Little Sasuke had gradually grown into a handsome young man.
One night, not long before Neji's graduation from the Ninja Academy, he and Sasuke made their way into a hidden chamber beneath the Uchiha compound.
—The hidden chamber had been painstakingly dug out by the two of them using Earth Release techniques.
"Dammit, Sasuke! Be more gentle! It really hurts when you're that rough!" Neji complained.
"Ah, I'll be more careful next time," Sasuke replied casually.
"..."
"You're getting less and less talkative," Neji muttered, unable to hold back a jab.
Without a word, Sasuke packed up the medical kit. Neji finished dressing as well. He had been almost caught by Root while out hunting yesterday, although he managed to escape, he was left with some serious injuries. Sasuke had just finished tending to them.
They stood up. Along the right side of the hidden chamber was a massive display wall, divided into numerous small compartments. Inside each were wide-mouthed glass jars and petri dishes, each containing various preserved organs.
Sasuke was conducting biological experiments—and Neji was one of the participants.
A few years ago, Sasuke had suddenly become the taciturn, withdrawn person he was now. While he'd already been quiet ever since the night the Uchiha clan was massacred, Neji, who was closer to Sasuke than anyone else, could clearly tell that something was different.
From time to time, Sasuke would emanate a sinister, unsettling aura. Most of the time he hid it well, but it tended to slip out during combat.
Not long after, Sasuke had invited Neji to join him in these experiments—with Konoha unknowingly providing the materials free of charge.
Maybe it was because the number of missing persons cases had gotten too outrageous, but the Third Hokage had finally hardened his heart and ordered a full-scale investigation. Otherwise, Neji wouldn't have gotten injured. Unfortunately for the Third, he made a fatal miscalculation: he hadn't anticipated that Neji would wield a form of power outside the usual chakra system.
Before conducting experiments on humans, Sasuke had carried out countless experiments on animals. He bought pets under false pretenses, captured creatures from the Forest of Death, even stole a deer from the Nara clan and a dog from the Inuzuka clan...
Yet down here, in the hidden chamber, only two ant colonies remained alive. Everything else had long since been discarded as waste.
These two colonies had originated from eggs laid by the same queen ant. However, after several generations of isolated breeding, they had almost evolved into two distinct species.
If Mendel himself were here, he would've cried out in astonishment. And the cause of it all—was the mysterious force known as chakra.
(T/N: Gregor Johann Mendel was an Austrian biologist, meteorologist, mathematician, Augustinian friar and abbot of St. Thomas' Abbey in Brno (Brünn), Margraviate of Moravia.)
Sasuke had infused the ant colonies with different types of chakra. And because of that, the ants mutated!
Later, he even tried infusing chakra into reptiles, mammals, and eventually humans. Although these organisms didn't mutate as rapidly as the ants, the changes were still undeniable.
The reason for all these experiments was simple: the Asura chakra present in this world had proven to be far more virulent than it had been in the original story.
Natural disasters had been hitting one after another in recent years—perhaps due to some unknown stimulus, or maybe because the Sage of Six Paths had made a move behind the scenes. Whatever the case, Uzumaki Naruto's growth had accelerated, especially his so-called "Talk no Jutsu." Ordinary people simply couldn't withstand it!
In the manga, both Sasuke and Neji had been beaten down by Naruto—and after that, they started acting like brainwashed fools, utterly in awe of him, their wills completely reshaped to match Naruto's.
Neji had once been a boy full of bitterness and resentment, trapped by the curse of the caged bird seal, blaming the Hyuga Main House and Hyuga Hiashi for ruining his father's life. He had sworn to exact vengeance.
But after getting beaten by Naruto in the Chunin Exams, Neji immediately turned around:
"My father, Hyuga Hizashi, sacrificed himself for the sake of the elder!"
Still had a caged bird seal on his forehead? Didn't matter anymore!
Had his father been tortured by Hiashi's cursed seal? Who cared!
The important thing was that Naruto was right! Worrying about fate was meaningless! And in the end, Neji even threw himself in front of a blade to save Naruto, dying just like Hizashi had.
—The first time Neji had read this part of the manga, he'd thought it was absolute poison.
In this entire world, maybe only Sasuke had shown any slight resistance to Naruto's mental contamination. But even he ultimately fell.
As for the others, it was even worse. Take Gaara, for instance. After getting beaten by Naruto, he immediately gave up his past and went from being a bloodthirsty killer to a warmhearted do-gooder.
Or Nagato—after being defeated, the man who had personally killed his own teacher suddenly decided to believe in Naruto's "mutual understanding" philosophy, even sacrificing his life to cast Rinne Rebirth and resurrect Konoha's dead.
It was beyond absurd. Nagato was the leader of Amegakure; he sacrificed himself for foreigners without sparing a thought for what would happen to his own country.
And in Boruto, when Sasuke and Sai went to investigate Kara in the ruins of Amegakure, they found the village broken and chaotic. Naruto's promise to Nagato had amounted to nothing. One Konoha shinobi even bluntly told Boruto and Sarada: peace after the Fourth Great War only extended to the Five Great Nations. Small border countries suffered even more.
And then there was Uchiha Obito. His devotion to Rin and the Eye of the Moon Plan had once been absolute—yet he flipped sides almost effortlessly, dreaming of becoming Hokage instead. It was terrifying when you thought about it carefully.
Naruto's mental contamination could twist people's wills, make them abandon their goals, betray their beliefs. It went far beyond the power of ordinary ninjutsu. Sasuke had no choice but to be on guard. Hence, the biological experiments.
But in the process, Sasuke made another startling discovery: Naruto's contamination wasn't unique to him. More accurately, this "contamination" was a property of chakra itself. Naruto's chakra was just... especially potent.
Insects with fast reproductive cycles made excellent test subjects. Sasuke and Neji had separately infused two batches of eggs from the same queen ant with their own chakra. After a few generations, the differences were stark:—The ants infused with Sasuke's chakra developed beautiful patterns on their exoskeletons and became highly poisonous.—The ants infused with Neji's chakra grew stronger and had dramatically enhanced vision.
This proved that chakra contained a certain kind of "information"—information powerful enough to alter an organism's traits. Orochimaru's Cursed Seals were a perfect example: people who bore them gradually became more and more suitable for Orochimaru's body-hopping technique.
After countless experiments, Sasuke concluded that this "information" embedded in chakra was none other than the individual's will. The more pure and determined a ninja's path, the stronger the will encoded into their chakra. And the stronger will would assimilate weaker ones.
To avoid being contaminated by Naruto's—or rather, Asura's—will, Sasuke and Neji had used their meager biological knowledge to try all sorts of methods. Sadly, they had little to show for it so far.
However, by sheer accident, they stumbled upon an extremely effective way to sabotage Konoha: they began subtly infusing their chakra into the children at the Ninja Academy...
Before they even realized it, Sasuke and Neji's moral bottom line had dropped considerably. But then again, the shinobi world had always been steeped in blood and slaughter. Who among them didn't have blood on their hands? Sasuke certainly didn't think the so-called "righteous" shinobi who killed for their missions were any nobler than he was.
—Self-deception made it easier to keep smiling.
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Pls Drop some Power Stones
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