Soon enough,
the two of them arrived at an underground archive room. As the heavy stone mechanism door rumbled open, the smell of old paper rushed out to meet them. Inside stood row after row of towering shelves that stretched all the way to the ceiling, packed tight with scrolls. Different letters and numbers were marked along the outer edges as catalog codes.
Tsunade had already memorized the code beforehand.
So Mikami Yuu didn't have to spend much effort to find the shelf holding the scroll on the Cell Activation Technique. He pulled it down, sat at a cold stone table, and began reading.
Tsunade stood nearby with her arms folded, looking bored out of her mind.
As Mikami Yuu carefully read, trying to dig useful information out of the dense, technical text packed with experimental data, he suddenly heard an extremely faint sound approaching from outside the archive room door—something like a snake slithering over the floor.
For a split second,
the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
Then a low, hoarse voice rang out:
"What a rare sight, Tsunade. I never thought you'd step into a place like this again… Are you nostalgic for the research days of old?"
"…So it's you, Orochimaru."
Tsunade turned, frowning slightly, and looked at the pale man who had appeared soundlessly at the doorway.
He wore the green flak jacket of a Konoha jōnin, but his frame was long and thin, his smile faint and unreadable. Under the dim light, his golden snake-like eyes gleamed with something profoundly inhuman.
Orochimaru.
The name alone cast a shadow.
Even without any direct interaction, just meeting his gaze across the room made Mikami Yuu clearly feel that cold, dangerous aura radiating from him, like a venomous cobra staring him down from not far away. It made his skin crawl.
Mikami Yuu had once considered apprenticing himself to Orochimaru.
But that had been before squad assignment.
While Orochimaru undeniably had teaching skill, his cold-blooded, life-is-cheap personality was still hard to stomach. And worse, by now he should already have started researching Living Corpse Reincarnation, which meant he was probably already looking around for suitable genius bodies to use as future vessels. Theoretically, Mikami Yuu was just barely qualified to count as one of those candidates.
So—
since Tsunade and Namikaze Minato were both clearly better options, there was no need to go to Orochimaru.
Mikami Yuu gave a polite little bow and greeted him with a respectful "Orochimaru-sama," then dropped his gaze back to the scroll and kept reading.
At that moment,
Orochimaru's eyes slid past Tsunade and landed on Mikami Yuu. A trace of curious interest lit up his snake-like pupils.
"Oh? This little one looks unfamiliar. Don't tell me he's your new student?"
"Not yet."
Tsunade answered coldly.
"'Not yet'?"
Orochimaru rolled the phrase over on his tongue, then let out a low chuckle.
"Heh… what a surprise. I thought the pain you buried yourself in had long since killed off any interest in teaching students. So this little one must have something rather special about him?"
Tsunade said nothing. She simply shifted her body slightly, deliberately placing herself between Orochimaru and Mikami Yuu, casually blocking his line of sight.
After a short silence,
Orochimaru walked a few steps into the archive room and stopped some distance away from them. He glanced at the open scroll on the table in front of Mikami Yuu.
"Cell Activation Technique? Heh. That's already a discarded line of research. The moment it began, it took the wrong direction—trying only to use chakra to forcibly stimulate nerve fibers, while completely ignoring cellular load capacity and energy conversion efficiency. That kind of failed product will only lead people astray."
As he spoke,
Orochimaru moved to another shelf, drew out a dark teal scroll that looked newer and less worn around the edges, then casually set it on the stone table and pushed it over.
"If you're interested in this field, you may as well look at this instead. It's the latest result from the past year.
"It's still incomplete, of course, but at least the direction is correct, and it's already gone through two iterations… Though whether someone at your level of knowledge can even understand it is another matter."
"…."
Mikami Yuu glanced at Tsunade. Seeing that she didn't object, he cautiously picked up the dark teal scroll and spread it open. He skimmed it once, then started reading it properly from the top:
[Ding! High-quality potential romance target fragment detected: "Cell Activation Technique · Incomplete." Begin encounter: Yes/No]
"Huh?"
A target fragment?
What did that even mean?
Did he have to assemble it himself?
A flood of question marks popped up in Mikami Yuu's mind. After taking a quiet breath and confirming that neither Tsunade nor Orochimaru seemed to be paying special attention to him, he made his choice:
Yes.
[In Konoha's underground laboratory, you see a mutilated girl. Her face is pale, her entire body naked, lying inside a life-support capsule filled with nutrient fluid. Both her arms are gone from the shoulders down, and both legs are gone from the thighs down as well. Her eyes are shut, her chest unmoving, as though she is already dead—or trapped in the deepest sleep.]
[Talk]
[A: Wake up! Sleeping isn't allowed here!]
[B: Hello, can you hear me? I'm Mikami Yuu. It's a pleasure to meet you.]
[C: (Stay silent and simply watch her)]
This was the first time Mikami Yuu had ever encountered a jutsu that wasn't fully developed yet.
Theoretically, things like the Rasengan or Chidori at this point in time were in similar states. He had wondered before how the galgame system would classify incomplete techniques, and now he had his answer—but he still couldn't quite tell what the right move was. After a brief hesitation, he chose B.
No response.
The dialogue box appeared again. This time he chose A.
Same result.
Then C.
"…What? No reaction no matter what I pick?"
Mikami Yuu scratched his head.
Could it be…
that he first had to help complete the jutsu before it could be romanced at all?
If that was the case, then the difficulty level was absurdly high.
Just as Mikami Yuu's thoughts were starting to drift,
Orochimaru's hoarse voice sounded in his ear again:
"Well, little one? How much of the contents on that scroll can you understand?"
"…A little."
Mikami Yuu came back to himself, glanced over the scroll in front of him, hesitated a moment, then cautiously said:
"A person's nerve transmission is carried out through electrical signals, and the essence of 'activation' is increasing the speed of that signal transmission in order to enhance biological performance.
"The old scroll's approach was to use chakra impact to force that result. It can achieve the effect, but it lowers the sensitivity of the neurons and can even damage the original structure of the nerve fibers. The new scroll's approach is to guide the cells themselves into producing a kind of resonance…"
"Oh?"
A strange light flickered in Orochimaru's eyes, like he had just found a fascinating new toy.
"So you can distinguish the essential difference between the two approaches that quickly. Interesting. Then tell me—what thoughts do you have on the topic of 'capturing resonance frequency and strengthening it directionally'?"
~~~
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