The Limits of Devouring

When Shinichi returned to the orphanage at three in the morning, everything still seemed normal.

Climb through the window, skip the third step, take off his coat, hide the kunai, lie down—the whole routine had become so practiced that he could do it half-asleep. He even had enough energy left to roughly review the memory fragments of the three people he had devoured tonight. Crow Face's trap-setting experience was the most practical, Dog Face's Fire Release formula structure was complete, and Snake Face's intelligence network map had directly upgraded Root's peripheral contact network from a tree diagram into a three-dimensional topology map. The haul was plentiful, he was in a good mood, and he closed his eyes, ready to sleep.

Then his body told him: no.

His chakra pathways were the first to rebel. Wind, fire, earth, and water chakra had originally each stayed in their proper places, like four roommates with different tempers sharing the same dorm room. They bickered now and then, but generally got along. But tonight, three new roommates had suddenly moved in—Crow Face's rudimentary Explosion Release, Dog Face's pure Fire Release, and Snake Face's communication-specialized chakra—and the dorm exploded. Fire chakra rampaged through his chakra pathways, squeezing wind chakra into the corners. Earth chakra tried to build walls in self-defense, only to be attacked from both fire and water chakra at once, forming an extremely unstable mixed fluctuation. Shinichi's chakra pathways had become far more elastic than an ordinary person's after being enhanced by Hashirama Cells, but even the best sewer could not withstand an entire reservoir being poured into it.

The pain came gradually. At first, it was only a swelling sensation around his dantian, like he had eaten too much. Then the bloated feeling spread upward along his Conception Vessel, his chest began to feel tight, and his heartbeat became irregular—sometimes fast, sometimes slow. When it raced, it felt as though someone was pounding a drum inside his chest; when it slowed, it seemed ready to stop at any moment. Then his body temperature began to rise sharply. His skin was frighteningly hot to the touch, yet deep within his marrow, he felt cold. The swings between heat and cold were even more violent than when he had devoured Tiger Mask last time. Curled beneath the blanket, his teeth chattered as he clenched them hard. His fingers gripped the edge of the pillow, nails digging into the fabric fibers. His legs twitched faintly, and his body trembled on instinct, beyond his control. His Sharingan activated on its own—not because he had deliberately triggered it, but because his body had sounded every defensive alarm under stress. The two tomoe in his eyes spun madly, his ocular power leaking out uncontrollably and casting two faint red glows onto the dark ceiling through the gaps in his blanket.

He heard the system prompt sound in his mind. It was not the usual indifferent synthetic voice, but a more compressed, higher-frequency stream of data. Chakra disorder. Chakra pathway overload. Simultaneous fusion of multiple attributes has exceeded the current carrying limit of the chakra pathways. Immediately cease all chakra circulation and enter a resting state to await automatic bodily adjustment. Then a warning icon he had never seen before appeared on the system panel, with a line of text beside it:

Recommended interval before devouring targets of the same scale again: no less than forty-eight hours. Current number of devoured attributes: four. Chakra pathway load rate: maximum.

Shinichi bit down on the corner of his pillow as violent tremors ran through him, forcing himself not to make a sound. Little Fatty's room was next door, and his teeth-grinding had stopped—not because he was no longer grinding them, but because Shinichi's hearing kept sharpening and dulling amid the disorder. His perception of outside sounds had already become distorted. He could hear his own heartbeat and the rush of blood through his veins, but the matron's footsteps in the corridor seemed alternately distant and near, as though separated by a layer of water. Any unnecessary movement in this state could expose him—if the matron saw him like this, the cost of explaining it would be unbearable. A fever? Greenish skin? Red eyes? All three together meant being sent straight to the medical department for a full examination, and Danzo's people would have a copy of the report before the ink had even dried.

He closed his eyes and forced himself to do something counterintuitive: relax. Not fight the pain, but accept it. In his previous life, he had read online about a method for dealing with severe pain—do not resist its signals; treat them as a stream of information instead. Observe them, describe them, but do not let them control you. The pain from fire chakra was a burning sensation, spreading outward along the Three Yang Meridians of the Hand. The pain from wind chakra was a tearing sensation, concentrated between his ribs. The pain from earth chakra was heaviness, pressing down on his lumbar vertebrae and knees. He separated each kind of pain and labeled them one by one, as if organizing an abnormal data report, then informed every defensive mechanism in his body not to indiscriminately attack a host with the same Senju Clan bloodline.

He did not know how long passed before the pain gradually began to ease. It did not vanish all at once. Like the tide receding, it slowly drew the residual fluctuations back from the ends of his limbs toward his torso. The flow of chakra through his pathways also slowly returned to normal. The chaotic fluctuations were neutralized bit by bit by the vitality of the Senju Clan bloodline, while the drop of Slug Sage Art chakra deep in his dantian simultaneously released an extremely thin layer of water film, wrapping around the most severely damaged inner walls of his chakra pathways. He lay drenched in sweat, the blanket and sheets soaked over a wide area, as the final trace of discomfort from the alternating heat and cold gradually faded.

It was still not dawn. Outside the window, the sky remained deep blue, and the shadow of the old locust tree stood perfectly still beneath the moonlight. He pulled out his notebook from beneath his pillow, turned to the page containing the system records by the faint moonlight, and drew a thick red line beneath the latest entry.

"Devouring limit: no more than two people should be absorbed in a single batch. Simultaneous fusion of multiple attributes will trigger spiral rejection, and the degree of rejection is positively correlated with chakra pathway load rate. Current safe devouring frequency: after a single absorption of a Chunin-level target, wait at least twenty-four hours; for Jonin-level targets and bloodline limits, allow a sufficient observation period. A complete chakra pathway assessment must be conducted before the next operation." After writing that, he silently repeated the words "allow a sufficient observation period" several times, closed the notebook, pulled the blanket over his head, and slowly steadied his breathing while curled up on the cold, damp sheets.

The next morning, he came down with a fever.

It was not the residual tissue heat from last night's chakra disorder, but a real, physiological high fever. When the matron pushed open the door and saw him curled beneath the blanket with a flushed face, she reached out to touch his forehead and jerked her hand back as though burned. Muttering curses, she said, "You went out and caught a cold in the night wind again, didn't you?" Then she slapped an ice-cold towel onto his forehead. Her movements were rough, but the towel had been folded neatly, all four corners perfectly aligned. Little Flower poked half her head in through the doorway. When she saw the towel on his forehead, she turned and ran to the kitchen, returning with a bowl of hot water that she placed beside his bed.

Shinichi closed his eyes, and an entirely unrelated thought suddenly flashed through his mind. The alternating heat and cold during chakra disorder—first the chakra pathways burned, then his marrow turned cold, and finally it was neutralized by the water film from the Slug seed. If that sensation of alternating water and fire could be measured in data, it was probably like forcing an adult to process a stream of information beyond their carrying limit while still keeping their surface temperature low enough to suppress every alarm at the edge of collapse. It had been difficult, but he had endured it. He would not make the same mistake next time.

After his fever broke in the evening, he leaned against the headboard and flipped through his notebook. Beside the progress section for the Root Peripheral Elimination Plan, he added a small note: frequency control takes priority over speed; every operation must leave sufficient cooling time for both the body and the traces left behind. After writing it, he closed the notebook and drank all the water Little Flower had brought him. Outside the window, the sunset was just right, turning the old locust tree's new leaves golden green. Downstairs came the sound of the matron banging a spatula against a pot and calling everyone to eat, while Naruto Uzumaki shouted over the courtyard wall, "Shinichi, did you get a fever again today? I'll bring you red bean bread tomorrow."