Chapter 640: The Culprit Is Jiraiya

Jiraiya had no idea that a terrible crisis was about to descend upon him.

Meanwhile, inside Engraved Tsukuyomi, Obito had finally finished extracting the Four-Tails and Five-Tails into his own body.

Extracting those two Tailed Beasts was relatively straightforward. He only needed to do it once, giving Rōshi and Han an additional resurrection each.

Minato's Nine-Tails, however, was a completely different matter.

Namikaze Minato valued his life more than anything else. To ensure he wouldn't die as the prophecy foretold, Obito needed to extract the Nine-Tails from him nine separate times, maximizing the number of additional lives a Nine-Tails jinchūriki could obtain.

Nine extra resurrection buffs!

Naturally, repeating the extraction that many times would take an enormous amount of time.

The work was so monotonous that even the spectators in the real shinobi world gradually lost interest. They temporarily abandoned their screens and returned to their ordinary lives.

The group that had traveled to Kirigakure to spread Naruto's Sage Mode shortcut also began enjoying the sunshine and beaches.

They still checked on Engraved Tsukuyomi once every day to see whether the extraction had finished.

But several days passed without any meaningful progress.

And while the Konoha group waited for the story inside Engraved Tsukuyomi to continue, they received some rather disturbing news from the real world instead.

Several workers from the pleasure districts had been seriously injured.

According to the victims, the person responsible was none other than Jiraiya.

Fortunately, none of the women were in immediate danger of dying.

Unfortunately, their injuries were severe enough to leave them paralyzed in their lower bodies, depriving them of the ability to continue earning their livelihoods.

It wasn't until they discovered that several others had suffered similar attacks that the victims gathered together and traveled to Konoha.

There, they approached the Fifth Hokage, Tsunade, and demanded an explanation.

When Tsunade first heard the accusations, her immediate reaction was skepticism.

Jiraiya spending his days wandering through pleasure districts?

Perfectly reasonable.

Jiraiya committing serious crimes against the workers there?

That was much harder to believe.

As a medical ninja, Tsunade naturally examined the victims while treating them. At the same time, she conducted a detailed assessment of their injuries.

Sure enough, she discovered something suspicious.

Contrary to what the women had described, their injuries hadn't resulted from ordinary physical activity becoming excessively strenuous.

They had been attacked with a particular type of ninja tool.

And it happened to be something that had recently become extremely popular throughout the shinobi world.

Bottle-kun: Gyūshigō.

That made the situation considerably stranger.

From the beginning, Tsunade had suspected that someone was attempting to frame Jiraiya.

Yet even after discovering the involvement of a ninja tool, she couldn't completely eliminate him as a suspect.

The reasoning was simple.

Someone using such a tool didn't necessarily have to be a female ninja.

They might simply be someone with an obsession about cleanliness.

Or perhaps the perpetrator lacked the stamina or physical ability to achieve the desired result without assistance.

As for the inconsistencies between the victims' testimony and the actual injuries, those didn't necessarily mean the women were deliberately lying to frame Jiraiya.

They might have been placed under genjutsu.

If that was the case, the investigation became significantly more difficult.

The use of a ninja tool meant there might be no biological traces left behind that could identify the perpetrator.

For the time being, Tsunade could only continue treating the victims while examining their injuries as thoroughly as possible, searching for any details she might have missed.

At the same time, she dispatched ANBU to investigate Jiraiya's recent activities and bring him back for questioning.

It wasn't long before the investigation produced its first lead.

The ANBU sent to Amegakure returned with some interesting information.

Jiraiya had recently approached Orochimaru and asked him to replace a rather important pair of biological components.

That immediately put Tsunade on alert.

Could Orochimaru's technology have been responsible?

What if something had gone wrong during Jiraiya's replacement surgery, causing a drastic change in his personality?

It wasn't entirely impossible.

Meanwhile, the ANBU investigating the pleasure districts returned with an even more shocking discovery.

Jiraiya had vanished.

He'd disappeared somewhere during his latest pleasure-seeking excursion, and nobody knew where he had gone.

Tsunade fell into deep thought.

Jiraiya's disappearance immediately made him considerably more suspicious.

It looked far too much like someone fleeing to escape punishment.

But the possibility that Orochimaru's procedure had caused a problem remained plausible as well.

After all, the two explanations weren't mutually exclusive.

Jiraiya could have committed the attacks because something went wrong during the operation.

Several more days passed.

Then, while treating the final victim, Tsunade made a crucial discovery.

Using a pair of tweezers, she managed to recover several extraordinarily tiny fragments of biological tissue.

They were so small that they were almost impossible to detect.

If Tsunade hadn't been using the stone Makoto had given her to fill herself with natural energy while treating the patients, greatly sharpening her perception of life energy, she might never have noticed them.

According to the investigation, this particular woman had been among the earliest victims.

She might even have been the very first.

Which raised an interesting question.

Why had Tsunade found these tiny fragments on her, but not on any of the others?

After carefully examining the evidence, Tsunade developed a reasonable theory.

Perhaps the perpetrator had initially intended to carry out the attacks using his own techniques.

But after trying that method several times, he'd discovered that it required too much time and effort.

So he'd gone out and purchased a specialized ninja tool instead.

Every victim after that had been injured using the tool, leaving behind no useful biological traces.

Even in the first victim's case, the perpetrator had apparently only attempted the original method a few times before changing his approach. There hadn't been enough prolonged contact to leave much material behind.

That would explain why the fragments Tsunade recovered were so incredibly small.

Now the next step was obvious.

She simply needed to compare the cells against Jiraiya's.

If they matched, she could identify him as the culprit.

Unfortunately, Konoha didn't actually have any of Jiraiya's cells preserved in storage.

After all, his strength didn't come from some special bloodline or unusual constitution.

There had never been much reason to preserve his biological material.

So, under Tsunade's orders, Konoha's medical department traveled to the pleasure districts to collect comparison samples.

And there was certainly no shortage of material to collect.

Before Jiraiya disappeared, he'd left behind plenty of biological traces during his openly acknowledged visits.

Those encounters had all taken place without any attempt to conceal his identity.

The attacks, however, were different.

According to the victims, the perpetrator had worn a mask.

So how could they be certain that the masked man was Jiraiya?

The explanation was simple.

Jiraiya was a longtime regular.

Those women were so familiar with him that they could recognize practically every detail of his body, much as a wife might recognize her husband.

What difference would putting on a mask make?

Before long, the laboratory comparison was complete.

The results were—

A perfect match.

Both sets of biological samples came from the same genetic source.

With this, Tsunade considered Jiraiya's guilt firmly established.

His disappearance was now officially treated as an attempt to flee before he could be arrested.

Tsunade immediately issued a mission to all available Konoha shinobi.

Everyone was ordered to watch for Jiraiya's whereabouts.

If anyone discovered him, they were to report his location immediately.

Naturally, the group vacationing in Kirigakure also received the mission.

To make sure they understood the seriousness of the situation, Tsunade even included a detailed account of the investigation in the mission scroll.

After all, outside the major pleasure districts, Jiraiya's favorite places to visit had always been hot springs and public bathhouses.

And recently, another location had become popular.

Sunny beaches.

Those were also places where Jiraiya could enjoy himself while gathering inspiration for his novels.

They couldn't afford to overlook them.

"That's impossible!"

Konohamaru immediately objected after reading the report.

"Jiraiya is such a friendly, kindhearted person! How could he possibly hurt so many innocent people?"

Kakashi sighed.

"But these are the conclusions Lady Tsunade reached after conducting her investigation. Whatever the truth may be, our first priority is to find Lord Jiraiya."

The mission scroll also mentioned that Tsunade had confronted Orochimaru about the operation.

She had demanded to know whether there was any possibility that his technology had malfunctioned.

Orochimaru had firmly denied it.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with his procedure.

And even if something had gone wrong, the transplanted components weren't the brain or the heart.

How could replacing something like that possibly alter a person's personality?

Kakashi couldn't deny that Orochimaru had a point.

But another possibility had occurred to him.

What if Jiraiya had been influenced by those novels Kakashi had published?

Perhaps Jiraiya had decided to write a new kind of bizarre, sensational story.

And while gathering material for it, he'd become so deeply immersed in his research that something inside his mind had finally snapped.

Could Jiraiya have actually turned into a deranged criminal because he took his writing research too far?