"Your brain works fast, brat."
Kiyohara shrugged.
"The Mist are best at ambushes and infiltration, after all."
Tsunade thought for a moment, then turned to Shizune and gave an order.
"Notify all patrol squads to widen their scouting range, especially along the inland rivers. Have the Hyuga clan send three more reconnaissance teams west along the waterways. It would be a waste not to use the Byakugan's range advantage."
"Yes, ma'am!"
Shizune hurried off.
Then Tsunade looked at Kiyohara.
"Where's the Executioner's Blade?"
"In a sealing scroll. I think Samehada is more interesting, so I took it out."
Kiyohara replied.
Earlier, he had already used a small fragment from the Executioner's Blade to make a flying spindle.
So he had already done some research on that material.
Only a living weapon like Samehada was something Kiyohara had never dealt with before.
"And you really plan to keep using that sword?"
"What else would I do?"
Kiyohara patted Samehada's hilt, and the living blade beneath the wrappings let out a pleased hum.
"It really likes my chakra."
Tsunade's mouth twitched.
Of course she knew Samehada was a living weapon with a simple consciousness.
But seeing a Mist sword switch sides this quickly still left her speechless.
"Be careful it doesn't bite back. The loyalty of living weapons has never been reliable."
"I know."
Kiyohara nodded.
He didn't plan on using Samehada forever.
What if the thing met Killer B someday and switched sides?
Or couldn't bring itself to go all out against him?
Kiyohara had no interest in keeping a weapon with that kind of risk.
He only wanted to clone a newborn Samehada and use that as the basis to develop other living weapons.
And their forms wouldn't necessarily have to stay the same as this oversized sword.
"And I've already added a little insurance."
Kiyohara said.
He unwrapped part of Samehada's hilt, revealing black curse-mark patterns winding around it and slowly seeping into the blade itself.
"A curse mark?"
Tsunade arched a brow.
"Yeah. A restraining curse mark. If it doesn't behave, it'll hurt a little."
Kiyohara said it casually, but Tsunade could imagine exactly what a little meant.
That brat was getting more and more like Orochimaru in the way he controlled things.
Still, she said nothing.
The ninja world was cruel by nature. There was no need to be soft with enemies—or their weapons.
Besides, she didn't want anything happening to Kiyohara. An extra safeguard was fine.
"Oh, right."
Kiyohara suddenly remembered something.
"Sensei, do me a favor."
"Go on."
"I want the Executioner's Blade reforged."
Tsunade blinked.
"Reforged? Why? It may be ugly, but the material is excellent, and the self-repair effect from absorbing blood is extremely useful."
"Exactly because it's ugly."
Kiyohara said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
"And I don't like using a big blade. I want a straight sword—something like the Kusanagi. Thin, sharp, suited to high-speed slashes."
He paused, then added,
"The Executioner's Blade is a variant of chakra metal. It can absorb blood and chakra. I want to melt it down, extract the useful properties, and mix them into my current sword.
"If I add in that chunk of chakra metal Asuma gave me too, it should make for a pretty good blade."
Tsunade rubbed her forehead.
Using one of the Seven Ninja Swords as raw material to forge a new weapon for himself…
This brat really was arrogant to the core.
But then again, he had the right to be.
"I'll find the best swordsmith I can. But…"
She looked at him.
"Reforging the Executioner's Blade will take time. At least a month."
"That's fine."
Kiyohara nodded.
That wasn't long.
And in the meantime, he wanted to run an experiment.
The Samehada cloning project.
Half a month passed in the blink of an eye.
Four miles east of camp, there was a cave.
From the outside, the entrance was hidden behind thick vines.
But once the vines were pushed aside and someone went ten or so meters in through the narrow passage, the interior suddenly opened up.
Kiyohara had carved it out with Earth Release and turned it into a laboratory. Torches burned along the walls.
Lined up against those walls were more than a dozen transparent tanks. The largest were half a person tall, the smallest about the size of washbasins.
Each tank had sand and pebbles at the bottom, recreating different aquatic environments.
Some of them held strange-looking fish swimming inside—the Binding Fish clan that Kiyohara had obtained through the black market and summoning-beast traders.
They were a special kind of fish. If the Monkey King clan could transform into the Adamantine Staff, then the Binding Fish clan could turn themselves into a kind of sludge that hardened into whatever shape they took after cooling.
They were usually contracted by ninja and used to restrain enemies.
That was why they were called the Binding Fish clan.
Kiyohara had not only collected live Binding Fish, but also a number of their eggs.
Those eggs were now sitting inside the tanks.
There was also a long wooden worktable covered with microscopes, culture dishes, syringes, scalpels, and other instruments.
Some of these had been taken directly from the medical tents, while the rest Kiyohara had purchased by selling off a portion of his gold dust.
It was already evening.
There were also two women inside the cave—Rin and Shizune.
To speed up the research, Kiyohara had outsourced some of the work to them.
After all, one had been trained by Tsunade, and the other was naturally gifted. Both were far more capable than ordinary medical ninja.
"She fell asleep?"
Kiyohara raised a brow.
"Your lab really is primitive."
After being quiet for more than half a month, Yotsuki Kiyohara emerged from the urn for the first time.
He looked around at the surroundings and scratched his head.
Honestly, he had no interest in research or science at all.
The only thing that really attracted him was the thrill of battle.
Every time he went onto a battlefield, he didn't need to know the mission.
He only needed to know that it was time to kill.
Kiyohara could tell from his expression just how bored he was, but said nothing.
He managed his time carefully. None of this experimentation had interfered with his own training.
And if the Samehada research succeeded, it would help him a lot when it came to training subordinates.
He himself was a cheat. His growth rate was basically rocket-fast.
Other people weren't.
So to avoid the problem of having to do everything personally, Kiyohara planned to cultivate a group of good subordinates.
Right now, his best men were Kakashi and Might Guy.
If he could develop a Samehada clone specialized in absorbing Lightning Release chakra and give it to Kakashi, then Kakashi could probably restore the glory of Hatake swordsmanship.
After all, Samehada could absorb chakra, which would help make up for Kakashi's poor stamina.
Kiyohara could even prepare a battery-pack type Samehada for himself—if he ran low on chakra, let the thing absorb some and then feed it back to him.
"I'm going back to sleep."
Yotsuki Kiyohara's spirit turned into a blur and slipped back into Kiyohara's mind, opening the lid of the urn and lying inside like a vampire in a coffin.
Kiyohara shook his head and looked toward the two women asleep on the long bench beside the stone table.
Rin and Shizune were both wearing white coats over clothes suited for movement.
Rin was lying on her side, her brown hair slightly messy where it brushed against her cheek, her eyelashes trembling softly with each breath.
She was curled up, her legs in dark red over-the-knee socks folded together, still wearing ninja sandals, with pale crescent-like toes peeking out.
Shizune's sleeping posture was neater. She lay on her back with both hands folded over her stomach.
When Kiyohara pushed aside the disguised stone slab covering the entrance and walked in, this was the scene waiting for him.
He quieted his footsteps and leaned Samehada—still wrapped in bandages—against the wall.
The living sword's barbs wriggled faintly under the wrapping, as though complaining about being ignored.
Kiyohara shot it a glance, and Samehada immediately settled down.
He walked over to the stone table and picked up the two thin blankets hanging from the back of the bench.
He had brought them from camp a few days ago.
He covered Shizune first, his movements so light they barely disturbed her.
When it came to Rin, she shifted unconsciously and let out a soft murmur in her sleep. Kiyohara paused for a moment, waited until she settled again, then carefully tucked the blanket over her.
Once he finished, he sent a stream of Yang Release chakra into both Shizune and Rin to ease their fatigue before standing back up.
Then he moved to the isolated workbench at the innermost part of the lab.
Here sat ten specially made miniature incubators, each only palm-sized, their transparent shells made from chakra-conductive material. Inside was pale green nutrient fluid.
Through the walls, small milky-white egg cells no bigger than grains of rice could be seen suspended inside. These were unfertilized eggs from the Binding Fish clan. Kiyohara had used special means to keep them in an operable state.
He pulled over a stone stool and sat down, closing his eyes.
When he opened them again, his pupils had turned crimson, with three tomoe slowly rotating.
The Sharingan.
The world in Kiyohara's eyes magnified.
The egg membrane, cytoplasm, nucleus—everything became as clear as lines in a palm.
With enough focus, a three-tomoe Sharingan could even see viruses, so Kiyohara could basically use it as a microscope. It made experimentation extremely convenient.
He raised his right hand, pressing his index and middle fingers together. Pale blue chakra condensed into a thread finer than hair—the Chakra Scalpel.
Guided by the Sharingan's precision, he carefully separated out the original nucleus.
This process had to be done with extreme care. Even the slightest mistake would kill the cell.
The removed nucleus was placed into a waste dish at the side, while the egg cell itself was kept alive, waiting for a replacement core.
Next came the extraction of somatic cells from Samehada.
Kiyohara stood and walked over to the wall, unwrapping part of Samehada's bandages.
Samehada seemed to understand what was about to happen. The blade trembled slightly and its barbs reluctantly opened.
Kiyohara placed his hand on the area where the hilt met the blade—the most active part of Samehada's body.
"Don't move."
Kiyohara said softly, green medical chakra glowing in his palm.
Samehada instantly froze.
It didn't fear pain, but mixed into Kiyohara's medical chakra was a trace of warm Fire Release, and that warmth instinctively felt good to it.
A few seconds later, Kiyohara pulled his hand away. At his fingertips was an almost invisible mass of transparent gel.
That was Samehada's somatic cell cluster.
Back at the worktable, he repeated the same process.
Through the Sharingan, Samehada's nucleus appeared noticeably larger than the original Binding Fish egg nucleus.
Kiyohara wrapped it in chakra threads and carefully placed it into the now-emptied egg cell.
Fusion began.
The egg cell's cytoplasm started to fluctuate, trying to reject the foreign nucleus. Kiyohara continuously fed in Yang Release chakra, gently mediating the conflict between the two forms of life.
He couldn't rush it. Samehada's nucleus had to slowly adapt to its new environment while still retaining its own traits.
The first reconstructed cell was completed.
Kiyohara placed it back into the incubator, where the chakra-infused nutrient fluid began automatically nourishing the new life.
He flexed his fingers and looked at the hundred-plus eggs remaining on the table.
This was what he had spent the last half month doing, over and over.
After completing a few more, Rin woke up.
The first thing she felt was the warmth of the blanket over her.
Then, half-asleep, she remembered that in her dreams it had felt like a gentle stream of chakra had been flowing into her body, easing her sore muscles.
When she opened her eyes, Kiyohara was already there.
"Kiyohara-kun… when did you get here?"
Rin asked sleepily, her cheeks still flushed from just waking up.
"Two hours ago."
Kiyohara withdrew his hand.
"You were sleeping so soundly, I didn't wake you."
Shizune woke at around the same time, rubbing her eyes as she sat up. The blanket slid off her.
She looked at Kiyohara, then at Samehada leaning against the wall, and her mind slowly cleared.
"How's the experiment going?"
"I've completed some nuclear transplants."
Kiyohara pointed toward the incubators.
"Next comes the incubation period. It should take three to five days."
Rin stood up and walked over to inspect them closely.
"These little things… their chakra signatures are so faint."
She spoke softly.
"They're artificially engineered lifeforms. The fact that they're alive at all is already a success."
Kiyohara walked over too, reopening his Sharingan and scanning the ten incubators.
"Shizune, help me record this."
Kiyohara said.
Perhaps because he had Orochimaru's research data as a foundation, the Samehada cloning was progressing very smoothly.
Orochimaru could even clone the Sharingan. Cloning Samehada wasn't all that difficult in comparison.
Because in the ninja world, the true core technology had always been the Sharingan.
Without the Sharingan, the Rinnegan could never be obtained.
And without the Rinnegan, the Ten-Tails could not be controlled.
If Madara and Obito had lacked the Rinnegan, then the first step of the Eye of the Moon Plan would have collapsed outright.
"All right."
Shizune nodded.
At first, when Kiyohara had described the experiment, Rin had thought he was just indulging in wild fantasies.
But as the days went by, she realized the project was progressing remarkably well.
Kiyohara… was terrifying even in scientific research.
At that point, Shizune had fully come to understand just how vast the gap was between a genius and everyone else.
She began organizing the experiment records, neatly writing down the time, procedures, and preliminary results onto a scroll.
Her handwriting was clean and elegant—the exact opposite of Tsunade's bold style.
Over the next several days, the three of them spent most of their free time in the lab, aside from their ordinary camp duties.
From time to time, Kurenai would wander over, insisting on taking a look too.
Even Tsunade came by to observe once.
She thought Kiyohara was doing a good job, and after offering a few pointers, the progress sped up even more.
Over the next week, Kiyohara increased the scale of the experiments, and finally, one day, the first breakthrough came.
In the smallest incubator, fine cracks appeared on the milky-white eggshell.
Crack.
The crack widened.
A tiny black creature, smaller than a fingernail, pushed its way out.
It looked like a newly hatched fish fry, pitch black all over. But instead of scales, it was covered in a thin gelatinous membrane.
"It worked…"
Shizune stared at it.
Rin stretched out one finger, a trace of pale blue Water Release chakra gathering at the tip.
The little black fish sensed it immediately and clumsily turned in the nutrient fluid, swimming toward the chakra.
It moved slowly, its body wobbling awkwardly as if it still hadn't learned how to control its new form.
Kiyohara opened the incubator and carefully lifted the little fish out with chakra threads, placing it into a small aquarium he had prepared ahead of time.
The bottom was lined with fine sand, and several water plants swayed gently in the current.
The successful hatching filled all three of them with excitement, but it also brought heavier work with it.
Kiyohara named it Number One.
He lifted Number One out of the aquarium and placed it on an observation tray lined with soft padding.
The little black fish began wriggling anxiously the moment it left the water.
Kiyohara hovered his right hand over it and began releasing chakra.
Number One calmed immediately, and its body began to change.
Its black gelatinous body softened, stretched, and lengthened as if it were being heated.
From a tiny fish, it slowly elongated into a narrow rod about twenty centimeters long.
Fine patterns appeared across the surface, and one end thickened slightly into a shape resembling a grip.
"A… rod?"
Rin leaned in to look more closely.
Kiyohara didn't answer, continuing to channel chakra.
The rod changed further. The middle section bent, both ends extended outward, and finally it settled into the shape of a miniature longbow.
The bow was pitch black. It had no string, but grooves formed naturally along the grip where fingers would go.
"A bow?"
Rin blinked.
Kiyohara reached out and took hold of the tiny black bow.
Perhaps because Samehada's somatic cells had been mixed into it, these Binding Fish were spontaneously shifting into certain shapes.
A weapon soul manifestation?
Kiyohara found the whole thing bizarre.
If it were a different chakra signature—or a different experimental host—would it still become a bow?
Or would it take another shape?
And what would happen if he changed the chakra nature?
Then he remembered Enma, the Adamantine Staff that could extend and shrink at will, and suddenly this didn't seem all that unusual by ninja-world standards.
After all, during the Fourth War, Hiruzen had used the Adamantine Staff to smash down branches of the Divine Tree and even shove the Nine-Tails clear out of Konoha.
Just turning into a bow still felt a little ordinary by comparison.
Kiyohara then tried feeding chakra into the bow.
Hum.
The limbs of the bow trembled slightly, and translucent chakra strings formed automatically between the ends.
Kiyohara drew the string with one hand, and a pale blue Water Release chakra arrow formed along it.
He aimed at the cave wall and let go.
Whoosh.
The water arrow flew out and burst against the rock wall in a splash, leaving a wet mark behind.
Its power was weak—barely better than an E-rank ninjutsu.
But the important thing was that this bow was alive.
Just like Samehada, it could shift its shape to a certain degree.
Maybe it could even fuse with its user?
At that moment, the black bow that Number One had become began trembling violently.
Fine cracks spread across its surface, and the black gelatinous material started writhing out of control, as if it were melting.
Kiyohara immediately sensed Number One's life force dropping sharply.
He kept holding the black bow in his left hand while opening the fingers of his right, pouring out dense green medical chakra and wrapping the entire bow in it.
Unfortunately, his first successful test subject still died.
"Still, it's a good start."
Kiyohara shook his head.
With this beginning, though, the next stages would proceed much more smoothly.
"What a shame."
Rin gently touched the little black fish in Kiyohara's hand and found that it no longer moved at all.
"With Number One's sacrifice, Number Two can be improved."
Kiyohara said it calmly.
That was what experimentation was: enormous amounts of repetition.
The only difference was that, instead of lab mice, Kiyohara was using fish.
For some reason, he suddenly thought of nuns and fish.
But he absolutely didn't have that kind of kink—using fish as a tool for sexual release.
People couldn't do that.
At the very least, they shouldn't.
"Kiyohara."
While both Rin and Shizune were still staring at the little black fish's corpse, Kurenai entered from outside.
"Kurenai."
Kiyohara looked at her.
This cave wasn't actually far from camp.
If Kurenai had come over, it was probably because something had happened.
"Tsunade-sama said the Cloud front might be moving again."
The moment Kiyohara heard that, he nodded slightly.
For the past half month, he had been telling Tsunade he wanted to go support the Cloud front.
But as vice-captain here, he couldn't just leave.
So the only way was to temporarily head there under the cover of another mission.
Tsunade had told him she'd keep an ear out for an opportunity.
This was probably it.
For Kiyohara, the Willbook had the highest priority of all.
The Samehada clone project would have to drop down a level.
~~~
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