Chapter 365: Orochimaru's Shock
Wandering Earth had once again entered its several-times-daily bout of woe-is-me. And this wasn't the performative kind of complaining, either — it was genuine misery.
All of its Points came from daily sign-ins and group events alone. Compared to what it actually wanted to accomplish, that income barely amounted to a drop in the bucket.
It had set itself several goals, three of which mattered more than the rest — and, naturally, cost the most.
The first was cultivating a "spirit body." Pulling that off meant either dumping tens of thousands of Points in one go, or grinding it out slowly through daily sign-ins plus painstaking cultivation.
The second was its "Human Domestication Project" — an effort to properly cultivate the humans living on its own surface. Still just a rough outline at this point, nowhere near finished. Even so, it counted this among its three great ambitions, something genuinely worth striving for.
The third goal was to earn Moderator status in the Dimensional Chat Group.
Yes — it wanted to become the group's fourth Permissions Hound, and worm its way into the upper echelon of the group's power players. And, conveniently, that would also mean latching onto Admin-sama's coattails for good. Perfect, really.
Permissions Hound #1 went without saying — that was Ryū, obviously.
Permissions Hound #2 was the least scrupulous youkai sage in the entire chat group.
Permissions Hound #3 was Tatsumaki — the group's resident flat-chested woman who, despite looking barely more than a girl, was a fully grown adult in her late twenties.
Becoming Permissions Hound #4 was clearly still a long road ahead for Wandering Earth. But it didn't let that discourage it in the slightest — if anything, it only felt more motivated. Drifting around the universe in endless circles got boring fast; might as well give itself some goals to chase.
Wandering Little Planet: Poor me. Being a "sphere" is way too hard. Wahhh, why'd I have to get reincarnated as a planet? I'd have been happy as a human, even! A youkai, even!
Eternally Seventeen: Not a problem at all — all you have to do is learn my Spirit Body Cultivation Method, and you'll be able to manifest a spirit body of your own. Crossing over whenever you like will be a breeze after that.
RawrSoFierce: Spirit Body Cultivation Method? What's that — some kind of spiritual-power discipline?
Eternally Seventeen: Less "spiritual power" and more "soul-focused," really. Master it, and you can slip your soul right out of your body!
Eternally Seventeen: And the soul that comes out isn't some weak, half-formed thing, either — it carries the full strength of your original body. It's brutally hard to learn, though. Even paying Points, it costs a full 9,000 just to reach the basics.
Eternally Seventeen: It's not without its downsides, either. There's a strict time limit — if your soul doesn't make it back into your body before that limit runs out, it never can again.
RawrSoFierce: I see... I'm guessing that time limit can be extended, though?
Eternally Seventeen: Well, well — didn't expect Admin-sama to be that sharp. Color me impressed! You're right, actually — the higher your proficiency, the longer the duration. I, for instance, can hold my soul outside my body for a full month with this method.
My True Form Is Cola: A whole month?! Damn... Yukari-senpai's an absolute unit!! (voice cracking)
Street-Corner Illustrator: Yukari-senpai's an absolute unit!! (screaming into the void)
Edward Newgate: Gurararara, if Little Sphere can pull off a soul-form crossing, it'll finally be able to join in on group quests!
Wandering Little Planet: Participating in a Dimensional Chat Group quest has been my life's dream since day one. Wahhh, this body's just been such a tragedy to work with.
Wandering Little Planet: If I could lose weight, I'd do it in a heartbeat — I'd settle for being roughly the size of Mount Everest, honestly.
RawrSoFierce: ...The problem is your own core is who-knows-how-many times bigger than Everest to begin with. And how exactly would a planet even go on a diet? Strip off all the surface rock and dirt until only the core's left?
Kaguya-sama: Admin-sama, the second you said that, I could suddenly picture it way too clearly.
Kaguya-sama: Poor Little Sphere. There, there. pat pat
Kaguya-sama: Speaking of which, if Little Sphere ever does manifest a spirit body, what shape would it even take?
Eternally Seventeen: Hmm... probably humanoid? I'd guess.
Kaguya-sama: If it's humanoid, would it be a man or a woman?
Eternally Seventeen: ...Now that's outside even my expertise. I suppose only Little Sphere itself would know whether it's male or female.
Wandering Little Planet: Um, actually, I don't know either.
Wandering Little Planet: Ahem — probably female, I'd guess? Given how many humans call me Mother Earth and all that.
"..."
Wandering Earth's gender remained, quite genuinely, a mystery to the entire chat group — even to itself.
And there was another important wrinkle to consider: did a planet even need to have a gender in the first place?
Maybe it simply didn't have one at all?
Or maybe it was some kind of hermaphroditic entity?
Running through all these possibilities — especially the legendary hermaphrodite scenario — Wandering Earth couldn't help feeling a shiver coming on.
But the second it registered just how many magnitude points of earthquake a full-body shiver would produce, it forced itself to stop cold.
For the sake of its human-domestication ambitions, it reluctantly gave up on the whole shivering idea.
The chat carried on being just as lively as ever, the Void Beast business already forgotten. A pile of slaughtered, oversized brutes wasn't exactly worth dwelling on.
But just because the chat group had moved on from the Void Beasts didn't mean the Naruto world's own people had.
The sprawling grassland where the Ancient One had dumped the corpses sat within the Land of Fire, near its border with the Land of Rice Paddies.
It was an enormous stretch of open plains — about as perfect a dumping ground as one could ask for.
The Land of Rice Paddies, incidentally, was the same country where — in the original Naruto canon — Orochimaru had gone on to found the Sound Village after leaving Akatsuki.
In this timeline, though, Orochimaru had already joined Akatsuki, and right now he happened to be somewhere within the Land of Rice Paddies — close enough to spot that sudden, sprawling "mountain of flesh" off in the distance.
His slit-pupiled eyes, gleaming with their usual sinister edge, now carried an unmistakable trace of shock and bewilderment. Even Orochimaru's pale, composed face couldn't quite hide his astonishment.
He'd been staring at that sudden mountain range of flesh for a good while now, utterly unable to make sense of it.
Why in the world would a mountain of raw meat like this suddenly appear out on the Land of Fire's open plains?
If his eyes weren't deceiving him, that thing was undeniably built entirely out of stacked corpses.
And the truly baffling part — he couldn't identify a single one of the creatures they'd come from.
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