Memory is Not Enough

"Please… let me—AAGHH!"

The man's scream twisted into something unrecognisable as his body convulsed, bones snapping in directions they shouldn't, skin shifting like it wanted to slither off.

Snake traits. But unstable.

Orochimaru stood over him, expression unreadable. No pity. Not even mild interest anymore.

Without a second thought, he drove a kunai across the man's neck. Quick. Clean. No mess beyond the blood already painting the floor.

No reason to let another mindless creature wander around.

He stepped over the corpse like it was nothing more than spilt ink, made his way to the table in the corner, and picked up the scroll.

Unrolled it. Ink already half-dry on the last note.

He dipped the brush again and started writing.

Experiment 64

Result: Failed.

A few more lines. Mutation unstable. Subject exhibited premature breakdown. Rejected transplant.

Scroll sealed.

He set it aside.

Creating or recreating what he had once achieved. That was the goal. Though even calling it "recreating" felt off.

Because having memories of what would happen was both a blessing and a curse.

He knew what he had done. What he would do.

But not how.

Not the actual steps. The trial and error. The sparks that led to results.

It was like remembering the answer to an equation but forgetting the formula.

That was the problem.

Because now, every success he remembered might have been born from ten other failures.

Or worse, might not have even been his creation to begin with.

Some could have been stumbled into by accident. Or stolen. Or byproducts of something else entirely.

This time, there was no shortcut. Just blood. Time. Curiosity. And a lot of bodies.

And Orochimaru was fine with that.

After all, he had no shortage of volunteers, though none of them knew they signed up.

Getting to work with Danzo came with its perks, ones most people would never even know existed.

After all, getting your hands on a hundred test subjects inside the village wasn't exactly a walk in the park.

Not without attracting attention. Or having to go out and hunt them yourself.

But Danzo?

Danzo collected people like other shinobi collected kunai. Quietly. Efficiently. No fuss.

War had its benefits. Enemy nin, missing-nin, prisoners from forgotten skirmishes—most of them just numbers on a list. The kind of people that wouldn't be missed. Or wouldn't be mentioned.

And Danzo kept a very organised list.

The one from earlier? He was from the Sand. Young, probably chunin-level.

Orochimaru didn't mind.

He didn't need perfection. He needed patterns. Data. The right kind of breakdown.

"I need to find that boy… Jugo," Orochimaru murmured, mostly to himself, eyes flicking to the edge of the scroll as if it might suddenly help. "And his clan."

He remembered. Of course he did.

Jugo's bloodline was the core, the very foundation of the Curse Seal. Raw. Unstable. Beautiful in its chaos.

Some people in his position might have ignored it. Too wild. Too unpredictable. Especially with gacha and memories.

Because for some, only the results mattered.

Get strong. Get the reward. Maybe even get a Whitebeard template and call it a day.

And really, could you blame them?

Not everyone wanted to keep pushing once they had power in their hands. Once they tasted strength, the hunger dulled. The drive waned. They settled.

And that wasn't wrong.

But it wasn't Orochimaru.

Others were fascinated by the process, the careful experimentation, the tiny breakthroughs, the elegance of failure that taught more than any success ever could.

They treated it like art. A craft.

Orochimaru?

He was both.

He wanted the results. The breakthroughs. The techniques that defied nature and rewrote the boundaries of what was possible.

But he also craved the path leading to them. The logic. The science. The dissection of everything that others took for granted.

He would not settle for only one side of the equation.

Power without understanding was unstable. Like handing a child a loaded weapon.

Understanding without power was just theory. Hollow. Ineffective. Noise.

No. He needed both.

And now, with the memories he carried, the puzzle had grown bigger.

More threads. More gaps to fill. More forks in the road where he had to ask not just what had happened in the original timeline… but why.

Some of those techniques he remembered felt too neat. Too sudden. Too unexplained.

Which meant there were likely missing steps, failed prototypes, discarded ideas, half-baked experiments that never made it into the light.

He wanted them all.

The memories hadn't replaced his ambition. They had magnified it.

Clarified it.

Because in the end, Orochimaru still sought the same thing he always had.

Complete understanding.

To know everything.

And to live long enough to make use of that knowledge.

Survival wasn't just instinct anymore. It was a necessity. A fundamental requirement if he wanted to stand at the summit of all creation.

He hadn't forgotten about them.

The Ōtsutsuki.

Kaguya. Her sons. Isshiki. And the ones who had yet to reveal themselves.

Beings that treated chakra like breath, who moved across dimensions not as travellers but as owners.

Their existence proved one undeniable truth. This world, for all its complexity, was just a single page in a much larger book.

And Orochimaru?

He wanted to read the entire thing.

Their presence meant others could exist. Other clans. Other species. Other laws of physics waiting to be broken.

Out there, beyond the veil of stars and jutsu and bloodlines, were creatures who didn't even need chakra to bend reality.

And the idea of them didn't frighten him.

It excited him.

A slow, unsettling smile spread across his face, the corners of his lips twitching with anticipation.

"Fascinating," he whispered, the word curling in the air like a promise.

**********

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