The more Orochimaru read, the more certain he became that the annotations Lie Yang had left were no idle conjectures.
Each question seemed independent, yet all of them pointed toward the same answer.
Chakra was not a power born from life itself.
It was more like some foreign, parasitic presence.
When shinobi molded chakra, they merely used physical and spiritual energy to awaken the power sleeping within their bodies.
Orochimaru slowly traced his fingertips across the page.
"Parasitic..."
He murmured the word.
His voice was hoarse, but held not a trace of disgust.
Instead, the light in his golden, slit-pupiled eyes grew brighter.
Anyone else might have instinctively rejected the idea.
Parasitism meant something foreign.
Something that did not belong to oneself.
It also meant that the power shinobi supposedly possessed had never been entirely their own.
But Orochimaru was different.
He had studied countless shinobi with kekkei genkai, researched Hashirama cells, and even experimented with transferring his own soul.
In his eyes, life had never been an inviolable domain.
Flesh could be replaced.
Cells could be activated.
Souls could be transferred.
If even the body could be modified, why couldn't chakra be influenced by an outside power?
No one had ever considered it from this angle before.
Yet Lie Yang had used the Cell Activation Technique as his starting point to overturn the Shinobi World's fundamental understanding of chakra.
Orochimaru continued reading.
When stimulated by chakra, cells could briefly become more active.
But that increase came at a cost.
The purer the chakra, the stronger the cellular response.
If the stimulation exceeded their tolerance, the cells would deteriorate faster, even suffering structural collapse.
This meant the relationship between chakra and living cells was not simply one of supplying energy.
Chakra changed cells.
Cells, in turn, adapted to chakra.
Over