Konoha: The Absolute Justice of the Uchiha.

Chapter 409 Immunosuppressive Factors

Neji looked at it for about ten seconds, then turned his head and whispered something in Ikezumi's ear.

His voice was so low that the sea breeze almost blew it away.

"His meridian walls have ring-shaped thickenings."

The distribution location is exactly the same as the traces of healing after the Divine Tree cells were eroded, which we have seen in the Konoha Hospital archives.

The thickening has stabilized and is likely scar tissue formed after the rejection reaction has ended.

Chakra flow is slightly slower than normal, but it doesn't affect basic functions.

After listening, Ikezumi gently turned his cane on the sandy ground, then looked up at Akamatsu Kinpei.

"What's the frequency of that sound coming from your bones? Can you hum it?"

Akamatsu Kinpei paused for a moment, then subconsciously looked back at his house, as if checking if any neighbors were listening.

Then he turned back, opened his mouth, and what came out of his throat was not a note, but a very low, low humming sound squeezed from deep within his chest.

Buzzing—the rhythm is not fast, very even, and the interval between each buzz is exactly equal, like an invisible ruler measuring time.

He stopped after making a dozen or so buzzing sounds, and his Adam's apple bobbed up and down.

"This is it."

It's always the same rhythm, never changing.

Chi Quan reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a stopwatch, and pressed the button.

He silently counted a few seconds in his mind to the rhythm that Akamatsu Kinpei had just hummed, and then looked at the stopwatch reading.

"Seven three." He put the stopwatch back in his pocket. "What's left in your body isn't a disease, it's the metabolic byproducts of the Divine Tree cells."

These metabolic products deposit in your bone marrow cavity, forming a tiny, non-diffusing crystal that still resonates with the flow of chakra in your body at the mechanical vibration level. The resonance frequency is 7.3 Hz, which is exactly the frequency of infrasound.

You think you heard a sound, but you didn't actually hear it—you felt it.

The crystals in your bone marrow cavity resonate with the flow of chakra when you turn over or your heartbeat changes. This resonance is transmitted to your inner ear via bone conduction, where your brain translates it into sound.

Akamatsu Kinpei opened his mouth, then closed it again.

He squatted down, picked up the scraper that had fallen to the ground, and scraped it hard on the bottom of the boat.

Barnacle shell fragments splashed onto his face, but he didn't wipe them off.

"So it's not a hallucination." His voice was much lower than before, not from lowering his voice, but from the natural downward drop in his voice as his emotions subsided.

"It's not an illusion."

It's a physical phenomenon.

"Can you get it off?" Akamatsu Kinpei stuck the scraper into a crack in the wooden planks at the bottom of the boat, stood up and looked at Ikezumi.

At that moment, his eyes were no longer complicated—only one thing remained: hope.

It was a very pure kind of hope, the kind that comes when someone finally tells you that you're not crazy and that the thing really exists, after you've been tormented to the bone by a strange voice for three years.

Chi Quan looked at him and remained silent for about three seconds.

In those three seconds, the sea breeze carried the sound of waves crashing against the rocks below the cliff, the sound of splashing water spreading evenly across the entire cliff like white noise.

"No," Chi Quan said. "The crystals in the bone marrow cavity are too small and too deep. Removing them surgically would damage the bone marrow."

However, the crystals will not spread and will not affect your health.

"It will just stay there." He paused, switched the cane to his left hand, and reached into his medical kit with his right hand to pull out a blood collection device and a vacuum blood collection tube. "But I can use your blood to stop the thing that makes this crystal from hurting more people."

The crystals in your body come from something you came into contact with in this sea three years ago.

That thing is still under the nameless island twelve kilometers away, and it's stronger than it was three years ago.

You have antibodies to this substance in your blood—you are the only person in the entire ninja world to have naturally recovered from infection with the Divine Tree cells.

Your antibody data can help us find its weaknesses.

Akamatsu Kinpei rolled up his sleeves and stretched out his rough forearm, covered in countless old scars from fishing lines, in front of Ikezumi.

His arms were covered with white marks, some as thin as a hair, others so wide that it was clear a lot of blood must have flowed when they were cut in.

"Spit it out," he said, emphasizing the word as if he were spitting out something he had been holding in for three years along with the word from his throat.

Chi Quan disinfected him, gave him injections, and drew blood.

The blood collection tubes were filled with dark red blood; there were three tubes, each containing five milliliters.

The blood draw process took less than three minutes, and Akamatsu Kinpei had a small piece of cotton wool and a bandage on his arm.

He stretched his arms and watched as Chi Quan put the three vials of blood into three labeled sealed bags in the medical kit.

"That thing," Akamatsu Kinpei suddenly said, "when I encountered it at sea three years ago, it wasn't underwater."

It is in the water, but not on the seabed—it is in the middle.

About ten meters from the sea surface, I was chasing a school of skipjack tuna that day. The school of fish carried me eastward for about four or five nautical miles.

When we got near that nameless island, the seawater began to glow.

It wasn't the sun shining; it was light coming up from the seabed. The color was strange; it wasn't blue, but white, a very, very white, like moonlight being poured into the sea.

Then I started to have a headache—not in my temples, but in the back of my head and along my spine.

After the headache came that sound, that buzzing sound.

After that, I don't know anything else.

"The white glow of seawater is a visual effect of chakra spreading at a high concentration in the water," Izumi said while tidying up his medical kit, without looking up. "The whiter the color, the higher the chakra concentration."

The pain you described in the back of your head and spine corresponds to the brainstem and spinal cord—the central nervous system.

The chakra of the Divine Tree cells has a special affinity for nerve tissue, and it preferentially erodes the nervous system.

During the time you were floating in the sea, a high concentration of Divine Tree Chakra entered your body through your skin and mucous membranes, spreading along the nervous system to the central nervous system.

You didn't die because your immune system initiated a rejection response before the divine tree cells completed their full invasion.

"In other words, that thing is afraid of our immune system," said Kinpei Akamatsu.

He wasn't an educated man, but he had fished at sea for thirty years, and he had his own way of understanding things. That understanding, based on survival experience, was sometimes more direct and accurate than the theories in books.

"Yes." Chi Quan zipped up the medical kit. "I'm worried about my immunity."

You survived because it was afraid of your immune system.

Akamatsu Kinpei nodded, bent down to pick up the scraper, and squatted back down under the boat to start scraping the barnacles.

His scraping motion was the same as before, but his back looked a little straighter.

The straight-line distance from Poche Island to the unnamed island is twelve kilometers.

The speedboat, hidden in the fog, took less than half an hour.

The speedboat was driven by a young Kirigakure chunin with dark skin and few words. He only said a few words when we reached the shore: "The reef camp is in this direction. Walk north along the reef for 300 meters and you will see the camp's signal light."

Note the tide times; the cave entrance is revealed at low tide and submerged at high tide, requiring diving to enter or exit.

The shape of the unnamed island, when viewed from the sea, does indeed resemble that of a nautical chart—a crooked half-moon, with the crescent's arc facing outwards towards the sea, and the inner arc forming cliffs. The seawater below the cliffs is much darker than the surrounding water, indicating that it is a deep-water area.

The island is covered with dense vegetation, including shrubs and vines common in subtropical regions. A small hill rises in the center of the island, bare of gray-white rocks, resembling a bald head from a distance.

The temporary camp of the Fog Shadows was set up on a group of reefs on the south side of the nameless island.

At low tide, the reef group reveals a relatively flat platform, while at high tide, two-thirds of the platform is submerged, leaving only a few of the tallest reefs exposed above the water.

The tents at the campsite were made of waterproof canvas, draped between several rocks and secured to the crevices with nails and ropes. The splashes from the waves hitting the rocks at the edge of the campsite occasionally landed on the tent fabric.

The signal light was a red LED light powered by a storage battery, hanging on the highest rock in the camp, emitting a faint red glow on the sea at dusk.

Three members of the Mist Shadows were already waiting in the camp.

The leader of the dark forces was a tall man wearing a mask. The mask was the standard white with blue patterns worn by the Mist Shadow Dark Forces. There was a crack in the left eye area, which was taped up with tape, and the edge of the tape was peeling up.

When he introduced himself, he only used the code name "Chao".

"You've arrived." Chao stood on the camp platform, the waves behind him hitting less than a meter from his heels, white foam splashing around his boots. "Something's been wrong in the cave since this morning."

Every two hours or so, a low-frequency vibration would be heard from inside the cave—it wasn't an earthquake, and the seismograph couldn't detect it.

It's a chakra vibration, with a very low frequency but a large amplitude. When it vibrates, all the seabirds on the island will take flight.

The most recent one was an hour ago.

When you come from the sea, you should be able to see that there are no birds on the island.

Kai glanced at the small hill on the island.

There wasn't a single bird on the mountaintop.

Not only on the mountaintop, but the forests on the island were also unusually quiet—there were no birdsong, no insect chirping, and even the sound of the wind rustling through the leaves was lower than normal, as if the island itself was holding its breath.

"Can we enter the cave now?" Kai asked.

"There's still an hour until low tide." Chao glanced at his diving watch. "After the tide goes out, the entrance will be exposed for about half an hour, and then the tide will come back in and the entrance will be submerged again."

To enter, one must arrive at the entrance before low tide, enter during low tide, and exit before high tide.

If you can't get out in time, there is an air layer in the cave, but the passage is narrow, and you may be in danger if you encounter an undercurrent when you dive out.

During our first reconnaissance mission, two of our men encountered a strong current at the entrance and nearly got swept into the sea.

Chi Quan squatted down on the reef, opened his medical kit, and took out a blood sample and a portable chakra waveform analyzer that he had brought from Pochi Island.

The analyzer is about the size of a hardcover book, with a waterproof plastic casing and an anti-glare film covering the screen.

He injected Akamatsu Kinpei's blood sample into the analyzer's sample slot, and at the same time, he retrieved the waveform data of the two chakra bursts on the island provided by the Hidden Mist Anbu, comparing the two sets of data on the same screen.

The analyzer emits a soft beep when it starts working, and then the waveform curve on the screen begins to jump.

The waveform above is the second chakra burst waveform on the island detected by the Hidden Mist Anbu. The amplitude is extremely high, with a low-frequency fundamental wave of about 7.3 Hz. The waveform characteristics are highly consistent with the main root chakra waveform that Izumi saw underground in Chiyu Valley.

The waveform below is the secondary waveform generated when the antibody binds to the Shenshu cell antigen, which is isolated from the blood of Akamatsu Kinpei. The peak frequency is around 12.8 Hz. The waveform is sharp and irregular, which contrasts sharply with the stable and smooth waveform above.

"The difference between the antibody waveform and the antigen waveform is significant." Chi Quan pointed to the two curves on the screen. "This means that there is a significant difference in immune recognition between the antibodies in Akamatsu Kinpei's body and the sacred tree cells in this container on the island."

This is a good thing—it means that the Divine Tree cell line that Kabuto used when making this container may have been genetically modified and is not exactly the same as the Divine Tree tissue in Chiba Valley.

The modified cell lines are less compatible with the human immune system, making them more susceptible to rejection.

"That means this container is more vulnerable to the immune system than we thought." Tian Tian squatted by the pool, watching the waveforms on the screen. Her eyes reflected two small red dots in the red light of the camp.

"Not only that, but I'm even more afraid." Chi Quan switched the analyzer to another interface, which displayed a concentration estimation model of immunosuppressive factors. "Based on the intensity of the chakra burst detected by the Hidden Mist Dark Side, the density of the Divine Tree cells in this container is at least twice that of the main root of Pheasant Valley."

Maintaining such a high density of Divine Tree cells requires a large amount of immunosuppressive factors—I estimate that the turnover cycle of immunosuppressive factors in its body will be shorter than that of the subjects in the culture tanks underground in Pheasant Valley.

The subjects in Chiba Valley needed to be supplemented with immunosuppressive factors every four days, and this container may need to be replenished every thirty-six to forty-eight hours.

Either he implanted an organ that automatically synthesizes immunosuppressive factors into the container, or he had to personally inject the container every two days.

"An organ that automatically synthesizes immunosuppressive factors," Neji suddenly spoke, his voice low but his enunciation heavy, each word as if squeezed out from between his teeth, "Kabuto conducted experiments on this in Chiba Valley."

He implanted a gland-like structure made from the root tissue of the Divine Tree into the White Zetsu. This gland can continuously secrete immunosuppressive factors, with the longest secretion cycle being seventy-two hours.

If he also implanted this gland inside the container's body, then this gland would be the Achilles' heel of the entire container system.