Chapter 75

I was satisfied with the recouped resources and a small amount of pride in my work, but the almost constant headache from the dispelled clones, which were absorbing information in huge quantities even by my standards, made me want to forget about everything and just rest.

Without the constant use of the kage bunshin, which reduced the time spent by a factor of ten, the work I'd done in eleven days would have taken months, if not years, given the amount of free time I usually had. Yeah, and that's just one fairly small project among many others requiring my undivided attention.

I didn't think I'd ever say this, but after experiencing the difficulties of normal research by myself and without the proper knowledge, on bare enthusiasm by trial and error, I began to understand Orochimaru better - not only do they always lack both material resources and just plain time for a lot of different interesting ideas, but also idiots are trying to tear away from the important work and send on some stupid mission, which a few jonin can cope with.

And the snake sannin doesn't use clones, unlike me, and the shinobi world isn't very friendly to such scientists - try not to die here, when large-scale wars follow one after another, and during the break the main players organize small feuds on the borders or territories of small countries, in which even the lives of elite shinobi are like wood for a fire, and then try to do research, before someone decided to try it again.

Orochimaru wanted to become Hokage not because he wanted to rule over everyone, but because despite the large amount of work and the obvious disadvantages of being a fat target on his back in big politics, this position was able to provide him with normal conditions for doing science, as well as a sufficient number of test subjects that he wouldn't have to run after himself and no obvious problems with the legality of their extraction in his home village (otherwise he would have created his own Otogakure and wasted precious time on it).

The last problem is also very much on my mind - if the experiments are eating up the available body stock at this rate, I won't have enough scrolls for a long time.

After a partial success (because it's only the first part - even a fool would guess that a corpse reanimated in this way does not run long, despite the amount of chakra spent and the power of the technique used), I devoted a couple of days to socializing with my family, simple rest and variable observation of the work of the new jutsu.

So, the fact that the muscles stimulated by the source of the jutsu were gradually dying off and becoming really dead was not a surprise to me. In total, such a puppet lasted a little more than a day and a half, as the tissue destruction slowed down and began to consume more and more chakra. Of course, if I had invested more in the creation of the puppet, it could have been twice as long, or even four times as long if I treated the wounds a bit, but the fact remained that the modified Shikon no jutsu had a finite lifespan, albeit not as short as the original.

I don't get the memory of the clone when the technique is terminated, as it was without the anchor, because the binding to the seal is permanent and it requires its destruction for the in-substance of chakra to return to its master. It's a minor inconvenience that could be used to my advantage, but I'll have to think about that later.

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