Time passed quickly.
The Five Elements Seal really was difficult. Under Hiruzen Sarutobi's guidance, Konome could barely bring it out, but using it in a tense, high-speed battle was still far beyond her reach.
When the little lesson ended, she watched his hunched silhouette vanish at a quick pace. After sweeping the area once with her Byakugan, she turned and went back to her bedroom.
The room was cramped.
A desk and chair, a bed, and Konome everywhere.
Several of her sat together in a circle, identical in face and clothes, each cross-legged with a different book in hand.
Yin, Yang, sealing, barriers, curse marks, medical ninjutsu. All of it dense, obscure, and heavy. Any one volume was as thick as her palm. Even with her clones reading together, it still took time.
The sealing and curse-mark knowledge came from books borrowed through Hiruzen.
There was no such thing as a free lunch.
Even as a "disciple," the price of ninjutsu knowledge had to be settled clearly.
Ninjutsu knowledge was Konoha's resource, not Hiruzen's personal property. So any new technique developed from that knowledge should, as much as possible, be submitted to the village's ninjutsu archive.
"As much as possible" mattered because shinobi were sensitive about these things. Konoha didn't force it.
You could refuse. That would be a one-time deal. The knowledge already in your head wouldn't be taken back, but if you wanted more books or more techniques later, the difficulty would rise sharply.
If you chose to submit your newly developed technique instead, the village would reward you with a secret technique of the same tier, based on the strength and value of what you turned in.
After that, you could continue borrowing books. It was basically the village investing in talented shinobi, then reinvesting once results came back.
Develop a technique to trade for a secret art.
Or spend a fortune buying tools and resources from the ninja shops.
Or find a master and learn under them.
These were Konoha's three main promotion paths for civilian shinobi after the Academy.
If you could develop techniques, you took the first path.
If you had money, you took the second.
If you had connections, background, or terrifying talent, you took the third.
Konoha's endless stream of civilian geniuses and bizarre secret arts were the product of these rules working together.
She'd heard the Second Hokage, Tobirama Senju, personally set these systems in place. To do it, he had opened up the Senju clan's own knowledge and techniques to fill Konoha's archives.
Konome sighed at Tobirama's brilliant policy, then agreed readily.
If you borrowed someone's knowledge to create something, turning it in was fair. Besides, it was a gentleman's agreement, not forced. That was basically a gift.
Compared to Hiruzen, Danzo was even more "generous."
No cost at all. She simply requested authorization under the excuse of "experimental requirements," and then she could take whatever she wanted from Root's secret archive and read as she pleased.
When she went, she discovered something shocking.
Root's library was larger, more complete, and even newer than Konoha's.
It looked like it had been hand-copied from the village archives, updated edition after updated edition.
Inside, she found plenty of valuable material, such as:
On the Principles of Medical Ninjutsu, by Tsunade.
Research on the Power of Yin and Yang, by Orochimaru.
And Tobirama Senju's own Fundamental Methods of Ninjutsu Development.
She even found quite a few books signed by the Uchiha clan.
Those were older, more eye-catching. Yellowed pages, heavy creases, obvious war trophies seized after the Uchiha massacre.
Since it was free and she was desperate to develop techniques, Konome packed up everything valuable and took it all.
Free was the most expensive price of all.
She understood exactly what Danzo was thinking.
He was relying on Kotoamatsukami to brainwash her and holding her involvement in human experimentation over her head, believing that would make controlling her easy.
He had no idea she didn't care.
The only thing she cared about was her life.
Everything else could step aside.
Creak.
Konome grabbed the bedframe and dragged it to the other side of the room, exposing the flat ground beneath.
Byakugan.
Activate.
Power surged through her eyes.
A pale red sealing formation immediately revealed itself on the floor. Konome formed hand seals quickly, her palm glowing with violet chakra. On the seal, an odd pattern appeared, like an unclosed semicircle.
This was one of her recent gains.
A sealing barrier that combined concealment, anti-peeping, and intrusion denial.
The effect was excellent.
When she had the chance, she'd use this principle to make a set of anti-Byakugan clothing. Small-scale, it could shut down the Hyuga Main House. Large-scale, it could still counter even the Ōtsutsuki clan to some degree.
Especially the Hyuga's Gentle Fist, the Eight Trigrams style that targeted tenketsu. If they couldn't see through you, half their artistry lost its stage.
Humm.
As the pattern fully formed and matched the expected chakra signature, the barrier dimmed and revealed a square opening in the ground.
Inside was a small underground room, roughly nine square meters.
The walls, compacted and reinforced with Earth Release chakra, were carved full of dense curse-script. There was a stone table, a glass rod, a few bottles and jars, and nothing else.
Not even a candle.
Konome had dug this space herself with Earth Release, a place to store things that couldn't see the light.
She was a practical person. Her Byakugan vision was strong enough that she didn't need a light source, so she never bothered.
She signaled.
One of the shadow clones, who had been memorizing books, lowered her text and activated her Byakugan, sweeping the entire room with a full field of vision.
After confirming there were no gaps, Konome turned and jumped down.
Boom.
Boom, boom.
Her landing was heavy, echoing in the empty space. There was no lamp, but the opening above hadn't been sealed yet, so thin shafts of light still slanted down, illuminating the airborne dust in sharp detail.
She waved away the dust, then picked up a wide-bellied glass bottle from the table.
Inside, two chunks of flesh soaked together in milky nutrient solution.
One was blood-red, barely alive now, only about the size of a fingernail, glowing with a faint violet light.
The pale flesh had grown root-like tendrils that had taken hold inside the red meat, continuously drawing out that violet power.
As it fed, the white chunk grew visibly, and its bright green chakra glow smothered the purple completely.
The red flesh was her own.
She'd cut it from her arm.
The pale chunk was Hashirama's cells, stolen from the experimental division.
Cells were absurdly easy to steal.
She could scrape a little from the transplanted flesh on a test subject with her fingernail. Before the cells started devouring energy, she'd let the nail naturally break off, then wrap it in paper money and seal it away.
Hashirama's cells had insane survivability, so raising them was easy. Toss in some minced meat, and within days, what had been barely visible would grow into a large piece of flesh.
If Hashirama's cells accumulated enough strength, they would begin forming a chakra core on their own, absorbing energy and converting it into chakra.
If there wasn't enough energy, they would burn their own vitality to force the conversion, until chakra ran wild and the mass turned into a lively sapling.
At that point, the cells were no longer usable.
So the hardest part of cultivating Hashirama's cells wasn't feeding them.
It was keeping them from becoming too active.
Decades of transplantation experiments had already solved that problem.
Some genius had come up with a ruthless trick.
Mix a specially formulated acidic toxin into the nutrient solution.
Absorbing nutrients meant the cells were constantly being killed. But the energy in the solution also forced them to proliferate and divide rapidly.
Dead cells were then devoured by newer cells starved of energy.
In the end, a delicate equilibrium formed.
She'd heard that some batches of cells even evolved antibodies to counter a toxin. When that happened, the researchers adjusted the toxin again and assigned a new numbered formula.
Changing toxin types once every three days was meant to prevent directional mutation.
Konome raised the bottle to eye level.
The veins at the corners of her eyes swelled, spreading like a spiderweb across half her face.
With violet chakra poured in without restraint, her ocular power climbed. The flesh inside the bottle magnified instantly.
Boom.
A miniature world unfolded inside her mind.
At a macroscopic glance, everything looked quiet and peaceful. But in the microscopic world, countless cells were locked in a struggle more brutal than war.
Calling it a struggle wasn't even accurate.
A purge was closer.
The pale cells were unnaturally active, almost insane, hunting down Konome's cells that carried violet chakra.
Soon, the frenzy of Hashirama's cells surrounded her cells, despite her cells being more numerous.
From an outer layer that was hard to tell as membrane or wall, countless tendrils extended and stabbed into her cells, sucking out their energy.
Her violet chakra, tainted with Tailed Beast power and normally vicious, now looked like a mouse before a cat.
It couldn't fight back.
It resisted symbolically for a moment, then was drained dry like a drink through a straw.
Her cells that had relied on that violet chakra to grow and divide lost all resistance.
They were dismantled quickly and mercilessly.
So it really won't work.
Konome's brows tightened.
Eighty percent of her Shikotsumyaku power was concentrated in her bones. Her flesh was special too, but imagining it could contend with the perfected vitality of Hashirama's cells was pure delusion.
What frightened her most was that even her chakra, mixed with Tailed Beast strength, was completely countered.
One light sip of those tendrils, and her chakra melted on contact.
Simpler than eating a small piece of cake.
And it wasn't over.
In the time she watched, after Hashirama's cells consumed the last trace of chakra in her red flesh, it was as if they'd swallowed a perfect tonic.
They began dividing and swelling madly.
The tiny lump formed a chakra core, extremely small, smaller than the point of a needle. From her perspective it was a single bright green dot.
That dot produced chakra rapidly, stimulating even more insane division.
Even the toxin-nutrient solution could no longer suppress the expansion.
The liquid was consumed fast, until not a drop remained.
Then the cells began devouring themselves, burning down into energy to feed the chakra core.
Mass death followed.
The flesh could no longer contain the spreading chakra.
Crack.
A tender sprout "broke through the soil" of the pale lump.
Konome clicked her tongue.
The sapling scraped the inside of the bottle, the sound sharp and ugly. Dark rootlets rapidly covered the mass.
In the blink of an eye, both Hashirama's cells and her own cells vanished.
Inside the wide-bellied bottle, a miniature sapling was jammed tight, its green leaves filling the space.
The glowing green motes settled.
Hashirama and Konome were both gone.
Konome shook her head and set the plant-filled bottle down on the table.
Then she picked up another bottle.
This time, the pale lump was much larger, and a luminous green chakra core had already formed inside it.
Accordingly, the toxic nutrient solution was far more concentrated, a brownish-yellow color like cooking wine.
This bottle contained no Konome cells.
She closed her eyes and took several slow breaths.
Then she pulled the stopper and dipped her index finger into the bottle.
Below her knuckle, the Hashirama cells wriggled as they consumed the liquid.
Chakra gathered at her fingertip.
Her smooth fingertip split open, a blood-red cut forming.
A segment of gray-white finger bone slowly grew from the flesh.
Creak.
Creak.
The familiar yet strangely unfamiliar grinding sound of bone echoed through the cramped space.
A large amount of chakra was swallowed by the mutated Shikotsumyaku in her hand, and the gray patterns on the bone spread more wildly.
Fighting the weakness that came from being drained, Konome used her Byakugan to restrain her Shikotsumyaku's devouring pace and forced the finger bone out completely.
Plop.
The strange bone, marked with ash-gray speckles, dropped directly onto the writhing Hashirama cells below.
Konome sealed the split flesh on her finger shut.
Her gaze never left the bottle.
She stared at the flesh and bone inside, life and death facing each other.
Lightning flickered across her skin.
Her right foot slid forward, and her grip on the bottle tightened hard.
If anything went wrong, with her speed, she could sprint from this narrow basement to the outskirts of the Hatake compound in under three seconds.
Crack, crack.
A layer of gray pattern spread rapidly from the contact point between bone and Hashirama cells, like vines crawling across a wall.
The pale flesh was instantly covered in strange markings.
Konome held her breath, every muscle in her body taut.
Her right leg even swelled visibly, muscles compressing like a coiled spring.
Squish.
Then the flesh beneath the spreading pattern softened, almost as if it had melted into something brittle.
The speckled finger bone sank into the flesh little by little, until it disappeared entirely.
Then it stopped.
…Huh?
Konome stared.
The half-evolved Gray Bone had vanished into the flesh. The two sat together, quiet, as if nothing had happened.
Her heart, suspended for so long, finally dropped back into place.
In its place rose a dense confusion.
Before the experiment, she had imagined countless outcomes.
Gray Bone and Hashirama's cells tearing each other apart.
Or the half-formed Gray Bone devouring the cells' energy and evolving.
Or Hashirama's cells consuming her bone cells in reverse and producing some unknown mutation.
She'd considered everything.
Except the one thing that happened.
No reaction.
Not enemies.
Not fusion.
Just a bizarre separation, as if they were two lonely strangers sharing the same room.
Byakugan surged.
Konome's world became a full 360-degree transparent vision.
The calm flesh mass, covered in gray patterns, instantly separated into three distinct layers under her sight.
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