"What did you say? You want death-row prisoners, and not just any prisoners, but the most heinous criminals—the kind nobody would feel sorry for, no matter what terrible things were done to them?"
Hiruzen Sarutobi looked strangely at the teenage boy in front of him. Did he even know what he was saying?
"What? Have you been Hokage for so long that you really think human experimentation is unforgivable?"
Ensei Uchiha spoke without hurrying.
For a moment, Hiruzen Sarutobi almost saw the shadow of his teacher in Ensei Uchiha.
If Tobirama Senju knew what Hiruzen was thinking right now, he would probably turn in his grave.
"No, it's just that I had a student who was once obsessed with human experimentation..."
Hiruzen Sarutobi was falling back into his old habit, preparing to lecture Ensei Uchiha.
But, clearly, Ensei Uchiha couldn't care less.
"I know. Orochimaru, right? Back then, you let him leave Konoha because you couldn't bring yourself to stop him."
"But if you ask me, you should blame yourself for that!"
"You let Orochimaru get involved with Danzo. What kind of person Danzo is—don't you know?"
"By the time you let Orochimaru get involved with Danzo, Orochimaru had probably already figured out what would happen to him. He was a rare clever man."
"Honestly, Tobirama Senju conducted human experiments too. Why are you telling me about Orochimaru and all that..."
Hiruzen Sarutobi hadn't even finished speaking before Ensei Uchiha interrupted him with a string of complaints, dredging up painful memories in the process.
As Hokage, he of course knew why Orochimaru had left Konoha.
"Perhaps I really am getting old!"
At that moment, Hiruzen Sarutobi seemed to have lost all his spirit. He looked particularly aged.
"Hey, old man. Don't just stand there pretending to be dead. Get me a few death-row prisoners, and make sure they're the worst of the worst. Don't bother with anyone whose crimes are too minor."
"If you don't have any here, go coordinate with other shinobi villages or the Daimyo of another country."
Ensei Uchiha's voice seemed to slice through Hiruzen Sarutobi's sorrowful expression like an invisible blade.
Before those Three-Tomoe Sharingan, their pupils gleaming blue, all his disguises seemed to vanish.
At that moment, Hiruzen Sarutobi felt a sudden fear of the boy in front of him and couldn't help asking,
"Ensei, what's your dream? To learn every jutsu in the world?"
Hearing the question, Ensei Uchiha more or less understood what Hiruzen Sarutobi was thinking.
"That's Orochimaru's dream. I'm actually a pretty peaceful person. My dream..."
"It's simple. I just want no one to be able to hurt me or anything I care about."
After hearing that, Hiruzen Sarutobi pondered for a moment, then suddenly smiled and praised him. "That's a pretty good dream."
"Thank you for sharing your true feelings with me. I'll have someone deliver the heinous death-row prisoners you want to the Uchiha Clan Compound."
The prisoners were delivered soon after, along with a document detailing their crimes.
As for whether the records were true... Ensei Uchiha didn't care. In a world like this, finding a few scumbags was surely a simple matter.
After finding somewhere to keep the scumbags, Ensei Uchiha ran experiments on them for a few days, then stopped. The experiments were pointless.
In his previous life, he hadn't been a doctor, so his knowledge of medicine wasn't extensive.
Although he had specifically studied Medical Ninjutsu in this world, he had focused mainly on chakra control and a few medical techniques. He hadn't learned anything about the human body.
So, a few days later, Ensei Uchiha returned to take lessons from Kushina Uzumaki.
That's right. Kushina Uzumaki. She had originally gone out to hunt down Danzo, but after failing to find him, she could only return.
Who knew what schemes Danzo was up to? He was clearly hiding in Konoha, yet no one could find him.
Using the malice-sensing ability of the Nine-Tails Chakra, Ensei Uchiha had found someone who seemed to harbor great ill will toward him.
That person might have been Shimura Danzō, but Ensei Uchiha wasn't interested in dealing with him.
He was just an Impure World Reincarnation body. What trouble could he possibly cause?
If Ensei went after him himself, there was a good chance it would be a trap.
Ordinary traps would be one thing, but anything Shimura Danzō set up was bound to be dangerous. Better to let someone else handle it.
Ignoring those trivial matters, Ensei Uchiha began learning Medical Ninjutsu from Kushina Uzumaki.
Over the past few years, thanks to Minato Namikaze, Kushina Uzumaki had often communicated with Tsunade through Katsuyu and learned quite a few medical techniques. She would even occasionally use the Transformation Jutsu to help out at Konoha Hospital.
That was how Minato Namikaze had managed to lie there for so long without his physical condition deteriorating at all.
Women really would put up with anything for the people they loved.
To understand the relationship between hormones and emotions in the human body, Ensei Uchiha figured that, besides consulting reference materials, the best thing to do was ask Kushina Uzumaki.
Time passed little by little.
In the blink of an eye, several months had gone by.
That day, Ensei Uchiha left Kushina Uzumaki's place and was thinking through the next steps of his emotional experiments when he happened to look up at the map of Konoha on the wall.
"Huh? The Pot Kage moved. I thought he was stuck in that spot."
"He's still outside the alert zone. I'll leave him alone."
Ensei Uchiha stared at the map curiously for a while and saw that Shimura Danzō had returned to his original position, where he was standing perfectly still.
"It's definitely a trap. Only an idiot would go."
After muttering that, Ensei Uchiha headed back to the Laboratory.
"Emotional Experiment, Phase One—Anger!"
As he spoke, Ensei Uchiha took out a syringe and injected its contents into the unlucky man in front of him.
Soon, as the drug entered his body, the death-row prisoner Ensei Uchiha had kept for several months began to look furious.
The first experiment had succeeded. It seemed almost too easy.
Next, after waiting for the drug to wear off, Ensei Uchiha tried other emotions in turn: joy, sorrow, worry, and so on.
Overall, the experiments were successful. But some finer details couldn't be achieved with drugs alone; they required special catalysts.
First up was genjutsu.
Although he had already heard from Itachi Uchiha that genjutsu wasn't much use for awakening the Sharingan,
for ordinary people, genjutsu could still easily make them feel a particular emotion.
Ensei Uchiha created a Shadow Clone and began monitoring the subject's hormone levels, as well as the changes in his thoughts and soul.
What he had to do now was recreate the moment when a person was at their saddest and most desperate.
But while he was busy, a surge of chakra made Ensei Uchiha snap back to attention, and he dispelled the Shadow Clone without thinking.
He summoned Zero-Two Model. Judging by the reaction of the Nine-Tails Chakra inside him, it seemed an enemy had infiltrated Konoha and was now heading this way.
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