Kei was very happy today.
For the first time in his life, he could finally see hope that his fate might change.
After spending two years in the Naruto world, Kei had finally understood what talent really was.
Talent was simply talent.
If Heaven bestowed it upon you, you had it.
If it didn’t, you didn’t.
And unfortunately, Kei was one of those who didn’t.
What did it mean to have no talent?
Those so-called famous underachievers in Konoha who were labeled as "talentless losers" were mostly full of crap.
They were actually people with exceptional specialized talents.
Once those talents were discovered, they would experience explosive growth.
To find someone who was truly untalented, one had to look at the nameless background characters who appeared on the battlefield only to be instantly killed.
And Lord Kei was one of the best examples.
When it came to the resources available to Kei’s faction, his educational resources far surpassed those of anyone in Konoha.
Uchiha Gen, the leader of the Iga Group, was a master of ninjutsu and genjutsu. As a professor of ninjutsu, he was no less accomplished than Hiruzen Sarutobi himself.
During the era of the shogunate, he had been the foremost authority in the shinobi world’s educational circles.
Uchiha Danjō, leader of the Kōga Group, was a taijutsu master.
His experience with the sword was enough to teach Tenzen .
Had he not grown old, his swordsmanship alone would have allowed him to roam the shinobi world with impunity.
Uchiha Danjō
Ninjutsu: A
Taijutsu: S+
Genjutsu: A
And yet, after two full years of training under these two men, Uchiha Kei had barely managed to awaken a One-Tomoe Sharingan.
At best, he could be considered roughly Chūnin level.
He had practically no combat ability whatsoever.
Didn’t understand how pathetic that was?
Let’s make a comparison.
Uchiha Minonki, who specialized in staff techniques, had raised a monkey.
That monkey had only been trained by Uchiha Gen for half a year.
Uchiha Minonki
Ninjutsu: B
Taijutsu: A
Genjutsu: C
Yet when it came to ninjutsu proficiency, Uchiha Kei was actually inferior to that monkey.
In a real fight, he couldn’t even beat it.
And this wasn’t some special ninja beast.
It was simply a wild monkey that Minonki had adopted because it was cute.
That was ironclad proof of Kei’s dreadful talent.
People often said that fate could be changed through several things:
First, one’s birth.
Second, one’s luck.
Third !
Fourth, accumulated virtue.
Fifth, education.
Of all the ways an ordinary person could change their destiny, education was the only one they could truly control.
Studying hard was the only path ordinary people could grasp.
In the Naruto world, that translated into training hard.
Turn whatever talent you possessed into strength and acquire the capital necessary to change your fate.
But with talent as poor as Kei’s, hard work was meaningless.
Even if he desperately squeezed every last drop of potential out of himself and converted it into strength, it wouldn’t help him.
After reaching this conclusion, Uchiha Kei felt the same way he had in his previous life when he saw a mildly intellectually disabled food-delivery worker confidently speaking to reporters on the news.
That man had managed to get into university and earn more than ten thousand yuan a month delivering food.
Compared to him, wasn’t Kei the mildly intellectually disabled one?
And compared to that monkey...
Wasn’t Kei the monkey?
Naturally, Kei was deeply unwilling to accept this result.
He finally understood the resentment that people like Hiruko and Might Duy had carried in their hearts.
They were all human beings.
Why could some people become the Sannin or elite Jōnin, while others could work themselves to the bone and still find Genin to be their normal limit and Chūnin their absolute ceiling?
Why?
Ambitious people simply couldn’t accept such a fate.
But what could one do when one refused to accept it?
If the conventional path didn’t work, one could only find another route.
Just like someone who couldn’t succeed through education but still wanted to climb higher would have to resort to unconventional methods and make money through less respectable means.
Among those people who had been used as examples by the "education is useless" crowd, how many had earned their first fortune without getting blood on their hands?
And so, a black-tech project was born.
Hyōma became the final experimental subject of this project.
The procedure had originally been designed for Kei.
But who would dare make Lord Kei the first test subject before conducting enough experiments?
Neither the Kōga Group nor the Iga Group was willing to let Kei be the first guinea pig.
Although every individual component of the procedure had already been tested on living subjects, this was the first time they were going to combine everything into a single procedure.
Hyōma was willing to be the experimental subject.
First, he was blind and already needed a pair of transplanted eyes.
The Red Eyes belonging to Red Maru happened to be suitable for him.
Second, he was a master swordsman and extremely sensitive to changes in his body.
If anything went wrong after the operation, he would notice it immediately.
This was no ordinary surgery.
It was an operation designed to combine:
a knockoff version of Senjutsu,
a knockoff Jinchūriki,
a knockoff Kekkei Tōta,
and a knockoff Sharingan.
All into a single body.
They had to thank Hiruko’s Chimera Technique for providing Azusai with the theoretical foundation.
If the Chimera Technique could fuse different bloodline abilities—and even fuse summoned beasts—then there was no reason why a Tailed Beast couldn’t be incorporated as well.
Although the resulting fusion wouldn’t be as powerful as the original versions, it wasn’t exactly bad either.
Besides, there was no such thing as perfection in this world.
And so, the project based on the Chimera Technique was born.
The Cursed Seal developed by Orochimaru was essentially a weakened form of Senjutsu.
It could provide a power boost to ninjutsu.
The Zero-Tails developed by the Land of Sky was a spoils of war acquired by Konoha.
Konoha didn’t think much of it.
Kei did.
The Zero-Tails could provide an enormous supply of chakra, essentially functioning as a source of seemingly unlimited chakra.
It had been offered to Kei by Danzō.
Orochimaru had also provided cells from Jūgo.
He was one of the last naturally born users of Sage Transformation, and his cells could increase the vitality of the body’s cells.
Hashirama’s cells were actually stronger than Jūgo’s.
Danzō had some as well.
But during experiments, a face resembling Hashirama’s would appear on the subject’s body.
Azusai suspected there might be unknown side effects.
By comparison, Jūgo was also a naturally born Sage Transformation user.
His power was weaker, but much safer.
Besides, Kei wasn’t Madara.
He didn’t have a habit of having the face of the woman he loved engraved across his chest.
There was another thing.
Danzō definitely had some kind of connection with the Land of Water.
He had even provided Kei with cells from the Kaguya Clan.
Azusai had removed the Kaguya Clan’s bloodline disease from the cells, but that had also greatly reduced their power.
They could no longer produce bone spines.
At most, they could improve the flexibility of the joints.
This was the entirety of the black-tech project.
All these components combined couldn’t create a top-tier powerhouse.
But they could give an ordinary person a comprehensive enhancement.
The path of hard work had already been blocked by Kei’s terrible talent.
And now he had the additional burden of a mysterious pair of eyes.
Kei had no choice but to experiment with these unreliable but convenient black technologies.
The reason they were called "black technology" wasn’t because they were good.
It was because they blocked off certain paths while allowing you to grow much faster through another.
For example, once someone had a Cursed Seal, they could never learn Sage Mode again.
Unless they happened to be one of the Sage of Six Paths’ chosen descendants.
The reason Kei had chosen such methods with obvious drawbacks was that he had considered the matter very carefully.
A person couldn’t be too greedy.
One needed to understand the principle of diminishing marginal returns.
The more one invested into something, the smaller the return received from each additional unit of investment.
In other words, the closer one pushed something toward perfection, the more difficult it became and the greater the price one had to pay.
It was better to choose a point that was good enough.
The risks would be much smaller.
Didn’t Kei know that genuine Senjutsu was far more powerful than Orochimaru’s Cursed Seal?
Of course he did.
But genuine Senjutsu carried the risk of failure.
Kei didn’t have the courage to test whether he possessed the same combination of talent and luck as Jiraiya and could successfully master Senjutsu.
If even Orochimaru couldn’t do it, what made Uchiha Kei think he could?
He certainly didn’t believe in the logic used by other transmigrators from different worlds.
They seemed to naturally assume that as long as they learned something, nothing could go wrong and they would inevitably master Senjutsu.
But one should always prepare for the worst.
What if he failed and turned into some kind of giant toad or snake?
What then?
Kei genuinely couldn’t understand where those transmigrators got their confidence.
Did they never consider the consequences of failure?
After all the girls they had worked so hard to win over, would those women really be willing to accept their beloved prince suddenly turning into a frog?
Therefore, the Cursed Seal was the best choice.
It might not be as powerful as genuine Senjutsu, but there was no risk of failure.
Orochimaru had already used it on Anko, after all.
The technology was mature.
The only side effect was that Kei absolutely could not let Orochimaru place the Cursed Seal on him personally.
Who knew whether Orochimaru might secretly implant a fragment of his soul inside it and play the same trick as Voldemort’s Horcruxes?
It was safer to let Azusai conduct the experiments first.
The same applied to all the other knockoff technologies.
Azusai had researched and tested every one of them.
Each component had been tested separately on living subjects.
Now they simply had to combine them and perform the final surgery.
And so this large-scale operation came into existence.
Hyōma was the experimental subject.
Because the burden imposed by his eyes had already left Kei extremely weak, he could only drag his seriously ill body along while watching the operation and praying for its success.
This procedure determined his future.
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