Weekend.
"Konome, Guy and I are going out on a mission for the next few days. Feed yourself."
"Mm."
Her reply was clean and indifferent, hanging in the air like frost.
A faint smell of scorching drifted in on the wind from time to time.
Guy and Kakashi looked at Konome in the center of the training ground, sitting cross legged for an entire day without moving, and could only shake their heads.
They could not out grind her.
They truly could not.
No matter how hard they trained, the gap between them and Konome did not shrink. If anything, it grew wider by the day.
That monster ate only one meal a day, and each meal could feed ten people.
Eight shadow clones plus the original trained together. Every day she sat down on the ground, did not move, and her entire body crackled as she grew stronger.
Someone with higher talent than you, working harder than you. How were you supposed to compete with that?
Kakashi had even secretly learned to train with shadow clones. He split off two clones and trained for about three hours. The instant they dispelled, he collapsed on the ground and did not get up for half a day.
Guy could handle it, but he was a pure taijutsu shinobi. Training like that was practically the same as not training at all. Suffering alone did not make his muscles grow.
Little by little, the two of them accepted reality.
A monster like her probably existed only once in the whole world. There was no need to push themselves to death. As long as they trained consistently every day and did not slack off, that was enough.
The excessive enthusiasm Konome had forced out of them faded, and life gradually returned to normal.
With Konome, that human shaped gold eating beast, living under their roof, Guy kept a close eye on new missions posted at the Hokage Building. Recently there was a well paying mission to hunt down a missing nin.
According to intel, the target was a taijutsu specialist with strong counter tracking ability.
Kakashi would handle tracking and scouting. Guy would handle the punching. Perfect.
"The money is in the second drawer by the bedside. Use it if you need it. We're leaving."
"Mm. Mm."
Konome narrowed her eyes and answered lazily, her attention fully buried inside her own body.
Blue violet lightning raced through her muscles. Cells bounced with joy as they absorbed Lightning Release power and awakened deeper layers of vitality.
After several days of training, her body's capacity to carry Lightning Release had clearly risen.
Lightning Release Chakra Mode matched her too well. Almost every session, she could feel her body becoming more active, more supple, more alive.
The body that once felt unbearably heavy now felt as if she had shrugged off a whole pack of burdens.
Her lightning stimulated reflex nerves combined with the Byakugan's perception made everything around her slow down.
She watched her old weakness, lack of agility, get patched up bit by bit, until it even started to turn into a strength.
It felt so good she was almost addicted.
And after the joy of Lightning training, every night she would receive all kinds of experience packs, nature transformation, taijutsu, shape transformation, peeling loose from the depths of her mind a little at a time.
She might get a Water Release inspiration today, and within a couple of days the framework would already be built.
She would hit a bottleneck she could not solve, then suddenly some unrelated nature would break through, dragging the earlier problem along and snapping it open.
Then a few days later she would realize that the nearly completed jutsu had an unfixable flaw, and she would discard it without hesitation.
The techniques inside would become nutrients, turning into another crucial cornerstone for the next jutsu's framework.
She was starting to get hooked on this life.
If only Shikotsumyaku would behave a little more.
Konome thought with regret.
Lightning stimulated her flesh, boosting her body's vitality, and that strengthening seemed to trigger a chain reaction with Shikotsumyaku.
The gray bone spread faster and faster.
Her spine and limb bones looked like bananas left out too long, mottled with spots. In some places, the spots even linked together, forming spiderweb patterns.
Even the periosteum beneath her skin began to show strange markings.
Because of that, she even had "Academy Konome" go ask Kurama for intel.
At first Kurama was stubborn and did not want to talk.
Later, Konome coaxed and tricked him, trading some information she knew for a couple of scraps. Only then did she manage to pry two sentences out of him.
He had never seen Hamura's power, he had only heard bits of it from "that one."
"The Byakugan is the starting point of all formless power. The gray bone is the end point of all tangible things. Hamura and the power he inherited are completely opposite in nature."
After leaving those two lines, the Nine Tails refused to say anything else.
But it was enough. Combined with what she already knew, Konome could reverse engineer quite a lot.
Hamura and Hagoromo's powers were opposite in nature.
If the Rinnegan with tomoe was the ultimate "formless power," the endpoint of ocular evolution, then the Byakugan that every Otsutsuki was born with was the beginning.
And if the Sage Body packed with overwhelming life force represented the beginning of life, then the gray bone reeking of decay and death represented the end of all things.
Those two brothers split Kaguya Otsutsuki's power in half, but clearly the younger brother got the worse deal.
The Byakugan, as a starting point, was not as brainlessly powerful as the Rinnegan that stood at the finish line.
Dead Bone Pulse was terrifyingly strong, but its side effects were equally terrifying. It could not compare to the Sage Body's broad compatibility and vitality.
You could even see it in their descendants.
Hagoromo's bloodline split into Asura and Indra, and every one of them was a monster.
Hamura's bloodline inherited two disadvantageous powers. The ancestors of the Hyuga and Kaguya clans did not even produce any famous top tier figures.
Hinata and Kimimaro were basically the miniature version of Hamura's lineage.
Pure eyes that were mostly useless, no offensive dojutsu. Shikotsumyaku was fierce, an all in one offense and defense tool, and its chakra absorption was even more terrifying.
Put the two together and you got Konome. She was strong, yes.
But once her age caught up to her, she might die even worse than Neji and Kimimaro combined.
Please let "Yang Release Konome" discover something real through medical ninjutsu.
Konome had already made up her mind.
If the Yang Release clone found a direction, she would have every clone, including her original body, focus all effort on developing the Reverse Eight Gates first.
If there was still no progress, no direction at all, then she would use these two years to grow as fast as possible. Once she reached full Kage level, she would storm Root's base and gamble her life injecting Hashirama cells.
Unless absolutely forced, she did not want to walk that road.
Danzo was not easy to kill, and Root held countless secret technique specialists.
There was a massive difference between a duel and a mob.
Even now, with how much stronger she had become, if she faced Yotsuki Yu again and played it right, she would at worst suffer minor injuries before taking him down.
But two Yotsuki Yu would push her into a hard fight. Three at once and she would die.
Unless you were two tiers above your opponents, numbers were a gap you could not easily bridge.
Konome sank her mind and continued training Lightning Release Chakra Mode with her eyes closed.
All her current troubles and frustrations, at their core, were simply a lack of firepower.
Lightning flowing through her veins brought power. The pleasant numb tingling through her muscles felt like a massage.
Before she knew it, dusk had nearly arrived.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Boom.
A set of footsteps suddenly sounded beside her, abnormally heavy yet painfully familiar.
Just from the sound, it felt like Guy training while carrying heavy weights.
"Guy, didn't you go…" Konome lifted her head, then froze. Her dead gray eyes contracted in disbelief.
The visitor seemed satisfied with her reaction. They pressed both hands down lightly, eyes curved into crescent moons.
"Don't rush. Let me explain slowly."
Time rewound three hours.
Konoha Hospital.
A temporary classroom converted from a meeting room. Chihaya Tooru stood beside a small blackboard. Below him sat two long rows of teenage shinobi.
Each of them had sweat on their foreheads. Their hands were held level above the desks, glowing a vivid green that illuminated the carp lying in front of them, only its gills still twitching.
In more than a dozen black and white fish eyes, a strange light flickered at the same time.
"I have said this many times. The most important part of medical ninjutsu is control."
Chihaya Tooru pinched a piece of chalk through a damp tissue, then aggressively wrote the word "CONTROL" on the board in large strokes.
He even circled it for emphasis.
"Uncontrolled life energy will cause horrifying mutations at the patient's wound. If your chakra is too strong, it can even affect the underlying logic of cell division, and the injury may grow all kinds of bizarre things."
Squinting, Chihaya Tooru stared warningly at the girl whose green glow was noticeably larger than everyone else's.
"I once saw it with my own eyes. A young man born with extraordinarily powerful chakra treated someone with simple food poisoning and turned them into a toad covered in meat tumors."
"Believe me, class. Life force with extreme corrosiveness is not less dangerous than violent Lightning Release. That 'brute force creates miracles' approach does not work in medical ninjutsu."
Targeted, "Yang Release Konome" bit her lip and lowered her chakra output again.
The carp on the table immediately calmed down. But as it calmed, its gills also slowed, barely moving once every long while, and it was hard to tell if it was breathing or twitching.
She had hit a problem.
A problem in the place she least expected.
Whether it was Shikotsumyaku or the Nine Tails' power, healing flesh never required "control."
As long as chakra was sufficient, wounds of every strange kind would simply knit shut on their own.
Even her "body control" looked extremely precise, but the process was unbelievably simple.
The Byakugan issued direct commands. Her Shikotsumyaku empowered body simply carried them out automatically. Konome did not need to worry about anything.
She was like a monarch. As long as she provided fuel and declared a vision, the Shikotsumyaku would make it real.
Medical ninjutsu was different. Every step was manual.
A wound healed because cells completed the work themselves, an extremely precise and complex physiological process.
But once medical ninjutsu was used, the medical ninja had to manually recreate those physiological activities one to one. The required precision was brutal.
In theory, this should not have stumped Konome with the Byakugan assisting.
The issue lay in her abnormal chakra.
After devouring the Three Tails and the Nine Tails, the quality of her chakra was extremely high, and it carried a partial Yang attribute by default.
When she used medical ninjutsu now, the effect was not "good."
It was tyrannical.
If normal people treated with "a wisp" of chakra, Konome using "half a thread" could still cause mutation.
Medical ninjutsu itself was hard enough.
Konome was a transfer student with no foundational knowledge of physiology.
Add chakra interference on top, and her learning speed instantly slowed.
Of course, "slower learning" did not mean "slower healing."
The injury inside the fish's belly had actually been healed long ago.
But in certain areas extra meat tumors had grown, squeezing its organs and causing its suffering.
There was no choice.
To save the carp's innocent life, she secretly used Wind Release to slice its belly open, cut away all the extra growth, then heal it again.
After repeating the process several times, the fish was clearly about to die.
Its mouth opened and closed weakly, eyes bulging as it stared up at the ceiling with complete despair.
Faced with Miss Konome's slow execution treatment, its fish life had gone numb.
Flap flap flap.
The dying carp suddenly became lively again, its tail whipping hard.
Konome raised a hand to block the fishy splash. She pulled back the fingers pinning it down, and the blue violet electricity at her fingertips dimmed quickly.
Medical Ninjutsu: Electroshock Therapy.
"Oh. Someone succeeded. That fish has so much energy."
"It's Konome Taketori…"
"She really is a genius."
The other students were immediately drawn over. Their eyes first filled with envy toward the lively carp, then shifted into admiration toward the talented girl in front of it.
On the platform, Chihaya Tooru also noticed the carp's "vigorous life force." He set down the chalk and stepped down in a few strides, arriving at Konome's side.
Flap flap.
The carp struggled like its life depended on it, tail slapping the tabletop like it was applauding Konome's excellence.
Chihaya Tooru frowned as he examined it. After a moment, his brow relaxed.
"Full marks."
He even started clapping first.
The other students followed, applauding Konome.
No one had personally witnessed her killing an elite jonin, but successfully healing an injured carp on her first day learning medical ninjutsu was more than enough talent to earn their approval.
Faced with the misunderstanding, Konome licked her lips awkwardly, not knowing how to explain.
The fish blew bubbles, its strong body turning sluggish again. Konome pressed her lips together and lightly patted its head.
Sizzle.
A tiny current, too fine to see with the naked eye, flowed out from her palm.
Smack smack.
With the Byakugan flaring, the carp instantly became lively again, thrashing wildly. The students' gazes grew even hotter, even more worshipful.
Not long after.
Ring ring ring.
The bell chimed sharply.
Konome let out a breath, grabbed the carp by the tail, and tossed it into a red plastic bucket beside the desk.
The fish was already starting to smell faintly cooked.
Chihaya Tooru wiped his hands with a wet tissue, then rolled up his sleeve and checked a pale gold wristwatch.
"Alright. Time's up. I'm assigning homework."
"Keep the carp in your hands alive. I won't check whether it's still today's fish. Don't fool me, and don't fool yourselves. Alright, class dismissed."
The room erupted as students lifted their buckets and scattered.
"Konome, stay a moment."
Konome was still holding her bucket, thinking about what she was supposed to do with this carp, when she heard the teacher call her.
Guiltily, she slid the pale fish behind her back.
Seeing that, Chihaya Tooru's malnourished face softened into a smile.
"Stop torturing that carp. Medical ninjutsu isn't that simple."
"You could tell?" Konome set the bucket down.
"You nearly cooked it. If I couldn't tell, what kind of doctor would I be?"
He packed up his things, then looked at Konome with an inviting smile.
"If you don't understand physiology, you'll never truly enter medical ninjutsu. I have a few professional books at home, written personally by Princess Tsunade. They're far more detailed than the textbooks you're reading now."
"Do you want to come take a look?"
Faced with that tempting invitation, "Yang Release Konome" quietly raised her eyes.
Above Chihaya Tooru's head, gold and black light intertwined, sharply divided in color yet tangled together.
Half good. Half evil.
Impossible to separate.
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