Corpse Collector of Konoha

Chapter 49: Screw It

After defeating the Iwagakure jonin, Qifeng stood motionless like a statue contemplating its own mortality.

He was processing the battle that had just concluded in less than a minute—a minute that felt simultaneously like an eternity and a heartbeat.

Honestly, he hadn't expected to wrap things up so efficiently. It was like ordering fast food and having it delivered by teleportation. The sheer effectiveness of genjutsu in actual combat was frankly ridiculous.

And here was the kicker: Qifeng, wielding this experience card, was significantly stronger than the original jonin whose abilities he'd borrowed. Much stronger, actually.

See, the original Nakagami Ryo had been a pure genjutsu specialist—his illusions were top-tier, but his taijutsu and ninjutsu were merely "not embarrassing" by jonin standards. Competent, but hardly spectacular.

Qifeng's taijutsu had always been his bread and butter, and that was before factoring in the Dead Bone Pulse turning him into a walking weapons factory. Combined with the experience card's statistical bonuses, his physical combat capabilities now ranked as genuinely impressive among jonin-level fighters.

Add in the borrowed genjutsu mastery?

He'd essentially become a comprehensive jonin who combined battlefield control with devastating offensive power. If his ninjutsu could match his other skills, he wouldn't just be jonin-level—he'd be pushing elite jonin territory.

No wonder the Iwagakure ninja had gone down like a house of cards in a hurricane.

The combination of genjutsu control with the integrated offense-defense of his bone techniques created a battlefield harvesting ability that, aside from lacking top-tier speed, wasn't much weaker than what Shisui would eventually achieve with his Body Flicker mastery.

This was an entirely new experience for him.

Previously, using experience cards had been like borrowing someone else's clothes—they fit, but they weren't quite 'him'. This time, he'd used the card to patch his weaknesses and amplify his strengths, creating something greater than the sum of its parts.

"So this is what real genjutsu can do," he whispered, a mixture of awe and satisfaction coloring his thoughts.

The ninja world had surprisingly few genjutsu specialists, and even fewer who were genuinely terrifying at it. In Qifeng's mental catalog of "people who could turn your brain into pudding," only Uchiha Shisui and Uchiha Itachi really stood out as the masters of mental warfare.

That scarcity made sense, though. Genjutsu demanded serious intellectual horsepower from its practitioners. You couldn't just be smart—you had to be tactically brilliant, psychologically perceptive, and possess the kind of timing that would make a Swiss watchmaker weep with envy.

It wasn't enough to master the hand seals, chakra flow, and mental influence techniques. You had to understand timing, rhythm, and psychological manipulation. The goal was to make reality and illusion indistinguishable for just long enough to end the fight permanently.

Make your genjutsu too obvious, and your opponent would snap out of it faster than someone waking up from an alarm clock. The art lay in the subtlety.

Of course, Sharingan-based genjutsu played by different rules entirely—those were less "subtle psychological manipulation" and more "your brain belongs to me now."

Take this battle, for instance. The Rock ninja had immediately recognized the Darkness Genjustu Technique for what it was and responded appropriately—defensive earth jutsu and preparation to break the illusion. If Qifeng's Dead Bone Pulse hadn't provided that unexpected trump card, the outcome might have been very different.

When he'd used genjutsu the second time, he'd corrected that mistake. The Hell Viewing Technique had created just enough momentary panic to land the killing blow.

Genjutsu really was a high-skill ceiling art form.

"Darkness Genjustu Technique, Hell Viewing Technique," he murmured, committing the techniques and their chakra flow patterns to memory.

Realistically, once the experience card wore off, his natural genjutsu ability probably couldn't handle these techniques. But there might be opportunities to use them in the future, and knowing the theory was half the battle.

The real challenge with any jutsu wasn't memorizing the hand seals—any ninja with decent memory could manage that part. The complexity lay in the precise chakra flow patterns. One small mistake could result in technique failure or, if you were particularly unlucky, spectacular self-injury.

If it were just about hand seals, the Sharingan's copying ability wouldn't be nearly as feared as it was. Any chunin with good visual memory could copy the external movements.

He shook off his technical analysis and grinned at the Iwagakure corpse lying at his feet.

"Jonin aren't that hard to kill after all."

Another yellow-tier corpse for his collection. War might be dangerous as hell, but for a corpse collector, it was basically Christmas morning every day.

Meanwhile, on the main battlefield, the clash between Iwagakure and Konoha was reaching its inevitable conclusion.

And Orochimaru was the one writing that conclusion.

The snake Sannin had been effectively contained by five Iwagakure ninja, unable to fully engage his abilities. But as the Rock forces gained momentum and victory seemed within their grasp, Orochimaru made a decision that would haunt his enemies' nightmares.

He stopped playing defense entirely.

Relying on his almost supernatural durability and regenerative abilities, he ignored the attacks of four ninja completely and focused every ounce of his considerable killing intent on Dohe, the commander of the Rock advance team.

It was like watching someone decide to tank damage in a video game while outputting maximum DPS on the boss. Except this was real life, and the stakes were considerably higher than respawn timers.

He brutalized Dohe so thoroughly that the Rock commander had to use Earth Release techniques just to escape the battlefield with his life.

Dohe's departure left the Iwagakure forces like a body without a head—technically functional, but lacking direction and coordination.

More critically, without Dohe's tactical leadership, the remaining four ninja could no longer effectively contain Orochimaru.

And an unrestrained Orochimaru? That was the stuff of enemy nightmares.

Ask any surviving Iwagakure ninja present, and they'd tell you: watching Orochimaru cut loose was like witnessing a natural disaster with a personal vendetta against your continued existence.

Single-handedly, he reversed the entire momentum of the battle, forcing the Rock ninja into an increasingly desperate retreat.

Without their commander, the Iwagakure advance troops began withdrawing with the instinctive urgency of animals fleeing a forest fire. And naturally, the Konoha forces weren't about to let their companions' killers just walk away into the sunset.

This was the battlefield impact of a true Kage-level fighter.

When restrictions were removed, they didn't just participate in battles—they ended them.

When Orochimaru had earlier dismissed Dohe and company as inadequate, suggesting they should have sent Onoki instead, it hadn't been arrogance. It had been cold, accurate assessment of the power gap.

Onoki had declined to participate due to his status as Tsuchikage, maintaining appropriate dignity for his position.

Fine then. Orochimaru would simply demonstrate why that had been a mistake.

Elsewhere on the battlefield, Dohe crawled out of his earthen escape tunnel, his face a mask of regret and barely contained fury.

It wasn't that he feared death or lacked the will to fight Orochimaru to the bitter end. His position simply wouldn't allow such gestures.

As a high-ranking member of Iwagakure's advance forces, Dohe possessed extensive knowledge about village battle plans, troop deployments, and various classified information.

If Konoha captured him—or even just his corpse—their Yamanaka clan and other intelligence specialists would extract every secret from his brain like data from a hard drive.

Even partial information could prove catastrophic when the two villages were preparing for full-scale war.

His duty to his village outweighed personal honor or the desire for revenge.

The other Rock ninja understood this calculation. That's why none of them had protested his strategic retreat, even as they watched their comrades fall.

This skirmish had been merely a preliminary engagement, a tactical probe before the real war began. His capture could compromise the entire Iwagakure strategy.

Dohe emerged from the ground and looked back at the distant battlefield, where Orochimaru was systematically dismantling his forces like a kid destroying a sand castle. He pressed his hand against the wound on his chest, his eyes full of internal conflict.

Watching your comrades die while being unable to help was its own special kind of torture. But duty demanded he swallow his pride and accept the bitter taste of tactical withdrawal.

He gritted his teeth and turned to leave, carrying the weight of command decisions and survivor's guilt.

But as soon as he turned around, his bloodshot eyes widened in shock and disbelief.

At the same time, Qifeng, who found himself face-to-face with a legend he'd only heard about in briefings, looked equally confused.

This was...

"Well, isn't this awkward," Qifeng muttered.

When Dohe's gaze fell on the corpse of his jonin subordinate lying on the ground nearby, rage flashed across his features like wildfire.

While the figure before him wasn't the Qifeng he would have recognized, the dead Rock ninja told the entire story.

The sight of his fallen comrade shattered the last thin barrier between tactical thinking and pure fury.

But before Dohe could channel that rage into action, Qifeng moved first.

If this had been Dohe at full strength, in perfect condition and thinking clearly, Qifeng would have turned around and run faster than a cat fleeing a bathtub.

But this version of Dohe—bloodied, burning with rage, teetering on the edge of rational thought—looked less like an insurmountable obstacle and more like a walking treasure chest with a security system that was currently malfunctioning.

Plus, the experience card was still active, and he'd just proven its effectiveness by dismantling a jonin like he was taking apart a broken toy.

The math was simple, even if the risk was astronomical.

Screw it.

Time to end this.