She wasn’t free, not really.
The freedom of her entrapment of three years within a Kami’s dream realm was but one layer of the prison her body suffered, the other two were a creeping madness that, while had been cured for now, would come back. The other was a virus slowly waking up inside of her body now that she was free of the fae suppression. Both things needed to be cured immediately, but neither were cures she could simply pluck out of the air.
For the first, at least, there was some serendipity. Ryuu Tama, scourge of her clan and son of the man who had cursed them with the Madness, had come to Kumogakure of his own volition. She had already surmised through chakra theory alone his blood could be used to inoculate against the curse via some rare herbs. There were plants capable of drawing out the raw chakra essence from a person’s blood, allowing it to be harvested from the fruits the vines produced. Taking that fruit, boiling down the pure essence, and then injecting it could at least prevent the ever lingering terror of her clan’s waking nightmares.
However, there was no way Tama had enough blood to spare. The plants itself were exceedingly rare as well, but, that wasn’t entirely a problem for Rei anymore. It was ironic, considering her past, that she be so adept with chakra now to a point of obtaining a rare power. She could grow plant matter of any kind within moments over the years it naturally took the fruits to bloom upon their vines. Drawback was that doing so fed the chakra hungry plants her energy as well, which would no doubt make distilling Tama’s more of a chore than necessary. It almost seemed like it would be easier to just let them grow naturally than influence their sprouts.
The man claimed to have something that might change all of that though. Reading the reports on his interrogation, which had been far more complicated to get a hold of now than it had three years ago, were quite enlightening. Upon his possession was a Ryuu Weapon; specifically, the one his father had found and turned against the clan in the madness it afflicted him with. Tengokai was dead and gone, but not unreachable.
Shortly after Rei had returned to Kumogakure with Shiro, and at least three weeks of rest and rehabilitation until she finally came to terms that this was, in fact, not, another dream; she began working immediately. The Kami’s Delight left something altered inside of her body after leaving in her death, and that was the augmentation of the chakra coil within that allowed it to hold up the dream realm. Blessed with an abundance of energy she hadn’t had before, the ex-Sennin turned away from her previous work as a spy master, and instead followed in the footsteps of her best friend; something she had secretly desired her whole life.
Passing the medical exams were a breeze. 90% of the knowledge she had already researched in finding a way to augment flesh with machine cleared that, and the other 10% she could easily guess at correctly. Having already been a student of Kitsune in her teens, she had something of a golden ticket when it came to practicing medicine. However, her plans to enter the medical field hadn’t been entirely to aid the living; a darker side to clung to that title she had grabbed withe ease.
Resurrecting the dead was not incredibly taboo in their society, and that was her major plan. At least, it wasn’t for high level shinobi. The Vault had more than enough tomes on the subject to fuel her curiosity and then some. In a fortnight, the emerald haired shinobi burned through the largest of the tomes before she came to wall that would require practice before she could continue learning. Pulling chakra into a corpse to bring life into it was only a single part of the process, and it wouldn’t produce the effect she sought.
Starting with small animals and working into more complex creatures, she gently zombified and then killed multiple creatures as she worked her way up towards humans. Getting human corpses was a bit more of a pain these days due to the new structure of life Kitsune had set for the nation. People didn’t die quite as easily as they once had, and their cold storage for corpses that didn’t possess important shinobi traits were very low. A Rei from a previous time would have simply gone and procured her own bodies to experiment on, but now she had someone who kept her balance.
Shiro was there to make sure that her dark research didn’t go to her head. He recognized immediately how bad the plan she had to save her clan could turn out, and always pushed for a measured learning experience no matter what her impatience demanded. He was a pillar of stability to her clan’s crude madness, and it kept her from falling into the same pits her cousin had long ago dove into willingly.
“Do you want to become Tama?” Such a line easily broke any argument she had to keep pushing her research, and having just recently beat the clan’s madness with his help, she had no desire to fall to it again so soon.
It didn’t mean she wasn’t any less frustrated by the lack of speed in her plans.
Moot point, though it was in the end. She still needed Kumogakure to be done with Tama enough that she could talk to him and collect the Ashura Blade; a weapon notorious for madness and eating souls. Within, she believed Tengokai’s soul remained. If she could just pluck it out…but, again, it was a moot point. Until she could successfully reanimate a human corpse, Rei couldn’t finish her studies enough to do much else with it. So, while she sat on the waiting list for fresh corpse, Rei turned her attention to the other, problem vexing her body; the Lycan virus.
In her large home within the Ryuu Compound, the woman had a lab commissioned so that she could work away from the hospital; just in case she wolf’d out or the madness came creeping back in. The further away from the general populace, the better. Her own home in the compound was bordering the edge of the Dark Forest as well, which gave her an exit stratgey to protect her clan as well. Within it’s white walls and overly clean floors the woman sat on a stool with her green hair tied into a half bun/half ponytail as would allow. She was staring down into a microscope. The slide she had under the lens contained her own blood, with the virus clearly still dormant but belligerently there. Next to her where a number of potted plants. They had all grown to a size that belied their pots, meaning she had forced grown them with her new chakra, and before each one was a vial of condensed essence.
Rei sat up, taking a pick colored solution before a plant first in the row of four, and drew a bit of fluid from it with a dropper before dripping a single glob of fluid onto the slide with her blood. Moving back in, she observed the virus in her bloodstream waking up and attacking the new compounds, before turning black and causing the sample to go up in a small blue flame. With a sigh, she sat back up and turned to a nearby whiteboard that had a multiple lines of math followed by an equal sign pointing to the mathematical compound of the distilled essence of that plant. She erased that bit.
Rei had sent word to the Raikage to aid her in this, but hadn’t waited. She had no desire to just simply rely on a friend when instead they could combine their knowledge to come up with an actual cure that would potentially even revert these creatures back to their original forms. Though she had sought the cure in a small selfish goal, her aim was to cure it entirely. If anyone could do it, the combined scientific might of Kitsune and herself most certainly was a possibility.
[MFT = 1300+wc]
The freedom of her entrapment of three years within a Kami’s dream realm was but one layer of the prison her body suffered, the other two were a creeping madness that, while had been cured for now, would come back. The other was a virus slowly waking up inside of her body now that she was free of the fae suppression. Both things needed to be cured immediately, but neither were cures she could simply pluck out of the air.
For the first, at least, there was some serendipity. Ryuu Tama, scourge of her clan and son of the man who had cursed them with the Madness, had come to Kumogakure of his own volition. She had already surmised through chakra theory alone his blood could be used to inoculate against the curse via some rare herbs. There were plants capable of drawing out the raw chakra essence from a person’s blood, allowing it to be harvested from the fruits the vines produced. Taking that fruit, boiling down the pure essence, and then injecting it could at least prevent the ever lingering terror of her clan’s waking nightmares.
However, there was no way Tama had enough blood to spare. The plants itself were exceedingly rare as well, but, that wasn’t entirely a problem for Rei anymore. It was ironic, considering her past, that she be so adept with chakra now to a point of obtaining a rare power. She could grow plant matter of any kind within moments over the years it naturally took the fruits to bloom upon their vines. Drawback was that doing so fed the chakra hungry plants her energy as well, which would no doubt make distilling Tama’s more of a chore than necessary. It almost seemed like it would be easier to just let them grow naturally than influence their sprouts.
The man claimed to have something that might change all of that though. Reading the reports on his interrogation, which had been far more complicated to get a hold of now than it had three years ago, were quite enlightening. Upon his possession was a Ryuu Weapon; specifically, the one his father had found and turned against the clan in the madness it afflicted him with. Tengokai was dead and gone, but not unreachable.
Shortly after Rei had returned to Kumogakure with Shiro, and at least three weeks of rest and rehabilitation until she finally came to terms that this was, in fact, not, another dream; she began working immediately. The Kami’s Delight left something altered inside of her body after leaving in her death, and that was the augmentation of the chakra coil within that allowed it to hold up the dream realm. Blessed with an abundance of energy she hadn’t had before, the ex-Sennin turned away from her previous work as a spy master, and instead followed in the footsteps of her best friend; something she had secretly desired her whole life.
Passing the medical exams were a breeze. 90% of the knowledge she had already researched in finding a way to augment flesh with machine cleared that, and the other 10% she could easily guess at correctly. Having already been a student of Kitsune in her teens, she had something of a golden ticket when it came to practicing medicine. However, her plans to enter the medical field hadn’t been entirely to aid the living; a darker side to clung to that title she had grabbed withe ease.
Resurrecting the dead was not incredibly taboo in their society, and that was her major plan. At least, it wasn’t for high level shinobi. The Vault had more than enough tomes on the subject to fuel her curiosity and then some. In a fortnight, the emerald haired shinobi burned through the largest of the tomes before she came to wall that would require practice before she could continue learning. Pulling chakra into a corpse to bring life into it was only a single part of the process, and it wouldn’t produce the effect she sought.
Starting with small animals and working into more complex creatures, she gently zombified and then killed multiple creatures as she worked her way up towards humans. Getting human corpses was a bit more of a pain these days due to the new structure of life Kitsune had set for the nation. People didn’t die quite as easily as they once had, and their cold storage for corpses that didn’t possess important shinobi traits were very low. A Rei from a previous time would have simply gone and procured her own bodies to experiment on, but now she had someone who kept her balance.
Shiro was there to make sure that her dark research didn’t go to her head. He recognized immediately how bad the plan she had to save her clan could turn out, and always pushed for a measured learning experience no matter what her impatience demanded. He was a pillar of stability to her clan’s crude madness, and it kept her from falling into the same pits her cousin had long ago dove into willingly.
“Do you want to become Tama?” Such a line easily broke any argument she had to keep pushing her research, and having just recently beat the clan’s madness with his help, she had no desire to fall to it again so soon.
It didn’t mean she wasn’t any less frustrated by the lack of speed in her plans.
Moot point, though it was in the end. She still needed Kumogakure to be done with Tama enough that she could talk to him and collect the Ashura Blade; a weapon notorious for madness and eating souls. Within, she believed Tengokai’s soul remained. If she could just pluck it out…but, again, it was a moot point. Until she could successfully reanimate a human corpse, Rei couldn’t finish her studies enough to do much else with it. So, while she sat on the waiting list for fresh corpse, Rei turned her attention to the other, problem vexing her body; the Lycan virus.
In her large home within the Ryuu Compound, the woman had a lab commissioned so that she could work away from the hospital; just in case she wolf’d out or the madness came creeping back in. The further away from the general populace, the better. Her own home in the compound was bordering the edge of the Dark Forest as well, which gave her an exit stratgey to protect her clan as well. Within it’s white walls and overly clean floors the woman sat on a stool with her green hair tied into a half bun/half ponytail as would allow. She was staring down into a microscope. The slide she had under the lens contained her own blood, with the virus clearly still dormant but belligerently there. Next to her where a number of potted plants. They had all grown to a size that belied their pots, meaning she had forced grown them with her new chakra, and before each one was a vial of condensed essence.
Rei sat up, taking a pick colored solution before a plant first in the row of four, and drew a bit of fluid from it with a dropper before dripping a single glob of fluid onto the slide with her blood. Moving back in, she observed the virus in her bloodstream waking up and attacking the new compounds, before turning black and causing the sample to go up in a small blue flame. With a sigh, she sat back up and turned to a nearby whiteboard that had a multiple lines of math followed by an equal sign pointing to the mathematical compound of the distilled essence of that plant. She erased that bit.
Rei had sent word to the Raikage to aid her in this, but hadn’t waited. She had no desire to just simply rely on a friend when instead they could combine their knowledge to come up with an actual cure that would potentially even revert these creatures back to their original forms. Though she had sought the cure in a small selfish goal, her aim was to cure it entirely. If anyone could do it, the combined scientific might of Kitsune and herself most certainly was a possibility.
[MFT = 1300+wc]
