Home Cooking

"Hah, hah, hah, hah,"

Gasping for breath and drenched in sweat, Suguru wiped the sting from his eyes as he crumbled to his knees. The regal aura he exuded vanished as if it never existed in the first place.

"It's... still insufficient somehow."

Looking around, he saw the traces left behind by more than a dozen clones all practicing the same Nintaijutsu. The rocky ground was charred and the oxygen in the air was thin. The persistent smell of roasted organic matter filled the air with an arid scent.

Like the smell of a corpse in the middle of a desert.

'The moisture in the air is gone as well,' Suguru thought as he looked inward again.

Feeling his depleted chakra reserves, he realized that he had to spend more time training. Despite having Hashirama's Cells, he did not have the vast reserves that the First Hokage had.

It would take time.

—Or a lot of lives.

"Hm,"

Straightening his back, Suguru went to freshen up. After kneading his chakra for a few seconds, he spat out enough water to fill a tub and stepped into its cold embrace.

"Haaaaaa,"

Exhaling, the water around his body was stirred into a boil. In a few moments, steam began to rise, and the hot water began to soothe his tired muscles.

Suguru relaxed for a few minutes before he got out of the bath.

When he was done, he sat back down on his desk where his other clones had yet to find respite. He returned to his main lab after meeting Matatabi and his consequent enlightenment.

Taking a moment to appreciate his clones' diligence, he recalled all of the relevant details he needed to continue his research.

—CRACKLE.

Thunder boomed just outside his laboratory, shaking the space within his lungs. The rumbling sky was like a beast baring its fangs.

Already used to the raging music of the thunderstorms, Suguru opened one of the books his clones had written.

Looking at the dense yet organized blocks of information, he pieced together his recent progress.

"I should be close to an initial success,"

Suguru mumbled, and his gaze wandered towards the corner of the room. What was once a neatly-assorted pile of corpses, now housed a white slab of biomaterial. Like the marble slates of Greece, the slab had a speck of majesty in its presence.

However.

—Slosh.

The audible sound of flesh tearing apart, reforming, and sloshing around like a viscous liquid, could bring anyone to wretch. Even Suguru, who had created such an abomination, doubted his actions every time he watched the slab for too long.

It was nightmare fuel.

'Especially those damn faces...'

Suguru's eyes sprang open. His eyes dilated in shock, and every hair on his body stood on end.

"This..!"

Barely able to suppress his excitement, Suguru flickered towards the white slab and noticed something he hadn't seen since its creation.

Staring blankly into the dark ceiling of his laboratory was a pair of blank, white eyes. Without any pupils for light to pour into, it was clear that these eyes were blind.

However.

—Slosh.

In a grotesque twisting of muscles and skin, a face began to form around these blank eyes. As the minutes passed by, the face was followed by an intact head like a ghost sifting through the earth. With its tongue hanging out of a mouth without any teeth, no semblance of intelligence could be seen from its watering eyes.

After the head was neck.

Then the torso and shoulders.

Arms and abdomen.

Waist.

Hips.

Legs...

"Interesting..."

Suguru, along with his clones, had all been drawn towards the sight before them.

Growing rapidly as it absorbed more and more chakra and very reminiscent of Wood Release's verdant creations, a humanoid figure eventually stood before them. The clones' eyes shone with different lights, analyzing the pale abomination before them.

A body of complete white, fragile yet brimming with chakra. An empty gaze filled with nothing but the absence of meaning. Disfigured limbs and veins pulsing with the same white substance that formed its body.

The sight before Suguru and his clones was horrifying beyond measure.

...And yet the child's eyes continued to shine with excitement.

"An initial success!" He gasped, hurriedly inspecting the Human Clone up close. "This method works... I can use this as a suitable base material!"

Feeling the flow of chakra coursing through the white slab, Suguru swiftly located the germination of another Human Clone.

With its eyes being the first to emerge and followed by the rest of its body, Suguru hungrily absorbed the data his experiments yielded.

He swiftly filled a few books, each penned by a different clone bearing their assigned Dojutsu.

When about five Human Clones, each disfigured in their own organic manner, had sprouted and bloomed, Suguru decided to proceed with the next stage of his experiments.

—Shing!

A sword was unsheathed with a cold squeal. The malicious gleam of its blade mimicked the shine of a farmer's scythe during harvest season.

—Swish!

Then, with ten precise strokes, Suguru severed the Human Clones from the squirming white slab beneath their feet.

A tremor coursed through the slab as if perceiving the sudden pain that severed parts of its body. However, it technically had no brain. Nor did it have a throat to scream with. Although it breathed through its pores, absorbing chakra and growing at an unimaginable rate...

It wasn't truly alive.

It merely screamed like the crackling plant cells of pruned vegetation.

Therefore.

Suguru watched as the five Human Clones fell face-first onto the cold stone floor before them. Without the white slab, signs of their deaths approached like the encroaching tide.

Like fruit about to ripen and go bad, yet at a pace much faster than what one would expect.

Regarding their broken limbs and shattered bones for a moment, Suguru's eyes flashed with a mysterious light. Though his expression was vacant, a hint of contemplation could still be perceived by the sensitive.

"..."

He kept silent for a few breaths before letting out a wry chuckle.

Shaking his head, he thought, 'Perhaps I've surpassed you in research, Orochimaru-sensei. I'm going on to become more of a monster than you ever will be.'

Suguru's hands drifted and met each other to form a seal.

[Bird].

Finally, he could taste some home cooking.

His own, home cooking, made to suit his tastes...

...And his tastes alone.

'Dark Release: Inhaling Maw!'

Suguru thus inhaled a ravenous breath.

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