aircannonsinc Chapter 380 A Rage of Passion
Chapter 380 A Rage of Passion
Chapter 380 A Rage of Passion
It was grayish-white, like swollen wood that had been soaked in water for a long time, or like a terracotta figurine that had just been dug out of the ground and had not yet been cleaned.
Its limbs are disproportionate; its arms are too long, its legs are too short, it has six fingers, and seven toes. Its face has no nose, only two small holes, and its mouth is a thin slit without lips, like a cut made of grayish-white clay.
Kabuto walked to the table, took a pair of gloves from the shelf, and slowly put them on. The gloves were rubber and transparent, allowing him to see every joint of the fingers. He reached out and touched the thing's face, his thumb gliding along the thin slit, feeling a very faint tremor on his fingertip, like the wind blowing across his skin.
"He's awake," Dou said.
His voice wasn't loud, but it echoed in the empty room, spreading out in layers like a pebble thrown into water. Two people wearing white masks stood motionless in the doorway, like two guardian deities.
The thing on the platform opened its eyes. Its eyes had no whites; the entire eyeball was a cloudy, yellowish-green, like a glass bead that had been left out for too long and was covered in mold. The pupil was a vertical line, like a cat's eye, but thinner and straighter, like a mark made by a knife on yellowish-green glass.
Dou took a notebook from the shelf next to the table, opened it, and wrote a few lines on it. He wrote slowly, stroke by stroke, as if he were writing something important that couldn't be wrong. After he finished writing, he clipped the pen to the notebook, closed the notebook, and put it in the left pocket of his white coat.
"Can you speak?" Dou asked.
The thing on the platform opened its mouth. The narrow slit widened slightly, revealing a grayish-white oral cavity, like a dried-up riverbed. There was no tongue, no teeth, only layers of wrinkles, like the throat of some deep-sea fish. A sound came from that cavity, short and soft, like something bursting deep in its throat—"pop."
Dou made another note in his notebook.
"The vocal cord structure is incomplete," he muttered to himself, his voice so soft that only he could hear it. "The vocal organs are missing, but there is some ability to vibrate the air. It may not be through the vocal cords, but through the resonance of the body cavity."
He took off his gloves and threw them into an iron bucket under the table. The bucket was already piled with used gloves, transparent and wrinkled, like shed snakeskin.
"Feed it nutrient solution," Dou said to the two people at the door. "Formula B, 200 ml. Observe the intake rate carefully. If the swallowing reflex is incomplete, force-feed it. Record the time, intake, and swallowing success rate. Take its temperature every half hour and draw blood every two hours. Put the blood sample in refrigerator number four."
The two people in white masks nodded in perfect unison, as if looking in a mirror.
Dou left the lab, walked through the corridor, and climbed two flights of stairs to a slightly brighter room. This room wasn't large, but it was much warmer than the lab below. There were windows in the walls, leading to a courtyard. In the courtyard grew a small tree of unknown species, its leaves all gone, its bare branches swaying in the wind. The room contained a table, a chair, a bed, and a bookcase. The bookcase wasn't filled with books, mostly notebooks, their spines labeled with dates and numbers.
Dou sat down in the chair, took out his notebook from his pocket, flipped to the page where he had just written, and looked at it for a while. Then he took out a red pen from the desk drawer, drew a horizontal line under those lines, and wrote three words below the line: "Mass-producible."
After finishing writing, he put down his pen, leaned back in his chair, and looked at the bare tree in the courtyard. The branches swayed in the wind, rhythmically, as if nodding. He stared at it for a long time.
Someone knocked on the door. Three knocks, neither too loud nor too soft.
"Come in."
The door opened, and a person wearing a black cloak entered. He was not tall, and his face was mostly covered by the hood, with only his chin showing. There was a long scar on his chin, stretching from his lower lip to his neck. The scar was light pink, indicating that it had been there for many years.
"My lord," the man in black knelt on one knee, "news from the south."
"explain."
"Back in Konoha, Izumi has returned from the western border. In the southeastern border, the roots of the Divine Tree were discovered in Pheasant Valley. He led people to dig them up and then filled them back in. Then he returned to Konoha, talked with Tsunade for two hours, and afterwards left with someone named Shikamaru. Their direction is unknown."
""
Dou tapped his fingers lightly twice on the armrest of the chair.
"Who told him that there was a divine tree root in Pheasant Feather Valley?"
"It was discovered by the patrol's glares. It must have been an accident."
"An accident." Kabuto chewed on the word, as if tasting it. "When did Konoha's Byakugan patrol start sweeping two hundred meters underground?"
"I'm not sure. It seems to be a new regulation. The patrol density in the western and southeastern borders has increased significantly in recent months, with three layers of scanning: ground, underground, and air."
Dou tapped the armrest twice more. This time it was three taps.
"Which way did Izumi and Shikamaru go?"
"North-southeast".
Kabuto thought for a moment. North-southeast. The Land of Rice Fields is northeast of the Land of Fire. North-southeast, if you keep going, you'll reach the southern border of the Land of Rice Fields. It doesn't necessarily mean you have to come to the Land of Rice Fields, but the direction is correct.
"Retract the sentry network along the northern front by one level," Dou said. "Don't stop them; stopping them will alert them. Let them in, let them find this outpost. But what they find won't be my real outpost."
The man in the black robe raised his head slightly.
"What are you going to show them?"
Dou stood up, walked to the bookshelf, and ran his finger along the spine of a row of notebooks, as if playing the piano. He stopped in front of a notebook marked "VII," pulled it out, flipped through a few pages, closed it, and put it back.
"Show them a lab. An abandoned, emptied lab with only a few tables and test tubes left. Let them think I came and went. Let them think I didn't want to be found, but wasn't careful enough and left traces. Let them spend time tracing those traces, three months, six months, a year. I need time."
The man in black robes remained silent for two seconds.
"What do you need time for?"
Dou turned around and looked at him. The light shone on Dou's face from the side, and the light reflected off his glasses, obscuring his eyes behind the lenses. But the corners of his mouth were slightly upturned, not in a smile, but in something more complex than a smile—expectation, or perhaps hunger.
"Make more white Zetsu."
The man in the black robe paused for a moment. The room fell silent. The tree in the courtyard was blown by the wind again, its bare branches creaking against each other, like someone rocking an old chair in a faraway room.
"The mass production of White Zetsu has entered the third stage." Kabuto walked back to his chair and sat down, crossing one leg over the other and placing his hands on his knees. "The first stage was replication, using tissue samples from the Divine Tree Root for asexual reproduction. The second stage was improvement, adjusting the structure of chakra receptors so that they could absorb different types of life force. The third stage..." He paused, adjusting his glasses.
"The third stage is personalization. This involves giving each White Zetsu a different appearance, different abilities, and different behavioral patterns."
Some excel at combat, some at infiltration, and some at creating chaos. Like tools, different people utilize different tools.
The man in the black robe stood up, walked to the window, and glanced at the trees in the courtyard.
"If Konoha discovers that we are mass-producing White Zetsu, they will attack."
"Won't."
Why?
"Because they have no evidence," Kabuto said. "The roots of the sacred tree in Pheasant Valley are wild, not planted by me. I have never conducted any experiments within the Land of Fire. My laboratory is in the Land of Rice Fields, which is not a member of the Five Great Nations Alliance and is not under the jurisdiction of the Land of Fire's laws. Konoha needs a reason to attack me. They don't have one."
The man in black robes turned around and looked at him.
"Chi Quan doesn't need a reason. He'll just come straight here."
Dou smiled. This time it was a genuine smile; the corners of his mouth turned up slightly, and his eyes behind his glasses narrowed, giving him a somewhat gentle look.
"Ikezumi." He pronounced the name slowly, as if chewing on each word. "He's the most interesting variable. He has the mark of the Hamura family, the blood of the Suigetsu family, and the swordsmanship of the Hatake family. Three completely unrelated things, growing in the same person. I've always wanted to figure out how his body can simultaneously withstand two bloodline limits without collapsing. Theoretically, the Hamura family's Ensui and the Hatake family's Shiraijin bloodline limits should repel each other, and his cells should self-destruct during the differentiation process. But he didn't. He's alive and well, can run, jump, and kill, and doesn't even have a rejection reaction."
Dou stood up, walked to the edge of the courtyard, and reached out to touch the bare trunk of the tree. The bark was rough and prickly, but he didn't mind and slowly drew circles on the trunk with his fingers.
"If he comes to me, I won't stop him. I'll let him find some things he's looking for, and then he can take those things back. Those things will tell him some things about the Divine Tree, and some things about White Zetsu. Most of these things will be true, and a small part will be false. The true parts will make him believe that my research findings are credible, and the tiny bit of falsehood will lead him astray. By the time he realizes that path is wrong, a year will have passed. In a year, I can dig out a city from beneath the Land of Rice Fields."
The man in the black robe reached into his cloak, pulled out a scroll, and placed it on the table.
"This is the latest deployment map of the northern outpost network. As you said, reduce it by one level, but don't seal it off completely. Leave them two paths, one obvious and one inconspicuous. The obvious one leads to the outpost you abandoned three months ago, and the inconspicuous one leads to—wait a minute, what did you put in the obvious outpost?"
He pulled his hand off the tree trunk and patted the dust off his palm.
"I left a diary. My diary. Fake, but written very realistically. It details when I started researching White Zetsu, what methods I used, and what problems I encountered. It describes my tissue culture techniques for the Divine Tree roots, the reproductive cycle of the White Zetsu, and the results of their chakra sensitivity tests. All the data is real, but the source is fake. I grafted the data from Team 7's sealing of the Ten-Tails after the Fourth Shinobi World War into my experimental records. When Ichi Izumi sees that data, he'll realize that my research on the Divine Tree is far deeper than he imagined. He'll see me as a threat. But he won't kill me immediately, because he'll first suspect—how could this person possibly have obtained the Ten-Tails' data? The Ten-Tails' data was sealed by Tsunade after the war; only she and a few high-ranking officials could see it. Ichi Izumi will investigate, and in the end, he'll find that Tsunade didn't leak the data, I didn't steal the data, and the data came from somewhere else. Where did it come from?"
Dou walked back to the table, picked up the scroll that the man in black robes had placed on the table, unrolled it, glanced at it, and then rolled it up again.
"During the Fourth Shinobi World War, the Ten-Tails' corpse was scattered across the entire battlefield. Many fragments weren't recovered; they were washed into rivers by rain, carried away by birds, or buried under mudslides. Nobody knows where those fragments went. But I found them." Kabuto placed the scroll back on the table. "I didn't find many, but it's enough. Enough for me to write down all the data in that diary."
The man in black remained silent for a long time.
"You want Izumi to think that you developed these things on your own, and that you didn't steal them from Konoha."
“Yes,” Dou said. “He wants him to feel that I am a threat that is worth being wary of, capable of, but not something to be eliminated in a hurry.”
Let him think he can deal with other things first, then deal with me. Because I won't run away; I'll stay here, in my lab, quietly doing my research. I won't attack Konoha, I won't kidnap villagers, I won't carry out terrorist attacks. I'm just conducting experiments. What can he do to me?
The man in the black robe pushed his hood back a little, revealing his entire face. The face was young, in his early twenties, with regular features, but the scar on his chin disrupted the overall harmony, making him look like a piece of porcelain that had been shattered and then glued back together. His eyes were dark brown, with deep pupils, and when he looked at people, it was as if he were measuring something.
"What if he doesn't do what you want? What if he finds your real base, doesn't talk to you, doesn't check your experimental records, and just comes in and starts attacking?"
Dou took off his glasses and wiped the lenses with the corner of his white coat.
He won't.
""
Why?
"Because he's not strong enough yet." Dou put his glasses back on and pushed them up. "His injuries haven't healed yet. The stitches on his left hand were just removed, there's a scar on the web of his right hand, and the knife he stabbed himself in the thigh still hurts when he walks. He won't confront me directly at this time. He'll heal his injuries first, gather intelligence first, and make preparations first. He's not the kind of person who rushes in impulsively. He's the kind of person who lies in the shadows, sees all the paths clearly, calculates all the possibilities, and only makes his move after ensuring everything is foolproof."
This kind of person doesn't do impulsive things.