Clang!
The heavy blast-proof steel door of the underground laboratory was kicked open, its hinges letting out sharp metallic screeches that grated on the teeth.
Yoru strode into the room, his boots squelching over the slime-covered floor with a scalp-numbing slap-slap sound.
The place was practically a massive dump. Discarded test tubes lay everywhere, along with metal puppet arms snapped in half, while an indescribable stench of formaldehyde and fermented dead flesh made his eyelids twitch.
That freak Orochimaru was hunched over like an old farmer digging for scraps in a field, his head buried inside a gigantic vessel glowing an eerie blue. Who knew what the hell he was tinkering with.
"Uncle Snake, did you forget to ventilate this place again?"
Yoru frowned and casually shoved aside a filthy white lab coat piled behind the door.
The coat was covered in dark red stains, stiff to the touch like layers of dried blood scabs.
"Cooping yourself up in a filthy hole like this every day, aren't you afraid you'll really turn into a snake someday?"
Orochimaru slowly turned around, his golden snake eyes looking especially eerie under the surgical lamp.
As he vigorously wiped a trace of unknown fluid from the corner of his mouth with his sleeve, he let out that chilling, sinister laugh that seemed to seep into the cracks of one's bones.
"Lord Yoru, please don't despise it."
"Only a place dirty and chaotic enough can hide the greatest truth of the Shinobi World."
Orochimaru's greasy long hair clung to his neck, giving off the stale stench of old sweat.
He patted the huge machine beside him.
It looked like an elongated rice cooker, its shell coated in rough black radiation-proof paint and covered in crooked sealing patterns like demonic scribbles.
"I spent the past few