Establishing a Laboratory

Tonight was destined to be sleepless. Yu had found solutions to two problems in a single day, and he was very excited.

But putting those solutions into practice would be difficult. Neither could be achieved overnight; he would have to take things one step at a time. Still, every journey began with a first step. Now that he had goals, he could make plans and tackle them one by one.

Yu had been keeping busy lately. During the day, he went to the Ninja Academy with Sasuke. He made plans during class, spent lunchtime with Naruto to "build" their relationship, and trained with Sasuke after they got home in the evening. Before bed, he spent two hours refining Chakra.

Every day was packed.

In private, Yu had Yunshang Jinwei buy various metals and laboratory equipment for him. After thinking it over for several days, he decided to build a private laboratory.

With his vast financial resources behind him, construction moved quickly. Konoha also supported the idea of private laboratories.

Many ninjas in Konoha had their own unique techniques, developed through all kinds of experimentation.

Developing a technique wasn't simple. Otherwise, so many clans in Konoha wouldn't have earned their current status through secret techniques. The Akimichi clan's Expansion Jutsu, the Inuzuka clan's Beast Mimicry Ninjutsu, the Yamanaka Clan's Mind Transfer Jutsu... These were all exceptionally powerful techniques.

That was why Konoha was very supportive of private laboratories. They even had a dedicated team of ninjas for building them.

Of course, conducting human experiments like Orochimaru wasn't allowed. But Yu had no interest in that, either. Although he was also interested in the Art of Immortality, he didn't seem to need such a technique right now.

Slimes had no lifespan limit. Unless they died in an accident or ran out of energy, he didn't need to worry too much about longevity.

His laboratory was built ten meters underground in his yard by several ninjas skilled in Earth Release.

Ninjutsu seemed even more effective for construction work. The underground laboratory, covering more than two hundred square meters, was completed in just half an hour. Reinforced with Earth Release, it was every bit as sturdy as one made of reinforced concrete.

All that remained was to finish the interior and arrange the experimental equipment.

Sasuke fully supported Yu's plan to build a laboratory and left the funding entirely to him. Sasuke was very rich these days; this amount of money was nothing to him.

With everything going smoothly, Yu's laboratory was officially completed two months later. It could have been finished sooner, but some of the equipment had to be imported from other countries, which caused long delays.

When Yu saw his laboratory completed, it felt almost unreal. In his previous life, his highest qualification had been a bachelor's degree in finance, and he had been a liberal arts student.

He had often fantasized about being transported to another world, but had never imagined that he would own a laboratory. The title of "scientist" didn't suit him at all.

Of course, he wouldn't be doing professional research in this laboratory. It was only for his own use.

Even so, the task was no simple matter. He had to study, especially since he needed to learn how to use all the laboratory equipment from scratch.

If news broke in his previous world that an eight-year-old child had started conducting experiments, there'd be no need to think twice: it would be a 99.99 percent chance of being fake. But in the Naruto world, such a thing was perfectly normal.

Summer gave way to winter, signaling that the year was almost over. During this time, Yu had become even less noticeable in class, not more.

The books Yu held made the children in his class feel even more certain that he wasn't one of them.

[Ten Theories on Kekkei Genkai]

That was the title of the book in Yu's hands. To get a copy, he had even posted a C-rank mission at Konoha's mission office.

He could swear that this was the most enjoyable time he'd ever spent studying.

Books like this had originally been classified as forbidden, but the restrictions had eased somewhat, so they could now be published. Even so, the book was hard to find.

Most of the information in it was theoretical and hadn't been tested in practice, but it still deepened his understanding of Kekkei Genkai.

Although Naruto, his target, didn't have a Kekkei Genkai, Yu himself did. After all, his Uchiha heritage was real. Yet he showed no signs of awakening the Sharingan, and the Uchiha constitution wasn't evident in him either.

The Sharingan was the Uchiha's greatest power. Talented Uchiha ninjas could awaken it around the age of ten. If they failed to awaken it during that period, they might never awaken it at all.

As far as he could remember, his grandfather was the only one among his direct relatives who had awakened the Sharingan.

To preserve their bloodline, the Uchiha mostly married within the clan. Of course, they also brought in talented ninjas from outside the clan from time to time to balance the bloodline and prevent it from becoming corrupted.

The Naruto world knew only that close-relative marriages could cause genetic problems in offspring. The Naruto world's technology was still quite advanced; in some fields, it had surpassed that of his previous world many times over.

Yu naturally didn't want to pass up the Uchiha's powers. Sharingan—Mangekyō Sharingan—Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan, and then the Rinnegan. He wanted them all, so finding a way to awaken his own Uchiha bloodline was one of his goals.

When he got home, he stopped training with Sasuke and went straight into the laboratory. He hadn't started experimenting yet; first, he needed to learn more.

However, there was already some tissue in several petri dishes. It had come from three people: Naruto, Sasuke, and himself.

He had gone to great lengths to keep the tissue growing. If his body weren't a slime now, he might already have gone bald from all the effort.

But during the process, he discovered something very strange: the tissue separated from his body grew especially quickly in the petri dish, and it began to develop toward the slime's original form.

After about a month, the tissue, which had originally been only the size of a fingernail, had grown to the size of a ping-pong ball. It was transparent and oval-shaped—that was the slime's original form.

What's more, this slime had developed a certain level of awareness. It might not have been awareness, exactly, but rather a creature's instincts. It would actively absorb food and instinctively avoid harmful things like fire and electric shocks.

It was almost more like a slime than Yu himself was.

"Slimes should reproduce by splitting. Could this thing be my child?"

Yu thought of this rather chilling possibility. He'd never considered having children, let alone giving birth to one himself.