Tetsumaru's War Preparations

Late at night, Aburame Tetsumaru used a tube lamp to illuminate a large stretch of woods. It was a very simple lighting tool: paint the inside of a wooden barrel white, then place a candle inside as the light source.

Since it used a candle, the tube lamp's lighting was rather weak. Fortunately, Konoha had no light pollution at the moment, and it was more than powerful enough as a lure. Before long, all kinds of flying and crawling insects gathered on the patch of ground lit by the lamp.

Tetsumaru took out a net and captured every insect on the ground that he had never seen before, sorting and storing them by category.

After repeatedly confirming that he had caught them all, he took out a butterfly net to catch the insects flying in the air that refused to land. This was more troublesome. After catching a batch, he had to identify them one by one, collecting those he had never seen before and those that were useful, while temporarily storing the rest in a mesh bag.

After spending quite some time processing them, another batch of insects arrived, and he once again caught the insects on the ground.

After repeating this several times, no more insects came. Aburame Tetsumaru sorted and packed away the mesh bags, then carried the tube lamp to another location and continued catching insects.

By the time dawn began to break, Aburame Tetsumaru had finished work at the fifth collection point and headed home.

During a routine inspection last month, Aburame Family ninja had discovered in shock that all the Sugar Ants in the forest had vanished, leaving behind empty nests that had been occupied by all kinds of insects.

The ninja who discovered the problem turned pale with fright and immediately ran back to the Aburame Estate to raise the alarm. The entire clan was instantly alerted, and more than a dozen Ninja Clans soon mobilized in response.

Five years ago, this would have been nothing. But now, it was a matter of enormous importance. For the families deeply involved in the Ant Sugar Alliance, it was practically a matter of life and death.

As the saying went, the bigger the snake, the bigger the hole it lived in. Over the past few years, the families in the Ant Sugar Alliance had made a fortune and gradually become lavish spenders without realizing it.

What shocked even Aburame Tetsumaru was that the merchants of the Shinobi World were truly capable and perceptive.

Several families in the alliance had been sweet-talked by merchants into playing the game of spending tomorrow's money today, racking up huge debts. If the ants were finished, they would truly be finished as well.

In the Aburame Forest, where insects mutated at an extremely rapid pace, some natural enemy of the Sugar Ants could emerge at any time. Or perhaps some targeted fungal, bacterial, or viral biological disaster could appear.

That was why Aburame Tetsumaru had proposed deliberately preserving part of the ant colonies as alarm systems, allowing them to warn of disasters and prevent irreparable losses to the large-scale farmed colonies.

Now, the Ant Sugar Alliance led by the Aburame Clan was raising sixteen hundred boxes of Sugar Ants, generating massive profits every month, equivalent to the mission earnings of at least three hundred Jonin.

If something harmful to Sugar Ants spread, the losses would be enormous. It absolutely could not be tolerated.

After a second investigation, they confirmed that a newly born insect species might wipe out the Sugar Ants. This was an attack on the Aburame Clan's livelihood. Elder Shihui leaped three feet into the air, and the entire Aburame Clan mobilized, with everyone participating in the investigation.

The Hyuga, Uchiha, and Inuzuka families were all invited. They had to find this damned insect and destroy it before it could spread.

Aburame Tetsumaru was also assigned an important task. Not only did he participate in catching insects at night, but he was also responsible for identifying them during the day.

The Clan Head, who was out on a mission, received the notice and immediately abandoned the mission to return to the village. He roared, "Until we find this damned bastard, no one gets to sleep!"

In the laboratory, Aburame Tetsumaru let out a huge yawn, rolled over, and continued sleeping.

He had already found the source of the problem. It was a type of Mutant Bee.

These bees laid their eggs near ant nests. The chemical scent they emitted made the ants mistake them for ant eggs, after which the ants carried them back into the nest's incubation chambers.

The newly hatched bees would steal and eat ant eggs, Larvae, and pupae. The Mutant Bee Larvae had enormous appetites and grew much larger than ants in just a few days. Then even adult ants became their prey.

Because the young bees were more than ten times larger than the queen ants, individual ants were devoured without any ability to resist. Their scent camouflage protected the young bees from being swarmed, leaving the ant colonies completely helpless.

From hatching to pupation, a young bee would consume roughly forty thousand ants. If more than twenty young bees infiltrated an ant nest, these greedy predators would completely destroy it. In the end, they would not even spare the queen ant.

Aside from these highly destructive Mutant Bees, there were two other insect species that preyed on ants. Their actual threat was not great, but they would probably suffer the same fate this time.

Aburame Tetsumaru had found the root of the disaster, but the Aburame Clan's identification work was not over. They could not be certain that no other threats existed, so they needed to conduct several more rounds of elimination to be safe.

After all, this was a full-clan mobilization. Including the other ninja they had invited, there were more than three hundred ninja skilled in sensing and reconnaissance. Their collection efficiency was simply too high.

They could be certain that this time, every insect in the forest would be screened. Aburame Tetsumaru could never have accomplished that alone, but he could use this opportunity to conduct a rare comprehensive inspection.

Aburame Tetsumaru sneezed and could no longer sleep.

He got up and swept his gaze over his laboratory. Oh no, the storage room was nearly full, and he did not have enough collection bottles either.

Well, had not the Clan Head said, "Spend the money that should be spent, and buy what needs to be bought"?

He would ask the Clan Head for money and manpower. First, he would double the size of the laboratory, then get ten thousand collection bottles. No, thirty thousand.

He also needed approval for some Insect Feed and reagents. Money was fine, but directly supplying materials would work too. Heh heh heh heh.

Over the next few days, Aburame Tetsumaru and several clan ninja responsible for identification jointly confirmed that the culprit was indeed the Mutant Bee. They also found five insect species that were harmful to or competitive with ants.

At the Aburame Clan Head's command, six hundred ninja swept through the entire Aburame Forest and completely exterminated all six insect species. Afterwards, Aburame ninja released ten new Sugar Ant colonies into the forest and monitored them continuously over the following month, confirming that no harmful insects remained.

This major incident, which concerned the survival of the Ant Sugar Alliance, finally came to an end.

Aburame Tetsumaru reaped enormous benefits from this incident. His laboratory doubled in size, his warehouse tripled in capacity, and the number of new insect specimens he acquired exceeded everything he had accumulated over the previous six years.

With life returning to normal, it was time to focus on preparing for war.

Aburame Tetsumaru silently considered everything he possessed. The foundational cultivation of his Kikaichū system was complete. It had four types of abilities—attack, defense, reconnaissance, and communication—and was already quite formidable.

He was not good at multitasking. Could he avoid it somehow?

The fundamental reason the Aburame Secret Technique relied on multitasking was that individual Kikaichū were weak and slow. They had to rely on arrangements, misdirection, and secret techniques to surround the enemy in advance before they could deliver a killing blow.

No matter which direction the Kikaichū path developed toward, it would increasingly require a talent for multitasking in order to bring out the Kikaichū's full capabilities.

Aburame Tetsumaru scratched his head. After six years of unrelenting training, his multitasking ability was too awful to describe. Whenever he thought about it, tears of regret threatened to fall.

To sum it up in one sentence: I should have given up sooner.

The path of ninjutsu was just as rough.

Although Tetsumaru slept in class, skipped school, and formed cliques at the Ninja Academy, he was genuinely a good student. He had completely mastered every C-rank ninjutsu available for him to learn.

The actual results showed that they were somewhat stronger than the Kikaichū Secret Technique he used, which was completely mismatched with the massive amount of Chakra he possessed—more than a hundred times that of his classmates.

The problem lay with the C-rank ninjutsu he had learned. They did not include the several techniques he was familiar with, such as Fire Release: Fireball Jutsu and Wind Release: Great Breakthrough.

What Aburame Tetsumaru had learned at the Ninja Academy were all unimpressive basic ninjutsu, trash not worth mentioning in the story, the thousand copied techniques Kakashi never used.

In present-day and future Konoha, there were only two paths left to learn powerful ninjutsu: find a powerful Jonin to take as a master, or accumulate enough merit to exchange for techniques from the village.

Aburame Tetsumaru had no opportunity to take a master, while exchanging for ninjutsu was too distant a solution for an immediate problem.

Taijutsu was even more troublesome. In Konoha—no, in the entire Shinobi World—there was only one mature Taijutsu system, the Gentle Fist Technique, and it could only be mastered with the Byakugan bloodline.

Aburame Tetsumaru had bought the Eight Inner Gates from Might Duy and confirmed that this Forbidden Technique was incomplete. It had no steps or techniques for opening the Gate of Opening, and it did not even contain any training steps or methods.

All he could say was that its unknown developer had been an absolute genius. Without undergoing training, the developer had opened the Gate of Opening, only recording the specific circumstances afterward, as well as the outcome of opening all Eight Inner Gates and dying in a burst of blood-red light.

The Second Hokage had organized the original records and added his own understanding to compile the Forbidden Technique known as the Eight Inner Gates. But as Hokage, he had been incredibly busy and had developed so many Forbidden Techniques. How could he have had time to perfect such a dangerous technique?

It was Might Duy who, through persistent effort and decades of work, using his life itself, perfected the Eight Inner Gates and figured out its training methods and techniques for opening the gates.

Every path was blocked.

Aburame Tetsumaru sighed. Since the mountain would not come to him, he could only go to the mountain.

He spread a blank sheet of paper across the table and thoughtfully wrote down his assets and strengths.

First, his talent for multitasking was terrible, but his single-threaded and dual-threaded control was not bad.

Second, he had a lot of Chakra.

Third, his Taijutsu was passable.

Fourth, the sixty thousand insect species he had collected.

Fifth, he had money.

Aburame Tetsumaru thought for a moment, crossed out "not bad" in the first point and changed it to "extremely outstanding," then crossed out the third point.

Looking at the sheet of paper, the conclusion emerged: select and cultivate insect species from the sixty thousand he had collected that were fast enough, sufficiently lethal, and highly functional. Then adapt them to his talent for single-threaded control and his powerful Chakra, allowing them to replace Kikaichū in battle.

First came reconnaissance. He needed to upgrade the Slime. Setting aside adding new functions, the most urgent need was to improve its survivability. It could not die so easily.

Why not give the Slime a shell? That was a good idea. Write it down.

Attack was indispensable. What Kikaichū lacked was attack power, and speed as well.

Then he would choose from insects that could fly and fly quickly. Hmm, this locust was good. It was fast, and its head was sharp and hard. It often poked through his nets. It had potential.

This beetle was not bad either. It was hard as rock, and a ring of sharp spikes lined its shell. It looked like a tiny Shuriken.

This Poisonous Stink Bug was incredibly fast, and more importantly, the venom it injected was remarkably potent. It had great potential.

Wait, that beetle from earlier. Although it could not fly, it was even tougher. Its carapace was broad and thick, and it could absolutely be used as armor plates to improve defense. Defense was important too. Write it down.

Choosing insects was like girls shopping—it was easy to get addicted. Without realizing it, he had filled an entire scroll with notes: over a hundred insect species, over a hundred different cultivation projects. When he snapped out of it, Aburame Tetsumaru was dumbfounded. There were only three months left. Could he complete induced mutation and trait selection for more than a hundred insect species?

Should he filter them again? He read through the list several times from beginning to end, then sighed.

He could not filter them again. Who knew what the cultivation results would be? A second selection after choosing traits was gambling, and he would often miss targets with real potential.

Forget it. Aburame Tetsumaru gave up on the idea of a second selection. He would start with the Slime and work through them one by one, running as many in parallel as possible.

Aburame Tetsumaru selected a Slime, then chose a Snail, a Scabies Mite, and a Weaver Insect, beginning the induction process.

As everyone knew, biology was cutting-edge technology on Blue Star. Its theories were immature and full of uncertainty. Especially without computers or pure reagents, every operation was like gambling.

Late at night forty days later, Aburame Tetsumaru stared at the indescribable lump of flesh in a test tube with a devastated expression. The induced mutation had failed again.

He had gained nothing.

His only trump cards now were his difficult-to-monetize Chakra reserves and forty-four trash ninjutsu. The concealment and explosive properties of the Chakra Grand Circulation barely counted as one ace.

Was he really going to the battlefield like this?

Without a hundred or so trump cards, plus eight or ten aces, what difference was there between a transmigrator like Aburame Tetsumaru going into battle and going in naked?

The more he thought about it, the angrier he became. The more he thought about it, the more furious he became. Then he remembered how much those four thousand induction experiments had cost, and Aburame Tetsumaru nearly cracked apart.

A tiny branch burst open from the Chakra Grand Circulation within his body, like a ruptured solar corona, like a flickering solar flare. An enormous surge of Chakra erupted in an instant, shattering hundreds of test tubes. The entire laboratory looked as though it had been struck by a Fireball Jutsu. Its interior was completely ruined, while the doors and windows flew out like cannonballs, breaking apart in midair and scattering fragments throughout the courtyard.

The pent-up fire in his heart was vented along with the explosion. Aburame Tetsumaru felt much better, then felt heartache and regret over the new losses.

Forget it, he would not deal with it. Leaving behind the mess, he endured the looks from his parents as though they were watching a brainless destructive maniac, then returned to his room to sleep.

After a good night's sleep, the refreshed Aburame Tetsumaru's mood improved completely.

After eating his fill at breakfast, his mood became even better, and he went to clean up the mess.

He gathered the shattered doors and windows from the courtyard into a pile, then began cleaning the laboratory. But the instant he walked inside and saw all kinds of mutant Slimes wriggling across the floor, Aburame Tetsumaru was completely stunned.

All kinds of Slimes: shelled Slimes, legged Slimes, winged Slimes, clawed Slimes, conjoined Slimes, hairy Slimes, Slimes with forty legs...

Fuck, it was like a dream.

Why? How?

Aburame Tetsumaru's mind raced as he considered why the result he had failed to obtain through such long effort had somehow appeared after a single outburst. As he thought, he absentmindedly sorted and stored the Slimes by category.

By the time he had finished cleaning them all up, he had eliminated every impossible factor, leaving only one: Chakra.

Chakra could do this?

Let me verify it.