A month and a half had passed since the attack on Konoha. And during that time, aside from my excursions to the worlds of beasts capable of senjutsu, a few other things had happened.
Beyond the routine outings, sometimes alone, sometimes with the girls, just to breathe and not go insane from the grind, my clones and I had accomplished a colossal amount of work: the experiments with souls had passed a critical stage, and the refinement of the second stage of body enhancement was complete.
With souls, it was the same as always: the deeper you dig, the more you wish the universe came with an instruction manual. But it doesn't.
The soul is a fragile thing. Especially someone else's. Not poetically, but literally. A mistake of a fraction of a percent, and you're watching it writhe in agony...
The path that led me to a method for regenerating another person's soul turned out to be unconventional for me, but quite ordinary for science. Animals. People are harder and noisier to procure, while rats and macaques don't ask questions. The clones handled the dirty, monotonous work: systematically damaging the outer shell of souls in whatever they could get their hands on and watching how they healed. Cruel? Undoubtedly. But it no longer bothered me.
Ultimately, after pouring in kilotons of energy, we found that the aura's outer shell could be regenerated at an accelerated rate by channeling energy with the right complex of properties into it... but only through my own soul energy. It wasn't quite on par with chakra in terms of raw power yet, but it already packed a damn good punch, and on top of that it remained far more "neutral": it had fewer distinct properties, making it easier to fine-tune. The experiments themselves were necessary precisely to obtain the data for that fine-tuning.
But when I went deeper, to the core... all hell broke loose.
It was as if souls had an extremely paranoid antivirus built into them: touch the wrong thing, and the system starts screaming, biting back, and destroying itself. When I tried to regenerate someone else's core using the same principle as the aura, the test subjects howled even under anesthesia. Grooves literally spread across the outer core, as if worms were crawling inside, leaving behind dozens of bumpy scar-lines all over the surface.
Technically, the regeneration did work: the outer core really did restore itself. Except this "restoration" broke the person. Waking up with a worn, scarred core, the subjects would immediately start whimpering from constant pain. They couldn't sleep without heavy-duty drugs and gradually went insane.
I reached a point where I could "program" my soul energy well enough: making it nutritious, making it absorb on its own. But it still had to be delivered through a probe that punched a hole in the core. And that hole needed to heal. And even after healing, the bumps didn't go away, and the patients still felt just as fucked.
And they didn't give a damn that their soul had grown stronger, or that their potential for energy control had increased along with it. No, after the enhancement, the regeneration actually caused slightly more damage than without it.
In the end, I had found a way to strengthen the soul... but it was janky. It was easier to kill a person than to put them through that. It wasn't suitable for my girls.
There were two paths to solving this problem. I either needed to become many times, possibly an order of magnitude, stronger so I could bend reality better and make everything work the way I wanted. Or I needed more data, and instead of bashing my head against a metal door, I needed to find where the damn handle was. The first path required time, possibly a lot of it. But it didn't interfere with the second. So that's what I focused on.
Therefore, the experiments in this area continued. And this particular kind of research, learning to heal hypersensitive human soul cores, required specifically human souls.
Fortunately, material was in ample supply.
Having the former, albeit severely weakened, head of Root under my command was a certain kind of power. Having Orochimaru nearby was even greater power. For the Snake, cooperating with Danzo was no problem: combining data, utilizing the latter's people and their connections, they brought me not just animals, but several thousand hardened criminals. That many punks with numbers tattooed on their foreheads... yeah, I was pleased. I still felt neither hatred nor pleasure toward them. They simply became a resource.
I was also delighted by the knowledge of my brainy snake. Exploiting him to the fullest, putting him to work helping me with the second stage, I sometimes only regretted that I still had some morals left and hadn't enslaved Tsunade for the exact same purpose. The Slug Princess still hadn't shown up in Konoha... Apparently, my negotiating skills aren't quite as high as I think. Or she just went on a bender and got lost.
The second stage of body enhancement was something I'd actually managed to complete during this month and a half. I needed a body more powerful than my current one. Even denser, more resilient, capable of withstanding far more senchakra. Because this time, I was building it specifically for that.
In this body, four types of senchakra were fully unleashed. The base for all senchakra is the same: across-the-board enhancement, a radical boost to techniques via natural energy, sensory abilities, survivability. But each source still had its own quirks.
Toad: close combat through an aura that extends past the skin. A strike doesn't necessarily have to land with the fist; hitting with "intent" and natural energy is enough. And the stability it provides is massive: you stand like a pillar, and it's everyone around you who has to account for that, not you.
Snake gave plasticity and regeneration. Plasticity even in grafting foreign genomes onto yourself. Right off the bat, it gave access to body transformation: bending at impossible angles, fluid dodges, tying yourself into a sailor's knot, all of that was just a shadow of what was truly possible. In my hands, this senchakra provided even more transformation advantages than the Jugo clan. And on top of that, the same applied to whatever you infused with your senchakra. For instance, by irradiating a pile of stones with energy, you could practically breathe life into them, turning them into, say, a snake. Very fine control over both internal and external matter.
Slugs: my favorite abomination. A powerful connection to everything carrying my chakra. To separated body parts, for instance, with the ability to control them at a distance. Though the ability to split myself into a bunch of little people never did appear. But rapid regeneration remained and synergized well with the snake regeneration and the next senchakra. And then there was the acid, which could be manifested from any bodily secretion. Saliva, sweat, urine, or, if the user is a special kind of pervert, Water Release techniques.
And standing apart from this bunch was Hashirama's Sage Mode.
I used to think it was connected to the forest and all that. But the user of this senchakra himself told me otherwise, and it actually made even more sense.
The elder Senju, in his youth, would sometimes escape the endless clan wars by retreating into the forest and just walking around. And one day he stumbled upon a half-ruined temple. Inside it lived an old man, a monk, bald as a cue ball. They struck up a conversation, and that's when the old man told the boy about an art whose purpose wasn't to kill, but to unite...
When Hashirama told me this, I was pretty damn floored. Because it turns out he was taught a badass ancient technique nobody knew about by some random old sensei he just happened to bump into... Like something straight out of a Chinese cultivation novel.
Anyway, the monk taught him to breathe. To sit. To listen. First to himself, then to the world.
Hashirama spoke of it so soulfully, as if he'd found one of the cornerstones of the meaning of life: "Chakra connects people. But natural energy connects all existence."
It didn't evoke the same reaction in me, though. After his rambling explanations and lamentations that words are empty, that you just have to feel it, I asked him to skip the enlightenment and just hand over a piece of his senchakra. He passed it over, and that, essentially, was how I mastered his mode.
His senchakra felt... bright. Not kind, exactly, just bright. It worked best for healing and strengthening living things: trees, tissues, the body itself. And also for "binding." Restraining, pinning down, holding back, not letting "evil" unfold. Not because the world is divided into black and white, but because everything here is held together by the polarities of Yin and Yang, and sometimes you just need to press down on one side so the whole structure doesn't blow its top. Creating harmony, so to speak.
Turns out his senchakra originated from monks. Not surprising. He had an Urna on his forehead, a third eye, like Buddha... And his signature technique, "Sage Art: True Several Thousand Hands," is literally a religious statue of compassion from that same tradition. And the Torii gates he used to suppress the Ten-Tails in the original story are tied to that religion too. A lot of things, really. Before this, I'd also suspected he was connected to slugs. After all, his granddaughter Tsunade summoned them, and there aren't that many worlds capable of teaching senjutsu. But no, no connection.
Modern monks who used fairly similar techniques, by the way, looked paled in comparison to Hashirama.
Not because of a lack of knowledge... As I found out during one brief excursion, as well as from intel gathered by Orochimaru, Danzo, and Hiruzen's son Asuma, who had ties to the monks. Because of the body. They simply lacked the physical durability to hold that kind of energy the way Hashirama did.
Once I'd studied all of this inside and out, added my own contributions and Orochimaru's, I was once again lying in the large laboratory hall, unconscious inside a chamber, while clones managed the changes in me through fuinjutsu.
And then I opened my eyes. Thankfully, everything went faster this time. There were fewer changes than last time, and I had more test subjects, as well as more personal computational power and knowledge. But there were changes. And I felt them immediately.
Small differences jumped out right away. I was now permanently in a weakened Sage Mode. My new body and chakra were sturdy enough to barely feel the burden, dipping only slightly in energy generation, while delivering partially synergistic benefits of all four types of senchakra. Properly combined, I should add. For instance, the toad senchakra in its passive state clung to my skin, making me far tougher, but without interfering with touch or preventing me from feeling the world through contact.
I raised my hands and froze for a second. My arms were bigger, my shoulders wider, the muscles not just "athletic teenager" anymore but proper, adult ones. And the thing that really sent me into ecstasy: they quietly hummed with contained power! Very quietly. As if whispering: come on, use us. And crush this world!!!
Before, I'd looked about fourteen at almost thirteen chronologically. Now my body had crossed the threshold into adulthood, and my brain... seemed to exhale. I'd died at eighteen in my past life, then lived here for another thirteen years. Only now did I realize that the child's body had been a slight but constant weight on me all this time. An invisible burden, unnoticed until it was finally lifted.
I stepped out of the chamber, set my feet on the floor, and habitually distributed my multi-ton body weight across the surface using chakra. Straightened up. My height had grown by a full head. Exactly one meter eighty.
I liked the result.
Soon I was supposed to head to Kiri. To start implementing the plan for world domination. Or rather, conduct a trial takeover of just one country, as preparation.
My recent experience with Tsunade had made one thing simple and clear: even if loud rumors circulate about you, people might, if only occasionally, not take you seriously if you don't look... serious. Like a child, for example. And an "overlord" who isn't taken seriously can be disobeyed. His orders can be ignored. And I needed power. Obedience! I needed people to do what was necessary, not march collectively toward self-destruction and call it freedom, as they usually did.
This was one of the main reasons I'd decided to age up my body's appearance.
Running a satisfied hand over my abs, I got dressed and headed to one of Root's bases.
Only a week remained before Jiraiya and I were due to arrive in the Mist. And before we stuck our noses in, my subordinates had gathered all available intel on the country and its people.
My body appeared in an underground room with a desk neatly stacked with papers.
Everything completed on schedule. Well done. My consciousness immediately plunged into the information.
Just one thought surfaced unexpectedly.
"Interesting... will I achieve my goal?"
I chuckled, catching a strange sensation, like a faint chill beneath my skin.
"Maybe it's just nerves... It's unlikely I'll even need to test this body to half its strength in the Mist."
Some Time Ago. Interlude. Momochi Zabuza
A black-haired, well-built man stood on the deck of a moderately large boat with a roof and a hold.
The shinobi, who had packed on a fair number of kilos during his stay in Konoha, was enjoying the blue sea breeze. His massive cleaver, Kubikiribocho, hung on his back, which only made him happier.
"The sea again... Feels like hardly any time passed. But how long it's been since I last saw it."
The Hidden Leaf... the prison... Zabuza didn't even notice his mind drifting back to the beginning of that delightful little vacation...
From the moment that underage monster knocked him out, the man woke up in a dark room feeling pumped full of something psychotropic. His thoughts were shrouded in fog... Black silhouettes flickered around him, and then the pain! The only thing he could feel. An unceasing, ever-growing agony in his head.
They tortured him for hours... or so Momochi had thought.
But then, when he woke up again, this time in some cell, a blond Konoha chunin simply walked up and apologized.
Apparently, when the Yamanaka clan was sifting through his memories, the solution meant to keep the swordsman unconscious had been improperly mixed by a pharmacy intern. Because of that, he had accidentally "woken up for about twenty seconds"...
The feelings Zabuza experienced upon hearing this were hard to put into words, but his facial expression at the time had conveyed them perfectly.
Then Momochi learned yet another fact:
"He apologized! To me! Because they extracted information from me the 'wrong way'! That's like an executioner apologizing to the prisoner after torture for making it too painful! What the fuck?!" The dilemmas blazed inside Zabuza's head.
And then it got worse.
Sitting in solitary confinement, they brought him quality food every single day!
Three times a day!
And on top of that, a day later they put Haku in the cell directly across from his.
"So you won't be bored," the Konoha slug-jailer had said when he brought me food yet again.
Ever since childhood, Zabuza had despised hypocrites. The kind of people who inflict pain and then smile at you like nothing happened.
Momochi was convinced: the entire world consists of those who manipulate and those who are manipulated. Everything is built on that! Spinning sweet words, "kind-looking" people make the truly pure-hearted commit the vilest atrocities. And the pure-hearted don't even suspect they're doing something terrible. They blindly follow whoever leads them.
But Zabuza had honor! That's exactly why, when he was leading the revolution, he never played the hypocrite. All his subordinates knew they were his pawns. He told them straight that he'd sacrifice them if necessary.
And people, sensing his sincerity, followed him anyway. It was something new, something unusual, and, as many believed, something that had a real chance of succeeding.
But then Zabuza himself had fallen into a den of hypocrisy...
Some time later, after the interrogation and information-extraction sessions were over, he was led into a room draped in dark crimson fabrics.
Sitting at the desk was what appeared to be an ordinary old man, yet a chill ran down Momochi's spine the second he laid eyes on him.
Logically, the swordsman should have been far more tense around the pair of ANBU who had brought him here, but before him sat the God of Shinobi. He might not have been in his prime, but Zabuza decided right then not to test his temper unnecessarily.
"Momochi Zabuza," the Third Hokage began. "Do you want to live?"
Obviously, he did. His revolutionary cause wasn't finished yet; raising funds for it was the whole reason he'd agreed to work for Gato.
Hiruzen then explained that everything Momochi could offer the Leaf had already been extracted. If he wanted to walk free with his companion, he just had to agree to a job he'd probably enjoy anyway.
Zabuza was tasked with helping the revolution in Kiri. Very soon. And simply not getting in Konoha's way afterward.
Essentially, he was being sent as a gift... But since this aligned perfectly with Zabuza's own goals, he didn't object.
He was also given one small additional task:
"You will travel with Konoha's first delegation. It is in your best interest to make sure none of them come to harm. An Uzumaki spatial marker has been placed inside your body. If I learn of anything that displeases me, you'll be returned to the Leaf. But this time, permanently."
"..." When the Hokage mentioned that monster, Zabuza shuddered.
The swordsman had no idea whether this was true or the Leaf's Kage was bluffing. But he had absolutely no desire to test it... That brat, who looked like just a kid, had turned out to be way too terrifying. And this old man, too... Momochi had heard he was one of the kindest rulers in the world. Apparently, that didn't extend to outsiders who'd once been enemies.
Returning to the present.
It was morning. Zabuza was sailing back to his homeland.
Having stared his fill over the railing, he turned to the deck, where not far away a Leaf shinobi sat at a small table, lazily scribbling something into a scroll.
"Another boy in a green vest. Just as two-faced a bastard as everyone else in Konoha," Zabuza thought with displeasure.
That one was listed as the leader here. Nara Sora was the kid's name. And Zabuza didn't give a damn that the guy was technically about five years his senior; he still called him that, both in his head and out loud. Because there wasn't a shred of real shinobi in him.
Momochi was convinced that if a person hadn't stood on death's edge so many times that it stopped bothering them, they weren't a damn shinobi. Just a person in a uniform, not a perfected tool.
Zabuza had, in fact, only just woken up and come out for some fresh air.
They'd been sailing all night. And they could've reached shore in a couple of hours, honestly!
All because of this "polite boy" who, instead of heading straight for land, had sent a letter to the current leader of the revolution saying, hey, we've arrived, come meet us.
Now the whole delegation was waiting for a reply, bobbing around somewhere in the waters between the Kanzoku Sea and the Kanashi Ocean, to the south. They'd originally set sail from the Land of Noodles, where a small fleet belonging to the Land of Fire was stationed, including this very boat.
Zabuza could go on characterizing the Konoha crowd at length. But it all boiled down to their hypocrisy, naturally. Though, to Momochi's surprise, one normal person in this dump had actually turned up. Or rather, turned up female.
When he was introduced to this delegation of theirs, besides the boy in the little hood, from the Aburame clan or whatever they're called, and the boy in the little black jumpsuit, some relative of Hiruzen's, there was an actual woman. And a proper man's woman at that. Yase Ai, her name was.
Zabuza, though they'd never crossed paths before, remembered her well. She was in the Bingo Book, and he knew she'd already survived two world wars. As far as Momochi was concerned, there were only three actual shinobi on this ship: himself, Haku, and her.
Chestnut hair down to her waist, height somewhere around two meters. She was taller than Zabuza himself. Her face was admittedly a bit "rocky," as if roughly chiseled from stone. But that was fine. And the fact that she wore the standard Leaf uniform, same as Nara, that was normal too. Because she radiated the aura of a genuine killer! She alone had more guts than all the other Konoha shinobi combined!
Aside from the two of them and Nara, the deck was empty. Having had his fill of the ocean view and the steady rocking of the ship, Momochi headed for the bathroom.
"These shell-less slugs infected me with their... what's it called... cleanliness," Zabuza shook his head. "And it all started with Haku, damn it. So obsessed with his appearance... The second those green seafood rejects showed him the bathtub, he started spending hours in there. And when those ichthyofaunal abortions let him bring some kind of clay into the cells, it got even worse. Haku started walking around half the day painted up like a carnival float."
And that was only the beginning... Because Haku, the little bastard, started trying to make Momochi smear the stuff on himself too.
"Zabuza-san, your skin isn't young anymore. This clay is excellent for removing wrinkles, cleansing pores, giving the skin a nice matte finish..."
And plenty more of that crap, which made the swordsman want to spit.
He recalled with horror how, day after day, they broke him down.
Not the Konoha interrogators. Haku... and in the end, Zabuza had caved. Now he was used to regular showers.
"Whatever. Once I get home, the battlefield will beat this crap out of me in no time. For now, I just need to go brush my shark teeth..."
Zabuza strolled casually to the bathroom and yanked the door open...
He really shouldn't have.
Because what he saw... would haunt his nightmares for a long time to come.
It was a woman! No, not naked... Just Ai, standing with a machete in hand, sleeves and pant legs rolled up. But her legs, unlike her apparently shaved arms, were absolutely covered in hair! And there was genuine stubble on her face!!!
"Holy fuck!!!" He slammed the door shut.
"I have less hair on my entire body than she has on one leg..." Momochi thought, deeply impressed.
From that day on, he promised himself he would always knock.
Interlude. Sora Nara
Sitting at the table on the gently rocking vessel, he habitually ran through his negotiation plan in his head. Thanks to the calm weather, the unrolled scrolls weren't blowing away, making working with them a pleasure.
The picture of the people he was about to forge an alliance with was shaping up colorful and, frankly, "problematic." Trusted contacts had compiled a report stating that while the situation in Kiri had changed since the last revolution, there was still absolutely no sense of unity.
For now, they were held together by a fairly strong kunoichi who ran the uprising with an iron fist. But the retinue gathered around her still resembled a jar full of spiders, each playing their own game, not yet daring to bite the mistress...
Thinking about this, Sora sighed more than once, cursing the day he'd decided to work as Konoha's envoy. The Leaf certainly wasn't without its own sins, but at home things were at least simpler and more predictable, thanks to familiarity.
The layout was as follows. The revolutionaries had Mei, who had personal scores to settle with the Mizukage. There were "ideological avengers," in the form of an illegitimate son of the Hoshigaki clan, ready to burn everything down for his own vendetta against the Mizukage. There were pragmatists and paranoids, like Ao, a dangerous veteran with a Byakugan who was equally formidable as a fighter, tactician, and scout. And there were "dark horses." A certain leader of the remnants of the Hozuki clan, whose motives were hidden and impossible to figure out, and, lastly, some guy named Mittei.
Mittei had a history of mercenary work, and on paper everything seemed fine with him... as fine as things can be for a leader of sabotage operations. But Nara's profile of him was bugging him for some reason. His intuition whispered that something was off about the man, but couldn't clearly explain what.
Here, Sora could only regret that the Leaf's spy hadn't managed to penetrate the upper echelons, so figuring out which of these "revolutionary leaders" would betray them first was something he'd have to do on the ground.
His back stiffened from the light brainstorming session.
Sora stretched with pleasure and shifted his gaze to the deck, where Momochi Zabuza had just appeared.
Rough, arrogant, but predictable. Unlike certain politicians, he knew his place and, surprisingly for a missing-nin, almost never lied.
Nara had heard plenty from his sempai Shikaku about how hard it was sometimes to work with the "hypocritical bastards" on the civilian council. How they'd show up in Konoha every few months and mumble something incoherent. So the Leaf's tokubetsu-jonin figured that at least in one thing he'd gotten lucky: working with someone like Zabuza was much simpler.
Zabuza's companion, Haku, interested him very little. The kid was a shadow, loyal to his master, and just another piece of political cargo they could dump on the revolutionaries as a gift, then leverage for better terms for the Village.
His thoughts flowed smoothly to his own squad. And here he couldn't help but grimace.
Yase Ai. Their main striking force and, simultaneously, their biggest headache. A woman with a massive frame, enormous chakra reserves, and a complete absence of hangups. Loved to drink, laughed too loudly, and, most terrifyingly, was "actively looking." Once, Sora had even prayed that she wouldn't start hitting on the Mist swordsman or the diplomats; an international scandal over sexual harassment was the last thing they needed.
Nara felt much calmer about the other two. Sarutobi Kenji and Aburame Kiyoshi were veterans of the Third World War who had long passed the age most shinobi never reached. As shinobi overall, they weren't exactly outstanding, but each excelled in something. Sarutobi was a summoning specialist, capable of yanking the whole team out of any mess in seconds with a special reverse summoning technique. Aburame was a sensor; his bugs were bred specifically for detecting chakra through dense fog and were an invaluable asset in Kiri territory.
When he thought about it, the Hokage had really prepared them well. The delegation to Kiri was a well-assembled team: "eyes" for the mist, an "escape route" in case of failure, a "battering ram" in Ai if they needed to buy time for that escape, and even a trophy Mist Swordsman for legitimacy and leverage.
The odds of returning to the Leaf alive, and with good spoils, were definitely above zero.
"Ki-i-i!"
Sora reflexively turned his head toward the sound. A mail hawk was descending, wings slicing through the air.
Rising from the table, the man stepped into the open part of the deck, squinting in the bright sunlight. The bird, flapping its wings, settled heavily onto his forearm.
But the idyll of the moment, the sound of waves and the proud profile of the feathered predator, was shattered by a muffled but utterly genuine scream of horror from below, where the bathroom was located:
"Holy fuck!!!"
Sora froze with his hand still extended toward the hawk.
The bird proudly looked away, pretending it had nothing to do with this circus.
"Ahem," he coughed awkwardly into the silence, understanding perfectly well that Zabuza had just gotten acquainted with the "feminine" side of their Ai. "Well... this was bound to happen sooner or later."
Finally reading the message, Nara gave a satisfied nod to himself... then his lips twitched.
"Gotta remember those flowers Uzumaki-san asked for."
The initial meeting with the revolutionaries was set to take place very soon.
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