"They're alive! They're all alive!" Yamato repeated excitedly, his eyes shining with joy as they began to redden around the rims.
"Nawaki, what exactly happened? Didn't you just say all the other modification experiments had failed? How did they come back to life?" Sarutobi asked in confusion.
"Nawaki-kun! I'm also very curious about what happened here. Back then, none of those test subjects managed to fuse with the Wood Release cells!" Orochimaru asked, equally curious.
Hearing this, Yamato looked at Nawaki with a mixture of hope and apprehension. Back then, he had watched with his own eyes as his companions' incubation chambers went dark one by one.
Faced with everyone's questions, Nawaki slowly replied in an even tone, "Back then, in order to make Orochimaru gain Danzo's trust, I tacitly allowed this human experiment.
However, considering that those fifty orphans had been innocently implicated, I decided to do my best to make amends, so I kept monitoring the experiment.
I discovered that whenever an orphan failed to fuse with the Wood Release and suffered physical mutation, Root would secretly bury their body to keep the matter confidential. Yet at that point, those children who had failed the fusion had not completely lost their lives.
After the first orphan was buried, I secretly moved him away and attempted to treat him! You know that I possessed a secret technique capable of fusing bloodlines, so I tried using that ninjutsu to save them!
To my surprise, this secret technique also worked on the fusion of Wood Release cells. After the fusion was completed, that orphan's body, which had already begun turning into wood, gradually recovered and came back to life!
So I secretly took him away and used Wood Release to create an identical 'corpse' at the burial site, successfully deceiving Root.