Chapter 151: Scientific Progress Sometimes Begins in Strange Places
"The so called Zero Tails was actually an ancient product researched in Konoha," Orochimaru explained. "But later, it was discovered that it could not absorb abnormal attribute chakra. Once it did absorb it, it would be greatly weakened."
The Zero Tails could be considered an ancient research product. According to records, it was first passed down from the era of the Sage of Six Paths.
Konoha studied it afterward and found that, while the dark chakra it produced could enhance physical fitness, it also drastically increased stamina consumption. The cost was not worth the benefit.
So Konoha eventually recorded everything about the Zero Tails into a scroll and left it alone.
Orochimaru had never expected that the remnants of the Sky Ninja Village would somehow find the resurrection scroll and drag this abandoned relic back into the present era.
Hearing that, Kenichi felt his teacher's explanation fit perfectly.
The Zero Tails did look powerful on the surface. The Sky ninja even boasted that it was a tailed beast without a tail.
Yet the moment they saw even a single ball of chakra from the Nine Tails, they became terrified. Comparing the two was a ridiculous exaggeration.
Still, Kenichi could not help thinking that Konoha might have abandoned the Zero Tails simply because they already had the Nine Tails. To the First Hokage, the Nine Tails was probably just a large summoned beast. With something like that in hand, of course they would not care about a flawed substitute.
With that thought, Kenichi looked at Koji with pity, then at the already dead Shinno in his memory.
Those two unlucky fools probably never imagined that the trump card they treasured, the Zero Tails they worshipped as a miracle, was just defective junk Konoha did not want.
To believe they could sweep through Konoha with it was nothing but wishful thinking.
By the time Naruto was forced into using Tailed Beast Mode, the Zero Tails would likely already be smashed to pieces.
"But they found a use for the Zero Tails that even I did not expect," Orochimaru said with interest. He poured Kenichi a cup of tea.
Kenichi quickly accepted it, feeling oddly flattered.
In the lab room, Anko sat on the sofa with a bewildered expression. For the first time, she felt like her teacher and senior brother were complete strangers. She could not even understand what they were talking about.
"Teacher," Kenichi asked with genuine curiosity, "if this kind of dark chakra converted from the Zero Tails can be used as energy, then can the Nine Tails' chakra also be used as energy?"
Tailed beasts possessed a terrifying amount of chakra, and their recovery speed was absurd. Strictly speaking, unless they were continuously forced to use techniques that consumed enormous chakra, their reserves were basically limitless.
"It's difficult," Orochimaru said, shaking his head. He had been interested in the Zero Tails' dark chakra before and had studied it, but he stopped the moment he confirmed the damage it caused to the body.
"Also, the Zero Tails' chakra is different from the Nine Tails' chakra. Tailed beast chakra is far larger, and it carries a particularly strong destructive nature. Extracting it is much harder."
Kenichi was not surprised.
It was a tailed beast. If someone could casually build a machine that extracted tailed beast chakra as a stable energy source, that would be beyond absurd.
Even food had to be eaten one bite at a time.
Orochimaru kept Koji behind. He also kept Anko behind.
He was extremely interested in the Sky Village's flying techniques and wanted to study Koji's knowledge first. Kenichi could only let his teacher handle it for now, and honestly, it saved Kenichi a lot of trouble.
His teacher's research ability was beyond question. He could even do outrageous things like facial recognition. If someone told Kenichi that Orochimaru might build a spaceship one day, Kenichi would not dare dismiss it outright.
Back when Kenichi watched Naruto, he had always wondered why Orochimaru, a man who mastered so many technologies and strange advances, never once thought about space exploration.
Later, Kenichi realized it might be a matter of perspective.
In ancient times, no one believed humans could fly, much less touch the moon.
They would never have guessed the world was a sphere either, though even now, some anti intellectuals still clung stubbornly to the flat earth theory.
"How's the rice planting going?" Kenichi left his teacher's laboratory and shifted his attention to his shadow clone.
He was a little disappointed he did not see Kimimaro, but that thought passed quickly.
Even though farming research was simple and did not consume much chakra, Kenichi's shadow clones still took damage over time.
In truth, shadow clones were always being depleted.
Maintaining a shadow clone's existence required chakra, and a shadow clone itself could not refine chakra. Once its chakra ran out, it vanished.
If shadow clones could exist forever, the shinobi world would be even more terrifying than it already was.
Kenichi also knew the memory that returned when a shadow clone dispersed. The problem was that his clone had not dispersed since he left Ancor, so Kenichi had no idea how things had progressed during that period.
"Still planting," the lead clone said, shaking his head. He looked bored out of his mind.
Agricultural students had classes and graduation projects every day, but even so, there was only so much land to manage. With ninjutsu, many tasks became trivial.
The problem was that there was no way to speed up crop growth. So every day was just checking, recording any data that needed attention, and waiting.
Until the final results came out, nobody knew whether the yield increase was a coincidence or a true breakthrough. That uncertainty was maddening.
Kenichi was not surprised. Science was often like this. Experiments, again and again, while people foolishly hoped the answer would appear just by thinking hard enough.
That was unrealistic.
Most scientific progress was long term accumulation, then a sudden burst, like how Kenichi was now trying to build a tailed beast chakra extraction device with one hand.
Without borrowing other people's experience, all he could do was summarize data, propose theories, and test them. If it failed, he started over.
It was not uncommon for researchers to receive funding and spend four or five years producing no meaningful results.
"Thanks for your hard work," Kenichi sighed.
This kind of life really was boring. And since it could not be accelerated, all they could do was wait.
His thermobaric explosive research was "better" in that sense. Whether the fusion worked was immediately obvious after a single detonation.
Of course, it was also far more dangerous.
Kenichi suddenly paused.
In a way, was he just thanking himself?
Shadow clones would eventually disperse, and when they did, all the exhaustion would return to the original.
So expecting shadow clones to suffer while the original enjoyed life was not realistic. Once a whole batch of 996 shadow clones dispersed, the fatigue from days of continuous work could probably kill someone instantly.
Kenichi looked at the clones in front of him, then silently released them all.
The instant wave of exhaustion slammed into him. It felt like he had stayed awake for three straight nights without sleep, and it was almost thrilling in how brutal it was.
"Hm?" Kenichi froze.
"If a shadow clone's memories and sensations return when it disperses… then pleasure returns too, doesn't it?"
He had just realized something important.
Fatigue was hard to accumulate safely, but pleasure was easy to accumulate.
If someone faced an enemy's shadow clone and forced that clone into a peak state, then once it dispersed, wouldn't that sensation rebound onto the enemy's original body and crush their will in an instant?
The idea was not impossible, but it was troublesome.
Unless the user deliberately prepared for it, shadow clones did not have any special organs beyond what the technique provided.
And in the middle of a fight, it was not like you could suddenly find a gigolo or a prostitute on demand. That was too absurd.
So Kenichi's thoughts expanded in a different direction.
If he could research a way to stimulate a person's nerves and brain to generate extreme pleasure, then the reverse should also be possible.
"In other words," Kenichi muttered, stunned by his own chain of logic, "if you stimulate the nerves and brain, you could also generate extreme sadness, and then achieve the goal of opening the eyes?"
It might not be a bad idea.
After all, the Sharingan's evolution was born from overwhelming emotional upheaval in the Uchiha.
Obito witnessed Kakashi kill Rin.
In that extreme grief and rage, he awakened the Mangekyo Sharingan on the spot.
Put differently, the Sharingan's evolution required intense emotional stimulation. And in the shinobi world, spiritual energy could be observed. It was not some vague concept.
So what if the brain was directly stimulated to produce overwhelming sadness?
Could that trigger the Sharingan to evolve?
Sure enough, scientific progress sometimes came from strange places.
Kenichi had never expected that his casual, twisted line of thinking would expand his research ideas so far.
Because Kenichi felt it was not easy for him to experience emotional fluctuations strong enough to meet the Sharingan's requirements. That meant conventional methods of opening the eyes might not work well for him.
As for genjutsu, Kenichi had seen cases where it might help awaken two or three tomoe, but he had never seen anyone use genjutsu to awaken a Mangekyo.
The Sharingan was naturally good at seeing through illusions. And whether a genjutsu on the level of the Infinite Tsukuyomi could stimulate the Uchiha to awaken their eyes was impossible to prove.
At that point in time, there were probably only two Uchiha left in the entire shinobi world.
Madara, and Sasuke.
All other members of the Uchiha clan had long since been wiped out.
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