Chapter 4: Chimera Technique
After resting in place for roughly half an hour, Ritsu felt his mental state had reached its peak. He lit an oil lamp and set it on a protruding stone ledge in the rock wall, then stepped forward to open the cell door. He stood before the still-unconscious "valuable material."
He took a deep breath.
His hands began forming seals.
The Chimera Technique required nineteen hand seals total. With each seal, the chakra within his body mobilized and circulated through specific pathways. Once all nineteen seals were complete, his hands blazed with pale blue chakra light. In his Byakugan's vision, this pale blue chakra light revealed its true nature—countless blade-thin fragments of chakra.
His pale hands were covered in fine cuts from the blade-like chakra.
Next, he slowly raised both hands toward the valuable material's chest.
"Rip!" The sound of fabric tearing to shreds.
Then, dense and countless minor wounds appeared across that muscular chest. Drops of blood seeped from the wounds. An invisible attraction drew the chakra-wrapped blood droplets, pulling them bit by bit through the wounds in Ritsu's palms and into his body.
In an instant, the muscles in both arms twitched and jumped. Blood vessels bulged like small snakes. It felt as though they would burst open at any moment.
Ritsu's expression remained cold and hard as iron.
Not wavering in the slightest.
He continued executing the Chimera Technique with unwavering determination.
Simultaneously, he released the regeneration ability he'd been deliberately suppressing. Blood vessels healed immediately upon rupturing. Of course, allowing his regeneration ability to take effect meant he had to repeatedly cut open his palms—and the wounds needed to be slightly longer and wider, or they couldn't keep pace with the healing speed.
The pain was undeniable.
The agony of split palms was merely an appetizer. The excruciating pain transmitting from everywhere inside his body was truly unbearable. Blood rampaged through his vessels like boiling water. Muscles convulsed endlessly as if electrocuted. Even worse, his bones transmitted waves of cutting and grinding agony—as though someone were taking a power drill and saw to carve an intricate landscape painting directly into his skeleton.
At the same time, even his eyes transmitted indescribable stabbing pain.
The pain was so intense that his eye sockets split at the corners. Thin threads of fresh blood slid down his face.
Cold sweat drenched him wave after wave, as though he'd just been pulled from a pool.
The concept of time blurred under this agony. One second felt like one minute. One minute seemed like an hour. Time stretched impossibly long—like the Snake Way leading to King Kai's planet. No matter how hard one ran, the end never appeared.
His consciousness wavered under the relentless waves of pain.
Fortunately, Snake Way did have an end.
The suffering wasn't endless either.
After climbing to an extreme peak, the pain suddenly plummeted cliff-like. In its place came a euphoric sense of clarity—as though every pore across his entire body had opened. The accumulated ailments within were swept clean. The relief was so overwhelming he nearly cried out.
"Did it... work?"
Ritsu snapped awake.
The pain had left him in a half-conscious, half-awake state.
Now, suddenly alert again, he immediately noticed changes in himself. First, his chakra reserves had exploded. If his previous chakra quantity was ten, now it was roughly one hundred—a tenfold increase. Second, he discovered his consciousness could now permeate every single bone throughout his body.
He raised his right hand. With a thought—
A sharp, pointed bone protruded from his palm.
"Shikotsumyaku!"
Ritsu stared at the bone segment jutting from his right palm. The corner of his mouth curved into a barely noticeable arc.
It truly worked.
Using the Chimera Technique, he'd successfully stolen the Kaguya clan's Kekkei Genkai—the Shikotsumyaku.
However, this was merely a secondary gain.
He hadn't risked using the Chimera Technique "incorrectly" just to obtain the Shikotsumyaku.
He activated his Byakugan. Veins bulged around his eye sockets. Simultaneously, a 360-degree field of vision with no blind spots flooded his mind. Yes—360 degrees with no blind spots. Not the 359-degree vision that Branch Family members possessed after the Caged Bird Seal's suppression—the vision with that one-degree blind spot.
This additional one degree of vision left Ritsu ecstatic.
He removed his headband and pulled out the small mirror he'd used before, bringing it close to the oil lamp's bean-sized flame to examine himself. The mirror reflected a vibrant, handsome face. His pure white pupils with his forehead—smooth and unmarked!
The Caged Bird Seal had dissolved without attack.
Not a trace remained.
"Finally! Hahahahahaha!"
Ritsu could no longer contain himself.
Deep within this underground secret laboratory, he laughed unrestrainedly until tears slid from the corners of his eyes.
A moment later, Ritsu regained his composure.
This wasn't yet the time to completely relax. The absence of the Caged Bird Seal was only a beginning.
Before they parted, Sensei Hiruko's words surfaced again in his mind. Without the Caged Bird Seal's restraint, he'd merely escaped a small cage—outside remained a prison called the "Main Family-Branch Family System" that still denied him freedom. Once the Main Family discovered his missing seal, he would become a thorn they'd eliminate at any cost!
Only by killing him as an example could they crush the ambitions in other Branch Family members' hearts and ensure the Main Family-Branch Family system remained solid as bedrock, utterly unshakable.
"This is a fight to the death. There's no room for retreat or compromise. Even if retreat or compromise occurs, it will only be to accumulate strength to annihilate the opponent." Ritsu spoke to himself, his gaze growing colder with each word. Killing intent as scorching as magma floated within his pure white pupils.
He didn't intend to follow Sensei Hiruko's suggestion to "leave Konoha."
Konoha Village possessed the shinobi world's highest standard of living—the closest to the modern society of Ritsu's previous life. In the fifteen years since his birth, he'd grown familiar with every tree and blade of grass in Konoha. He'd established his own social connections.
Why should he abandon everything in Konoha because of those inhuman bastards in the Main Family, becoming a rogue ninja endlessly hunted by ANBU, sleeping rough and wandering the world?
The ancient sages once said: Those who live apart from society are either beasts or gods.
And Ritsu wanted to be neither a beast nor some lunatic with spiral eyes claiming divinity.
He simply wanted to be a normal social creature.
In Ritsu's view, defecting from the village was the worst possible option—a choice to make only when everything else had failed, when no other path remained.
Before that point, he had to exhaust every method to fight, to struggle!
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