Chapter Fifty-Three: The Season of Harvest

After earning the qualification to participate in the third round of the Chunin Exam, Feng Xue’s trio gained the legitimate right to wander around the Hidden Leaf Village. With a full month of preparation ahead, the three of them were able to roam freely under the guise of training, visiting any non-restricted area they fancied.

It’s worth mentioning that, after the preliminary round of the third exam, Orochimaru greeted Feng Xue, Xia Mi, and Mu Qianrou with a smile, requesting some of their blood. Yet it was precisely this act of “donation” that put their minds at ease—for now, at least, they would not be treated as disposable pawns or sacrifices in Orochimaru’s Konoha Destruction Plan, at least not until he had thoroughly finished studying them.

Having survived the most dangerous part of their mission, the three embarked on their own treasure hunts. While Mu Qianrou sought Might Guy and Xia Mi vanished without a trace, Feng Xue exploited his ability to render his presence nearly imperceptible, quietly slipping into the Akimichi clan’s compound. His method wasn’t so much infiltration as blending in—effective only in crowded places, since even the faintest presence would be noticed in a room with just three people. Of course, in a world devoid of any sense of mystery, this ability could almost serve as true invisibility.

Compared to the well-guarded and heavily trapped clan techniques like the Multi-Size Jutsu, the secret of converting calories into chakra was merely stored in the family library, saving Feng Xue considerable trouble.

However, after reading through it, Feng Xue understood the reason. Strictly speaking, this wasn’t a true secret technique. The Akimichi clan possessed a unique type of high-energy fat, which stored energy more efficiently than ordinary fat but also made them prone to obesity. (Such fat actually exists; many people are predisposed to obesity due to it. On the other hand, those with this fat can endure crises longer and, at one point, someone even tried to turn it into a biological battery, but had to abandon the idea due to its instability.) The Akimichi might look like a group of overweight individuals, but the energy stored in one clan member’s fat alone could rival five others of similar weight.

For anyone outside the clan, this conversion method was almost useless. Even Akimichi members lose several sizes after using it; for anyone else, even without the fatal secret pills, it would be downright lethal—one would probably be reduced to a dried husk instantly, as happened to Choji later without the secret pills.

Moreover, this was merely energy conversion, not a technique in itself, so it wasn’t especially guarded. But Feng Xue only needed it for reference.

In truth, the Akimichi secret technique didn’t directly convert fat to chakra, but instead transformed it into bodily energy—akin to life force, yet not exactly the same, lacking its healing properties. Because of this, ordinary members struggled to provide enough spiritual energy to forge chakra. However, after countless years of experimentation, the Akimichi developed the Three-Color Pills—potent, nearly toxic stimulants that could greatly enhance mental energy, triggering an explosive surge of chakra. If one possessed sufficient spiritual strength, the secret technique could be used even without the pills.

Feng Xue, though lacking high-energy fat and having no desire to become overweight, had mastered the Art of Consumption, allowing him to store food energy within every cell, accumulating far more calories than the Akimichi by simply gaining weight.

Unfortunately, he still lacked a method to utilize this bodily energy.

Yet Feng Xue had a plan. He still had a small reserve of academic credits—just enough to transplant one or two magic circuits. He wouldn’t be able to store much magical energy, but by leveraging his vast caloric reserves and the Akimichi conversion technique, he could mimic nearly unlimited magical output.

Time passed swiftly. In just over two weeks, the trio had visited nearly every clan in Konoha. While the most closely guarded secrets remained beyond their reach, the many new ideas they encountered opened up a whole new world for them.

Such is the nature of the transmigrator: drawing wisdom from countless worlds as nourishment, pushing themselves ever closer to eternity.

Yet today, Feng Xue uncovered the greatest discovery since arriving in the world of the Hokage—a find so momentous that, in thousands or even tens of thousands of years of transmigration history, no one had ever secured it before!

This was none other than the stone tablet hidden in a secret chamber beneath the Uchiha clan’s ancestral Naka Shrine. (Perhaps someone had obtained it in the early days, but without a universal language, they couldn’t decipher it, and so it was left behind. By the time a universal language was developed, the transmigration system had matured, and the Hokage world—while not unpopular—was so thoroughly “strategized” that few bothered to explore its hidden content anymore, much like a game where, once a walkthrough is available, hardly anyone seeks out secret content themselves.)

While in the original story, the tablet could only be read with the Sharingan, Mangekyo Sharingan, and Rinnegan, for someone who’d mastered the universal language, this was no obstacle. Such a person could decipher even draconic script imbued with innate mystical power, let alone a cryptic language suffused with special energy.

This modest stone tablet, aside from its misleading or useless historical records, held true value in several techniques.

Pure Yin and Yang Release—for which one need not even use chakra, but could employ physical or mental energy directly—offered a vital supplement to the transmigrator’s system. These techniques were not unique to the Uchiha, and previous transmigrators had reverse-engineered them from branches like the Nara clan’s shadow jutsu or medical ninjutsu, but never in such comprehensive detail as now.

Yet that was just the beginning, for the tablet also described a secret art for rapid ascension—

The Infinite Tsukuyomi!

If one’s power reached a certain threshold, by using the Infinite Tsukuyomi, one could hypnotize every being in a demi-plane and thereby seize control of one of the plane’s two great consciousnesses. (Every plane’s consciousness is divided into Alaya—the collective consciousness of intelligent beings—and Gaia, the will of the world itself. To control all living beings is to control Alaya; to assimilate the domain is to control Gaia.) This could accelerate world assimilation to the extreme, drastically shortening the period when a transmigrator is most vulnerable—transitioning from Saint to Demigod. (During world assimilation, transmigrators cannot use their domains or leave a certain range, making them easy targets for hostile forces; countless have perished in past racial wars during this stage.)

For Feng Xue, however, the Infinite Tsukuyomi was simply a tool for amassing vast academic credits. What truly mattered were the techniques—Izanagi, Izanami, and the exclusive arts for the Mangekyo Sharingan: Amaterasu, Tsukuyomi, and Susanoo.