Chapter 331: Cultivation

Chapter 331: Chapter 331: Cultivation

Cultivating and implanting the Chimera Bud was far more troublesome than Hyuga Kagami had imagined.

Moreover, Kagami didn’t dare experiment recklessly on his own body the way Hiruko had.

After all, his Yin Release true body was the core of everything. If it suffered some severe, irreparable injury before he achieved the Kekkei Mōra, then his entire plan to make the breakthrough would be over.

"Good thing I managed to get Shinno under control in time..."

Closing the scroll containing the Chimera Technique, Kagami secretly felt relieved.

When Shinno defected from the Akatsuki, he had taken a large amount of Hiruko’s experimental materials and equipment with him.

After Kagami successfully dealt with Shinno, not only had he acquired the Land of Sky’s aerial fortress along with a huge amount of wealth and equipment, but he’d also obtained the vast quantity of materials and instruments related to the Chimera Technique that Shinno had stolen from Hiruko, as well as some of Shinno’s own experimental records from cultivating the Chimera Bud.

With all of this in hand, cultivating the Chimera Bud became significantly easier for Kagami.

After all, he already possessed an exceptionally rich amount of experience with human experimentation. Now he had the materials, the equipment, and even experimental records to work from.

If he still couldn’t cultivate the Chimera Bud with all that, he might as well just die.

Cultivating the Chimera Bud wasn’t something that could be accomplished overnight. So even though Kagami had yet to assemble all six of his clones, cultivation of the Chimera Bud had to be put on the agenda immediately.

Having made up his mind, Hyuga Kagami first stopped by the ANBU base. After confirming that there were no special missions assigned to the ANBU that day, he left a Shadow Clone behind in the village while his true body quietly slipped out of Konoha.

Once outside, he entered Tenseigan Chakra Mode and flew up to the aerial fortress hovering several thousand meters above the ground.

Walking through the corridors of the aerial fortress, Kagami couldn’t help but frown.

After his initial amazement and admiration had faded, he gradually discovered that many areas throughout the fortress had suffered varying degrees of deterioration and damage.

Take the corridor leading to the central hall, for example. The stone walls on both sides were damaged in several places, and some of the branching passages had even partially collapsed.

Aside from the obvious deterioration and structural damage within the fortress, there were also fairly serious problems with the power transmission system at its core.

In particular, the two magnetic propulsion units at the rear of the fortress weren’t even producing the same amount of power. The unit on the left was clearly outputting considerably more power than the one on the right.

As a direct result, the aerial fortress was far from stable while in flight and suffered from fairly severe turbulence. Worse still, for every ten kilometers it traveled, its course would deviate by roughly five degrees, forcing the operator to constantly correct its flight path to keep the fortress from straying off course.

"Looks like repairing the fortress will have to be put on the agenda too..."

Kagami thought to himself as he continued walking.

Now that this aerial fortress had become his secret base, he couldn’t afford to let anything happen to it. Proper maintenance was therefore absolutely necessary.

He wasn’t asking for the fortress to become some kind of superweapon anytime soon. All he wanted was to make sure the thing didn’t suddenly fall out of the sky due to years of neglect and take his secret laboratory down with it.

Upon arriving at the compartment housing his secret laboratory, Kagami took out the inventory Shinno had personally compiled and carefully checked through the materials and equipment Shinno had taken from Hiruko one by one.

After confirming everything, he sorted the materials and equipment into their respective categories and rearranged the entire laboratory according to his own working habits.

After rearranging everything, Hyuga Kagami immediately began his experiments to cultivate the Chimera Bud.

Since he already had a large supply of ready-made bud seeds, all Kagami needed to do was extract some of his own cellular tissue and plant the bud seeds into it. Any bud seed that managed to survive would become a Chimera Bud compatible with his body.

According to Hiruko and Shinno’s experimental records, directly implanting a bud seed into one’s body offered the highest probability of cultivating a Chimera Bud compatible with oneself.

On the other hand, Kagami’s method—extracting cellular tissue and then planting the bud seed into that tissue—had an extremely low probability of successfully cultivating a Chimera Bud compatible with his body.

Even so, Kagami still decided to cultivate the Chimera Bud using isolated cellular tissue.

After all, directly implanting a bud seed into his own body carried far too many uncontrollable risks. No one could predict what kind of mutation the implanted bud seed might undergo, nor what changes it might cause to his body.

To increase his chances of successfully cultivating a Chimera Bud, Kagami divided samples of his cellular tissue among one hundred petri dishes, then planted a bud seed into every single one.

He believed that as long as his luck wasn’t too terrible, out of those hundred petri dishes, he should be able to cultivate at least one or two Chimera Buds compatible with his body.

As for the implantation process, which was even more troublesome than cultivation, that wasn’t something he needed to worry about for the time being. At the very least, he wouldn’t need to consider it until he had finished cultivating all six of his clones.

Over the following week, Kagami divided his time between monitoring the cultivation of the Chimera Buds and surveying the extent of the damage throughout the aerial fortress.

Cultivating a Chimera Bud required a lengthy period of three to four months, so naturally, a mere week wasn’t enough to produce any noticeable results.

However, after a week of meticulous inspection, Kagami discovered that the condition of the aerial fortress was even worse than he’d imagined. It would have to be landed in an open area and undergo extensive repairs before he could be certain that nothing would go wrong.

And so, Kagami disguised himself under several different identities and traveled throughout the major nations of the shinobi world, purchasing large quantities of construction materials from various locations.

Afterward, he brought the aerial fortress down in a remote, flat stretch of desert within the Land of Wind.

Repairing a structure of this scale involved many different fields. Even simply identifying where the problems were required the person carrying out the repairs to possess extensive experience.

Naturally, Hyuga Kagami had no such experience.

But he had the Byakugan.

So whenever there was a problem somewhere in the aerial fortress, or an area that needed repairs, all he had to do was carefully inspect it with his Byakugan, and he could easily pinpoint the issue.

On top of that, he had the Third Kazekage Human Puppet and its Magnet Release Kekkei Genkai assisting him. As a result, it took him only two weeks to replace and repair all the deteriorated sections within the aerial fortress.

As for the fortress’s power transmission system, Kagami still hadn’t completely figured out how it worked, so he didn’t dare recklessly attempt to repair it.

For the time being, after the repairs, the internal structure of the aerial fortress had been stabilized. As long as it wasn’t attacked by an enemy, there was no longer any danger of it suddenly falling from the sky or breaking apart.

However, problems still remained with the fortress’s power system, making it unsuitable for frequent long-distance travel. The safest option was to leave it hovering in one location and avoid moving it unless absolutely necessary...