Konoha: The Absolute Justice of the Uchiha.

Chapter 397 Muscle Memory

The grayish-white coating on his glasses had begun to crack, just like the fine cracks on his knife blade.

Interwoven, spiderweb-like cracks.

He looked at Kai through the cracks and remained silent for about three seconds.

"Yes," Chi Quan said, "I was lying to you."

Kai's lips moved as if he wanted to say something, but Chi Quan stopped him.

"But it's not because I don't trust your ability to handle things." Chi Quan took off his glasses and wiped the lenses with the tattered hem of his white coat—this time he didn't wipe them clean, because there wasn't a clean spot on the hem of the white coat. After wiping them, the lenses became even more smudged. "It's because in that emergency situation, your brain needs to make the most important tactical decisions in the shortest amount of time."

If I told you that I was taking a standard neurostimulant and that I might experience cardiac arrest after the effects wore off, your brain would have some processing power occupied by this information, and your decision-making speed would slow down, even by just a fraction of a second, and the result might be different.

So I chose the option with the best decision-making efficiency—to lie to you.

This is my standard operating procedure as a medical ninja when triaging patients on the battlefield.

He put his glasses back on.

His glasses were fogged up, and everything in his vision was shrouded in a blurry, grayish-white halo, as if he were looking at the world through a frosted glass.

He saw that the expression on Kai's face was not anger, not blame, not heartache, but a very complex expression, one that rarely appeared on Kai's face, as if he had mixed up many emotions and didn't know what to do.

Tenten lay on the ground, her head resting on Neji's backpack, her right eye seeing Izumi.

Her lips moved slightly, and this time the words she uttered were clear—"Thank you."

Chi Quan squatted down and gently flipped over the wound above Tian Tian's left eye with the fingers of his right hand.

Neji had pressed the wound with a bandage, and the bleeding had temporarily stopped, but the skin at the edge of the wound was peeled back about three millimeters, revealing the red muscle tissue underneath.

Chi Quan gently pressed her finger on the edge of the wound. Tian Tian gasped, but she neither flinched nor cried out.

"It needs stitches," Chi Quan said. "If the eyelid wound is not treated properly, it may affect the function of the tear gland."

But there are no facilities for suturing right now, so I'll temporarily seal the wound with medical tape and then treat it properly when I get back to the base.

Neji, untie your bandages.

Neji untied the bandage from Tenten's head.

Chi Quan took a small silver metal tube out of his pocket, unscrewed the cap, and inside was a transparent gel-like substance.

He dipped his finger in the mixture and carefully applied it to the edges of Tiantian's wound. Then he aligned the two sides of the wound, pressed it down, and waited for about ten seconds.

The medical adhesive solidified quickly in the air, temporarily sealing the wound.

"Don't get it wet for two days." Chi Quan stood up, his body swaying slightly.

The pain in his left leg had returned—not a dull ache, but a sharp, persistent pain, like someone was drilling into his thigh bone with an awl.

His face was turning pale, his lips were turning purple, and cold sweat began to bead on his forehead.

The effects of the nerve stimulant were wearing off faster than he had anticipated, and his nervous system was beginning to experience a post-drug side effect.

Neji helped Izumi sit down.

The dark red mist in the bamboo forest was slowly dissipating.

The cracks in the ground stopped emitting smoke, and the half-meter subsidence also stopped.

The bamboo is still there, but the color of the bamboo leaves has begun to change—from emerald green to yellowish-green, from yellowish-green to light yellow, and from light yellow to withered yellow.

Within minutes, the leaves of 30,000 bamboo stalks changed color from life to death, as if time had been fast-forwarded in the bamboo forest, compressing the change of a season into just a few minutes.

Dead bamboo leaves began to fall, not one by one, but the entire bamboo forest was falling at the same time. Yellow, withered, and curled bamboo leaves fell like a huge, silent, golden snow from the bamboo tips, onto the ground, onto the White Zetsu statue, onto the still steaming cracks, and onto the heads, shoulders, and hands of the four people.

Neji reached out and took a bamboo leaf.

The bamboo leaf fell into his palm, so light it was almost weightless. The edges of the leaf were withered, but the veins were still there, one by one, clearly visible, like a miniature, still, vein map that had completed its mission.

"They're dead," Neji said softly, as if speaking to the bamboo leaves in his palm. "Thirty thousand bamboo stalks—"

They're all dead.

We won.

Kai didn't speak.

He stood outside the bamboo forest, watching the dying bamboo grove, watching the yellowing bamboo leaves fall from the air, watching the still white statues fall and shatter one by one, spreading into a pile of grayish-white fragments on the ground.

The green flames in his eyes had gone out—not because they had lost something to burn, but because the battle was over and the flames could rest.

His fist loosened, and the blood on his fingers had dried into dark red scabs. He slowly straightened his fingers one by one, his movements very slow, because each time he straightened a finger, the joint would make a slight "crack" sound.

"We won," Kay said.

He didn't speak with an exclamation; he spoke with a statement, as if confirming a fact—not confirming that the bamboo forest was dead, not confirming that the main root was broken, but confirming that his students were still alive.

Tian Tian is still alive, her head is wrapped in bandages, her right eye is open, and her lips are moving. She is speaking to Chi Quan in a very soft voice.

Neji was still alive, kneeling on the ground, holding a withered bamboo leaf in his hand. The bloodstains at the corners of his eyes had dried into dark red shells, but the pupils in his eyes were clear.

Chi Quan was still alive, sitting next to him. His face was pale, his lips were purple, and his hands were trembling, but he was still alive, his eyes were open, and he was still using his medical ninja instincts to treat Tenten's wounds. He was still saying in the calmest tone, "Don't get it wet for two days."

The bamboo forest is dead.

The main root of the sacred tree broke.

Fifteen miles away, the divine tree sapling underground in Pheasant Feather Valley lost its energy connection with the main trunk at that moment.

It's still there, but it can no longer receive chakra from the depths of the earth.

It will wither—not today, not tomorrow, it may take weeks, it may take months, but it will wither.

Because its root—the root of the divine tree cultivated by Kabuto using tissue culture—was connected to the main root, which had been severed 103 meters underground by a bespectacled medical ninja using a cracked sword.

Neji gently placed the bamboo leaf in his palm on the ground.

Bamboo leaves fell to the ground, blending into the thick carpet of bamboo leaves.

Neji stood up and patted the dirt off his knees.

His legs were still weak, the side effects of the soldier pills were raging in his body, his chakra was exhausted, and his body was like a faucet that had been wrung out.

But he can still stand up.

He can still walk.

He can still recite "Tian Tian".

Every day, I would sit on his back, my chin resting on his shoulder, breathing evenly. It wasn't that I was asleep; my body had finally entered a relaxed state. All my muscles were relaxed, and every cell was greedily and unreservedly absorbing this hard-won tranquility, like parched earth absorbing rainwater.

It took four days to get back to Konoha.

It's not because of the distance—from Pheasant Valley to Konoha, it normally takes two days on foot.

However, two of the four people couldn't walk normally. After two days of bandages wrapped around Tiantian's head, tissue fluid started to seep out. Kai's ribs developed a fracture after the Eight Gates Formation. With every step he took, he could feel something in the left side of his chest hurting along with his heartbeat.

Neji was able to walk, and the side effects of the soldier pills subsided by the second day, but his chakra recovered extremely slowly, like a well that had been drained of water, waiting for the groundwater to seep out little by little.

Chi Quan stopped walking. He started to have a fever the next afternoon, and his temperature climbed to 39.6 degrees Celsius by evening. He was talking nonsense.

Kai carried him on his back, with Chi Quan's glasses hanging around Kai's neck, the lenses fogged up and wet.

"Thirty-nine degrees six." Neji removed his hand from Izumi's forehead and put the thermometer back into his medical kit. "The side effects of the nerve stimulant are at least thirty percent greater than the standard dose."

He told me he had improved the recipe—I should have asked him when he improved it.

"He made improvements last year, and that's what he told you too." Kai didn't turn around. His steps were steady on the gravel road, each step as precise as if measured with a ruler, because he was afraid of bumping the person on his back. "Last year, he stayed in the lab for two whole months and hardly ever came out."

I brought him food three times, and each time he left it at the door to cool down.

"That's because he's modifying another formula." Neji zipped up the medical kit, the sound of the metal zipper ringing crisply in the evening air, like a tiny bell. "Last year, he was researching tissue culture medium for the Divine Tree cells. Kabuto's materials mentioned this culture medium, and Izumi is trying to deduce Kabuto's formula."

He probably never even started developing a plan to improve the neurostimulant; he just had a framework in mind but never had time to conduct experiments.

Kai remained silent for a moment.

There was a fallen tree by the roadside, its trunk lying across the middle of the road, its bark riddled with holes from insects.

Kai didn't go around it; he lifted his leg and stepped over the tree trunk. As he stepped over, his body tilted slightly, and Chi Quan on his back let out a muffled murmur, as if his body had been moved in his sleep.

"So what's going on with him now?" Kai asked.

Neji did not answer immediately.

He looked at Chi Quan's hand hanging on Kai's shoulder—the fingers were very white, the base of the nails was a little purple, and there was a very thin old scar on the ring finger, he didn't know if it was cut by a scalpel or by blood from a glass instrument during an experiment.

The hand trembled slightly from the feverish body temperature; it wasn't a tremor from the cold, but a tremor from the nervous system entering a disordered state after excessive excitement.

"The pharmacological mechanism of neurostimulants is to forcibly activate neural conduction pathways," Neji said slowly, as if reciting a medical text he didn't want to recall. "Nerve conduction in normal people has an upper limit. Once this limit is exceeded, the nervous system will automatically reduce conduction efficiency to protect itself."

The neurostimulant forcibly shuts down this protective mechanism, allowing nerve conduction to operate at maximum power without protection.

There were no problems during the duration of the drug's effects—his nerve cells could withstand short periods of overload.

The problem is that after the drug's effects wear off, the protective mechanism doesn't recover immediately; it takes a while.

During this period of lag, his nervous system was completely unprotected; any stimulus—pain, temperature, sound, light—was amplified several times over.

So he has a fever now because...

"His body is recalibrating its nervous system."

Fever is a byproduct of the calibration process. Neji looked up at the sky. The sun had already set below the distant ridgeline, and the clouds on the horizon were burned into stripes of orange-red and dark purple, like a huge, still glowing striped cloth spread across the sky. "If his immune system doesn't have any other problems during the fever, it should break down in about two or three days."

After the fever subsides, it's time to rest.

During his recovery, he was unable to use his chakra, as his nervous system could not withstand the extra burden caused by the flow of chakra.

During this time, he will act like an ordinary person without chakra.

Kai lifted Chi Quan up a little so that his head would be more comfortable resting on his shoulder.

Chi Quan's breathing was hot, and each breath carried a medicinal smell—not the smell of Western medicine, but the kind of medicinal smell found in traditional Chinese medicine shops, a mixture of herbs and tree bark, somewhat bitter, with a slightly sweet aftertaste.

Those were medicines he had prepared himself, which he had packed in a small cloth bag in his medical kit before setting off, just in case.

What if it really happens?

"How many days will it take to recover?" Kai asked.

"I don't know." Neji slung his medical kit over his shoulder, stood up, and stretched his shoulders. "The side effects of nerve stimulants vary from person to person."

I've seen people fully recover three days after the medication wore off, and I've also seen people still have hand tremors three months later.

He's a medical ninja; he understands his own nervous system better than others. He should know this.

"He knows what he's doing." Kai repeated the three words, his voice carrying an indescribable meaning—not sarcasm, not helplessness, but more like a deep, habitual, natural trust, as natural as breathing, mixed with a lingering worry. "He always knows what he's doing."

She walked next to Neji every day, her head still wrapped in bandages. The medical tape above her left eye was changed on the third day; Ikezumi changed it for her before she developed a fever.

When he was changing the wound, Chi Quan's hands started to tremble, but the moment he squeezed the medical glue onto the wound, his hands suddenly stopped trembling and became as steady as a calibrated precision instrument.

I ask him every day how he does it, and he says it's muscle memory, then his hands start shaking again.

"Has Senior Ikezumi used nerve stimulants before?" Tenten asked Neji.