The days kept rolling by. Different teams of clones worked themselves to the bone, and of course I—the original—didn't slack either.
There were a shitload of results from the groups working on the body-enhancement project. But most of it just meant more experiments—sometimes with tiny tweaks, sometimes with not-so-tiny ones.
On the soul-research front, I put clones on it too, even if they could only work through "crutches"—the analyzer. They had a kind of soul-sight; since they don't actually have souls, they could only fake it using chakra, and even then it was way more crooked than what I used thanks to my natural ability. To use that sphere-vision properly through chakra, you first had to actually understand it better. But there were no big, fat breakthroughs there, which made me—the original—pretty damn irreplaceable. The clones, again, leaned on the fūin analyzer, which couldn't fully replace my inborn sense, but in a lot of aspects it was actually even better.
With the tools we had plus a pinch of materials, the clones managed to detect soul emission from the test subjects on one of reality's layers—emission that leaked past the chakra "veil." Meaning: radiation spreading outside the body and readable by my sensitivity! After that, the clones poked around "to the sides" from that point to figure out what spatial ranges that emission usually showed up in, and using those data they created a Soul Analysis technique.
The jutsu gave you data on a soul even while it was still inside a body. It didn't work as well as ripping the soul out, and sure as hell not as well as ripping it out and then studying it with a fūin analyzer. But it still let you determine the strength, color, and a bunch of other minor—sometimes not so minor—traits. Using that technique, the clones ran a huge study with over a hundred thousand people from different countries. The end result was some pretty notable, pretty reliable data.
Everyone is born with slightly different soul strength. With age, the soul grows stronger. But after around fifty, ordinary people hit a plateau. After sixty, degradation ramps up more and more. For shinobi it's a bit different: the more chakra you have—or the stronger a soul you were born with in the first place—the later that degradation starts.
Hiruzen had impressive chakra reserves in his youth, and his soul—unlike his body—is still bursting with energy. Even if it turned out weaker than mine. His chakra, though… chakra can degrade too. Age. Especially if it doesn't get "refreshed" for a long time. It can accumulate damage that healed badly or wrong. In theory, if he still had those special sections in his Chakra Circulation System—the ones responsible for potential and letting it grow more—then that aging could be fixed. But local science has pretty damn little data in that direction. And the guy with the most extensive knowledge on it is staring back at me from the mirror.
Even so, like before, I had no way to just start mass-producing those sections on an industrial scale. Though I was close to cracking how to do it anyway.
This whole topic needed research, because it looked like even if I solved the problem of cell durability, actual biological immortality would still require working on chakra too.
The clones kept collecting data, and they were going to keep doing it for a long time.
But the greatest discovery these days was a real goddamn breakthrough! Found it! I found that thing inside me!
Yeah, it sounded like a kid who'd been using the potty without ever thinking about how it worked suddenly discovering there's something weird and unusual down in the genital area. But it wasn't quite like that for me.
So. Asura. First: my soul is not his reincarnation. Neither is my body. Or rather… my body… I think it's becoming the reincarnation. But I still need to sort that out.
A long, painstaking comb-through of spaces inside my body and a little beyond it followed. I checked every square centimeter. And since the search wasn't happening in three dimensions, the search volume over those days got so massive that if you converted it into normal 3D space, you could build a launch site for an Earth-to-Moon rocket there and still have some room left.
So yeah… that explains why, after all that, my eye was twitching and I was basically baring my teeth while staring down a little sphere—white with a faint bluish tint—glowing with energy.
I called it Asura's construct. Not a soul. I might be kinda shit at sensing under certain abnormal conditions—like when you're dealing with a brain-melting multidimensional space—but I can tell chakra apart from soul energy.
This crap was, as expected, in shifted space, in the area of the center of my chakra hearth. Right in that little flame. It was a kind of energy body: not especially thick in raw power, but very thick in terms of how many properties were stuffed into it. Its very existence was sustained by fūin—unknown to me before, but woven into Earth's chakra a long time ago. The construct had no soul, and without those fūin it shouldn't have been able to exist at all.
What was even more interesting: the construct was eating my energy, even if only bit by bit. It processed it and output a slightly smaller amount—and, most importantly, in a slightly altered form. That was supposed to slowly reshape my chakra toward the type it radiated… and even more than that.
Before, I didn't even feel it. Maybe my senses just got used to what's been happening to me… I don't know. Since birth? Even earlier?
This heretical Asura construct got me seriously interested. This was a legacy of the descendant of an ancient alien—not the work of modern, or even merely recent, minds. Which meant there could be a lot in there that I'd never understood before, but that could be insanely useful.
Days took off again. Most of my time was now eaten up by studying souls, the construct, and ways to strengthen the biological "container." That didn't mean I had no life outside the lab… at least, the clone did.
Back to the construct. Over a few days I studied it properly. And it was just… something else.
But in order, and relatively brief.
The construct has the progenitor's body template—presumably Asura's. Following that template, using the CCS as a conductor and a tool of influence, the construct alters the host's body. From that influence, much more slowly, affinity for manipulating elements and Yang also grows.
Compared to modern research—especially my own—the construct works slowly, and inefficiently at that. But it's effective and safe for the host.
The Mystical Palm Technique can visibly change the body right before your eyes, healing wounds. The construct's work is designed for long years.
Based on just these surface-level facts, even without deep details, you can already form a pretty solid hypothesis about why certain events happened the way they did. Specifically: why Hashirama was so strong. Answer: he was apparently the only reincarnation who managed to (a) be born with extremely high chakra growth potential and (b) live to an age where he could actually realize (a). The construct runs on the host's chakra. Without a monstrous reserve, at its current efficiency—and especially when the construct only takes a small percentage of energy production—a shinobi with even an average jōnin's strength would have to learn how to live for centuries to reach the transformation the First Hokage went through.
The template includes a body capable of far higher physical performance than normal, with insanely strong regeneration. A body that can produce far more Yang and can even exist without food and water—living purely on its own generated energy. Those were the obvious abilities; there were more, just less noticeable.
Pretty significant, right? Especially in the shinobi world, where people constantly clash up close and use life energy a lot.
Hashirama was very strong. The construct boosted him even further. The First had a lot of Yang, and over time the construct made it even more. He could heal himself mid-battle, without hand seals… a massive achievement among med-nin that officially nobody managed to replicate.
Well, not exactly: with my control and chakra, it's within my abilities too. And thanks to meta-knowledge, I remember Orochimaru has a powerful healing technique that's supposedly also impossible for local med-nin. And maybe there are other people who can pull off something like that. But now I'm nitpicking.
I had access to Hashirama's cells. That's how I understood the Asura construct had fully finished its work on the First. Too bad it didn't help the Second God of Shinobi survive anyway. That same access to the First Hokage's body had previously kicked off many of my sub-projects inside the grand body-enhancement project, so the Asura construct isn't valuable to me for every single part of it.
The most important thing in the construct wasn't the template itself, but the mechanism that rebuilds the body to match it. A real treasure—once I studied it, ideas lit up in my head in whole armfuls about how to copy it and improve it.
This new data changed a lot in my experiments, and I needed to adjust things so the body-enhancement project would turn out even better. But… later.
Lately, I'd gotten way too fixated on studying. So the next day I gave myself a "day off," so to speak. Especially since I had a reason.
Today was March 28th—and also Sakura's birthday.
Since that mission in the Land of Waves—which, as far as I was concerned, was still ongoing—the girl had gotten… stranger. Or rather, more sane, but compared to her old personality, that looked strange. Sakura used to express her emotions loudly, but now she stopped reacting that way to unusual events.
And also—and this looked weird too—she started treating me more respectfully, especially during training. Exactly "more respectfully," like in those sketchy Chinese cultivation novels, though not quite that extreme—just that kind of tone.
Still, the fact nobody was calling me "Master" suited me fine. Because considering our "species"—twelve- to thirteen-year-old kids—that would've been weird.
My gift wasn't expensive, so she wouldn't stress later about needing to give me something equally pricey. And it wasn't the usual crap like a set of kunai or a technique. Sakura liked board games, so I figured a quality set brought from another continent—not too expensive, but actually emphasizing our personal connection and mutual understanding—was the right kind of gift.
So I took it and showed up at the clearing where she was doing her morning exercises to wake herself up properly. Then I made it clear that I, as her mentor, was declaring today a day off and dragging her to Konoha to celebrate.
Her confused questions—like, aren't we on a mission right now?—were heard, but only so I could deal with them. Because after I towed Sakura over to the rest of our team, Kakashi and Sasuke got informed they were pulling double watch today—covering Sakura, and, while we're at it, me too. And then, ignoring Hatake's complaining, I teleported myself and Haruno back to the Leaf.
After that came a full day of exploiting either me or her, which I used to the max for our "rest." As in: with me repeatedly asking, to her embarrassment, "What else would you want?"
We visited her parents, who were surprised she'd shown up in Konoha. We went through an interrogation that was embarrassing for Sakura but not for me—a guy fully intending to relax and have fun—about what kind of boy their daughter had brought home.
And it wasn't just me enjoying her embarrassment. The Haruno family enjoyed it too. They knew the jinchūriki by face, didn't have any negative feelings about it, and actively played dumb to crank that embarrassment up, like a bunch of clueless little stumps.
After that we gathered our old crew of former classmates. According to Sakura, they weren't prepared because they hadn't gotten invitations, and she hadn't even planned to celebrate, and calling them would be rude, and maybe they had stuff to do, and blah-blah-blah—broken apart by a couple of my lines. Don't overcomplicate it, and the main thing is to have a good time, right?
Nobody actually had anything urgent, so our core group assembled within a few hours at a restaurant I paid for.
I'd wanted her not to feel like she owed me too much afterward. Didn't quite work out. But my explanations—that I did it from the heart and didn't want anything in return—seemed to get through. Hopefully.
We stayed like that until night. First there were questions about why Sakura changed her image, but after her brief, no-deep-details explanation that the mission left a heavy mark on her memory, it shifted into shared stories about who had what happen on assignments. Then to other topics, just whatever was going on.
The most wild story, in my opinion, was mine—where I told them how "a friend of mine" screwed over some sucker from the capital.
Sakura's birthday, honestly… yeah, she liked it, but it could've been better. But how many emotions she got because of me—that was… something. Especially for her. At least, that's how she put it at night, before I left her to sleep at home, in her usual bed.
That was the break. I acted pretty pushy, organizing everything like that, but I understood Sakura's personality and the others' too, and I knew that in this specific case I could do it this way and it'd be better. If I tried to organize Hinata's birthday like that, she'd burn up from shame, and that would be very not good. Here, though, it was a lot more good than bad.
When the break ended, our routine in the Land of Waves continued. And my lab work resumed with new force.
After I put the clones on new experiments based on data from the test subjects, and after I studied Asura's construct inside me, I couldn't just ignore its "bro." Indra's construct. And my teammate, Uchiha Sasuke, was supposed to be its host.
The very next day I baited him into my lab. It was elementary. I offered Uchiha a serious spar with no restrictions. He, of course—after a bunch of personal training and awakening the Sharingan—agreed, burning to prove his prowess and superiority. As you can guess, it didn't work out for him.
In the heat of battle, I "accidentally" hit him a bit harder than necessary and knocked him out. Then, putting on a show of extreme concern for my "dear" comrade's condition, I kept him under my fūin analyzers for several hours. Ahh—what a kind soul I am.
Knowing where to look, I barely wasted any time. The right sphere—only coal-black, with the same faint blue glow—was also found in shifted space at the center of Sasuke's chakra hearth.
The data I got from it was insane. I even surprised myself when I realized Indra's construct worked noticeably more efficiently than Asura's. Which made sense. It was mostly made of Yin chakra—the energy of mind and spirit. Yin sets form and structure, while Yang—raw power—without Yin is almost uncontrollable. Even the Adamantine Chains technique—no matter how much I'm glowing gold—I use with a hefty Yin component too.
Indra's construct, unlike Asura's, focused almost all its attention on transforming the dōjutsu and the CCS, touching the rest of the body only as a side note. And it did it pretty efficiently, focusing on the finest, microscopic changes.
In Sasuke's case, the process was moving fast. The properties embedded in his construct were even deeper than mine, and some of them even my analyzers couldn't fully catch. It became clear that dōjutsu development is a ridiculously complex mechanism—one you could sink a lot of time into studying.
But my current goal is body enhancement. There's a saying: "Chase two rabbits, and you'll get smacked in the face by both." Or was it not exactly that? Whatever. The point is: be consistent.
Judging by a quick analysis, the construct will finish its work on Sasuke by the time he's fourteen or fifteen. The process depends a lot on how hard Uchiha himself trains, but even then, the result won't be all that obvious to outsiders. To them, he'll just be a childhood "genius" with pretty dense chakra. Actually, he already is—but later he'll be better.
And yeah, dense chakra doesn't mean you have a lot of it. Sasuke got decently lucky with chakra potential, but compared to my reserves, he's one of many mediocrities.
I copied everything I could from Indra's construct onto a special metal capable of storing chakra imprints. I didn't know how that mechanism worked in full, but watching its end result in the future would definitely be interesting. After that, I put the construct back, patched Sasuke up, and sent him out of the lab, "making him happy" with the news that he'd lost again.
And yes, I could create a copy in the form of a similar energy body—the kind constructs themselves are. But I still hadn't figured that out properly, so I copied the properties the best way I could, as accurately as I could.
Studying Indra's construct wasn't useless at all. Its template gave the host very strong Yin, tweaked the brain a little, and slowly built affinity—as if the host trained nonstop—giving solid aptitude for using techniques. Among other people Sasuke is a real diamond, capable of a lot, and in the future, even more.
But as a person… well, I didn't pick Sakura for "raising" as a better candidate for delegating some of my tasks in the future for nothing. No matter how problematic she could be, she didn't have a deranged brother who made her relive her parents' murder over and over in Tsukuyomi, and her psyche was way healthier.
Back to the construct: the data I got gave me a colossal chunk of understanding about transforming energy itself. Ideas were literally flashing before my eyes—what I could now do with the Chakra Circulation System!
The constructs were living examples of targeted strengthening of Yang and Yin. Exactly what I'd been aiming for for so long—just implemented differently. And now the picture finally came together. I got working hypotheses for how to do the same thing, but on a much deeper level. Not just force chakra to match the progenitors' template, but calculate that template myself—make it way more powerful. Artificially increase the number of those CCS sections responsible for reserve growth.
My body-enhancement project, and the chakra-enhancement project that had only just been born but was practically finished thanks to the new data, merged into a single whole.
Test subjects started flowing through the lab like a river. There were even more clone teams. We were all in for a titanic amount of work.
Running projects in the lab, of course I didn't forget my development as a shinobi. To my—again—surprise, after my talk with Koharu, Kakashi even… I still can't believe it actually happened… offered me a spar himself.
Thankfully for my mental health, he did that a lot only during the first week. The second week—less often. After that I had to drag his ass out myself again, just so I could "motivate" his kidneys, liver, lungs, and other vital organs with my fist. Otherwise the poor guy will wither away without me.
On April sixth, the bridge was finished. After that, our team moved back to Konoha.
After that, time seemed to go even faster. Endless experiments…
If I packaged everything I did with the clones into scientific dissertations and then implemented it even at a basic level among the general population, there'd probably be enough material for over a thousand professor degrees.
After thoroughly working through CCS enhancement and almost finishing the project, I saw another big opportunity—enhancing the soul the same way. The idea was that now, with a wide base of experience in transforming energies, I wanted to transform, say, my chakra into the energy my soul absorbed when I reincarnated. That was what made me multiple times stronger in a very short time. So why not do the same for other people? The soul clearly has some kind of ties to chakra, like my clones noticed.
Except it didn't work.
Transforming the energy worked. I had to do what I'd had to do for previous experiments too—order a whole lot more fūin metal to build a single device stuffed with a damn sea of properties that helped with—or rather, almost entirely did for me—the chakra transformation according to a template. The template wasn't something I remembered in perfect, tiniest detail so much as something I refined based on current knowledge, my own gut feeling, and the sensation of the soul itself—how it "felt better."
But carefully introducing what I got into other people—nope, didn't work. The soul only absorbed that energy if it got into immediate proximity to the soul core. Even when I tore out a test subject's soul and placed it into what looked like the same conditions I myself had been in back in that space—where there's tons of "nutritive energy" around—it still produced no result.
And there had been hope: souls in babies are very young, meaning in that space they do absorb energy and rejuvenate before being born. So if they weren't absorbing it in my artificial space, then I was doing something wrong. And what that "something" was—who the hell knows.
The second option—chronologically it was actually the first—where I forcibly made a hole in the soul with a probe of my own soul and pumped the needed energy into it, did work. The soul strengthened and purified. But after absorbing the nutritive energy, the souls started growing around the probe right where I'd made the hole. And with that hole, souls functioned badly—usually losing more energy than they produced—and because of that, presumably, the soul felt like shit. A week later—yeah, it turned out that due to permanent depletion, the soul started breaking down faster.
That was not okay.
But after a bunch of failed attempts, I decided to risk it. And do what I'd managed to do before. Converting that same nutritive energy from my own chakra, I pulled it inside with my own soul… and it worked.
The energy tasted a little "off" compared to what I remembered. But I knew my soul could regenerate, and thankfully, as a complex organism, it sent me signals when something was slightly wrong versus when something was seriously wrong. While absorbing the energy with my soul, the sensation was somewhere at the lower edge of "something's kinda off."
My soul was stronger than any soul of any creature I'd ever met. But my chakra, compared to it, was stronger by three orders of magnitude. Just a reminder of one of the reasons I mostly use chakra in this world—when something is a thousand times stronger, you feel it.
Since my "bootleg" nutritive energy wasn't ideal, my soul probably absorbed it with less-than-perfect efficiency, and after gulping down half my chakra reserves in one go, it basically responded: "That's it—one more sip and I'll pop." So I flat-out couldn't "pump it" at a crazy pace.
Well, I could: those half-reserves raised my soul strength by about sixty percent, which compared to the previous pace of around twenty percent per YEAR was just monstrous. So that "efficiency," which was low because I couldn't make the energy closer to what was needed and the soul had to "digest" it down to the right level, felt pretty damn insignificant.
But with my chakra-enhancement project in mind, my soul would catch up to my chakra—if I completely ditched developing the latter—only very, very slowly. And again, chakra has undeniable advantages in affinity, plus the sheer mountains of local knowledge about it, which I also possess. Still, the soul had its own advantages, which is why I kept pumping it too—while experimenting with what doses and frequency worked best.
Over the week—while still buried in the rest of the experiments—pumping my soul showed itself especially well. Or rather: holy shit, it worked insanely well.
After digging into it, I didn't fully understand what exactly happened, but it was clearly something huge. With soul strengthening, my intellect, control, and sensitivity crawled upward fast. And the second and third didn't scale proportionally to the first.
It felt like I'd regained the kind of growth potential for control and sensitivity I had in early childhood.
The clones went to check that hypothesis—dug through ninja medical records, checked the ninjas themselves—and it turned out: yes. Those rare few who were born with stronger souls had higher potential for chakra control! That discovery, with a snap of the fingers, made soul development so important that now I always keep my soul at least strong enough for that potential to stay.
That potential, by the way, doesn't get realized too fast, and soul growth itself goes much quicker. But now I'm definitely not stopping that development anytime soon.
Years of prep, and the guns I'd set up weren't just firing one after another—turns out I'd loaded other, hidden weapons too, and they started blasting as well. Now all that was left was to polish the last strokes and reap the big harvest.
So there was nothing surprising about the fact that soon—after a lot of tests—it was time for the final stage of the body-enhancement project… Time to make my child's, relatively weak body truly powerful.
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