Mito's cloudy eyes widened slightly.
Her wooden cane, wrapped in sheet iron, thumped heavily against the wool carpet. "A generator?"
Her voice cracked a little, charged with the anger of someone whose decades of experience had been insulted.
"You won't use him as a weapon to deter enemy nations?"
Shu Shiraishi didn't answer.
He pulled open a drawer in the mahogany desk and rummaged out a half-used charcoal pencil.
He grabbed a blank sheet of parchment and spread it flat on the desk.
"Scratch, scratch, scratch."
The charcoal pencil raced across the rough parchment.
Black lines crossed one another, and a massive cylinder took shape on the page.
"Throw a fox weighing hundreds of tons onto a battlefield to crush people?"
Shu Shiraishi clenched an unlit cigarette butt between his teeth, his wrist moving swiftly.
"That's what unevolved savages do."
Mito frowned.
The red Chakra mist coiling around her arm churned violently. It was a reaction from the agitated Nine-Tails inside her.
"A Tailed Beast's power is enough to destroy mountain ranges," Mito said heavily.
"What good does destroying a few mountains do?"
The charcoal pencil in Shu Shiraishi's hand never stopped.
"Let him out, and he attacks friend and foe alike. Seal him back up, and a few Sealing Squad experts have to die. It's too inefficient."
He drew three thick conduits connected to the cylinder.
"True divinity is order. It is steel."
Shu Shiraishi tossed down the charcoal pencil.
It rolled twice across the desk and stopped beside the tea mug.
He rapped his knuckles on the sketch.
"Lock him in a cage. Hook up these three pipes."
Mito lowered her gaze.
On the drawing, the massive cylinder was connected to a complex mechanical structure.
"What is this?"
"A boiler and a steam turbine." Shu Shiraishi leaned back in his chair. "We'll use the Nine-Tails' endless Chakra to boil water."
Mito froze.
The calamity that struck fear throughout the Shinobi World, boiling water?
"High-temperature, high-pressure steam drives the rotor, turning Chakra into electricity." Shu Shiraishi looked at the old woman.
"Electricity?" Mito didn't understand.
In Konoha, people still used kerosene lamps and candles at night.
"It's a power that can make the whole village as bright as day."
Shu Shiraishi stood and braced both hands on the edge of the desk.
"It can drive thousand-ton steel treads. It can make iron tubes that need no Hand Seals spit out thousands of bullets a minute, bullets that punch through Ninjutsu defenses."
He stared at Mito.
"That's called a dimensionality reduction strike. Use Chakra to power industrial production lines and build war machines that don't cost human lives."
Mito understood only some of what she heard.
But the sheer scale of that vision left her breathless.
"Even if you can build those hunks of iron," Mito said through clenched teeth, "the Nine-Tails' Chakra is incredibly violent. The moment it comes out, it corrodes everything. How would you keep the flow stable?"
"That's where the lousy scroll you gave me comes in."
Shu Shiraishi pulled the red spiral scroll toward him.
He unrolled it with one hand.
In his mind, his heaven-defying comprehension spun into overdrive.
Before his eyes, the complex inked formulas were broken down into their most basic energy circuits.
He picked up the charcoal pencil again.
Beside the sketch, he began drawing an array.
"The Four Symbols Seal is too rigid. It only takes things in, never lets them out."
With a turn of Shu Shiraishi's wrist, a reversed Four Symbols array appeared on the page.
"Turn it into an inverter. When the Chakra comes out, it passes through here, and its violent properties are stripped away."
The pencil tip tore through the parchment, but he paid it no mind.
"Use the Eight Trigrams Seal as a voltage-regulating casing. Lock any escaping energy inside the pipes."
"Don't use the Adamantine Sealing Chains as chains. Use them as superconducting cables."
Shu Shiraishi drew a one-way valve at the edge of the diagram.
"The array's core will be set on you. Extract a fixed amount at a fixed time every day."
Mito leaned closer.
She had lived for more than seventy years, and no one in the Shinobi World could match her understanding of Sealing Jutsu.
At first, she had dismissed this as a young man's fooling around.
After a couple of glances, her breathing suddenly grew uneven.
The array's lines, drawn in charcoal, were crooked and uneven.
But the underlying energy circuits fit together flawlessly. They perfectly solved the problem of Chakra running wild during output.
This sketch shattered her old understanding of Sealing Jutsu.
In this drawing, Chakra was no longer a beast.
It was a gentle stream, held fast by the throat and forced to flow obediently into a channel.
The violent red mist around Mito's wrist had vanished at some point.
Even the Nine-Tails inside her had gone quiet.
Her cane clattered onto the mahogany desk. She didn't pick it up.
Both hands pressed against the desk's edge, her gaunt knuckles stark white.
Mito stared fixedly at the sketch, her throat dry.
"You..." She swallowed. "In less than ten minutes, you turned the underlying logic of the Reaper Death Seal into a pump?"
Her voice trembled.
"It's a Chakra Pumped-Storage Array."
Shu Shiraishi corrected her.
He spat the cigarette butt into the wastebasket.
"Draw thirty percent of the Nine-Tails' Chakra every day. Once he's drained, lock him in a little dark room and let him recover his mana. Then draw more tomorrow."
Mito looked at Shu Shiraishi.
As if she were looking at a monster wearing human skin.
"He'll go mad."
"Mad?" Shu Shiraishi sneered.
"On my turf, animals have to work."
Shu Shiraishi pushed the sketch in front of Mito. "If he won't work, I'll go into the sealed space and beat him three times a day, until he's willing to be a battery."
Mito stared at his cold, hard face.
She believed him.
This kid really would do it. He had slaughtered elites like Kinkaku and Ginkaku like pigs. What was one fox locked in a cage to him?
"All right."
Mito picked up her cane again and stood ramrod straight.
A fire began to burn in her cloudy eyes.
"As long as we can win. As long as we can put an end to these chaotic times."
Mito pressed her palm against the sketch.
"However much Chakra you want, I'll draw it for you. You can do whatever you like with these old bones."
Shu Shiraishi nodded.
"The first step for the Tailed Beast nuclear power plant is settled."
He reached out, ready to roll up the drawing.
Just then.
"Boom!"
A deafening crash came from downstairs.
The entire Hokage building shook.
The coarse porcelain tea mug on the corner of the desk jumped, spilling cool water across the mahogany surface.
Someone kicked open the solid wooden doors on the first floor.
The doors slammed against the wall, sending splinters flying.
Before the Anbu Ninja on duty on the first floor could draw their swords, a tremendous force shoved them back several steps, sending them crashing into the stair railing.
Immediately afterward.
A shrill stream of curses shot up the empty stairwell to the third floor.
"Where's the newly appointed Hokage? Is he dead yet?"
A jumble of footsteps followed.
Leather boots clomped on the wooden stairs. By the sound of it, there were at least dozens of people.
They showed no restraint whatsoever, acting as if this were not Konoha's highest seat of power at all.
"Tell him to get his ass down here and see me!"
A greasy, grating voice bellowed in the corridor.
"The daimyo of the Land of Fire has sent me to collect this year's taxes! You're a day late. Is Konoha planning a rebellion?!"
In the third-floor office.
Shu Shiraishi's hand stopped in midair, still holding the drawing.
In the first-floor hall.
A fat man stepped on an Anbu member's scabbard and swaggered toward the stairs.
He wore a dazzling purple silk outfit.
His face was coated in white powder, his lips painted bright red. He waved a golden fan in his hand.
Its ribs struck the solid wooden railing with an ear-piercing clatter.
More than thirty heavily armored samurai followed behind him.
Their hands on their sword hilts, the samurai shoved aside a Konoha Chunin who blocked their path.
"The daimyo's envoy is on official business! Konoha's dogs, get out of my way!"