Haruto thought back to yesterday when he was conversing with Jiraiya.
"Was it really Uchiha Madara that launched the meteorite?" Haruto asked with obvious worry.
Jiraiya sighed deeply before shaking his head, "Not something you have to worry about Haruto-kun. We'll handle it."
"...but weren't you about to resurrect the First Hokage to fight him just now?" Haruto asked pointedly, causing Jiraiya's brows to twitch slightly.
"Brat. I told you not to worry about it." Jiraiya said with dark lines on his face.
Snapping back to the present, Haruto quickly noted down Tsunade's observation of the patients they were currently seeing as she narrated it.
"....his soul vessel is shattered and his chakra is slowly leaking… any suggestions?"
Haruto stared blankly at Tsunade, wondering if she really expected him to suddenly come up with suggestions.
"..."
"..."
"I have a suggestion Tsunade-sama… why don't you clone his body and replace his soul into his new body?" Haruto finally said after Tsunade kept staring at him for a long time.
"That will not work. The soul vessel is unique to a body, so even a clone's soul vessel will not necessarily be the same as the original body." Tsunade said and Haruto nodded, clearly simply pretending to understand the words.
Tsunade's brows twitched causing Haruto to hold his head and duck once again.
Only when she didn't hit him again and continued walking to the bed of the next patient did he get up and follow her.
As Haruto walked past the current bed, he paid careful attention to the face of the patient Tsunade had just diagnosed. His eyes looked bloodshot, but they still carried a faint sense of hope.
At least all the eyes that he had seen till now carried a faint sense of hope.
He didn't know how long their lie about treating the patients would last, but he knew that it was their best shot at keeping these people alive for now.
Especially after they'd been left for dead when the Meteorite was falling earlier.
Eventually their rounds finished and Tsunade let Haruto do some self study in the hospital office.
He studied books she personally handpicked and quietly went through them, turning page after page as he absorbed the information in them like a sponge because of his Occlumency.
He had perfect recall and perfect understanding from the Occlumency, meaning once he read something he understood it for life and also remembered it for that duration.
'Unless I literally run out of space in my brain to store new memories I won't forget anything.'
'And I won't be running out of space for likely another five thousand years… at which point I'll probably have larger things to worry about than wondering what I ate for breakfast or what my current bed smells like.'
Haruto was silent for a while before his mind wandered from the confines of the pages of his current textbook.
'I can't possess Tsunade anymore unless I want to get caught.'
'I'll need to find a way to clone my soul like the shadow clone jutsu to be able to split my soul and then possess Tsunade for a duration before reabsorbing the soul piece to regain all the memories of the event.'
'But cloning the soul… is such a thing even possible?'
'I can't even perform any experiments regarding this… not even with my shadow clones or Tsunade and Jiraiya will notice with their ridiculous sensing abilities.'
'And I can't risk doing this without an experiment since I might lose a piece of my soul in the process.'
POP.
PUCHI.
Haruto's hand snapped up to his forehead where a toothpick had broken through to the subcutaneous layer just beneath his skin on his skull and gotten stuck.
He plucked out the toothpick and glared at Tsunade.
"What?" Tsunade asked with a smirk on her face, "You got distracted."
Sigh… Haruto didn't argue. Instead he went back to reading about how the body produced and interacted with chakra and the various energies that constituted it.
Only suddenly, Tsunade spoke up.
"Brat…"
Haruto looked up.
"...why did you hide your chakra control level from me?"
Haruto stared into Tsunade's eyes and read her memories backing up this claim blatantly.
'Oh… she's talking about how I controlled the chakra she pumped into my body so efficiently.'
'Hmm… what do I say to this?'
Haruto opened his mouth and spoke softly, "I hid nothing Tsunade-sama… it was but a momentary enlightenment that occurred in me as you pumped the chakra through my pathways when I realised that chakra cannot be controlled, it's flow can only be redirected."
The answer was bull.
There was no redirecting the flow of chakra like this was some grand cultivation novel or he was some kungfu panda.
In fact Haruto didn't even know this was a novel.
But he still gave Tsunade a valid excuse, after all each person understood chakra differently, it was made up of their own spiritual energy and they could control it as they saw fit.
Tsunade grumbled a bit under her breath at the response but said nothing further and went back to lazing around at her desk while Tonton lay in the sun like a plant performing photosynthesis beside her.
The silence returned to the office room until a knock resounded on the office door.
Knock Knock
"Tsunade-sama, are you in there?"
"Hmm… Inoichi?" Tsunade asked.
"Yes, Tsunade-sama, it's me, I've come to discuss our business proposal."
"Come in." Tsunade said, getting up from the desk and walking towards the sofa.
Inoichi arrived, looked at Haruto seriously studying and quietly walked up to the sofa and sat down opposite Tsunade.
Summed up, their discussion amounted to Tsunade taking sixty percent of the business profits while Inoichi took forty percent of the business profits.
While Inoichi agreed to that, Haruto read his surface thoughts and he wasn't surprised.
Inoichi planned to drum up business costs to always show off a lesser profit than actually existed, taking away not forty but fifty percent in the end.
So Haruto had Tsunade add another condition to the deal by sending a thought to her head and making her believe it to be an idea she came up with herself.
She then added a condition that quite frankly sent a shiver down Inoichi's spine.
"If I catch you cheating me of my share of the profit, you'll have to compensate me with two hundred percent of the profit share of all the previous transactions between us."
And with Haruto able to read Inoichi's mind, he doubted there would be anything hidden from him if he actually did so.
And so their business deal concluded.
Haruto expected the shadow clone internet to begin testing sometime in the next week and then roll out sometime in the next month.
'Does that count as mission accomplished, Edward?'
Edward thought about it for a few seconds but nodded, 'I was wondering if I wanted a working prototype first… but seeing that it'll be ready in the next week or so… I can make an exception for now.'
'Cool!' Haruto cheered.
Then he was suddenly hit with loads of information about transmutation circles and how they functioned in alchemy to transmute one material into another.
The law of equivalent exchange and the law of all is one and one is all engraved themselves thoroughly into his mind.
Haruto's eyes widened.
Suddenly with this new knowledge he realised a lot more doors opened than he had initially realised.
He could make new jutsus that had never been seen before and he could make them so weird and unique that he could dominate the shionbi world sheerly through them.
Things like igniting the body of the person he came in contact with much like Roy Mustang did with Lust, such that since it was their body that was setting itself on fire, no water could douse those flames.
He could combine transmutation circles with souls to transmute his own soul into two without any loss since Alchemy was a closed loop circle where no energy could be destroyed or created.
And when he was done with the second piece of his soul, he could always recombine it into one to become a single whole once again.
He could even do pseudo element bending like in Naruto without actually learning the pesky nature transformations behind them and manipulate them purely using Transmutation circles.
All in all, this was a powerful bonus to his ever growing arsenal.
'I just need a cover story for inventing and using Transmutation circles though…'
PUCHI!
"TSUNADE-SAMA STOP POKING ME WITH TOOTHPICKS!!!!"
"Then pay attention to your textbook…"
"Argghhhh!!"
***
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