Chapter 208: A Desperate Gamble
"We can only risk it..." Haruno Sakura said with a tight frown. "Her chakra reaction is already close to zero. Her body's resistance and rejection of external chakra should be almost non-existent..."
"Sigh..." Shino was not unaware of the risks of doing this, but he just let out a long sigh. "Just do as you think best!"
Using Ice Style shape transformation to temporarily construct a heart to fill the void in Yūgao's body was just the simplest step.
The next step was to impart the nature transformation of Water Style to the blood inside the heart—whether it was "pressure" or "flow" would be fine—in short, to use the water nature transformation to drive the gradually solidifying blood in Yūgao's body to flow again, to complete the blood circulation, and then to use medical ninjutsu to deceive the body, making Yūgao's body mistakenly believe that the original heart was still functioning.
This was Sakura's idea.
She placed her right hand on Yūgao's chest, her hand movements a little shaky.
She took a deep breath.
A faint blue fluorescent light lit up on her hand. The Ice Style chakra circulated, and the icy-cold chakra texture immediately calmed Haruno Sakura's uneasy mood.
Her hand became steady. Pouring chakra into Yūgao's body, Sakura began to cast the ninjutsu.
The step of using Ice Style shape transformation to construct a heart was not difficult for Sakura. In fact, the Medical-type Ice Clone, which replicated the original by 100%, was a special kind of ice shape transformation.
So what she needed to do was to use her own body as a template, use Ice Style to simulate her own heart and flesh, and fill the wound on Yūgao's body.
It was nothing more than partially casting the Ice Clone.
Hn, there's just one small problem. The skin tone and size don't match...
She shook her head vigorously, throwing the extra thoughts out of her mind. These trivial details were not important. As long as the blood vessels matched, it was fine. After all, this was just an emergency measure. After the chakra dissipated, the flesh and blood temporarily simulated by the ninjutsu would also disappear...
She focused her mind on the wound on Yūgao's body.
The next step was to use the water nature transformation to make her blood flow again.
Originally, to use Water Style to drive the blood flow in another's body was almost impossible due to a living organism's natural resistance to foreign chakra. If Sakura could do this, then she wouldn't have needed to develop so many other ninjutsu.
To directly extract all the blood from an enemy's body with Water Style—if it were really that simple, she would have long been invincible.
However, the situation was different now. Yūgao's life force was actually very low now, and she was close to a corpse-like state. This, on the contrary, made it very easy for Sakura to inject her own chakra into her body and control her blood circulation.
The heart made of Ice Style also began to beat vigorously, assisting Sakura in pumping Yūgao's blood along her arteries to all parts of her body.
Then she used medical ninjutsu to awaken the functions of all parts of the body and to deceive the body into mistakenly thinking that the heart was still working.
This desperate gamble, after a bit of work, actually made Yūgao's breathing gradually stabilize.
The body had really been deceived. The blood began to flow again, and her various vital signs were slowly returning to a stable state.
It was just that the situation was still not optimistic—one could tell from the fact that Sakura's chakra had not been rejected by Yūgao at all.
This meant that Yūgao's spirit was still in a dissipated state...
She was merely maintaining a living state.
And very quickly, the Anbu who had seen the distress signal also arrived at the battlefield one after another.
Looking at the fallen Inuzuka Makoto and Yūgao Uzuki, everyone's faces were not very good.
"What's going on?" the captain of Squad 18 asked as soon as he landed. "What kind of enemy did you encounter?"
He glanced at the ravaged battlefield, which was covered in large and small pits, sword marks, and broken ninja tools, and knew that a tragic battle had taken place here.
He knew Shino's combat power. And for Tsunade to have put Xi and Tobi in a team with Shino, with a number even lower than theirs, was enough to show that the strength of this Anbu squad was at the elite level. The other two female ninja were definitely not just for show!
And right now, the result after the battle was that one ninja from the reconnaissance troops was dead, and another from Squad 14 was seriously injured. Yet they had not left any enemies behind, and had instead let the opponent run away...
"We should have encountered people from the 'Akatsuki' organization..." Shino said, slumping to the ground, his voice weak.
Seeing that Yūgao's condition had stabilized a little, and that the support troops had arrived, the exhausted him could no longer hold on. He suddenly went limp, feeling his whole body groaning weakly.
With a long sigh, Shino shook his head and said, "They were a team of two, and each had very bizarre secret techniques. Their strength was unbelievably strong... Among them, the one Yūgao and I dealt with just now was named Hidan, and the other was named Kakuzu..."
"I saw the battle traces over there..." The third squad, Squad 12, had also arrived at this time. They landed on the ground not far away, and the leading captain said in a heavy tone, "I found signs of at least five different elemental ninjutsu clashing. The one in your team who uses Ice Style is that Haruno Sakura, right? She fought quite fiercely. The terrain over there has been completely turned over by her and Kakuzu!"
He walked over and helped up Shino, who was so weak he couldn't stand straight. Only then did he see Yūgao lying on the ground and said in shock, "What's wrong with Yūgao?"
"It's a secret technique of the enemy. It directly destroyed her heart..." Shino said, then shook his head. "Let's talk about the details when we get back. Now that everyone's here, let's hurry back to the village!"
"Yūgao's injuries are no longer something we can handle. We need to go back to Konoha and have Lord Fifth Hokage deal with it personally!"
The captain of Squad 12 then put Shino on his back—the latter had been very resistant at first, but in the end, he had accepted his good intentions with a twisted expression. After all, Shino also didn't have the stamina to make another continuous forced march back to Konoha. Being carried back was a last resort, done only to save time...
Two medical ninja took over Yūgao's body from Sakura's hands. They were also helpless against this kind of injury and could only maintain the ninjutsu that Sakura had cast, keeping Yūgao barely breathing.
Another female Anbu put Sakura on her back. Sakura was a little embarrassed, but she said quite heroically, "It's fine, you're pretty light anyway!"
By the way, this female ninja could also be seen at a glance to be a taijutsu-type ninja, because her arms were really thicker than Sakura's thighs...
They traveled all through the night, under the stars and the moon.
Traveling day and night, they arrived back in Konoha before the sun rose the next day.
It was late at night, and everything was silent. It was the darkest time before the dawn.
Squad 14 was quickly sent to the Konoha Hospital for treatment.
Outside the first treatment room.
Outside the treatment room were two long rows of chairs. There were no decorations on the white-painted walls. Sitting on a chair, all one could see was a stretch of pale white wall.
This reminded Sakura of the TV drama clips she had often seen in that world: outside the closed operating room, a few people were either pacing back and forth anxiously, or sitting on chairs, exhausted.
She had never thought that that cliché scene would happen to her.
She had now become the protagonist who was anxiously waiting for someone else.
The Anbu squads had force-marched back to Konoha overnight. Sakura, after a great battle, had not slept all night and had to constantly pay attention to Yūgao's physical condition. She was already exhausted. At this moment, after handing Yūgao over to Tsunade, she sat on an empty bench outside the treatment room, waiting alone for the experimental results. A thick wave of fatigue swept over her.
The pink-haired girl squatted on the floor next to the chair, hugged her knees, and buried her head between the chair and her thighs.
Before long, a faint snoring sound was heard, and she fell into a light sleep.
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