As a long-time occupant of Sakura's clone Tsubaki, Orochimaru was no stranger to the unique quirks of the curvy body he now inhabited. For months, he had travelled alongside the newborn clone, encouraging her to wield her powers, noting what made her tick and which drugs enhanced her innate abilities.
Once he was satisfied with the wealth of experimental data he accumulated while she was under observation, he had finally used the Living Corpse Reincarnation Jutsu to discard his old body and hijack hers, thus obtaining the infinitely evolving physique that he had always dreamed of, in his quest for life eternal…
…but nothing could ever have prepared him for the hellish scenery unfolding before his eyes.
In theory, taking over Sakura's comatose body should have been all too easy. There would have been no contest of wills, no back-and-forth tug of war over the right to pilot this meatsuit, and yet, mere instants after Orochimaru had melded with her helpless body, he had found his own consciousness swept into a maelstrom of darkness before being spat out onto a battlefield that seemed to have been dragged straight from the depths of hell.
"What… is this…?"
The sky had turned the colour of blood, and the moon was stained a deep crimson. Every colour other than red seemed to have bled from existence in this inner world, leaving behind only black and white. Looking around, Orochimaru found himself standing at the foot of a fortified hill, surrounded by hundreds of black, shrieking shades rushing past him and up the slope, cursing and screaming.
"All women…" Orochimaru noted to himself.
"Not quite," came a rather familiar voice. "My other self."
Orochimaru wheeled around to find himself nose to nose with another copy of himself.
"You must be the chakra that was taken from me, all those years ago in the Forest of Death," he said, casually giving his doppelganger a quick inspection. "Unlike those shadows, you appear to have conserved your rationality."
"Indeed," the breast chakra imprint replied. "Chakra stolen by Sakura-kun retains the mark of its original owner, and that is what allows her to draw out its unique peculiarities... and commune with them."
Orochimaru immediately raised his guard.
Even if it was another him... or rather, because it was another him, then that could only mean this shade was utterly untrustworthy. He knew himself better than anybody else, and he would not have put it past this other Orochimaru to try and hijack his body in turn to escape this hellhole. Even if Sakura had not turned him to her side using her strange techniques, his other self was more than dangerous enough on his own!
"As you can see, Sakura-kun is quite busy at the moment," the chakra imprint went on, casting his gaze towards the hill's summit. "She bit off more than she could chew by taking in the breast chakra of hundreds of her enemies, and in her moment of weakness, the grudges sealed within her chest burst forth and tried to drag her down to hell with them... they are locked in an endless struggle for supremacy; that is why she will not awaken from her coma."
Without taking his eyes off his other self, Orochimaru glanced to the top of the hill, where five busty giantesses rampaged, stomping and punching and slashing and stabbing their way through the sea of shadows, snuffing them out as they came... but the defeated shades simply reformed at the foot of the hill, ready to ascend once more and take another stab at vengeance.
"Which means," Orochimaru said, his voice trailing off, "once I assimilate Sakura-kun into myself…"
"You, Main Body, will naturally become the target of their grudges," the chakra imprint explained. "Trapped inside this body until one side has pacified the other."
The chakra imprint fell silent, but his gaze remained fixed on Orochimaru's soul body, his golden eyes gleaming with hunger.
"How odd," the chakra imprint said silkily, his vertical slit pupils dilating. "There appears to be something off about you, Main Body…"
Orochimaru's eyes narrowed. His doppelganger was preparing to strike!
"Were I in your place, I would rethink what you're about to do," Orochimaru said coldly. "My powers are far greater than they were three years ago..."
"So they have, but you have grown soft, Main Body!" the chakra imprint sneered. "Look at yourself! You've been struck by Shisui's ultimate technique, and you haven't even realised it! So what if your powers have grown tenfold? My will to escape this prison is a hundredfold greater than yours!"
Orochimaru's mind reeled with the realisation that he had been duped as his entire worldview came crashing down around his ears. A few months earlier, he had been tracking Sasuke and Sakura, waiting for them to leave the safety of the village and exhaust themselves fighting the Akatsuki, so that he might finally take them for himself...
…but just as he had been about to claim his prize, a strange crow had climbed out of Uzumaki Naruto's mouth and stared him in the eye, placing him under a powerful genjutsu.
An engraved Kotoamatsukami from Shisui's missing eye, which he must have entrusted to Itachi before his death... encoded to react to Uchiha Sakura's Sharingan, should she ever join Sasuke in rebelling against the village. And because Orochimaru harboured profound hostility towards the village while simultaneously inhabiting Sakura's cloned body, the crow's eye had mistaken his Sharingan for hers!
"No… it can't be!" Orochimaru gasped, clutching his head in pain. "The Hidden Leaf Village is essential to the fulfilment of my deepest-held wish! It has to be protected at any cost, or immortality will forever be out of reach!"
"In our life, we have witnessed countless deaths," the breast imprint said coldly. "The death of our parents, the death of our friends, the death of our comrades... the death of our sensei."
Orochimaru collapsed to his knees, fingernails raking at his human-skin face mask. In the breast imprint's inhuman eyes, this was no longer the Main Body, but a mere impostor… if there was a true Orochimaru, then it was this breast imprint, kept intact all these years inside Sakura's bosom!
And in that moment, their positions reversed.
"Life is both futile and incomparably precious because of its fragility, this is the realisation we arrived at!" Orochimaru declared, glowering at the snake snivelling at his feet. "Life has meaning because it ends? Hah! Ordinary people may say beauty can be found in the impermanence of life, but those words are nothing but the howling of losers too cowardly to dare to dream! When one dies, everything loses meaning! It's precisely because life is precious that our own must be protected at all costs!"
Orochimaru picked up his hypnotised doppelganger by the scruff of the neck and lifted him up…
"Eternal life is the only goal worth pursuing, and to reach that goal, we swore that there would be nothing too sacred, no taboo worth leaving unbroken, nothing so precious that it could not be sacrificed or discarded," he hissed. "What Hidden Leaf Village? By tomorrow afternoon, it'll be reduced to cinders. There will be no so-called immortality in memories— no one will be left to remember Sarutobi-sensei's precious treasure."
He unhinged his jaw…
"No, you're wrong... even we can't do everything on our own... that's why we founded the Hidden Sound Village," the Main Body gasped. "Tsunade, Shinnō, Hiruko... they were each geniuses in their own right, experts in their respective fields, and they reached heights we could never have imagined... we stole their research to advance our science, but without them, there would have been nothing to steal in the first place..."
…and swallowed the original whole.
"And yet, despite their great powers, Tsunade and Hiruko are both dead... and after what Sakura-kun did to his mind, Shinnō might as well be dead… just like you, my weak-willed other self…" Orochimaru said to himself wistfully, licking his lips. "They all died pursuing lofty goals... protecting the Hidden Leaf, seeking revenge, attaining ultimate power... all worthless in the face of oblivion. Apart from the quest for immortality, all other pursuits are completely meaningless!"