
After sniffing carefully, she said,
"Strange, nya. All the blood is gone. Not even a trace of smell was left behind, nya."
Yoru smiled.
He raised his head and looked at the cave ceiling.
But his gaze seemed to pass through layers of rock and look into the void.
"So greedy."
"It seems that even if this evil god still has some power, He is weak enough."
"Maybe I should try using bait. Poisoning through bait would be very easy to succeed."
"But…"
"I still don't know what gods are like, much less what counts as poison to a god."
"Greed, anger, ignorance… but I don't know how to collect and deliver them."
Yoru shook his head and decided to continue according to his existing plan.
"I still have to rely on Little Ke. Although that fellow is strange, I can more or less control it."
In the end, Yoru did not act rashly here.
In his shallow knowledge of the divine path, divine halls, temples, and altars were all extensions of a god's power.
They could even be regarded as part of a god's kingdom.
Before making sufficient preparations, and while still lacking understanding of gods, Yoru absolutely did not want to provoke a god inside an altar.
He believed that aside from observation, it was best to do nothing at the altar.
Heaven knew which pattern might be the key to communicating with the god.
Yoru memorized every pattern carved on the altar, including its height, diameter, material, and every other piece of data.
Not a single detail differed.
After completing three Foundation Establishment breakthroughs, he possessed a photographic memory.
Combined with the observation ability of the three-tomoe Sharingan, he could guarantee that his memory contained not the slightest error.
As long as he found suitable materials, he could reproduce an altar elsewhere.
Only after arranging layers of sealing techniques and fully understanding the god's information would he directly communicate with the evil god and see whether he could exchange for any benefits.
Of course—
If he discovered the god had no real power, then swallowing the god whole and slowly digesting Him was also only natural.
At this moment, Yoru did not consider the possibility that the evil god might be very powerful at all.
This was self-evident.
A cult church that could only operate underground and was limited to the central-southern region of the Land of Hot Water could not possibly have a powerful god behind it.
In the future, the evil god's greatest manifestation of power would be the immortal monster Hidan.
That useless trash who relied on a high-end immortal characteristic to act recklessly, but was actually good for nothing.
In the shinobi world of the shinobi era, gods were existences that could not appear openly.
They could not possibly possess any great power.
What Yoru was interested in was the ability to enlighten from afar and the method of shaping fanatics.
Quite fun.
After confirming that no intelligence had been missed, Yoru sealed the cave entrance and returned to Konoha's camp.
Inside his own tent, he carefully recalled the information from the Uchiha clan's archive room.
Comparing it with every pattern he had memorized today, he found over a hundred records with slight connections.
After eliminating overly unreliable records and removing those whose locations or descriptions contradicted other details, Yoru locked the suspected target onto three gods.
Yamawaro, also known as Yamanwarō.
Short in stature, similar to a child, with a hairy body, long and sharp nails, and especially fond of playing with children.
Yamauba, also known as a mountain hag.
A god shaped like an old woman, possessing one side that granted land harvests and wealth, and another side that ate travelers and children.
Mikoshi.
A huge god that obtained faith by frightening people and attacked those who were not afraid of Him.
After narrowing the possible range, Yoru once again arrived at the tent used for interrogation and imprisoning captives.
He had Miwa Masayo take everyone away and instructed them to stay at least fifty meters away.
Then he placed his hand on the monster's head.
Several more hours had passed.
A large number of wrinkles had appeared on the monster's facial skin.
Black, hard hair had grown.
Its teeth had become sharp.
Its nose had clearly risen high.
One could no longer see the boy's previous appearance.
As for the monster's body, it looked even more horrifying now.
Gray-black long hair covered its entire body.
The knees of its legs had completely retracted into the waist and abdomen.
The reverse joints of its ankles had become the main moving joints.
For a body to undergo such mutation, the energy consumed was not small.
And every change leaned toward physical strengthening, rather than natural power.
[This evil god doesn't seem very good.]
Yoru felt somewhat regretful.
It was not the evil god who had shaped Hidan.
It could only grant believers madness and physical mutation.
The level was far too different.
[Forget it. Weaker is better. Weaker is safer. Targeting a powerful evil god on the first try would be too risky.]
[It's time to let my weapon, Little Ke, appear.]
Yoru's breathing became incomparably steady.
His mind slowly sank into his inner world.
He grabbed the adorable porous octopus Little Ke, and following the connection created by physical contact, invaded the monster's mental world.
The evil god high priest who had transformed into a monster no longer had a complete mental world.
Some vast but thin consciousness embraced this world, rudely devouring everything in it.
What remained capable of basic stability was, at most, less than half.
Yoru's appearance made the vast consciousness tremble.
Undisguised greed and thirst swept over like a storm.
But it could only peel away the monster's mental world essence little by little.
It could not directly attack Yoru.
Unable to succeed in attacking, the vast consciousness grew angry.
He increased the storm's power and accelerated the peeling of the mental world, not even caring that the fragments being stripped away scattered everywhere.
This was completely different from His previous cautious appearance, where He had been unwilling to lose even a single drop.
One could imagine that Yoru's temptation far exceeded this mental world.
At the same time, He also transformed into hundreds and thousands of illusory tentacles.
They pierced into the shattered mental world through infiltration, trying to capture Yoru and prevent him from escaping before He broke through the world.
Yoru did not feel any fear.
He could clearly sense his own mental world and was certain that with a single thought, he could return at any time and cut off the connection between both sides.
With confidence in his heart, he could observe the enormous consciousness body boldly.
From that enormous yet thin body, Yoru saw countless mysterious runes.
The runes formed ring-shaped chains.
The chains were manifested rule frameworks.
These frameworks bound the vast consciousness body, making His reactions slow and movements sluggish.
At the same time, the rule frameworks also maintained His existence, which was on the verge of collapse.
"So this is a god."
Yoru sighed.
Those runes were similar to the sealing technique runes he had learned, but they were clearly more complex.
And…
Too complex.
So complex that they lacked flexibility.
This was Yoru's evaluation.
He instinctively determined that this was the reason gods had declined.
A vast and complex rune system had itself become the foundation of a god's existence.
And the basic condition for such a rune system to exist was inevitably a sufficiently vast spirit body.
Because if it was not vast enough, it could not contain the rule framework constructed from such enormous runes.
No matter how weak a god became, this rule framework could not be shaken.
That was why such an incomparably thin consciousness body existed now.
This was not a good thing.
It represented an extreme thinning of energy concentration.
It represented slow reaction from an unnatural existence.
And it represented the upper limit of maximum output dropping to a hair-raising degree.
The total spiritual power of this current god exceeded Yoru's by at least a thousand times.
But His body size was forcibly propped open by the rule framework.
Its density was not even one percent of Yoru's.
Yoru even suspected—
If this spirit body truly caught him, could He really digest the highly ordered him?
Yoru was different from ordinary people.
His spiritual power was highly condensed and extremely orderly.
It was precisely because his own spiritual quality was extremely high that his genjutsu was so powerful.
Like an army with high fighting spirit and iron discipline attacking a force with loose discipline and no will to fight.
Easily crushing them.
No.
Not right.
Yoru looked at the mental world beside him and realized that he had overestimated the god's weakness just now.
He probably couldn't even devour ordinary people.
This was the mental world of His highest fanatic, His high priest.
A fellow who saw himself as the god's servant and wholeheartedly wanted to merge into the god.
His mental world could be called completely defenseless.
It would even turn around and help the god digest it.
Yet this weak god could still only slowly gnaw away.
Even after discovering Yoru's existence, urgent enough to abandon the food already at His mouth and begin destroying it desperately, He still could not quickly break through this mental remnant that was about to die.
Yoru smiled wickedly.
He raised the palm-sized hole-filled octopus in his hand and said,
"Unknown god, I estimate that you cannot digest my existence."
"Why not try this instead?"
"Eighty percent water content, soft and easy to digest. The rarest part is that it no longer has a main body."
"It is a pure spiritual lifeform."
"Absolutely the supreme tonic for a god."
Gods did not speak with men.
The god could not understand Yoru's words.
He continued destroying the mental world and waving tentacles, trying to capture him.
Yoru didn't expect the god to understand either.
After finishing his one-sided speech, he threw the hole-filled octopus in his hand onto one of the tentacles reaching over.
The hole-filled octopus was not captured by the tentacle.
Instead, without the slightest obstruction, it smoothly merged into the tentacle.
The sudden foreign object inside clearly made the god's tentacle feel uncomfortable.
The tentacle suddenly shrank.
Like a leech touching salt, it curled into a ball.
The god had thousands of tentacles probing into the mental world.
The change in one tentacle was completely inconspicuous.
The god did not care at all.
He locked onto Yoru's spirit body and attacked tirelessly.
He did not even care that the tentacles could not keep up with Yoru's movement speed.
Nor did He care that with a single thought, Yoru crushed dozens of tentacles into scraps.
This kind of persistence, disregarding success rate, feasibility, and all losses just to pursue Yoru, made Yoru inevitably think deeply.
What exactly was special about his spirit body that could make a god fall into madness?
Comparing the differences between himself and the god's spirit body, eliminating one different point after another, Yoru discovered that his spirit body had three advantages.
High density.
Entropy-reduction tendency.
Fast reaction speed.
Among them, high density was a result.
As long as the god obtained enough faith, He could certainly achieve it easily.
After all, the rule framework was not only used to support the spirit body's size.
It could also suppress the spirit body's size.
Entropy-reduction tendency referred to the high consistency of his own spirit body, as well as its natural ability to absorb resources from the surroundings and transform them into his own spirit body.
This was an incredible matter.
Although normally, he was inside his own mental world and could only maintain this continuous growth with the help of the four heart-shapes, it was still a terrifying reality.
Because it meant that the upper limit of his growth was continuously rising.
There was no fixed, insurmountable ceiling.
And now, while Yoru was inside a dead mental world, he discovered that this collapsing world was being absorbed and digested by his spirit body, increasing himself at an extremely fast speed.
The key point was—
Yoru had not discovered any abnormalities.
Nor had he obtained foreign emotions, knowledge, or other impurities.
Perhaps because the person was dead, the remaining spiritual power had returned to infant-like purity.
He stayed silent for a moment.
Then silently tried many methods and stopped his spirit body's absorption.
Absorbing the spiritual power of others after death did not give Yoru the disgust of eating people.
But he firmly believed that he could not strengthen himself through methods like the Star Absorbing Great Art.
This was an evil path.
A demonic path.
Yes.
These dead people's spiritual power was very pure.
It looked like there should be no hidden danger.
But did one think that if the mind and body did not have problems, then there was no problem?
The fundamental harm of the demonic path did not lie in power.
It lay in making people accustomed to the rapid growth brought by plunder.
From luxury to frugality was difficult.
From frugality to luxury was easy.
Once anyone became used to their own rapid growth, they would inevitably develop disgust toward polishing their own foundation.
Bitter, tiring, and without visible effect.
It was like people who won the lottery.
After obtaining unexpected, reasonable, and legal enormous income, not a single lottery-made rich person had a good ending.
The reason was that the money came too easily.
Those who became rich overnight could not use cautious mentality and reasonable methods to handle that money.
They could not even manage to simply save it and live off the interest.
Mindset and habits—
These were the foundations Yoru valued most and never dared relax.
However, this point was probably not the god's focus either.
Yoru discovered that after the god locked onto him, He exposed two major problems.
Chaos and sluggishness.
Thousands of tentacles invaded the mental world.
Yet less than one percent of them attacked Yoru.
The remaining ninety-nine percent either stayed still or randomly attacked the mental world.
Not only did those tentacles seem uncontrolled—
Even the god's spirit body itself was clearly doing completely different things from one end to another.
The god's behavior was not like the spirit body of one lifeform.
It was more like a country formed from countless spirit bodies.
Because He was restrained by the rule framework, the god had not split apart, disintegrated, and vanished.
But the chaos inside that framework was enough to make a human's scalp go numb.
The other serious flaw was reaction speed.
The tentacle invaded by the porous octopus Little Ke suddenly curled up and shrank all the way back into the god's main body.
During its retreat, the god seemed not to know that this tentacle had a problem.
Only after it shrank back into the god's main body did hundreds of light points gather toward Little Ke.
Part of the god's spirit curiously observed Little Ke, watching it stretch out its eight tentacles and shake its head full of holes.
Until strands of madness flowed out from Little Ke and were captured by the light points.
Suddenly—
All the light points fled crazily.
The god began twisting madly, trying to peel away the part of His body where Little Ke was located.
His movements transmitted straightforward fear.
Yoru even felt as though he heard this god hysterically shouting,
"Don't come any closer—!"
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