Dazzling blue pooled in her eyes and cooled to silver gray, then spilled like mercury and swept her body.
Scarlet flesh stirred as if it were a flowerhead meeting the sun. It rustled and danced, quivered and leapt, rising and falling in clusters, swelling and settling.
The liquid silver circled her frame and flew back to her pupils like swallows to the eaves. As the ocular power faded, the quickened flesh grew quiet again.
It did not die. It slept, saving its strength, waiting for its mistress to call.
Konome willed it.
On her slender, pale index finger the skin split and opened. A length of white phalanx wormed out of the red meat and dropped into her palm. She closed the tiny mouth of skin and, beneath it, new tissue sprouted buds so fine even the Byakugan struggled to see them.
They twined, stitched, filled, and fused.
The slack joint was braced by regrown bone until flesh and bone were one again.
Konome closed her fist.
No trace of injury, and the chakra cost was small.
She pinched the shed finger-bone between two fingertips. Its surface held a muted, metallic sheen.
Shikotsumyaku bone could stop a kunai cold. On paper, a girl who knew only the Three Basic Techniques should have no way to crush a material harder than steel.
Yet.
Konome's gaze tightened.
Under the Byakugan's fine view
roughly twelve billion muscle fibers across her body contracted near at once. Unmatched force gathered from every muscle and rushed into the pinch at her fingertips.
Her hand bones creaked under the pressure.
Crack.
The phalanx burst, coughing bone dust.
She stared at the grit on the floor, a thrill running through her. A finger-bone like a steel slug, and she had crushed it to powder with two fingers.
That was pure physical strength.
If she added chakra to amplify it, her muscles would harden into something even more fearsome. What kind of power would be born then.
She remembered a study from her former life. Humans had more than six hundred muscles. If they all fired together, they could produce something like twenty-five tons of force. In theory. In reality muscles did not all pull the same way and bones and blood vessels could not carry that load.
At this moment, theory had begun to come true in Konome.
At least in part.
When Shikotsumyaku is used, foreign bones pierce tendons and skin and injure the user. The dossier explanation was that the awakened had an extraordinary healing factor and mended as they fought.
That did not explain how you could move freely after punching bone through your own tendons.
Anyone with a little biology knew this.
The human body is one system.
Bones, tendons, vessels, fascia. Anatomy divides them on paper, but that is for the dead.
In a living body, no organ works alone.
The nine systems together make the person.
The locomotor system is bone, joint, and skeletal muscle and weighs out roughly sixty percent of the body.
Touch one strand and the whole body moves.
All the more so with bone, which matters to everything.
You cannot have bones changing shape at will while the rest stays ordinary.
In her past life Konome had watched the anime for fun and let the questions slide.
Now a fantasy had hardened into fact.
The true terror in Shikotsumyaku was not the unbreakable bone. It was the living meat that could be commanded at will.
Skin and muscle could grow and split with the shifts of bone.
Organs could slide inside the abdomen to avoid being spiked by their own reshaped ribs.
Fascia and vessels could peel off from bone whenever needed.
Only a body like a living corpse could carry a skeleton that changed shape at any moment. In the name Shikotsumyaku the corpse should come before the bone.
Yet
something still felt off.
Konome rifled through memory.
Neither Kimimaro nor any tale from the Taketori clan spoke of this kind of absolute control over one's flesh.
The clan's secret techniques
spoke of driving the large muscle groups to unleash brute strength and forcing adrenal glands to flood the blood. Nothing about ruling so many individual muscles with this precision or gathering the whole body's force into one point.
She was not like other Taketori.
The answer leapt up at once. The Byakugan.
Her body had begun to change when Shikotsumyaku awakened yesterday. Today she had opened the Byakugan again and again while playing the blind woman. In the end her body had been flooded by ocular power.
No.
Not flooded.
She felt the root of it in a flash.
If it were contamination by ocular power, then when the Byakugan drew that power back the quickened flesh should have fallen still.
It would not have stayed active.
It was not contamination. It was activation.
The Taketori had always carried a power to command flesh, but it worked passively and beyond conscious reach.
It was like a car without a steering wheel. The driver could not steer.
Her Byakugan had provided the controls the car lacked. Only then did the hardware show what it could do.
The episode out on the street must have been the operating system shaking hands with the hardware through the Byakugan and bringing long-silent functions fully online.
Konome dared the hypothesis.
It did not come from nowhere.
In the end of the original story, the ancestor of chakra, Kaguya Otsutsuki, wielded four powers. The Sage's Body, the Sage's Eyes, the Byakugan, and the All-Killing Ash Bones.
The Sage's Body echoed the Senju and Uzumaki. The Sage's Eyes echoed the Uchiha. The Byakugan echoed the Hyuga. The Ash Bones matched the Taketori.
Byakugan and Shikotsumyaku had once been severed from a single whole.
After a thousand years, they had awakened together in Konome and begun to knit.
She let a long breath go.
Sweat glued her shirt to her back.
She had feared some incurable bloodline sickness. It was the opposite.
Her pores opened. Sky-blue chakra seeped from meridians and points and hung in the air like mist, coiling into bands that wrapped her. The thin girl seated cross-legged on the bed looked like an immortal at rest.
If her guess was right.
Shikotsumyaku and Byakugan were halves of one thing.
If the Byakugan could fully awaken Shikotsumyaku, then Shikotsumyaku should answer and feed the Byakugan in turn.
Chakra ringed her in a blue spiral, gathering and loosening like a waterspout at sea.
A draft curled through the room. The curtains breathed.
Sunlight knifed through the window and washed the dim room white. Shadows of the curtains jumped on the wall, and the seated figure swelled and loomed like a temple's solemn statue.
At the statue's crown
the halo that should have hung behind a Buddha was gone. In its place a thousand fine threads writhed like spirit serpents, stretching and twisting in the light.
Konome narrowed her eyes and smiled. Her silver-gray hair, lit with chakra, spun behind her. Each strand webbed out like spidersilk in brushwood and locked the air around her in a net.
"So this is what they call Rabbit Hair Needles."