"Phew..."
Standing before the office door bearing Yuriko's name, Chiba silently wiped away his sweat and glanced back toward the corridor he had come from, still somewhat shaken.
That had been too dangerous!
It had been far too dangerous! Before finding Yuriko's office, he had first gone to ask for directions at the office of a sixty-year-old pedantic scholar called Doctor Tanaka. By chance, the elderly doctor had just finished lunch and was resting, preparing for his afternoon research.
Generally speaking, those old scholars were often not in their offices. The hospital was sufficiently staffed, and ordinary illnesses, major or minor—even severe injuries suffered by ninja—did not require their treatment. When they remained at the hospital, they did nothing but research. So most of the time, those old scholars either gathered together to conduct all sorts of research or went to mooch off Konoha High Command's medical departments—uh... no, to persuade Konoha High Command's medical departments to allocate research funding.
To be honest, a considerable portion of those old scholars' time was spent mooching—uh... no, requesting research funds.
Over the past few years, Chiba had been dragged along several times. Each time, he had been utterly awed by those old scholars' relentless pestering, deeply feeling that it was a waste of their talents not to haggle at a marketplace.
This time, Doctor Tanaka had fortunately been there. But as the saying went, fortune and misfortune went hand in hand. The unfortunate part of this stroke of luck was that Doctor Tanaka had become somewhat obsessively devoted to medical research. After being thoroughly shocked upon first seeing Chiba and nearly suffering a heart attack, the old man clutched his chest and, under Chiba's worried, almost panicked gaze, haltingly and breathlessly explained all the research results he had achieved over the past