Orochimaru snapped awake from the dream, spine going rigid.
His narrow, reptilian eyes were like blades—cold, razor-sharp, sweeping the room with lethal wariness.
The lab was empty.
The familiar tang of disinfectant lingered in the air. Outside the window, the sky was still dark.
"I'm back…"
He slumped back into his chair and turned his head to look at the clock on the wall.
From the moment he'd dozed off to the moment he woke up, only ten-odd minutes had passed.
But in the Cathedral of Bones, it had felt like at least half an hour.
Clearly, that mysterious place warped the flow of time differently than the real world.
Orochimaru pinched the bridge of his nose, a flash of wariness—and something that looked a lot like hatred—passing over his sharp features.
"Orochimaru… be wary of the Third Hokage and Danzo."
That had been the first line of "fate" Adam revealed to him before sending him back.
Being wary of Danzo, he could understand.
The deeper their cooperation had gone, the more taboo research they'd touched—projects that Konoha as a village loudly condemned while quietly approving from the shadows.
They were holding each other in a death grip; there was no guarantee things wouldn't snap someday.
He didn't want to believe that line about the future… but with White Fang as a living counterexample standing in front of him, how could he afford to ignore it?
After thinking for a while, Orochimaru unrolled the scroll on his desk again.
His brush moved cleanly, striking out the last paragraph and replacing it with a neat, understated report:
"Preliminary progress has been made in Wood Release research. To continue, I will require several dozen additional human test subjects. If possible, I request they be selected from death-row inmates in Konoha Prison.
Your disciple — Orochimaru."
"Heh. Fate, is it?"
He sealed the scroll, fingers lacing together as his purple-shadowed eyes drooped half-shut, some unreadable emotion fermenting behind them.
"Let's see how this plays out."
The black mist receded like a falling tide.
Uchiha Sogetsu slowly opened his eyes—and immediately winced. His skull felt like someone had split it open and was ringing a bell inside.
In the corner of the room, the brass candlestick that had been burning earlier had gone dark.
Thin threads of white smoke curled upward, spreading a faint, strange fragrance through the air.
"Keeping a Rank III dreamscape running is way too much strain on my spirit…"
Sogetsu massaged his temples, trying to ease the pounding ache. It didn't fix it, but it dulled the edge enough to breathe.
"Ten people's worth of spiritual mass… and the dream only held for ten minutes."
Hermes' Brass Candlestick was the core of his "dream-meeting" trick.
It was a Relic forged from the distilled traits of a Rank III Dreamweaver on the Idealist path. With it, the holder could weave dreamscapes of their choosing, then forcibly drag everyone within a kilometer radius into that shared dream.
How long the dream lasted—and how potent it was—depended entirely on how much spiritual mass you fed it as fuel.
And like all extraordinary items, its power was double-edged.
First: while the dream was upheld, it devoured the user's spirituality at a frightening rate. Let your spirituality get too badly eroded, and you were in real danger of losing control—sliding into madness, distortion, or worse.
Second: after using Hermes' Brass Candlestick, you were stuck with roughly twenty-four hours of "misfortune."
Not luck, exactly—not the coin-flip kind.
In that window, everyone within a kilometer of the candlestick would have their subconscious nudged and overwritten. Their hearts would sour, their thoughts would turn, and they'd begin to feel a vague, unjustifiable hostility toward the holder.
Sogetsu suspected this came from the Idealist path's peculiar nature—Hermes' Candlestick reaching out to brush the collective unconscious, eroding and tugging at those inner seas of thought on a mass scale.
In other words… this Relic very clearly "wanted to kill" its holder.
"Has the same rotten attitude as 0-08…"
He muttered under his breath, stashed Hermes' Brass Candlestick somewhere safe, and—for once—went to sleep the old-fashioned way.
Morning sunlight bled into the sky before he woke again, no alarm needed.
He got up naturally with the dawn. A habit drilled into him on the battlefield—shinobi who slept too deeply didn't live long.
Always stay aware of your surroundings.
Whether or not there's a war on.
Any careless moment could be the last mistake you ever make.
Once he was dressed, Sogetsu stepped out of the Uchiha compound.
On the way out, he could feel it—those strange looks people gave him in passing.
Eyes slid over his back and then away again, some wary, some outright unfriendly. Even without opening his spirit vision, he could taste the faint hostility in the air.
"Here's hoping I get through today without anything going wrong…"
Knowing exactly why this was happening, Sogetsu could only offer a silent prayer to himself and pick up his pace toward Konoha Hospital.
"Morning, Dr. Sogetsu~"
"Good morning, Doctor!"
"Is Dr. Sogetsu here yet?"
Fortunately, the hospital was far enough from the Uchiha district to be outside Hermes' "hate field."
Otherwise, he might honestly have considered taking a sick day.
Especially since the "patient" on today's schedule… was someone violently inclined even on a good day.
Sogetsu straightened his clothes outside the top-floor office, then pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The first light of morning spilled in through the full-length windows, laying a golden veil over the woman standing there.
Her pale-blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Her face was delicate; her figure was… generous. Though she was nearly thirty, her skin was still smooth and soft as a baby's.
Long lashes hid her eyes. Her right hand propped up her chin as she nodded off, head bobbing as if she'd doze straight through a staff meeting.
She really was beautiful.
"After years away, Tsunade had returned to Konoha Hospital on a special contract—short-term, strictly clinical."
Seeing her in person, Sogetsu finally understood why Tsunade kept ranking first on… certain lists.
An undisputed beauty even among Konoha's elite—Senju Tsunade.
"Ah—"
The peaceful little scene shattered as she woke.
Tsunade let out an absolutely unladylike yawn, arms stretching over her head in a long, lazy arc. The motion was big enough that her chest heaved under her loose top, ripples rolling like a small-scale natural disaster.
See no evil. See no evil…
Sogetsu silently recited, eyes on his nose, nose on his heart; with a vision like this less than a meter away, he forced himself into the stillness of a meditating monk.
"Oh, the brat's here."
Tsunade lifted her eyelids a fraction, pink lips half-parted in a lazy drawl.
"Sorry, sorry. I stayed out too late last night—got on a hot streak at the tables."
"A few rounds," my ass…
Sogetsu wrestled the urge to comment back down his throat.
"If today's not convenient, Lady Tsunade," he said mildly instead, "we can always reschedule the session for tomorrow."
Technically speaking, Tsunade counted as one of his clients.
Technically.
And "technically" for a simple reason: she didn't actually manage to pay him every time.
"It's fine. Let's do it today."
She waved a hand, completely unbothered.
"Besides, I hit it big last night!"
Tsunade. On a hot winning streak.
Sogetsu's eyelid twitched hard.
According to the "Tsunade Law," if she was lucky enough to win… that meant someone close to her was about to hit a catastrophic loss.
"All right then, Lady Tsunade."
He swallowed his commentary, mostly out of a healthy fear of being punched through a wall.
No second chances with this patient.
"Sorry to trouble you as always, brat."
Tsunade's eyes softened; she straightened up properly, her voice dropping into something gentler.
"If it weren't for you… I'd probably still be trapped in those old memories."
"It's no trouble," Sogetsu replied with a warm smile.
"If I can help you at all… that's an honour for me."
As he spoke, his dark pupils slowly turned red. Three tomoe unfurled and began to spin.
"Are you ready, Lady Tsunade? We're about to begin. Try to relax."
"Mm. I'm ready."
There was a trace of something in her tea-brown eyes—old grief, maybe, or fragile hope—as her mind gradually emptied.
Sogetsu raised his hands in a familiar seal.
"Genjutsu: Wish-Fulfillment."
The tomoe in his Sharingan whirled faster.
This time, though, beneath the surface, spiritual power surged. A flash of light shot through his gaze—
Hypnosis.
Under spirit vision, he could see it clearly:
The "door" to Tsunade's subconscious mind creaked slowly open.
"Perfect test subject," he thought, a twinge of guilt flickering through his heart.
"Let's see just how far a Rank VI Hypnotist's suggestions can go…"
Sogetsu offered a soundless apology, then dove down into the depths of Tsunade's inner sea.
There, in a place closer to instinct than thought, he quietly planted a single, subtle suggestion.
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