Chapter 190: Did I Just Pull an SSR?
After that, they explored several more bases, but still found nothing.
Sakura was starting to get a little impatient.
She was just making a joke! Carrying out a mission and doing a ten-pull were still fundamentally different—at least the former was life-threatening.
However, the bases they had entered were generally quite small and couldn't hold too many people. They seemed to be just temporary sites, not long-term residences.
Two of them were even just a few rooms and a huge hall. The floor of the hall was stained with blood. Who knew what Orochimaru had been doing in here.
There were also some bases that looked as if they had never been used at all, without a single trace of having been lived in. Perhaps ever since Orochimaru had built them, they had been sealed away and never used again.
The good news was that the closer they got to the Land of Rice Paddies, the more recently these bases had been abandoned. It seemed that at the locations further ahead, they might be able to find a few bases that the Sound ninja were still using.
In that case, a battle would naturally be unavoidable.
"Are you ready to fight?" Shino said, checking the equipment on his body and looking at the dark cave entrance in front of him, as he spoke to the two subordinates behind him.
This cave in front of them was clearly much larger than the few bases they had finished exploring, which had been stingy with even an entrance.
The footprints that were faintly visible at the entrance and exit also gave it a bit more of a "human" feel.
Obviously, this place had at least been frequented by people recently.
This also meant... they were very likely to encounter enemies.
For some reason, Haruno Sakura actually felt a faint sense of anticipation.
Squad 14 quickly adjusted into a battle formation: Yūgao drew her long sword and stood at the very front. Shino was in the middle to provide support. Sakura stood at the back of the team to cover their rear.
They hid outside the door and listened quietly for a moment.
Not the slightest sound came from the dark and deathly-still cave entrance. Nor were there any chakra fluctuations.
It was gloomy and sinister, like the wide-open, bloody mouth of a giant beast.
Yūgao turned her head and looked at Shino, asking for his opinion with her eyes. The latter just calmly raised his hand and made a forward gesture.
Squad 14 was then quickly submerged in the darkness.
Following the long and narrow passage straight down, this base of Orochimaru's was much deeper than the previous ones, probably more than a hundred meters underground.
The moment they passed through the end of the passage and entered the base, a wide-open hall appeared before them. Oil lamps were inserted on the walls, their flames somewhat dim and flickering, illuminating the surroundings with wavering shadows, alternating between light and dark.
However, there were no figures.
Apart from the almost inaudible footsteps of Squad 14, this place was frighteningly quiet.
The three Anbu exchanged a look.
"Bang!"
A room door was kicked open violently. The figure of the cat-faced ninja charged at the very front, breaking through the door, and then—
Swish, swish, swish!
Hundreds of kunai shot out from the mechanisms in the room, turning the intruder into a hornet's nest!
Crack, crack.
The cat-faced ninja's body turned transparent and crystalline, transforming into an ice sculpture full of kunai.
"It's clear. No one's here!" Yūgao strode in, pulled out a kunai from the ice clone's body, looked at it, and said with a shake of her head and a smile, "A nice welcoming gift. It's even coated with snake venom. How vicious."
"It seems they've indeed left," Shino said, stepping on the fragments of the door and walking slowly into the room. "No one would set up traps in the place they live."
The last to walk in was the young girl with the cat-face mask.
"This kind of mechanism is just a petty trick..." Even through the mask, Shino could hear the thick disdain in the girl's tone. "You think you can hurt someone with just these little toys?"
"Don't say that, Tobi. This snake venom is no simple matter," Shino said, shaking his head. He had just looked at the faint green layer of poison on the kunai. "Even Lord Third Hokage was forced to sever his own arm by Orochimaru's snake venom."
Yūgao chimed in, "Even if you're just grazed, it would be very troublesome. But, since such an insidious mechanism has appeared here, does that also mean... we're close to a valuable target?"
That was indeed the case.
Sakura raised her head and carefully sized up the layout of the room. A bookshelf stood tall, almost reaching the ceiling.
"This room seems to be a data archive room, but most of the materials have been moved."
Messy scrolls and books were scattered on the bookshelves and all over the floor. It was clear that when the Sound ninja had left, they had only hurriedly taken the precious materials, and had casually used the remaining useless scrolls to conceal and set up a trap before leaving.
After the ice clone had cleared the danger, Sakura casually picked up a scroll from the ground and opened it to browse.
"Experimental Data Handbook for Uzumaki Jūgen's Body Modification..."
She read softly.
It seemed to be something very evil.
Flipping further, there were only some messy characters. Blacked-out words were all over the scroll.
She couldn't see any useful information.
From the few words on it, this person named Uzumaki Jūgen seemed to have undergone Orochimaru's Soft Physique Modification and had been turned into a half-man, half-snake thing...
It was just that the experimental data had stopped halfway, which seemed to imply this person's fate...
She flipped further, and it was all blank. It probably wasn't an important or effective experiment, otherwise, it wouldn't have been casually left on the ground.
"Captain, are we taking back this kind of scroll too?" Sakura asked, a little helplessly.
"What kind of content is on the scroll?" Shino, who was clearing a clean area in the hall, asked, turning his head back while spreading out a huge scroll in his hand.
"It's an experimental data record scroll for a human body modification," the girl said, shaking the scroll in her hand. "But there's no useful information. Most of the data written on it has been blacked out."
She smiled and continued, "And this guy named Uzumaki Jūgen had a short life. He died before the experiment was even halfway done."
"Died?"
"Uh... yeah, it means he died," she said. Sometimes she would accidentally blurt out some internet slang from her previous life, which made everyone not understand, which was very awkward. But sometimes, some words with rich connotations would also spread from her and become popular buzzwords among the young people of Konoha.
"Alright," Shino said, not minding Sakura's little slip of the tongue, just treating it as a cute catchphrase that was popular among little girls. He beckoned to the girl. "We'll take it. We'll take all the scrolls and books! Anyway, the scroll that Lord Hokage gave us can seal a lot of things."
Sakura shrugged and casually tossed the scroll over.
The matter of human body modification sounded evil, but the village also had similar experiments. Sakura couldn't say who was more noble. In any case, as long as it was a voluntary experiment, Haruno Sakura felt that it was acceptable—the moral bottom line of the Naruto world was just that low. There was nothing she could do about it.
At least the Hokage faction she was in couldn't bring itself to force its own people to undergo human body modification. More than a decade ago, they had even expelled a Kage-level powerhouse, Orochimaru, for this matter.
As for what Danzo's side was capable of... it was hard to say...
These things were not convenient to discuss with her teammates. Although they were already comrades who had been through life and death together, there still seemed to be some distance from being close friends. She could talk to the people in Team 7, but Naruto and Sasuke might not understand. As for Kakashi, she could chat with him when she had time.
But for now, Sakura could only keep these thoughts to herself.
She then continued to flip through the messy scrolls and books on the ground. Those that looked useless at a glance were all thrown to Shino, while the useful ones were opened to be browsed first.
The content of most of the scrolls was the experimental reports of those evil experiments of Orochimaru, his insane experimental conjectures, and so on.
Although there was no hard-core information, just the words on the periphery were enough to make the girl's jaw drop, a real eye-opener.
She had already sorted through more than half of them. Just then, at the very bottom of the pile of scrolls, the girl found an old booklet with a dull, gilt edge.
It seems to be something good?
She opened it.
"The Basic Principles and Implementation Methods of Cloning Technology..."
Haruno Sakura's body... her girlish body, trembled.
Is this... an SSR?
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