Meanwhile, far away in the underground base in the Land of Rice Fields, a very different smell hung in the air.
Medicinal solutions, blood, mildew, and damp earth and stone mingled together, along with the faint, sickly sweetness of rotting vegetation.
Three dissected White Zetsu corpses lay spread across a long stone table. Their skin had been peeled back, exposing muscles and channels beneath the cold white light, but their flesh wasn't red like a normal person's. Instead, it had the grayish-white hue of wet wood.
Wearing gloves, Yakushi Kabuto worked with an extremely fine blade, carefully separating the tissue inside one White Zetsu's chest. Light reflected off his lenses.
An iron tray beside him already held seven or eight slender tubes soaking in a medicinal solution. They were still writhing ever so slightly.
Jūgo stood a little farther away, watching with his arms folded. At last, he couldn't hold back. "Don't you think these things get more disgusting the longer you look at them?"
Kabuto didn't even look up. "Disgusting and valuable have never been mutually exclusive."
"They look like trees and people at the same time. Cut them open, and their insides look like waterlogged fungal threads."
"Mm."
"Isn't that a little too calm a reaction?"
"Because I've been looking at them for days."
Kabuto gently pushed aside a pale green channel inside the White Zetsu's chest, his eyes alight with interest. "Besides, I'm increasingly convinced these things aren't merely experimental material."
Jūgo frowned. "Then what are they?"
"Something close to a 'fundamental life-form.'"
Jūgo looked utterly baffled. "In plain language."
Only then did Kabuto look up at him and smile.
"It means White Zetsu can accept foreign cells, chakra, and even wills more easily than normal humans."
Jūgo still didn't understand. "What does that have to do