An Unspoken Understanding

The dark shadows withdrew into Tsukimi's feet. The chill vanished from the office, and sunlight filled it with warmth once more.

Hiruzen Sarutobi kept staring at the spot where the shadows had appeared, the shock lingering in his eyes. As far as he knew, the Nara clan's traditional secret techniques were limited to conventional uses like binding. The abilities Tsukimi had shown before were strange, but they still followed some recognizable logic. Using shadows to store objects, however, was far beyond anything he had expected.

Even Hiruzen Sarutobi, renowned as the Professor of Ninjutsu, had never seen such an ability. The others in the office were more astonished still, and they could not help marveling at Tsukimi's talent.

After a brief pause, Hiruzen Sarutobi suppressed his surprise. He picked up the experimental records the Shadow Ninja had placed on his desk and began reading them carefully.

The white pages clearly laid out the procedure for the Living Puppet experiments. Every trial record and every line of human data carried a cold, brutal weight.

The experiments used living bodies as vessels, forcibly integrated puppet mechanisms into them, and grafted Chakra pathways onto them. By destroying, modifying, and rebuilding flesh, the researchers sought to create controllable living combat puppets.

Tsukimi had skimmed the records too. Rasa had gotten a raw deal from the technological limits of his era. Put him in the age of that old man Boruto a few decades later, and he would have gone all in on "the flesh is weak; ascend through machinery"!

A thought occurred to Tsukimi. Perhaps Rasa's experiments had not been a flash in the pan in the original timeline. If they had influenced Orochimaru, could they have influenced Sasori as well? Sasori's Human Puppets looked remarkably similar to Living Puppets. The two even seemed