A Study of Ice and Bone [Private]

[Byakko Yukiin]

Laying everything out, tools, books, vials, clippings, a few skeletal pieces, and an apple (although that was for eating, not for medicine) Yukiin realized that over the past few months he had converted a fair portion of his apartment into a study and that he had yet to really sit down and take that fact in. Things were arranged in an orderly fashion so he’d never seen it at all at once like this but getting back from the latest mission in his exhausted state removed the veneer of normalcy over his home now that it had become a much welcome place to rest. Still, his day was not done and as he entered the trip wire through the door frame set itself off, a kunai attempting to lodge itself in his skull being batted off with one hand, prompting it to land in a small dish which set the coffee machine on. It was a crude mechanical arrangement but it served two critical purposes.

One - It maimed home invaders and door-to-door salesmen
Two - It started the coffee machine

The puppeteer unfastened the scroll-cuffs attached to him and set them aside atop his nightstand, easily reached in case he needed to access their sealed contents, and lumbered forward as several chakra strings pulled off his outer garments and threw them onto a coat rack adjacent the door. Once he was sufficiently declothed he released his body weight into the waiting stability of his chair, the thing buckling as he plopped himself into it momentarily before it readjusted with the mechanical efficiency he’d created it with...now if only the human body was easy to direct as he could direct machinery, though they certainly shared many similarities. The coffee machine gurgled and sputtered out as the froth-less black blood it had dumped into the cup settled, the steam of freshness wafting out as he wrapped a string around its handle and dragged it closer to him.

It would be a very hot day in hell if he touched a coffee cup with his bare hands, that kind of warmth was unwelcome. With his other hand he opened up the ice box, resting near the machine but sealed off from it with layers of frost he renewed daily, and extracted the ice only to deposit six or seven cubes worth into the half filled coffee. He could’ve made ice himself but he’d learned that the type of ice he could purchase from reputable vendors from exotic locations had quite the taste and was something he couldn’t replicate without access to similar quality of water, though he was putting some effort into reverse engineering it. A shelf filled with various labeled bottles of water from several locales gave evidence of that fact, someday soon he hoped to be able to make synthetic ices which covered a very wide gamut of flavors...maybe even flavorless ice with caffeine already in it, that would be good…

He brought the cup to his lips and took a draw from it, ingesting the chilled liquid and sighing heavily as his body settled into its work with as little resistance as he could manage when it came to busy work. Yukiin held out his hands, cracking each knuckle independently before spreading out a barrage of strings across the room.

“This is what it means to be a medical shinobi, cold coffee and warm, ideally living, corpses.”

 

[Byakko Yukiin]

[Herbalism]

Each string returned to Yukiin with various vials of small, ground up, portions of plant material which he had either gathered from the outside world, as his knack for adventuring out and beyond came with some small perks, or had purchased due to some interest in their function or properties. The bookshelf in front of him had an item pulled from it by string as well, folding out in front of him to open pages detailing Kumogakure’s most common and most medically useful growths. Since this was review work he wanted to start from the top and take stock of his inventory, eyes passing over vials with scribbles and notes that anyone but himself would find hopelessly impossible to understand which gave Yukiin some small reassurance that anyone who invaded his home for valuables might just try and ingest nightshade and save him the trouble. Not that every plant in that family would kill them, but the kind he kept around most certainly would...he didn’t have a real taste for peppers after all.

He looked over at the flowerbed in front of his window, ornamental plants largely who were amicable to the chilled climate he preferred and could do with poor soil quality as Kumogakure was not a great place for exotic plant friendly soils to be found, that was certainly more of Konohagakure’s realm of expertise. He wanted to grow his own nightshade but he simply didn’t have the room, they got a bit big, so he had to resort to going to Nimbus Delactatio and bartering with the Yamanaka for more of the stuff when he needed, not just nightshade though of course but all sorts...though they did seem to prefer psychoactive plants, now that he thought about it...probably because the medical branch gave them so much revenue and not many other shinobi have a need for plants.

Oh well, the book detailed the basics of how to use a plant for medicinal purposes such as the fact that many plants have different effects depending on the portion sampled or used, the flower (or fruit) can be very different from the root and that when gathering samples from the wild it was best to take the whole plant if one didn’t know which part would be useful. If they did know better, however, then it was wisest to take smaller samples that the plant could recover from without killing it, fruits and flowers being the most obvious choices, but any extraction would be best conducted without touching the thing directly. Yukiin preferred to use strings but others might need gloves, even if the plant itself isn’t toxic or dangerous the surrounding environment could contain other things that don’t share that kind of human-friendly sentiment.

Leaving behind a blood sample because you forgot to notice something with sharp levels was in the underbrush or some small animal while you were clipping flowers from it was a great way to upset your superior or lead someone back to the village. They wouldn’t know, exactly, what had cut you and would be fair to assume the worst and take action to ensure you don’t die of unknown poisons or the like, it was all very much a waste of other people’s time because you wouldn’t take sane precautions.

Continuing his reading it went over the basic tools, a small clipper to cut parts of a plant off cleanly (and the materials to make a ‘plant-splint’ if one was super concerned about it, typically only needed if you were taking entire branches off trees and introducing a lovely parasite friendly wound), cheesecloth, mortar & pestle, watering can...oh right. Watering.

Yukiin took another sip of coffee and snapped his fingers at the flowerbed in front of him, splashing it with a burst of water and ensuring the soil stayed sufficiently moist. Caring for plants wasn’t terribly difficult under normal circumstances but since he was rarely home it introduced some complications, they needed sun, water, and proper soil which varied from plant to plant such as nightshade requiring limestone rich soil to grow best.

And that was why it was his favorite, you could grow that shit anywhere in Kumogakure because you couldn’t throw a stone and fail to hit a limestone laden soil patch. It also, coincidentally, was really spectacular to slide into someone else’s veins on the tip of a claw and bring their whole body to a screeching halt.

[WC 744]

 

[Byakko Yukiin]

[Anatomy]

Speaking of shutting things down, he needed to give his poisons their own look over and go over their effectiveness in a human body. Yukiin didn’t exactly have a large body of willing test subjects and couldn’t effectively test the most lethal of them on himself, killing himself was typically regarded as ‘a bad idea’ after all. His small anatomical model doll rested to his left and he absent mindedly directed his strings to pick at its various layers, removing them like a layer doll and setting each individual piece aside, as he pulled out his mortar and pestle and crushed together another experimental poison.

“Skin, the first layer of the body, the largest organ, responsible for screening and restricting the access of common irritants or chemicals to the inner body and composed of several thin layers, mostly irrelevant in combat as even a modest push goes through each of them.”

A string pulled off the doll’s outer suit of skin, revealing its muscular layer.

“Muscles, the strings of the body, responsible for moving the human vehicle and exerting force within micrograms of precision as directed by the brain, popular place to push chakra and governing body part for one of the most critical types of Shinobi Art - Taijutsu. Contraction and expansion is common, very flexible, and capable of a degree of regeneration that can promote growth in overall mass unlike the skin which tends to scar and maintain the same mass.”

A few strings snaked their way beneath the model muscles and popped them off, Yukiin allowing them to land where they fell as the organs were grabbed and set aside by the strings now.

“General organs, shielded by the skeletal and muscular systems, a lot of specifics about their function...the heart pumps blood through the vascular system and its various types of ‘branch’, the lungs compress and expand and pump oxygen gathered, the brain is safeguarded within the skull and directs electrical charges through the nervous system to control most of the non-bone bits to one degree or another, and the rest of them are lower down and much...messier in their functions of processing various unpleasantries.”

He sipped his coffee once more, deciding against thinking about the coffee of the stuff and its relationship to intestinal functions. He’d pulled most of the organs free of the skeleton, though he had to move some of the bone pieces to reach some organs as the body was a bit of an unclean arrangement into layers.

“Bones, the spookiest part of the body, and thus we shouldn’t talk about them.”

Yukiin smirked to himself as his strings animated the little medical figure, bones moving about in a dance. He needed to invest in a top hat and bow for his replica, he might look nicer in some proper attire, but for now he needed to focus his efforts on using one hand to smash herbs in a bowl and the other to perform rote work as he verbalized it.

[WC 501]

 

[Byakko Yukiin]

[Bloodlines]
It had been some time since he'd last set himself to his studies within the confines of his personal space, having the opportunity to work elsewhere had ensured that this dwelling had been largely set apart as a place absent of working materials but when push came to shove, sometimes work came home. The clang of his keys bounced through the home as his fingers set to work delicately disarming the traps laid out for home intruders, non-lethal of course so as to avoid any legal complications even being implied in his direction, with a spiderweb of chakra strings. Human digits would be incapable of the task which was an added layer of security that he enjoyed, it was easy for him to remedy and hard for anyone else without the gifts of Kugutsu...or being a Revenant, both of which were thankfully small populations.

He flopped down at his desk, flicking a finger at the coffee machine and extracting its fluids in a flow of hardening ice until the coils of frozen drug became pocky-like sticks between his lips, the heat of his mouth slowly melting the concentrated substance like a drip feed. Yukiin pulled a sample from his pocket and set it on the table, the chittering of the insects within it quickly escalating into a louder clanking and buzzing at the exposure to sunlight and, if their simple minds, potential freedom. From his perspective, learning how to work on this kind of subject, the Aburame's Kikai, he would be better able to understand the general complications of bloodline-based operations. These were simply the easiest things to tamper with, they wouldn't be missed and could be freely experimented upon, having no legal rights or safeguards so long as they were voluntarily taken from the shinobi who possessed them.

Considering the Aburame tended to have an excess of the things, that wasn't a hard task.

Yukiin unsealed the jar and pulled one of the creatures from the end of a chakra string, flinging it down to the table as he resealed the remainder of the creatures. With a quiet crunch the chakra thread hardened and pierced through the creature, holding it to the table like a pin as he pulled open a drawer, retrieved one of his syringes, and began the delicate work of peeling back the insect's chitin to inject the tip into the creature. It was a small dose of poison, one the Kikai should've been able to break down, but it seemed to kill the thing rather quickly, leaving the operator more than a little confused.

"Hm, that answers one question." He remarked.

The Kikai were naturally competent creatures but in the absence of chakra they were relegated to the level of a large bug, their supernatural abilities were drained when they ran out of chakra which would explain their constant hunger. Failure to eat meant that they failed to be special, chakra was the critical force seperating shinobi from anyone else and even an Aburame with no training would need to develop some command over the substance or risk becoming little more than a meal ticket. This held true for most of the bloodlines he was aware of, many of them contained dangerous elements that were regulated through the use of chakra and posed several medical complications because of it.

Perhaps this was part of the insistence on mundane operation when possible, avoiding the process...but then again, without draining the chakra from their body or having tools that could cut it away there was no added benefit to not using your own chakra to combat the subject's usage. Even passively or against the best interests of the Aburame, these creatures would feed and fight off toxins, as he had learned earlier, so the best way to fight that was to apply more chakra or more poison, not less.

Putting this concept to practice, Yukiin set out another beetle and fed it with a chakra pill, enabling it to gorge itself in a way that didn't potentially compromise his own chakra system, and applied the same toxin, in the same dosage. The Kikai successfully neutralized the poison, however a second application overcame the creature's resistance and killed it. Applying the chakra feeding and then poison to the entire jar, spread with a gas, the resistance was greatly improved such as to require five doses to achieve a lethal effect - not only did they use chakra to break it down, they also seemed to 'share' the burden of the task across the network of creatures, illuminating why the Aburame could achieve effects that were fairly called immunity to poison rather than mere resistance.

But he was out of bugs to tamper with now and would have to move onto other subjects.

[WC 795]

 

[Byakko Yukiin]

[Kinjutsu Surgery]
The more pressing subjects, fortunately for him, were much more interesting and, unfortunately for him, in a more dangerous and gray area than killing bugs. Yukiin dumped the contents of his pockets out onto the table, several scrolls unfurling across the table as he spread out his fingers and let his strings rearrange them into a sensible fashion, keeping the relevant pieces with one another in a progressive order of operations. His dreg research was penned in his own hand, margins filled up with notations and alterations of the smattering knowledge of Kinjutsu that was contained in this works. Reading between the lines had become a vital skill when it concerned these topics as while they were dangerous in application the knowledge itself was, if Osuteno was to believed, as of some risk to one's moral fiber. There was a risk to humanity, to loss of self, and reasserting that by scribbling down genitals and jokes in the margins of dark forbidden tomes was part of making that assertion bold and proud.

Several of the scrolls had poof'd up their contents, corpses of animals that he had available for experimentation and which he had gathered and prepared himself. Hunting things like deer was easy enough but this was the wrong environment for it and similarly the local creature population was not close enough to human anatomy to be useful in his process beyond the most introductory of levels. For this reason he had resorted to purchasing arrangements with farmers, bartering with them for the possession of pig corpses which were now littered ontop of his table, some still bleeding into rivers running off his table like a strange blood ritual (not that he was above or unaccustomed to blood rituals, that was like step 0 out of 10 for this kind of material.) With a rushing sweep of cold however that problem was corrected, corpses frozen in an instant and blood frozen and broken down into mist that was carried out and discarded in the biotoxin container in the corner.

Even if he was playing with magic most foul he still had to follow procedure and safety rules.

The bodies had to be properly drained first, the developing medic pulling out the blood, even the faintest traces, with a steady hand and similarly extracted remnants of the vital energy shinobi knew as chakra. Even a pig had chakra and a network within it, though it was useless to a creature as unfortunately short of the goal of sentience. Once that had been taken care of, a slow process to say the least, he set to work deep freezing them, pushing against the boundaries of the flesh, muscle, and bone to withstand it. Each pressure wave of cold inched closer to the absolute limits of a corpse before it would simply break apart.

It was a lot like a river bed, washing over it time and time again, each time pushing the limits of the stone and dirt below, a constant but delicate flow until what you wanted, deep in the riverbed, exposed itself to you. There were no shortcuts here and outside of a controlled environment this was a much more difficult task as the damage to the bodies was great, two of the things had simply broken apart and one more pig corpse had simply failed to produce what he wanted.

The remaining handful were successful however, allowing him to extract the substance he wanted - the dregs, as he called them. Once they'd be pulled out, delicately, carefully, and bottled he moved to the next corpse until he had a sufficient collection of the things to put to use. It took him around a dozen of the things to come up with enough to suffuse one corpse with enough dreg to coax it back to 'life', pigs being a poor source of anything chakra related (even the absence of it, apparently.)

But they had that critical feature of being anatomically adjacent to humans.

More careful work, delicate cuts with a delicate blade held in the frost of his hands so that not even a modicum of heat touched his project, allowed him to enscribe the marks on the scrolls dangling around him as he progressed from their basic levels to the more advanced. He knew that only basic markings were needed, advanced sealings such as those relating to a sentience would do nothing as there was no sentience to capture, but he enscribed these marks as practices anyways. After all, he'd need to do it on a human eventually.

As the night passed over him and the frosted glaze over his own body threatened to inflict hypothermia (again) he reached his finish mark, sealing the creature shut with its new contents marked into its various organs to return to them psuedo-function. The pig shuddered and twitched, the addition of more 'hearts' (although he was loathe to call them as such) giving it the tell tale signs of the copied process, that of becoming a Revenant. Obviously this didn't work very well on, well, animals as even incompetent shinobi couldn't manage the process but under supervised conditions and with an excess of dregs in its body to run through, it did manage to animate.

This animation consisted of the pig kicking its feet, rousing to them, shaking its head with a snort, and then promptly re-dying.

Still, proof of concept and proof of ability. This Kinjutsu business was doable and he'd managed to make a pig into a psuedo-Revenant for about...ten seconds. That was two seconds longer than last time and ten seconds more than most people could manage. It was coming together, slowly but surely.