"Squeak—"
That short, piercing cry was the signal that Pointy-headed Mouse's life had ended.
Damn it! Even without a pointy head, Pointy-headed Mouse couldn't escape the fate of flying to Steroid Planet and Peptide Star!?
Hiroki frowned as he looked at Pointy-headed Mouse.
Just a moment ago, its muscular body had been running tirelessly on the wheel. Then, after a violent spasm, it collapsed with a crash, its limbs stretched stiffly outward, and it fell completely silent.
Almost at the same time, Hiroki's mental space tried to contact Big Mouse.
[Attempting to connect to target "Big Mouse_01"...]
[Error: Target device does not exist.]
Does not exist...
Hiroki's consciousness shuddered slightly.
This was the first time he had encountered such a situation.
This was... shutting down... But on a biological level, there might be another word for what had happened to the mouse.
Dead.
Did being dead mean "shut down"?
Hiroki pressed his lips tightly together. If death corresponded to shutting down, did that mean that if he shut down involuntarily because his battery ran out or for some other reason, he would be dead, too?
That was really bad news.
Worse still, with the mouse dead, he could no longer read its System Log to figure out what had gone wrong.
Debugging at the code level was no longer an option. He had to turn to the most primitive and fundamental method—the physical examination.
He needed to perform an autopsy.
Hiroki put on his gloves, his expression calm to the point of coldness. He didn't have a professional scalpel, but a ninja's tool kit contained something even sharper.
He took out a Kunai and carefully disinfected it with alcohol. Under his precise control, its sharp tip sliced steadily and smoothly through Pointy-headed Mouse's chest and abdomen, like the finest surgical scalpel.
A stench more overpowering than the smell of urine from before hit him, a mixture of blood and rotting organs, but Hiroki didn't even furrow his brow.
The sight before him confirmed his suspicions.
The muscle tissue was unusually well developed. Every bundle of muscle fibers was astonishingly thick and a healthy deep red, proving that his script had performed perfectly at its one goal: "building muscle."
The kidneys, however, were in a horrendous state. They were swollen to nearly twice the size of normal mouse kidneys, blackened, and as fragile as tofu left to soak too long.
Hiroki lightly touched them with the tip of his Kunai. The organs, already in complete failure, collapsed.
"Acute kidney failure, just as I thought."
He matched the biological phenomenon before him to what he had learned about biology.
Muscle growth and synthesis produced metabolic waste.
And the [Muscle_Automatic_Growth_v0.1.bat] script had forced the body to continuously perform protein synthesis and breakdown at an extremely high intensity. The process had produced vast quantities of metabolic waste, such as blood urea nitrogen and creatinine.
All this "system garbage" had flooded into the blood, waiting for the kidneys—the "filters"—to remove it.
But working at the limit, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, had far exceeded the design limits of the "hardware."
The kidneys couldn't bear the strain and ultimately went on strike. The metabolic waste couldn't be eliminated, rapidly accumulating in the body and triggering fatal uremia. In the end, it led to "systemic failure" as multiple organs shut down.
"It looks like this was just a bug caused by setting the values incorrectly. I didn't account for anything beyond the muscles." Hiroki fell silent for a moment, then created a new experiment log and wrote down his conclusion.
It was lucky he hadn't used himself as the test subject.
If he'd been just a little more reckless, he might have died on the spot...
—He would need to lower the values drastically. He didn't even need the mouse's muscle growth speed at ten percent. Maybe five percent, or even one percent, would be enough.
Assuming his muscles grew at a steady rate of 100 grams per day, that would be 700 grams in a week, three kilograms of pure muscle in a month, and thirty-six kilograms in a year.
That was already close to Hiroki's current body weight.
Hiroki took a deep breath. Next, he would need to catch more Big Mice to contribute to his quest to grow stronger!
Meanwhile, deep beneath Konoha, at Root's base.
Orochimaru returned to his familiar laboratory, filled with the smell of formalin.
He was intensely interested in the "interesting Kekkei Genkai" Danzo had mentioned.
To be honest, Orochimaru didn't think much of the average Sharingan.
The so-called ability to copy ninjutsu could only replicate techniques that were mostly useless. On a real battlefield, once someone used a jutsu of the highest caliber, it was almost always a matter of life and death.
Most of the techniques the Sharingan could copy were useless ones that could be defeated by a crude Fire Release technique.
The truly powerful and astonishingly effective techniques were rarely seen more than once. They were also incredibly difficult. Forget copying them—even studying them by imitation for over a decade might not be enough to master them.
Examples included the Second Hokage's Flying Thunder God Technique, Dan Katō's Spirit Transformation Technique, and the Impure World Reincarnation he had recently learned about.
But copying someone else's ninjutsu by reading their memories was a different matter.
Orochimaru narrowed his eyes. Although he had acted as if he didn't care much in front of Danzo, this Kekkei Genkai really could help him achieve his ideal—
Learning every ninjutsu.
Orochimaru sat in a chair, going through the files.
Thanks to the special clearance he had in both Anbu and Root, he had easily accessed the complete files of the two children.
Kushina's file was unremarkable. Other than the labels "Uzumaki orphan" and "Jinchuriki candidate," there was little of note. The only thing worth paying attention to was the unusual nature of her chakra.
Hiroki's file, on the other hand, had a strange, abrupt break in it. He had been utterly ordinary for the first nine years of his life, but after the "Cloud Village kidnapping incident," it was as if he had become someone else.
Just like those Uchiha who awakened the Sharingan.
"A Kekkei Genkai awakening..." Orochimaru's golden, slit-pupiled eyes narrowed slightly. Most of the information Root had provided concerned the boy's daily activities. They hadn't done much investigation into the Kekkei Genkai awakening or his background.
After all, Root was ultimately an underground organization. Its main responsibilities were dealing with traitors and troublesome members within the village, as well as handling enemy intelligence operatives. The backgrounds, personalities, and grades of children in the village weren't Root's responsibility.
His teacher, the Ninja Academy's honorary principal, the Third, Sarutobi Hiruzen, clearly knew more about that.
He left the laboratory and headed straight for the Hokage's office.
He needed more information to understand this student better and decide how to test him.
If—if this student didn't meet his expectations... Orochimaru narrowed his eyes. Trying to extract the boy's Kekkei Genkai might be another option.
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