A laboratory tends to conjure up a certain type of mental image but it was one that Yukiin seemed actively interested in rebuking, straining the definition such that it could accomodate his tastes as the room was teeming with freshly transplanted lifeforms who ensnared and encompassed the room within their hungry tendrils. Hundreds of flowering blooms crawled forth from the bookshelves and material cabinets, toxic things or thorned unpleasantries hiding beneath their vibrant colors, and their attendant spreading them over with a fine mist of icy dew that seemed to be as ever present as the sensation of chilling unwelcome that started several meters from the door and only intensified the further any other party intruded on his territory. Several of these botanical guardians were poised to inject a venomous payload in anyone that strayed off the path or tried to force open many of the doors, something that had already paid out dividends in killing prey animals trying to scavenge through his subjects.
It was a land of frosted flowers and equally cold metal components, most of the books being sealed in glass cases and locked doors even if their contents were not classified or otherwise worthy of such treatment, Yukiin regarded everything he had developed over the past months as dangerous as the materials that he had used to reach them. Paranoia implied he was worried and thus was ill fit, the spindly male was more like a spider ensuring that its web was as excessively deadly as possible to anyone that wasn’t him because it was simply in his nature to booby trap and safeguard.
The chilled vapors were intermingled with the heady smell of deep and ever fresh coffee as if the smell had buried itself into the walls in the same way that the plants had, Yukiin seated in a deeper chamber of his personal laboratory pouring out another cup and watching the escaping heat struggle and choke out in the midst of his oppressive chill. Only himself and Osuteno were welcome parties in this place, also the only parties who wouldn’t be concerned with a bit of venom as far as he knew but he supposed other Revenants could intrude without harm as well, although as the junior he was typically retrieving and bringing things rather than bringing his superior down to his own workstation. He detested the word and the title and insistently scratched it out of all paperwork brought to him, to become something like that would be to admit failure and he had no such thoughts to entertain - failure was a bright flame that would catch anything you touched to it, even a thought.
In this land of frost and flowers no flame could survive.
Yukiin groaned, pushing the earthy fluid to his lips with no pleasure as his fingers searched documents on the desk in front of him like eyeless worms skittering from the light, the newest cadaver in front of him being a sight only for the most detached and depraved of humanity...so pretty much only medical shinobi. He’d learned rather quickly that things that were depraved and unsightly caught the eyes of the medical staff like a jewel caught a raven’s, largely because what he was doing down here was uniquely horrific and they must’ve seen something in learning how to treat an entirely new kind of wound. These people were already dead but in order to conduct experiments on matters of the soul he needed to use living things and the warmth of hot blood and fresh, ragged, breath while he tried to operate on animals had become increasingly intolerable.
The dead were quiet and cold, he preferred it that way.
“Name redacted, age 22, blood type A+, chakra sensitive, no medically significant aberrations, bloodline recessive…” Yukiin muttered to himself, reading off the paper that his digits returned to him like faithful hounds. The corpse had already undergone the process of having several transplants put into it from the corpses of some wild prey that had already been removed from his space and was taking to the dead flesh slowly...but it was taking. Several iciciles marked with sealing marks that had been foreign to the doctor not that long ago now didn’t even register to him as the dangerous Fuuinjutsu it was, these kinds of concerns about ‘old forbidden dark magic’ had been relegated to the part of his brain that cared about jaywalking and public smoking laws...that is to say, it was impossible to determine if he even remembered these things were wrong.
The ice guided the flow of the white, messy, chakra that even he could see without the assistance of eyeglass or Doujutsu, but that was because it wasn’t exactly chakra...to call the height of his research anything definitive would be wrong.
Dregs. They were called dregs. Something...abyssal in the soul, and thus the chakra, of the living that either had not previously existed before the hand of a man reached through to extract it or hadn’t been noticed before this particular man saw it. Energy, spiritual or physical, was a thing that by its nature was hot and vibrant, it moved and flowed and lived independent of a being but when combined with a vessel it became an animating force. Reanimation was performed using such principles, forcing the animus of chakra into something that no longer contained it and reactivating the vessels that had previously housed a foreign animus...but what had been there prior?
Dregs. They were always there, dead or alive, like the heavy sediment left behind by water running through a riverbed and they rebuked the concepts of the animus’ warmth, seemingly repulsed by it. When energy coursed through the flesh it was a flame and it kept the dregs at bay, the offspring it produced was too small and insignificant to be noticed and while the being lived it was impossible to notice but straddling the boundary between life and death...glimpses could be seen and once Yukiin saw it, well, that was it.
When you find something you don’t understand, you seek to correct that second part.
In the corpse in front of him were these unknown things, crystallizing and liquifying and generally regarding physical and chemical laws as curt and unwelcome suggestions. The corpse took to them well and filled with the substance as the old pathways of chakra, blood, nerve, and the like were flooded and hardened over as the doctor passed his hand over his work. The direction of chakra, and thus warmth, caused the material to shirk and condense, hardening immediately at the application to solidify its most external layer to make its work visible to the naked eye. It could, in time, revert but so long as Yukiin was tampering with it things would stay easily workable and chemically compliant. It had been...difficult to get this far without knowing that, to say the least.
“The dregs have reformed the internal pathways of the corpse, no organs are present, no separation between the systems, as expected animal dregs do not properly fill the corpse with sufficient animus to return to function. Cross species dreg usage has been reconfirmed as ineffective for animation, only sufficient for sustenance.”
He spoke aloud, recording equipment shaking quietly from the boughs above as it captured and encoded his words. The coffee had run its course through him and he held out his hand over the corpse, a tendril of ice churning from the air and cutting into a vein as the blood pooled out and was also crystallized. It was liquified, recrystallized, liquified, recrystallized, liquified, recrystallized...over and over rapidly as the warmth was extracted and pushed to the outside atmosphere until it appeared all the blood and chakra had been extinguished before the crystalline substance shattered upon the body like a broken vase with the last threads of chakra burnt out. The dregs churned out from it and infused themselves in the body, bringing vital animus as Yukiin kept his cup in one hand and the bled hand moved back to his body with his white claws erupting forth.
“Resuming human dreg tests, seals remain effective on my body enabling the extraction of dregs once the temperature of any chakra-containing fluid or flesh is reduced to something near or perhaps impossibly below absolute zero, absence of seals produce no result. Dreg animus in the human and chakra sensitive subject should begin shortly.”
Yukiin glanced at the markings carved into his skin, the foreign things that had been drawn out from some textbook that Osuteno probably killed a man for since its contents were that extra special kind of forbidden that entire lineages would die to protect. Thankfully he hadn’t had to kill anyone for research materials, plenty of people died naturally in the line of duty and were useless once organs had been extracted and other useful materials had been doled out to the other Revenants. These hand me down scraps were perfect for his work as he had no intention of becoming something like them anyways, if he was going to be better than he needed to be able to work with more ethical materials.
This wasn’t a body anymore, it was just scraps, to call it inhumane would require a very generous definition of humanity and while, as was covered earlier, it was not work for the faint of heart or the non-medical it was certainly not monstrous...only the products were.
The one big kink he’d yet to work out was that dreg animation seemed to...create issues with the living, such as himself. Yukiin tilted his head, scanning the area to reconfirm for a fifth of sixth time that nobody else was around and that his senior hadn’t snuck in to watch him work, before turning back to the gurney with the body on it that was lifting itself. There wasn’t anything separating him from the subject, a shinobi didn’t need those kinds of handicaps, so once the new lifeform lifted itself and the tendrils of white erupted from it to lash out at him he responded swiftly.
“Dreg animation successful, typical results…” He sighed, talons cutting through the assailing limbs and through the originating body in several swift, brutal, swings that left chunks to fall to the floor before Yukiin stepped out. One claw found a button on the wall which he pushed unceremoniously as the floor produced several small flame jets, puppetry designs he’d rigged up while tampering with his other hobby, that engulfed the creature as its body tried to mend itself. Once the heat and chakra came into play that whole ‘fixing yourself’ game came to a sharp conclusion, one major weakness of the discovery and one major question he had to ask to whoever felt this concept was worth defending.
“...seriously, who died defending this? It's so hard to work with but so easy to kill...without a human element and a living mind to control it, dreg animation is susceptible to any energy source...pretty sure a sunny day would put this things down…”
Speaking of that he removed his finger from the button as the trailing net of kugutsu strings produced fell apart and the jets sputtered out, his eyes moving to the cabinet of extracted brains currently soaking in chakra enriched water. Every time he went that far the thing came out worse, much harder to kill, much smarter, and much more dangerous so he wasn’t ever able to really ask it questions like ‘Have you retained consciousness?’ and ‘Who are you?’ and ‘On a scale of 1 to 10 how likely would you be to recommend conversion into an undead monster?’ but if you never ventured...you never gained.
With a human mind guiding it the thing became much more like a Revenant, shuffling the life and showing a flicker of intelligence, but brains were a much rarer resource and wasting them to get the same result again where he gets attacked in his office by an immortal monster that shrugs off flame jets had been labeled by his superiors as ‘wildly and stupidly reckless.’ In his defense, it did die...eventually. It just required a bit more effort than normal and put him on bed rest for several broken bones for a couple days but Yukiin wasn’t stupid, he wouldn’t repeat the same mistake...more than seventeen times.
He nursed a healing break in one of his elbows, looking at the claw marks in the wall with a flinch of memory from lucky number seventeen...yeah that one had been pretty bad...the medic was now familiar with what it felt like to have your arm snapped and pulled completely out of its socket just to have the rest of its arm bones crushed under heel. Thankfully when he succeeded at his research the damage to his body would be largely irrelevant, these things healed easily and once he was one the permanent damage he sustained would be eradicated….hopefully, there was always a margin of error when it came to predictions of this nature.
The shinobi groaned dejectedly, claws sheathing themselves back into place and his self-inflicted wound glowing momentarily with threads of green that stitched back the flesh without overtly tampering with the recovery process. It was one of those things Osuteno seemed insistent on, that he not actually heal himself despite the capacity to easily do so and simply guide his body in its own recovery in order to prevent potential complications and burn through his available cell’s lifespans before his time but really considering the nature of his work...the suggestion struck him as stupid. He was going to kill himself anyways and at that point all the rules about his body’s chemical limitations were sort of out the window, once you were more chakra than flesh you could do a hell of a lot to tamper with the boundaries of living inconvenience.
But it did give him practice and his fusion of kugutsu and medical techniques had become something of a unique trait of his, marking his work with the visible chakra stitching that came to be his hallmark. A hallmark he had to set to use as he recovered the scraps of flesh and chakra slop on the floor, strings lashing out to reassemble the remnants of this project and trying to make it at least appear to be humanoid again. It was a grotesque thing but it was an instructive thing as well, once you knew the kind of damage that could be inflicted on someone you became very familiar with how to fix it after all and there were only two ways to learn that - inflicted on you or someone else.
Yukiin was firmly in the latter camp and he made no effort to hide that predisposition.
Eventually, however, self inflicted damage became part of the work and the longer that phase lasted the more agitated he was becoming. How long had he been stuck with this rejects? Weeks, at least. Getting this far only to hit this kind of roadblock was unacceptable, so long as the subjects were separated from his consciousness there was no way for him to make judgements about their status or to gauge how well complete the transformation had been beyond the physical. Physically they displayed the signs he was looking for and the signs of previous Revenant projects, being able to integrate ‘hearts’ into themselves in order to extend their own lifespan such that a fatal blow would simply terminate one rather than the creature as a whole, but they were still so...feral.
This was likely the result of being given subpar shinobi however, most of them were killed in the line of duty or from mundane illnesses and represented the larger number of them which were never going to be capable of a successful transformation in the first place. The research provided to him and annotated by his own hand made it quite clear there were certain prerequisites to meet in the process, if you were too weak then the process would fail utterly but there were several other stages along the way which showed improvement but incompletion. Unless he planned on finding someone more sturdy and killing them himself there was really no way to verify with absolute certainty that his conversion process would function...the only person he had faith in the ability to make this transformation were other Revenants and himself.
Self inflicted damage was the price of progress, wasn’t it?
Yukiin directed a snap of ice at the door, barricading it as the spreading crystalline eruptions overtook his work space and crawled along the walls until he was certain that no sound and no foreign intruder would be able to interfere. Now was the time to do something reckless, the same kind of recklessness that had gotten him here in the first place, and a slow, deliberate, carving of markings into his own flesh was not the part that he thought would require soundproofing...that would be the part where he affixed himself to his own operating table and began the process of his own medical death. Thankfully cloning yourself was a pretty baseline shinobi skill and greatly assisted with the labor of arranging everything and cannibalizing his available materials. He would need dregs…a lot of dregs...and thankfully there were a lot of bodies to rip them out of in this place.
The absence of living parties available to him beyond the preserved brains complicated this process but even fractions of a human could contain chakra and spiritual residue to pull apart, though it was a gross misuse of them for such a crude purpose that Yukiin was certain he’d hear about if the process failed...well, actually if it failed then he’d be dead and that wouldn’t be much of a concern at that point.
The flow of the white, crystalline, pulsing stuff was something that he’d grown used to be suffusing it into his own body was a process that he approached slowly, choosing to work with a part that he could lose first by freezing his left arm first. The flow of dregs into the swiftly slain limb, sustained by nothing as any type of chakra to preserve the limb would endanger the process, didn’t feel like much of anything as the limb was no longer returning nervous signals but through the eyes of his puppet he could observe the process as the limb twisted and morphed, warmth burning and fizzling out as the useless veins, nerves, etc. were replaced with the network of white.
Yes, he imagined this would be excruciating if the limb was able to feel such a thing but it did mean that the sound proofing might be unneeded as the process would be painless. The limb didn’t respond to any commands from the rest of his body since it was, well, dead but the fact that it retained its shape and form gave him great hope.
One leg followed, then another, and finally the remaining arm as the core organic components of the shinobi remained steadily beating and unaware of the slow, deliberate, calculated self destruction occurring to its now unreachable limbs. The puppet he’d been using crumbled to the floor but the clone he’d created persisted, as intended, for as long as he could manipulate his chakra then it would sustain itself and now it would have to do the grizzly task of working on the more...critical pieces of himself.
A swift slice through the chest as Yukiin gritted his teeth, allowing the pain to crash against him like a hot wave before the much more serious pain of a clone shoving a large bundle of dregs into his chest made that little cut seem like a scraped knee...and in response his teeth cracked under the pressure of his clenched jaw, the small bits of bone scrapped off on impact falling out of his mouth as the blood made a similar exit. No chakra anesthetic was available for such a thing and actual anesthetic toxins would be rendered ineffective anyways, so the process of dying on a operating table was left to be experienced in all of its vibrant glory. Organ failure, one by one, as the chill of the grave crept through him and the clone maintained a constant blast of cold and ice to continually pull away any heat in its path so that they could contain uninterrupted. It was an efficient system but admiring it was difficult when you were the victim of its ruthless talent.
That only left one thing now, the rest of his body had fallen slack and dead, unresponsive to his head which was a vital component needed to oversee the clone’s operation but now he’d have to lose even that much.
“This is Byakko, Yukiin. This is not a goodbye, I choose this freely and have the upmost faith in my abilities but if any part of my mind is damaged in this process I want the record to show that those squid and lady woodcuts aren’t mine and I’m only holding onto them for a friend. To everyone who knows this me, today is the new one’s birthday.”
His clone stepped forward, pressing a cold palm to his head as the press of frost and the insertion of more of the white, reanimating, chilling ichor flooded through the slice in his neck it had also inflicted. This time the pain was...negligible. The freezing in his brain made that very very hard to discern, along with shapes, colors, and cognition in general. As the process spread upwards he focused until the last on maintaining as much chakra as he could in the clone before it eventually vanished, either because he could no longer see or because he could no longer maintain it but thankfully dying did not require assistance….that part just sort of...happened.
It didn’t take very long from his perspective but the frost in the room had time to melt, flowers had time to wilt, and his body had time to feel...stiff. His thoughts came before any of his senses but they were scattered, muddled, like he was trying to regather an entire lifetime of considerations in a few moments but they came flooding back easily as the sensation of unwelcome warmth came over him. It was all around him, like a ceaseless current pressed to his skin...his skin...right...that was probably the thing protecting him now….
Wait. Yukiin’s eyes flickered open, the steady gaze of the world coming back to him as his ears buzzed and returned to function and his nose picked up...well not much to be frank. Still, they all worked as he came too and touched his head by instinct, though he felt nothing like the familiar sensation of skin to skin contact...well, he wasn’t dead...well technically dead as he could sense no pulse but that was sort of the intention.
He turned his hands over and his eyes scanned his form which was exactly as he had left it, he certainly hadn’t gotten any darker and it wasn’t possible to get any paler, but a swift claw to the wrist revealed the bubbling white dreg fluid which reacted poorly to the outside exposure and sent a feedback sensation back to his brain that was pain-adjacent. The markings in his skin had faded for the most part and those that were left when he awoke were swiftly regenerated away, leaving the body of the freshly created undead unscathed.
Osuteno talked like he was going to return to the world of the living with more...fanfare and consequence but he really didn’t feel all that different. His emotional range seemed unphased but really that only meant one thing - a success. An unprecedented success...although he still didn’t know how long he’d laid there medically, legally, and probably spiritually dead before he came to but he probably needed to give a report at this point.
“Addendum - dying is an unpleasant experience, please remind me not to do it again.”
[WC 4044]
It was a land of frosted flowers and equally cold metal components, most of the books being sealed in glass cases and locked doors even if their contents were not classified or otherwise worthy of such treatment, Yukiin regarded everything he had developed over the past months as dangerous as the materials that he had used to reach them. Paranoia implied he was worried and thus was ill fit, the spindly male was more like a spider ensuring that its web was as excessively deadly as possible to anyone that wasn’t him because it was simply in his nature to booby trap and safeguard.
The chilled vapors were intermingled with the heady smell of deep and ever fresh coffee as if the smell had buried itself into the walls in the same way that the plants had, Yukiin seated in a deeper chamber of his personal laboratory pouring out another cup and watching the escaping heat struggle and choke out in the midst of his oppressive chill. Only himself and Osuteno were welcome parties in this place, also the only parties who wouldn’t be concerned with a bit of venom as far as he knew but he supposed other Revenants could intrude without harm as well, although as the junior he was typically retrieving and bringing things rather than bringing his superior down to his own workstation. He detested the word and the title and insistently scratched it out of all paperwork brought to him, to become something like that would be to admit failure and he had no such thoughts to entertain - failure was a bright flame that would catch anything you touched to it, even a thought.
In this land of frost and flowers no flame could survive.
Yukiin groaned, pushing the earthy fluid to his lips with no pleasure as his fingers searched documents on the desk in front of him like eyeless worms skittering from the light, the newest cadaver in front of him being a sight only for the most detached and depraved of humanity...so pretty much only medical shinobi. He’d learned rather quickly that things that were depraved and unsightly caught the eyes of the medical staff like a jewel caught a raven’s, largely because what he was doing down here was uniquely horrific and they must’ve seen something in learning how to treat an entirely new kind of wound. These people were already dead but in order to conduct experiments on matters of the soul he needed to use living things and the warmth of hot blood and fresh, ragged, breath while he tried to operate on animals had become increasingly intolerable.
The dead were quiet and cold, he preferred it that way.
“Name redacted, age 22, blood type A+, chakra sensitive, no medically significant aberrations, bloodline recessive…” Yukiin muttered to himself, reading off the paper that his digits returned to him like faithful hounds. The corpse had already undergone the process of having several transplants put into it from the corpses of some wild prey that had already been removed from his space and was taking to the dead flesh slowly...but it was taking. Several iciciles marked with sealing marks that had been foreign to the doctor not that long ago now didn’t even register to him as the dangerous Fuuinjutsu it was, these kinds of concerns about ‘old forbidden dark magic’ had been relegated to the part of his brain that cared about jaywalking and public smoking laws...that is to say, it was impossible to determine if he even remembered these things were wrong.
The ice guided the flow of the white, messy, chakra that even he could see without the assistance of eyeglass or Doujutsu, but that was because it wasn’t exactly chakra...to call the height of his research anything definitive would be wrong.
Dregs. They were called dregs. Something...abyssal in the soul, and thus the chakra, of the living that either had not previously existed before the hand of a man reached through to extract it or hadn’t been noticed before this particular man saw it. Energy, spiritual or physical, was a thing that by its nature was hot and vibrant, it moved and flowed and lived independent of a being but when combined with a vessel it became an animating force. Reanimation was performed using such principles, forcing the animus of chakra into something that no longer contained it and reactivating the vessels that had previously housed a foreign animus...but what had been there prior?
Dregs. They were always there, dead or alive, like the heavy sediment left behind by water running through a riverbed and they rebuked the concepts of the animus’ warmth, seemingly repulsed by it. When energy coursed through the flesh it was a flame and it kept the dregs at bay, the offspring it produced was too small and insignificant to be noticed and while the being lived it was impossible to notice but straddling the boundary between life and death...glimpses could be seen and once Yukiin saw it, well, that was it.
When you find something you don’t understand, you seek to correct that second part.
In the corpse in front of him were these unknown things, crystallizing and liquifying and generally regarding physical and chemical laws as curt and unwelcome suggestions. The corpse took to them well and filled with the substance as the old pathways of chakra, blood, nerve, and the like were flooded and hardened over as the doctor passed his hand over his work. The direction of chakra, and thus warmth, caused the material to shirk and condense, hardening immediately at the application to solidify its most external layer to make its work visible to the naked eye. It could, in time, revert but so long as Yukiin was tampering with it things would stay easily workable and chemically compliant. It had been...difficult to get this far without knowing that, to say the least.
“The dregs have reformed the internal pathways of the corpse, no organs are present, no separation between the systems, as expected animal dregs do not properly fill the corpse with sufficient animus to return to function. Cross species dreg usage has been reconfirmed as ineffective for animation, only sufficient for sustenance.”
He spoke aloud, recording equipment shaking quietly from the boughs above as it captured and encoded his words. The coffee had run its course through him and he held out his hand over the corpse, a tendril of ice churning from the air and cutting into a vein as the blood pooled out and was also crystallized. It was liquified, recrystallized, liquified, recrystallized, liquified, recrystallized...over and over rapidly as the warmth was extracted and pushed to the outside atmosphere until it appeared all the blood and chakra had been extinguished before the crystalline substance shattered upon the body like a broken vase with the last threads of chakra burnt out. The dregs churned out from it and infused themselves in the body, bringing vital animus as Yukiin kept his cup in one hand and the bled hand moved back to his body with his white claws erupting forth.
“Resuming human dreg tests, seals remain effective on my body enabling the extraction of dregs once the temperature of any chakra-containing fluid or flesh is reduced to something near or perhaps impossibly below absolute zero, absence of seals produce no result. Dreg animus in the human and chakra sensitive subject should begin shortly.”
Yukiin glanced at the markings carved into his skin, the foreign things that had been drawn out from some textbook that Osuteno probably killed a man for since its contents were that extra special kind of forbidden that entire lineages would die to protect. Thankfully he hadn’t had to kill anyone for research materials, plenty of people died naturally in the line of duty and were useless once organs had been extracted and other useful materials had been doled out to the other Revenants. These hand me down scraps were perfect for his work as he had no intention of becoming something like them anyways, if he was going to be better than he needed to be able to work with more ethical materials.
This wasn’t a body anymore, it was just scraps, to call it inhumane would require a very generous definition of humanity and while, as was covered earlier, it was not work for the faint of heart or the non-medical it was certainly not monstrous...only the products were.
The one big kink he’d yet to work out was that dreg animation seemed to...create issues with the living, such as himself. Yukiin tilted his head, scanning the area to reconfirm for a fifth of sixth time that nobody else was around and that his senior hadn’t snuck in to watch him work, before turning back to the gurney with the body on it that was lifting itself. There wasn’t anything separating him from the subject, a shinobi didn’t need those kinds of handicaps, so once the new lifeform lifted itself and the tendrils of white erupted from it to lash out at him he responded swiftly.
“Dreg animation successful, typical results…” He sighed, talons cutting through the assailing limbs and through the originating body in several swift, brutal, swings that left chunks to fall to the floor before Yukiin stepped out. One claw found a button on the wall which he pushed unceremoniously as the floor produced several small flame jets, puppetry designs he’d rigged up while tampering with his other hobby, that engulfed the creature as its body tried to mend itself. Once the heat and chakra came into play that whole ‘fixing yourself’ game came to a sharp conclusion, one major weakness of the discovery and one major question he had to ask to whoever felt this concept was worth defending.
“...seriously, who died defending this? It's so hard to work with but so easy to kill...without a human element and a living mind to control it, dreg animation is susceptible to any energy source...pretty sure a sunny day would put this things down…”
Speaking of that he removed his finger from the button as the trailing net of kugutsu strings produced fell apart and the jets sputtered out, his eyes moving to the cabinet of extracted brains currently soaking in chakra enriched water. Every time he went that far the thing came out worse, much harder to kill, much smarter, and much more dangerous so he wasn’t ever able to really ask it questions like ‘Have you retained consciousness?’ and ‘Who are you?’ and ‘On a scale of 1 to 10 how likely would you be to recommend conversion into an undead monster?’ but if you never ventured...you never gained.
With a human mind guiding it the thing became much more like a Revenant, shuffling the life and showing a flicker of intelligence, but brains were a much rarer resource and wasting them to get the same result again where he gets attacked in his office by an immortal monster that shrugs off flame jets had been labeled by his superiors as ‘wildly and stupidly reckless.’ In his defense, it did die...eventually. It just required a bit more effort than normal and put him on bed rest for several broken bones for a couple days but Yukiin wasn’t stupid, he wouldn’t repeat the same mistake...more than seventeen times.
He nursed a healing break in one of his elbows, looking at the claw marks in the wall with a flinch of memory from lucky number seventeen...yeah that one had been pretty bad...the medic was now familiar with what it felt like to have your arm snapped and pulled completely out of its socket just to have the rest of its arm bones crushed under heel. Thankfully when he succeeded at his research the damage to his body would be largely irrelevant, these things healed easily and once he was one the permanent damage he sustained would be eradicated….hopefully, there was always a margin of error when it came to predictions of this nature.
The shinobi groaned dejectedly, claws sheathing themselves back into place and his self-inflicted wound glowing momentarily with threads of green that stitched back the flesh without overtly tampering with the recovery process. It was one of those things Osuteno seemed insistent on, that he not actually heal himself despite the capacity to easily do so and simply guide his body in its own recovery in order to prevent potential complications and burn through his available cell’s lifespans before his time but really considering the nature of his work...the suggestion struck him as stupid. He was going to kill himself anyways and at that point all the rules about his body’s chemical limitations were sort of out the window, once you were more chakra than flesh you could do a hell of a lot to tamper with the boundaries of living inconvenience.
But it did give him practice and his fusion of kugutsu and medical techniques had become something of a unique trait of his, marking his work with the visible chakra stitching that came to be his hallmark. A hallmark he had to set to use as he recovered the scraps of flesh and chakra slop on the floor, strings lashing out to reassemble the remnants of this project and trying to make it at least appear to be humanoid again. It was a grotesque thing but it was an instructive thing as well, once you knew the kind of damage that could be inflicted on someone you became very familiar with how to fix it after all and there were only two ways to learn that - inflicted on you or someone else.
Yukiin was firmly in the latter camp and he made no effort to hide that predisposition.
Eventually, however, self inflicted damage became part of the work and the longer that phase lasted the more agitated he was becoming. How long had he been stuck with this rejects? Weeks, at least. Getting this far only to hit this kind of roadblock was unacceptable, so long as the subjects were separated from his consciousness there was no way for him to make judgements about their status or to gauge how well complete the transformation had been beyond the physical. Physically they displayed the signs he was looking for and the signs of previous Revenant projects, being able to integrate ‘hearts’ into themselves in order to extend their own lifespan such that a fatal blow would simply terminate one rather than the creature as a whole, but they were still so...feral.
This was likely the result of being given subpar shinobi however, most of them were killed in the line of duty or from mundane illnesses and represented the larger number of them which were never going to be capable of a successful transformation in the first place. The research provided to him and annotated by his own hand made it quite clear there were certain prerequisites to meet in the process, if you were too weak then the process would fail utterly but there were several other stages along the way which showed improvement but incompletion. Unless he planned on finding someone more sturdy and killing them himself there was really no way to verify with absolute certainty that his conversion process would function...the only person he had faith in the ability to make this transformation were other Revenants and himself.
Self inflicted damage was the price of progress, wasn’t it?
Yukiin directed a snap of ice at the door, barricading it as the spreading crystalline eruptions overtook his work space and crawled along the walls until he was certain that no sound and no foreign intruder would be able to interfere. Now was the time to do something reckless, the same kind of recklessness that had gotten him here in the first place, and a slow, deliberate, carving of markings into his own flesh was not the part that he thought would require soundproofing...that would be the part where he affixed himself to his own operating table and began the process of his own medical death. Thankfully cloning yourself was a pretty baseline shinobi skill and greatly assisted with the labor of arranging everything and cannibalizing his available materials. He would need dregs…a lot of dregs...and thankfully there were a lot of bodies to rip them out of in this place.
The absence of living parties available to him beyond the preserved brains complicated this process but even fractions of a human could contain chakra and spiritual residue to pull apart, though it was a gross misuse of them for such a crude purpose that Yukiin was certain he’d hear about if the process failed...well, actually if it failed then he’d be dead and that wouldn’t be much of a concern at that point.
The flow of the white, crystalline, pulsing stuff was something that he’d grown used to be suffusing it into his own body was a process that he approached slowly, choosing to work with a part that he could lose first by freezing his left arm first. The flow of dregs into the swiftly slain limb, sustained by nothing as any type of chakra to preserve the limb would endanger the process, didn’t feel like much of anything as the limb was no longer returning nervous signals but through the eyes of his puppet he could observe the process as the limb twisted and morphed, warmth burning and fizzling out as the useless veins, nerves, etc. were replaced with the network of white.
Yes, he imagined this would be excruciating if the limb was able to feel such a thing but it did mean that the sound proofing might be unneeded as the process would be painless. The limb didn’t respond to any commands from the rest of his body since it was, well, dead but the fact that it retained its shape and form gave him great hope.
One leg followed, then another, and finally the remaining arm as the core organic components of the shinobi remained steadily beating and unaware of the slow, deliberate, calculated self destruction occurring to its now unreachable limbs. The puppet he’d been using crumbled to the floor but the clone he’d created persisted, as intended, for as long as he could manipulate his chakra then it would sustain itself and now it would have to do the grizzly task of working on the more...critical pieces of himself.
A swift slice through the chest as Yukiin gritted his teeth, allowing the pain to crash against him like a hot wave before the much more serious pain of a clone shoving a large bundle of dregs into his chest made that little cut seem like a scraped knee...and in response his teeth cracked under the pressure of his clenched jaw, the small bits of bone scrapped off on impact falling out of his mouth as the blood made a similar exit. No chakra anesthetic was available for such a thing and actual anesthetic toxins would be rendered ineffective anyways, so the process of dying on a operating table was left to be experienced in all of its vibrant glory. Organ failure, one by one, as the chill of the grave crept through him and the clone maintained a constant blast of cold and ice to continually pull away any heat in its path so that they could contain uninterrupted. It was an efficient system but admiring it was difficult when you were the victim of its ruthless talent.
That only left one thing now, the rest of his body had fallen slack and dead, unresponsive to his head which was a vital component needed to oversee the clone’s operation but now he’d have to lose even that much.
“This is Byakko, Yukiin. This is not a goodbye, I choose this freely and have the upmost faith in my abilities but if any part of my mind is damaged in this process I want the record to show that those squid and lady woodcuts aren’t mine and I’m only holding onto them for a friend. To everyone who knows this me, today is the new one’s birthday.”
His clone stepped forward, pressing a cold palm to his head as the press of frost and the insertion of more of the white, reanimating, chilling ichor flooded through the slice in his neck it had also inflicted. This time the pain was...negligible. The freezing in his brain made that very very hard to discern, along with shapes, colors, and cognition in general. As the process spread upwards he focused until the last on maintaining as much chakra as he could in the clone before it eventually vanished, either because he could no longer see or because he could no longer maintain it but thankfully dying did not require assistance….that part just sort of...happened.
It didn’t take very long from his perspective but the frost in the room had time to melt, flowers had time to wilt, and his body had time to feel...stiff. His thoughts came before any of his senses but they were scattered, muddled, like he was trying to regather an entire lifetime of considerations in a few moments but they came flooding back easily as the sensation of unwelcome warmth came over him. It was all around him, like a ceaseless current pressed to his skin...his skin...right...that was probably the thing protecting him now….
Wait. Yukiin’s eyes flickered open, the steady gaze of the world coming back to him as his ears buzzed and returned to function and his nose picked up...well not much to be frank. Still, they all worked as he came too and touched his head by instinct, though he felt nothing like the familiar sensation of skin to skin contact...well, he wasn’t dead...well technically dead as he could sense no pulse but that was sort of the intention.
He turned his hands over and his eyes scanned his form which was exactly as he had left it, he certainly hadn’t gotten any darker and it wasn’t possible to get any paler, but a swift claw to the wrist revealed the bubbling white dreg fluid which reacted poorly to the outside exposure and sent a feedback sensation back to his brain that was pain-adjacent. The markings in his skin had faded for the most part and those that were left when he awoke were swiftly regenerated away, leaving the body of the freshly created undead unscathed.
Osuteno talked like he was going to return to the world of the living with more...fanfare and consequence but he really didn’t feel all that different. His emotional range seemed unphased but really that only meant one thing - a success. An unprecedented success...although he still didn’t know how long he’d laid there medically, legally, and probably spiritually dead before he came to but he probably needed to give a report at this point.
“Addendum - dying is an unpleasant experience, please remind me not to do it again.”
[WC 4044]