Elric stood before the swirling portal, one foot already raised to step through, when he suddenly froze.
A sound reached his ears—faint, distant, almost impossible to hear.
A gunshot.
It was too quiet for any normal human to hear from fifty kilometers away, possibly more. But for him, it was clear as if the shot had been fired right next to him.
Under normal circumstances, he would just ignore it and move on. Random gunshots in remote Russia weren't his concern. He had plans to execute, equipment to install, an AI to build. Every moment spent on distractions was wasted time.
But this was a secret Russian base, located almost in the middle of a huge forest, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest settlement. The area was supposed to be restricted and carefully monitored. Random hunting shouldn't be happening here.
His curiosity got the better of him.
With a slight gesture, Elric changed the portal's destination. Instead of his house where he'd planned to return, he redirected it toward the source of that gunshot.
He stepped through.
The portal deposited him in a small clearing surrounded by dense pine trees. The moment he emerged, a thick blood smell hit his nose.
"What an unpleasant sight," Elric said quietly.
His words carried mild distaste, but his face remained completely blank. He'd seen worse—much worse. This was just unfortunate, not shocking.
In front of him, sprawled across the forest floor, was a mangled corpse of what should have been an adult man. The body was barely recognizable anymore, torn apart by claws and teeth. Blood pooled beneath it, soaking into the pine needles and dark soil.
Beside the corpse lay the culprit—a huge Siberian tiger, its orange and black striped coat matted with blood. The magnificent creature was already dead, its eyes glazed over, a bullet wound visible in its side.
A little farther away, about ten meters distant, lay a small tiger cub. The young animal had also been shot, and from the bodies and blood trails, Elric understood what had happened instantly.
Probably an illegal hunter who'd shot the cub first, seeing it as an easy trophy. But the mother tiger had been nearby. When her cub cried out in pain, she'd attacked.
Elric could almost feel her lingering anger in the air. He could see what she'd done to the hunter's body while dying from her own gunshot wound—the destruction.
Ignoring both corpses, he walked over to the dying cub.
The small tiger was still breathing, but barely. Each breath came shallow and labored, its small chest rising and falling with obvious difficulty. A bullet had torn through its chest, missing the heart by centimeters but causing massive damage. Blood soaked its white belly fur.
Elric crouched down and carefully picked up the cub. It was surprisingly light, probably only a few months old. Its eyes were closed, body limp, but he could still feel the faint flutter of a heartbeat.
"You're already lucky enough to encounter me," he said softly, looking down at the dying animal. "But let's see if you're lucky enough to survive."
Without another word, he opened a new portal and stepped through, the wounded cub cradled carefully in his arms.
In front of Elric's house, a black portal opened, and he walked out.
Here, everything seemed the same at first glance. The same handmade wooden house stood exactly where he'd left it, built from local timber with his own hands over several weeks. The same forest surrounded it on all sides. The same mountains rose in the distance, their peaks capped with snow.
But at the same time, everything had changed.
Most of the work had been done underground. Chakra was really convenient like that—you could accomplish anything you could think of, as long as you had the knowledge and enough energy.
Want to time travel? You can, with the right techniques.
Want to teleport across vast distances? You can.
Want to manipulate reality itself? You can, with advanced enough applications.
And the Uzumaki clan had accumulated nearly a thousand years of knowledge. Just some basic fuinjutsu techniques had worked wonders for his underground construction, allowing him to carve out vast chambers and reinforce them without disturbing the surface above.
He quickly headed toward the back of his property, where a big metal door now stuck up from the ground at an angle, partially concealed by carefully arranged plants. To any casual observer, it would look like nothing more than an old storm cellar.
He opened the door. Inside was pure darkness.
Without hesitation, Elric jumped down, still holding the wounded cub.
He really needed to build some stairs for convenience, but since he didn't actually need them himself, he'd felt too lazy to bother. The drop was easily ten meters straight down.
Lighting was in the same category of "things he should probably add but hadn't gotten around to yet." He could see in darkness just fine, so he'd never bothered to illuminate this place.
After walking through several branching corridors carved from solid stone, he reached one particular room and entered.
Inside, neatly placed on metal shelving units, were medical devices. The room was filled nearly to the brim with equipment—MRI machines, surgical tools, monitors, IV stands, autoclaves, everything a fully equipped emergency room might contain. He'd need to expand this space soon. His collection was growing faster than anticipated.
He carefully placed the tiger cub on a medical bed designed for humans. The small animal looked even more fragile on the white sheets, its striped coat standing out against the sterile fabric.
The cub's body was already weak from blood loss. As Elric watched, he could see its heartbeat starting to slow down, the rhythm becoming irregular and weak. Minutes at most before total cardiac failure.
If he could use medical ninjutsu, this would be simple. A few hand seals, some precisely controlled chakra, and the wounds would close within seconds. But unfortunately, neither Isshiki nor Naruto versions of himself had learned those techniques.
The three versions of him had decided to meet every week to share status, exchange knowledge, and coordinate their plans. But there were still three days left before their next scheduled meeting, which meant it would be too late to ask for help or borrowed knowledge.
Looking at the visible wound on the little cub's chest, Elric realized that regular medical equipment would hardly work. The damage was too extensive, the blood loss too severe. The animal needed immediate intervention beyond what conventional medicine could provide.
The heartbeat was getting slower and slower, each pulse weaker than the last.
He decided to experimentation.
Elric placed his hand directly over the cub's chest and began to inject his own chakra into its body. The energy flowed from his palm like liquid light, invisible to normal eyes but tangible to anyone with spiritual awareness.
At first, the cub's body rejected the foreign energy completely. Its cells recoiled from it, recognizing the chakra as something alien and potentially dangerous. The reaction was violent, the small body convulsing under his touch.
But then, when the cub's own life force sensed its impending death, something changed. The body seemed to stop caring what this strange energy was. Faced with death, survival instinct overrode everything else. The cells began to directly absorb the chakra, pulling it in desperately.
Looking at the little body that had started to absorb his chakra greedily, Elric didn't hold back. He poured more energy into the dying animal, channeling it carefully but generously.
After coming back, he'd always wanted to try something similar to what Kaguya had done in the Naruto world. Not as extreme as directly creating two baby demigods, but closer to what the Sage of Six Paths had done later—distributing chakra among humans and creating the first ninja civilization.
An Otsutsuki's chakra and a human's chakra were fundamentally different. For humans, chakra was created from a combination of spiritual energy and physical energy—drawn from the soul and body working together.
But for a pure-blooded Otsutsuki who had consumed a chakra fruit, it almost acted like an organ that could naturally produce chakra. The energy wasn't just stored; it was generated continuously, replenishing itself over time.
So in theory, even giving someone else chakra wouldn't harm the donor permanently. The lost portion would just regenerate in time, exactly like how the Tailed Beasts could reform after being destroyed.
It was different from the Sage of Six Paths' method, where he'd directly given portions of his own finite chakra to others. Elric was providing not just energy, but the means to create chakra within the recipient's body—seeding them with the potential for independent generation.
And it seemed to work.
All of the wounds on the little cub's body had already healed by the time Elric finished supplying it with pure Yang chakra. The bullet wound closed, flesh knitting together seamlessly. The internal damage repaired itself, organs regenerating. Even the matted, blood-soaked fur seemed cleaner somehow.
And even after the cub's body had fully recovered and expelled the excess chakra it couldn't contain, Elric still sensed a small trace of chakra remaining within the animal.
It was very small—barely a fraction of what even a civilian human might possess—but it was absolutely present. A tiny seed of potential, lying dormant in the tiger's chest where a fatal wound had been moments before.
It seemed there was a real possibility of creating his own ninja army—or at least, chakra-capable beings under his control. But he'd have to carefully select candidates. Not everyone would survive the process or adapt successfully.
He'd felt it when the little tiger cub's body initially rejected the foreign energy. Only when it was almost dead, when survival instinct overrode all other considerations, did it finally accept the chakra.
Perhaps that was the key—a brush with death, a moment of absolute desperation where the body would accept anything rather than die.
Looking at the cub's peaceful sleeping face, Elric was curious about examining it further. He wanted to run tests, measure the chakra levels, understand how the energy had integrated with the animal's biology. But he restrained his curiosity for now and let the small creature sleep peacefully. It had been through enough trauma already.
After leaving the medical room, he went to the adjacent chamber.
This room was also filled with devices, though the equipment here served an entirely different purpose. Instead of medical instruments, the walls were lined with server racks, cooling units, fiber optic cables, and various pieces of advanced computing hardware he'd stolen or salvaged from facilities.
This was his server room—the place where his new AI would live once construction was complete.
Without delay, Elric placed the box he'd just stolen from the Russian facility onto the central workbench. Inside was a quantum processing unit worth four billion rubles on the black market—if you could even find someone selling such technology.
He connected it to the existing infrastructure, watching status lights blink to life as the systems recognized the new hardware.