Crows x Souls

Time passed for Itachi who had finally decided to slow down his pace after the fact that he'll likely be here for centuries hammered itself into his head after conversing with the locals of the small settlements he came across every once in a while.

Seeing children and teenagers of more than fifty years scattered around everywhere, and adults with age usually ranging from a century and upward, the oldest he's seen being over 300, Itachi had to accept that he had nowhere to hurry to and slowed his wandering to a casual pace, sometimes even staying a few weeks to a month on one spot before moving onwards. 

After his discovery of the sword, Itachi refrained from using it as much as he could. He would have thrown it away except that he had no other weapon on him. Limited by his choices once more. 

He had no idea if the sword was a cursed weapon, or one that bonded with its wielder by consuming their energy just like Kisame's Samehada. With his lack of knowledge and lack of his eyes, he limited how much he wielded the blade and cut the flow of energy from his body to the sword just to see how it would react but nothing happened. Not even when he practically left the sword in his sheath for over a month. 

Right now, Itachi sat on the bank of a river with one hand over his left eye as he stared at his reflection. 

His appearance was the same, similarly was his body mass and muscle structure identical to his body when he was still alive. 

Apart from his eye that should be gone after using Izanami, everything was just as it used to be, except for his inability to open the sharingan. 

With the absence of chakra, he had long surmised that this new energy was the reason why he couldn't use any ninjutsu or his dojutsu. 

Itachi was smart, terrifyingly so, but trying to use an entirely new and foreign form of energy as a substitute for chakra to cast ninjutsu was something out of his area of expertise. This was more of Orochimaru's field than his. 

Simply put, chakra was the energy of the world - life energy - but right now he was dead. He had once thought this energy was yin based due to him being dead but that too turned out to be wrong. 

He looked at the sword by his side with a slight frown on his face. 

Honestly, he considered stopping his pointless wandering and integrate back into society but he had heard numerous times of settlements and villages being attacked by hollows who feed on souls, and though most of these attacks were promptly taken care of by the Shinigamis stationed in different posts throughout the Rukongai, sometimes the Shinigamis arrive late to find a destroyed village. 

If not for that constant worry, he'd have settled down months ago, which was why he kept trying to remove the veil covering his eyes as he was severely limited without access to it and his jutsus. 

"I really hope that I'm not being too paranoid about this." He said and strapped the sword to his waist before throwing his cloak over his body. 

"Maybe I can use the sword as a crutch in learning how to use this new flow. The sword seems to run on it, so hopefully…"

….. 

"I'd advice you turn back, man. Heard those damned Shinigamis are chasing down a Hollow." Itachi came across a small group of people, all of whom told him the same thing. 

"Can you point me in the general direction?" He asked the man who was now giving him a weird look. 

"Ya deaf, man? You shouldn't be asking for general directions to the eye of a disaster." The man said, almost shouting at the end of it as he saw how itachi's face remained inexpressive even after everything he told him. 

"You don't have to worry about me, but I'll appreciate it if you point me in the general direction." Itachi politely asked. 

"Stray off the path to your left at the crossroad up ahead and continue on. You'll come across it in an hour or two depending on how fast you travel. Knock yourself out, man." 

The man left in a hurry to catch up with his group up ahead. 

'Let's see if there is any importance to this sword.' He flickered towards the direction the man described and it only took him a few minutes to pick up the trace of a battle. 

He followed the trails and got to where the battle was most likely fought before the hollow escaped. 

Unlike the first battle he saw, this one was  a lot more different because he could feel how densely this place was filled with the energy he was having problems with. 

'Obviously they can harness it, but this feels somehow different. An element or attribute perhaps?' He pondered as he studied all the irregularities scattered everywhere around the place. 

'Explosions and sword marks, but mostly explosions.' 

The site was filled with blast marks and craters of different proportions. Some places were molten glass, some places looked like something small and very heavy was dropped there. Some looked as if someone sliced open the ground. 

The scene before him was eerily similar to that of where shinobis fought. 

'Different abilities. Not a single projectile weapon. Different attributes and elemental discharges.' He disappeared from the place after he committed the details of the battlefield to memory. 

As far as he knew after inquiring from a lot of locals, all Shinigamis carried swords. Every single one of them. 

It is simply stupid and inefficient for different divisions, if not all of them, of any military to use only one type of weapon, but since the Shinigamis do, it means the sword is a lot more than a crutch than Itachi initially thought it was, and more like the basis of their strength. 

'But why only swords? Even those two from months ago used swords, albeit with different shapes and aesthetics.'

An answer started taking shape in Itachi's head as he trailed the prints the Shinigamis left behind, and noted another thing of importance. 

'The few footprints barely visible are too far apart and not uniform. They are fast.'

The conclusion so far: this group was far stronger than the ones Itachi had met months ago.