Beast of Burden (Private)

[Byakko Yukiin]

A parasite was a parasite, regardless of what it fed upon, so why did the world seem to treat these particular parasites as if they were something to envy and to choose, deliberately of all things, to invite into your own being? That was the thing he never understood, something was clearly wrong with allowing a foreigner into your flesh to feed on your chakra and share its own, pretending to be in symbiosis when without a physical host they couldn't exist on this plane. Yet it fooled them, hosts would eventually come to believe that they had a "relationship" with it and that it was their "friend" or "a part of them" and it reminded him of typical parasitism-induced behavioral modification. If fungi could infect an ant and tell it to march up a sprig to die or a worm could force a cricket to drown itself, what made shinobi feel immune to the influence of their spiritual guests?

Clearly they thought too highly of themselves or were born stupid...maybe both. The funniest concept to him was the idea that they were a chakra source. They were animals, of some stripe, so they had to eat something and what did people think they ate? Nobody bothered to ask. Nobody bothered to know. But they knew what they produced - chakra. They cannibalized something from the host to produce chakra, it can't exist of nothing and it can't be created without a combination of physical and spiritual influence, of which these beasts only had one source. It was his theory that chakra beasts drained the host of its physical energy and used that to produce chakra for the host, without a host it had to eat humans to gain physical energy prompting many of the monstrous creatures that wandered the world. It was, as of yet, unproven but it made sense.

Especially in light of the corpse in front of him right now that had shredded itself to tatters due to the influence of one such beast that was presently attempting to gouge him with its claws. It was a very unfortunate thing since that limited his thinking and he had to devote a portion of his mind to dealing with it. Even if it lacked training and the host body was poor and insufficient food, a chakra beast could make due and cause plenty of harm...just not to him.

No, to a trained shinobi like Yukiin it wouldn't fly and he moved his own claws in rhythm with his opponents as they made their swings and swipes, one hand parrying the corpse monster and the other guiding one of his 'puppets' to empty out the building.

He was waiting. Once the last person had left he no longer had to and as his icy golem shut the door and fell inert, he pressed his free hand into the beast's head and drove a talon through its skull, holding it immobilized. Well, maybe that was the wrong word, as his claws slipped out and dripped the excess of blood prompted by piercing through one's head the body fell to the floor not because it was not mobile but because it would never again be mobile. Cutting the wrong part of a brain turned a healthy man into a vegetable and, he hoped, an artificial Jinchurikki also into a non-threat.

The Medic hadn't cleared the area because he was accepting 'maybes' as answers though.

He'd cleared it because nobody needed to watch as what Yukiin was slipped out of what he appeared, the dangling, slithering, creature emerging to grasp the flesh and the tear it open like a bag of chips in the hands of a child - recklessly and ravenously. He didn't care to eat this physical slop, he only cared to ensure the body was picked through and as he separated organs and pieces, the method and control of his animalistic behavior shone through. Each part had its place and as it was sorted into preservative containers and sealed into scrolls, he felt some relief in knowing that these things were certainly killable.

There was also relief in eating his portion of the man, the part nobody else missed.

There had been some worry that they wouldn't be but it seemed to him that their spiritual parasites were of the weaker variety or, perhaps, they were simply unable to express their full strength in such poor hosts, he would have to study it. For now, knowing they died like anyone else was comforting knowledge after wandering into town spending the last week trying to find one of them only to have this one interrupt him trying to enjoy the play.

The Collector snapped back like the crack of duct tape, retreating into his flesh and cracking his neck as he spoke aloud to nobody in particular, his voice echoing across the empty stage and seatings of the theatre.

"Note to self: proto-Jinchurikki dislike period pieces. May dislike other play types, yet unstudied."

Fresh in his flesh he groaned uncomfortably and examined the area, or rather what he'd cleaned of it. In the midst of splitting up the body he had many apendages not in use so why wouldn't he put them to use in fixing the place up? He wasn't a talented carpenter so he couldn't do anything like that but everything unbroken was back in place and all the shattered glass and other problems had been gathered and dumped into their appropriate bins. Similarly his golem dissolved, couldn't be leaving any of his ice sculptures around, they might get confused about it.

Yukiin pushed the door aside like a street beggar, moving into the gathered ground that for some reason hadn't fled the scene but instead decided to move only the minimum distance to feel safe and the maximum distance to stick their noses in the matter.

"Human nature..." He chided, clearing his throat with a cough he didn't need to make to ready for an announcement he did. "The building is safe, the problem has been taken care of. If you have any further information about these 'berserkers' I'm staying at the Umbrella Inn. Please meet me there."

"Which room?" Someone asked from the crowd.

"All of them." The shinobi responded, as if he could fit his lab equipment in one room...such a dumb question. What an idiot. He was going to find that guy, follow him home, and then ask him stupid questions like 'which child is yours?' or 'do you think your wife has gained weight?'

"What about refunds? We didn't even get to the intermission!" Another voice asked, more aggressively.

"Okay so first off - I didn't agree to answer questions. Second - you almost died, why are you worried about your ticket price? Do you know much a funeral costs?" The Medic responded, knowing the costs of a funerals of several prominent faiths as well as the price of the coffins off the top of his head for both adult and child sizes.

"Right but I didn't so I don't have to buy a funeral, what I have to buy is new tickets." They came back, seemingly never having been told there was such thing as a stupid question.

"...just...okay, one second, hands up if you know this guy?"

Several hands shot up, many reluctantly.

"Is he always like this?"

"Him? Absolutely."
"Pretty much."
"Thats like...his thing."

"Okay, uh, homework - go home and have a real long think about it and then write down your answer, don't tell me now though. Go home, think, and tell me 'Is the refund policies of the venue putting on 'Trial of the Marshes' the job of shinobi to determine?' and for extra credit 'Why don't any of my friends like me?' Bring it to my room."

"...which room?"

"For the love of...Any of them. ANY ROOM."

 

[Byakko Yukiin]

Several specimens gathered over the past two weeks lined the place he had made into his base of operations. The property owner no longer knocked and bothered him about missing meals or any other mundanity, only bringing people to him if they requested him in order to offer information or leads on more of these creatures. He'd eliminated a baker's dozen already, some of them harder than others though all of them were below the threshold of threat to a shinobi, they were far too wild and attached to far too weak of a host. These things were a threat to citizens but he had yet to see one bonded to a host that already had chakra potential above and beyond the norm, only then would he be able to safely determine what kind of threat it really was to Kumogakure.

This was complicated though, if the beasts were implanted into a suitable host...how would he know?

Yukiin had taken to flipping through records of the health of Jinchurikki which were already registered, individuals who engaged in this spiritual paratism with zeal. As mentioned, they seemed oblivious to the nature of their 'partner' as one could not exist without a host and the other existed prior to having a parasite, but in his experience they reacted poorly to being asked questions using such phrasing and preferred to respond to more ambigious terms. They lived in a state of denial that he found difficult to manage as it prevented him from probing into matters of their exact relationship, sustenance wise, as it seemed they were simply oblivious as they didn't think about what it ate. Chakra had to be created, it did not exist of its own accord and it could not be spun up from nothing, so any powers it granted had to be extracted from the host...so why didn't they notice? It was an efficient creature, to say the least, as it offered them potent ways to enhance their chakra reserves and to maximize its usage but it could not violate basic principles and create from nothing.

It seemed that this efficiency enabled them to extract minimal amounts, to the point where the victim is called 'chakraless', and convert them into something usable by combining these efforts with its own biomass. Chakra, being composed of two components of biological and spiritual energy, might be produced more efficiently for a creature that was largely spiritual by gaining more physical mass and vice versa. This was a sort of symbiosis, he supposed, but the primary benefit was that both parties gained access to a resource they were deficient in.

Suppose your average human is 90% flesh and 10% spirit, they can only ever create 10% chakra as it is capped by their flesh.
Suppose your average spirit is 90% spirit and 10% flesh, they encounter the same limiting factor.
Now suppose you put both together so that a creature was more evenly distributed, 50-50 ideally, and you would be able to produce 50% of your 'chakra potential' so to speak. In this way those who bonded with a spirit beast 'gained chakra' despite this being a scientific impossibility (not that he was one to talk about scientific impossibilities as a shambling below zero degrees Fahrenheit monstrosity.)

Following that logic even an inefficient change that raised a human's spiritual component too far or too little would produce more chakra in total than either party could develop on their own. It was just a matter of finding the optimal balance at a 50-50 split, something that Jinchurikki strived to attain and would never usually achieve as they developed due to, well, reality. This was complicated by the fact that 51% or so of the host body's spiritual mass needed to be their own, otherwise the beast had a majority stake in their body of their soul and this gave them overriding control such as was happening here. Only a foolish or brave Jinchurikki would offer a beast a majority control over their spirit and the end result, most often, was the overriding apetite of the beast taking over the host body and causing these kinds of outbursts.

Thus an ideal Jinchurikki would be 80-90% Human Physicality (spirits had too little to contribute much more) and 51-61% Human Spirituality with their parasitic spirit affording the remaining 10-20% Physicality and 49-39% Spirituality. This was consistent with what he could glean from the registered Jinchurikki he knew of, though some dangerously allowed for larger portions of spiritual majority from their parasites and were effectively walking time bombs by his knowledge.

Your average shinobi was likely a 75-25 split and thus adding a spirit could increase their potential chakra substantially.
Your average chakraless, on the other hand, with a near zero amount of spirit? You could force them into being a shinobi.

Was it stable? No. He would have to make some determinations on success rates but every one he'd seen, thus far, had failed.
Was it ethical? Maybe, converted into a consensual practice and perhaps with monetary incentive it could be repurposed.
Was it efficient? At producing chakra, yes. At producing shinobi...less so. Very dangerous edge to walk but they'd walked finer.

Even if your average chakraless contained little chakra if they could survive having a spirit inserted into them they could become, in theory, chakra capable and defy the limitations of their genetic condition. The condition was not completely understood but regardless of whether it inhibited body, spirit, or the ability to combine them any of these possibilities was mitigated by adding another source, both of raw spiritual mass and combinational potential (even a spirit had, roughly speaking, a genetic component as it had a chakra component and since spirit's did not have a chakraless mutation you could circumvent the problem partially by allowing the spirit to do the molding.)

In short - what The Solution was claiming to be a cure to the condition was not true, per se, but it did emulate the appearance of a cure and go around the problem. This made them half right, the genetic condition was still present (and there was, as of yet, no known way to combat that) but its damage was minimized. In short if he could determine how this was produced and make a cost analysis this had potential...a lot of potential.

Yukiin glanced at the arrangement of pieces, bottles, beakers, and corpse accouterments around him.

"We pile on the corpses to reach the heights of progress." He muttered.