Out in the scorching desert, Naruto alone—or rather, one blonde boy and one giant fox—continued their infinite, repetitive jerking cycle to stall for time.
Anyone else would have surrendered hours ago.
Even if they hadn't, their physical bodies would have given out from the sheer exhaustion.
But this was Naruto.
His raw grit and Uzumaki stamina for a single, monotonous task remained entirely unmatched.
For anyone else, this was psychological torture.
To Naruto, Makoto choosing a pure battle of attrition felt like stepping right into his comfort zone!
...
A full day passed.
Back in the Hidden Rain Village, Makoto finished his leisurely day of shopping, catching a movie, and eating a nice dinner.
As the group dispersed and he watched the girls return to their quarters, Makoto sighed.
This sinful Shinobi World forced its children to mature far too fast.
Even a well-protected young lady from a major clan like Hanabi acted like a miniature, calculating adult, despite being under ten years old.
It robbed Makoto of experiencing those cute endearing quirks normal kids had—like a puppy's excited bark or a penguin's clumsy waddle.
The ninja world severely lacked adorable innocent children!
Oh, wait.
They did exist.
But they were just all crossdressing boys with traumatic backstories!
Realizing this only made the situation sadder.
"What is it?" Rin Nohara asked, looking at Makoto in confusion.
"Nothing. Let's go," Makoto said, shaking his head to clear the depressing thought.
With the mundane activities over, only the two reanimated best friends remained with him.
It was time to officially initiate the resurrection plan.
He had deliberately delayed starting to give Orochimaru enough time to prepare the facility.
A day had passed.
The essential items and equipment stood ready.
The three of them arrived at the underground laboratory.
Yes, an underground lab this time.
The resurrection plan carried zero risk of volatile energy explosions, so it wouldn't disturb the outside world.
In fact, fewer external environmental disturbances meant better surgical results.
The secure underground setting was perfect.
"Makoto-kun, I've left everything here. The equipment manuals are on the steel table. Ask Director Nonou if you need any operational help," Orochimaru hissed smoothly upon Makoto's arrival, already heading for the door.
"Since your new ability perfectly patches the technological gaps in my thesis, I will suspend my deep dive into this specific research. I have other pressing matters. I must go."
The old Orochimaru might have obsessively lingered to witness a brand-new resurrection method.
The current Orochimaru lacked all interest.
His Living Corpse Reincarnation provided enough immortality.
Reincarnating into a durable White Zetsu erased any lingering lifespan worries. Developing new, highly complex resurrection methods for other people essentially meant doing unpaid charity work.
Orochimaru wasn't selfishly opposed to resurrecting others, he just found the required time and energy did not scale with the practical results.
Looking at it purely from a combat power perspective, a gap existed between Edo Tensei and true resurrection, but it was a minor one.
The only massive, noticeable gaps applied to Reanimated bodies on the god-tier level of Senju Hashirama and Uchiha Madara.
The only other flaw was that an Edo Tensei body couldn't train to grow stronger, its strength remained permanently locked in place.
The power boost between the two methods matched, yet the required effort differed like heaven and earth.
Orochimaru and his dedicated team had tackled resurrection time and again, yet faced endless, maddening detail-oriented problems.
But Makoto's grand plan mandated resurrecting the Three-Tails Jinchūriki, Rin Nohara.
Setting others aside, she had to return to the living.
Orochimaru had tried to shift his thinking.
High resurrection difficulty ruled out mass production.
What about lowering the safety standards for a one-time, high-cost, high-difficulty method? Still a biological failure.
Until Makoto appeared today.
Makoto's new Ōtsutsuki ability granted pure life.
Unlike Tsunade's medical ninjutsu, which simply transferred existing life force, Makoto bestowed true Genesis.
A single demonstration of this bug-level ability resolved all of the lab's hurdles. It even let them discard original, convoluted solutions for hurdles they had already cleared.
The sole drawback: a true resurrection required Makoto to personally perform the operation.
That didn't matter to the snake Sannin.
The current plan only called for Rin Nohara's revival.
Even if future cases arose, they would remain isolated incidents. Makoto never planned to revive every tragic corpse in the ninja world.
In short, since the method sufficed, Orochimaru happily halted his research and shifted focus.
He had far too many mad-scientist directions to explore.
Like his recent sudden inspiration: Tailed Beast chakra entanglement, using Naruto's biology as a relay station, paired with the theoretical Baryon Mode.
Orochimaru practically sprinted down the hall to research this exact terrifying concept!
Four people now occupied the sterile room: Rin Nohara, Kushina Uzumaki, the 'designated tool person' Nonou Yakushi, and Makoto.
"Ready to begin?" Makoto asked, looking at Rin.
Regarding the bet with Naruto, Makoto assumed a default loss for the boy.
In truth, Naruto's statistical chances of catching him sat well below 0.1 percent.
But who told Naruto to be the number one unpredictable ninja?
Weren't all shonen protagonists unpredictable?
Regardless, no accidents occurred this time, nor would they.
If Naruto had miraculously won, Makoto would have kept his promise and resurrected Kushina first.
The logic felt simple: before resurrecting the politically crucial Rin Nohara, someone needed to serve as a biological test subject to prevent accidents.
Kushina would have gladly agreed to help.
That proved unnecessary now.
"...Okay." Rin glanced at Kushina, hesitated for a brief second, then gave a firm nod.
She wanted Kushina to resurrect alongside her, but realized this very first attempt carried unknown risks.
Furthermore, her specific resurrection remained a core foundation of Makoto's plan—her duty and mission to the world.
Sentimentality had no place in the operating room.
Rin truly lived up to her saint-like nature.
After having the Three-Tails forcefully sealed inside her in her youth, she chose suicide on Kakashi's Chidori over gambling on the Hokage subduing the beast, terrified of harming a single innocent villager.
"Then, lie down inside," Nonou Yakushi instructed, pressing a button on the console.
A cylindrical cultivation pod filled with a glowing, viscous liquid hissed open, a cloud of cold vapor spilling over the floor tiles.
Rin dipped one foot into the fluid. Her face suddenly flushed a bright crimson.
"Do I... need to undress?"
"Uh..." Nonou blinked, not expecting that shy question. "What is the point of taking off your Edo Tensei clothes?"
The Reanimated body regenerated on its own, a magical process that included the fake dirt-woven clothing spawned alongside the ash.
It wasn't real fabric.
However, rumors did dictate that when Orochimaru and Kabuto first refined the forbidden jutsu years ago, a few reanimated ninjas spawned completely naked in the lab.