A Sudden Accident and Tsunade's Guidance (Please Bookmark, Follow, Vote, and Send Monthly Tickets)

Ever since Taiichi had run into Obito and the other two at the hospital, word of his internship at Konoha Hospital had spread throughout the class.

His classmates were also curious about just how skilled Taiichi was at Medical Ninjutsu to be able to work directly at the hospital. The rumors grew more outrageous with every retelling, until people were saying Taiichi was already a Special Jonin-level Medical Ninja. What was worse, some people actually believed it. These idiots had lost even the most basic ability to judge things.

Sure enough, classmates kept finding all sorts of excuses to visit Taiichi at the hospital. Some claimed a family member had been hospitalized, some said they were looking for someone, and others even cut their own arms just to come find Taiichi for treatment. The chaos eventually alerted Director Fujita. Only after she caught several truly audacious brats did things finally settle down.

Taiichi finally returned to a regular life.

That day, Konoha Hospital suddenly received a massive influx of casualties. The smell of disinfectant was overwhelmed by the heavy stench of blood, and the hospital corridors were packed with stretchers. Plaster dust and blood flecked with the rusty scent of iron drifted through the air. The wheels of the stretchers made sticky sounds as they rolled over the tiles. The hem of Taiichi's white coat had already been stained dark red, while green chakra gathered in his palm flickered over a worker's chest.

"Fracture of the third left rib, puncture to the right lung lobe." Nurse Haruno tore open the injured man's shirt, which was covered in broken cement chunks. "Blood pressure: 70 over 40!"

Taiichi's fingertips moved above the bleeding chest cavity as chakra turned into fine threads and entered the wound. He could feel the jagged broken bone pressing against the alveoli like a dagger, while the adhered tissues trembled with each weak breath. Three months ago, he would still have needed an anatomy chart to identify an organ's location. Now, he instinctively controlled his chakra to wrap around the sharp fracture.

A collision of stretchers sounded from the end of the corridor. A newly delivered casualty had his entire left leg twisted at an impossible angle. Taiichi had just finished stopping the bleeding in the man's lung when he staggered and grabbed the treatment table—hours of continuous chakra output had made his temples throb violently.

"Move!" Director Fujita burst through the emergency exit, carrying an unconscious little girl in her arms. Pinkish-white brain tissue continued to spill from the wound on the child's head, and blood mixed with concrete debris had soaked through the director's medical headband.

Taiichi grabbed gauze and pressed it over the missing section of the girl's skull. A sticky sensation seeped through the gaps between his fingers. When he tried to gather chakra, the familiar cool feeling did not appear. His overdrawn body could not even perform the most basic hemostasis technique.

"Start an IV!" Fujita's voice seemed to come from very far away. "Prepare the craniotomy instruments!"

The sterilization lamp cast a deathly pale halo overhead as Taiichi mechanically pressed down on the gauze. He saw his intern badge floating in a pool of blood, the four characters of "Taichi Matsushita" on its metal face blurred by grime and blood. The groans rising and falling throughout the corridor gradually became distant, until a familiar voice pierced through the thick smell of blood.

"Out of the way!"

Tsunade burst through the emergency passage door, her dark green outer robe snapping behind her. When she saw the scene inside the treatment room, her pupils suddenly contracted—kneeling in the pool of blood, the boy was biting down on a bandage to stop the bleeding from his own right hand, while the medical headband around his forehead had become unrecognizable beneath the blood.

Memories pierced her temples like kunai. On a rainy night twenty years ago, Nawaki had also knelt on the battlefield like this, using bloodstained bandages to bind the wound in his abdomen. A shattered medical headband, pale knuckles, and those words that had faded into the rain: "Sister, save them."

"Leave it to a professional." Tsunade grabbed Taiichi by the back of his collar and lifted him up, but eased her strength when she felt the boy's trembling shoulders. When she saw the little girl's injuries on the treatment table, a familiar burning sensation suddenly rose in her throat—the warning sign of an oncoming hemophobia attack.

Taiichi wiped the blood from his face with his sleeve and gathered chakra in his palm again. "The director said that if brain tissue is exposed for more than twenty minutes—"

"Go treat the leg bone puncture." Tsunade abruptly cut him off, her fingers digging deeply into her palm. The sterilization lamp stretched her shadow long behind her, and for a moment, it overlapped with the image of herself standing before an operating table twenty years ago. Back then, she could calmly cut open her younger brother's chest. Now, she could not even bring herself to look directly at a child's wound.

Taiichi picked up the emergency kit and rushed into the corridor. Moonlight spilled through the broken window lattice onto the stretchers. His chakra was already too weak for him to use the Mystical Palm Technique, so he could only use his hands to secure splints for the injured. When one worker bit through his wrist from the agony, the boy merely silently stuffed a piece of gauze into the man's mouth.

It was not that Taiichi did not use Attribute Points to restore his stamina. It was simply that Taiichi was selfish too; this was as much as he could do for strangers.

Tsunade leaned against the cold wall, the sounds of clashing instruments echoing in her ears. For the first time in twenty years, she hated the sensory ability she had once been so proud of—she could clearly hear Taiichi in the next treatment room using the most primitive physical methods to stop the bleeding of a casualty with a ruptured artery. The boy's ragged breathing intertwined with Nawaki's fading heartbeat from her memories, weaving a net that tightened around her sanity layer by layer.

The darkness before dawn was at its deepest. When Taiichi knocked over the treatment cart for the third time due to chakra exhaustion, Tsunade finally grabbed his wrist. The skin beneath his white coat was burning hot, but his pulse was as weak as a dying candle in the wind.

"Enough." Her voice was so hoarse it did not sound like her own. "Go to the break room."

"But the worker in bed three—"

"That's an order!" Tsunade suddenly raised her voice, but her eyes reddened when Taiichi staggered away. Moonlight illuminated the medical insignia on the boy's back. The green cross that symbolized healing the wounded and saving the dying was now stained dark brown with blood.

When the morning mist drifted into the corridor, the last critically injured patient was wheeled into the operating room. Tsunade stood in the shadow of the emergency passage and watched Taiichi curl up on a bench, deeply asleep. His right hand, covered in dried blood, hung over the edge of the seat, and the marks left by medical chakra on his palm had yet to fully fade.

"As stubborn as Nawaki..." She removed her outer robe and draped it over Taiichi. The dark green Senju clan crest glimmered faintly in the morning light. The robe she had failed to place over her brother's shoulders had finally found its resting place.

When the first ray of sunlight the next day pierced through the morning mist, Tsunade unfolded a brand-new scroll in the dawn light. Dew collected before daybreak still clung to the freshly inked Advanced Medical Ninjutsu Compendium.

"Starting today, you'll train an extra two hours every day." She stuffed the scroll into Taiichi's arms, her fingertips brushing over the scabbed web between his thumb and index finger. "What I'm going to teach you is more than just how to save people."

Taiichi looked at the scroll in his hands, still somewhat dazed. Having slept for more than ten hours, he had not fully awakened from his grogginess. "Tsunade, what is this?"

"From now until school starts, come study with me for two hours after your internship every day. At your current level, you'd only embarrass me if you went outside!" She was clearly going to teach Taiichi, yet her words remained so haughty.

Taiichi knew Tsunade's personality and did not take it to heart. If people learned that Princess Tsunade, one of the Sannin, was willing to teach someone, the line of applicants would circle Konoha.

"Thank you, Tsunade. I'll definitely work hard and live up to your guidance."

"Enough, brat. Go clean yourself up."

"Yes."

From that day onward, Taiichi went to study under Tsunade every morning after finishing his internship. Tsunade also began carefully teaching Taiichi Medical Ninjutsu from the very beginning, making up for the shortcomings in his medical foundation. After all, Taiichi's Medical Ninjutsu had previously been self-taught, and at most, he had only asked Nonō for guidance.

With Tsunade's systematic instruction, Taiichi improved rapidly in both theoretical foundations and Medical Ninjutsu. More importantly, his Yang Release Nature Transformation also advanced tremendously. Over the next half month, Taiichi learned his first A-rank ninjutsu—Chakra Scalpel.

Taiichi's current abilities were: Healing Technique Lv10 (14/2000), Mystical Palm Technique Lv6 (24/1000), Delicate Illness Extraction Technique Lv5 (231/800), Chakra Scalpel Lv3 (84/400), Yang Release Nature Transformation Lv4 (75/600). It could be said that Taiichi's medical skill had now completely surpassed his combat ability.

This was something Taiichi had never expected.