“There’s no helping it. You could not be expected to come to the correct conclusions if you didn’t have the complete picture and several key pieces were missing. You got exceptionally close though for your flawed starting point and that alone proves your expertise in the field.” I said seriously.
“Perhaps but no one likes to be proven wrong.” she said with a hint of bitterness.
“You’ll find no argument from me there.” I said with a nod.
“Beyond that how certain are you that you can develop this field in this way?” she asked tapping my report.
“With Karin and Shizune’s help along with some test subjects, highly. Never one hundred percent as there is no such thing as absolute certainty but I am confident enough to say ninety six percent minimum.” i said honestly.
“Shizune I understand but why Karin?” she asked confused.
“A three part refinement process for the techniques I develop. I have a bad habit of forgetting that I am the exception to most rules so my techniques need serious refinement to become usable by more normal people. Development will be primarily my job while refining the technique into a more usable form for others will go to Karin and Shizune. Karin’s robust lifeforce makes her Ideal for this as she is closer to me in terms of lifeforce, a mid point between me and a normal person like Shizune if you will. Shizune will then take Karin’s refined technique and refine it further into a technique much more manageable by an normal person.” I explained seriously.
“You’ve given this considerable thought I see.” she said impressed by my explanation.
“Of course, this represents a massive contribution to medical understanding and necessitates the utmost dedication. I’ll not allow carelessness to cause problems here if I can help it.” I said firmly.
“Very well, I’ll need to discus this with the council for funding but unless I meet resistance you can expect the project to be green lit.” She said and I shook my head.
“I’ll fund the research myself if necessary and post missions to capture bandits for test subjects if I must. This may offend some of the council members but that’s a price I’ll gladly pay to see this brought to fruition.” I said seriously.
“That’s a dangerous stance to take Kenzo, borderline treasonous even. I hope you know what you are doing.” she said with a stern voice.
“No offense sensei but once I became strong enough to crush an entire hidden village by myself things like obedience and subservience to the leadership of the village lost all relevance.” I said bluntly.
“I know. I hope that even if you disagree with the council you’ll at least try to play nice with them, if only to make my life easier.” she said with a helpless sigh.
“Not to worry. I won’t expressly go against them or anything in this matter unless they give some ridiculous reason why they refuse to accept the project.” I said with a shrug.
She looked placated with that and dismissed me to get started on the paper work required for something like that. She also started to find ways to butter up the council even if she didn’t think they had any reason to deny the project. I meanwhile didn’t care whether they agreed or denied the project as I had said. Frankly speaking I could commit to the project all by myself without them unlike most projects as I was rich enough to not need extra funds at all.-
Hell it wasn’t even all that strange for medical practitioners to use their personal funds to research things on their own time. Before she started hemorrhaging money my sensei had done exactly that to push medical understanding to the heights she did. Sadly once her brother and Dan Kato died she developed Hemophobia and sort of lost her drive to improve her medical knowledge like she had originally. If she hadn’t I had no doubt in my mind she would have likely long since figured out lifeforce application and probably stumbled onto Wood release as a result as well.-
Growing up with her Grandfather still alive for the majority of her childhood she had naturally hoped to inherit his Wood release and even with wind as her primary chakra nature had practiced earth and water as well to some degree. At some point however she gave up hope on awakening Wood release and focused on medical study as she was extremely talented at it. If she had continued down her original path before she lost her drive and discovered the usages of lifeforce by the time the experiments on her grandfathers cells started she most likely would have realized the missing piece to it was lifeforce itself.-
Anyways the point here was that it wasn’t strange at all for medical practitioners to fund their own research while cutting out the villages support. A big factor there was that if the village funded the research the results belonged to the village and ONLY the village. One could find themselves facing prosecution if even a smidge of information related to the project they were involved in got out somehow. Despite this however the sheer cost to conduct research forced most to agree to these terms as they simply couldn’t gather enough funds otherwise.-
Anyways back at my home I looked over my growing collection of lawn statues with a peculiar expression. While I was away dealing with that emergency mission in the land of wind some spies thought that was their chance to make a grab for the collection in my meditation chamber. Normally that logic would hold up as without the owner around most places lost a lot of their danger. My chamber was not one of those types of places however. Since no spy had ever survived breaking into the place and instead gotten petrified there was no intel on what they were dealing with and all suffered the same fate as a result.-
The dense rainbow hued fog wasn’t poison or a seal or even technically harmful at all so no tests they could run in a hurry on the spot told them just how dangerous the stuff was. That was the horrifying part about the mist, it seems to be harmless by all metrics of understanding for anyone not familiar with what it is. Natural energy was insidious with how it’s danger just seemed to creep up and consume those not paying very close attention.
