Fortunately, I wasn't stuck with a second Hyuga, despite my fears that Setsura would bite the bullet, and things worked out very well with Hitomi — I had known her for years, we had a common ground to build on rather than having to build a relationship with a stranger, and besides, she knew from the start what she was agreeing to and fit into the family quite easily, first and foremost by winning Katsumi's trust.
Linley spent a couple of training sessions with the candidate for second wife, went shopping with her, and then gave her approval. Saya proved to be the most difficult to establish a relationship with, but I put in my two cents in support of my friend and closed the subject.
Under pressure from Shenesu, my brother and I were forced to rush the wedding and held the ceremony in a small clan temple just a week later, inviting only our closest friends and a few people from the brides' side.
There was no pomp, no lavish celebrations or anything like that, since these were political marriages of convenience that we would have to turn into marriages based on feelings, maybe not love, but mutual affection and respect, because to do otherwise would have been despicable towards the girls.
However, these were all family matters, pleasant in some respects, but not cancelling out everything else — I gradually performed more and more bone replacement operations, finishing with the upper limbs and moving on to the chest.
And I had never seen such a headache, consuming the lion's share of my attention even in everyday life! Control, control, and more control, both over the chakra that passed through Shikotsumyaku (Dead Bone Pulse) and over the mental effort that had to be put into this chakra so that the new bones would not accidentally start to grow, tearing the body apart from the inside.
Fortunately, the more time passed, the better I felt the replacement, while gaining greater control over Kaguya's increasingly apparent kekkei genkai as the total number increased.
According to rough estimates, the progress will go from quantitative to qualitative in about a couple of months and almost complete replacement of the skeleton, but until then, I had to be careful.
But despite the undoubted success, I doubt that anyone else could pull this off, except for other first-degree iryonins who have a cooperating Shikotsumyaku user at their disposal — kanpeki ninja not only had to grow their lost bones, but also change their existing ones before extraction so that they would exactly match the ones being replaced.
The sudden increase in his parameters — the man was still a little stockier and more squat than me — could easily have been noticed by his relatives, and why did I need unnecessary questions on such a slippery subject? But the project of acquiring a second kekkei genkai was far from the only thing I had in mind.
Thanks to the use of kage bunshin, I memorized all the information from old man Hishi's papers in a little over a week, even though it wasn't easy even with the Yamanaka technique.
So far, I've only memorized it; I still have to understand and apply it, but even just having access to so much material allowed me to reach a new level of mastery in the profession of iryonin, adding the missing pieces of the mosaic of knowledge to a couple of projects I had been working on before.
The main one was improving the nervous system. Actually, I didn't even need to use Hyuga's work — he wasn't the first to work on this task, and the library of the Konoha main hospital had many works by other iryonins who had conducted research and proposed their own solutions to the problem, which I carefully studied and borrowed the most successful elements from.
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