The instrument hummed for two or three minutes, emitting light in slow sweeping passes across Finn's body. He lay inside it and stared at the ceiling and thought about nothing in particular. When it finished, it went quiet, and Finn climbed out.
Orochimaru was studying the readout — a chart dense with figures that Finn could not parse, organized according to a system that probably had a name and a logic that Orochimaru had invented and not yet shared with anyone.
"How is it?" Finn asked.
His arm, at this point, was mostly wood. The green had spread past his elbow, the branches growing in slow arcs from his forearm, small leaves catching the laboratory's artificial light. He had stopped finding this alarming and had shifted to finding it inconvenient.
Orochimaru didn't answer immediately. He kept reading. After a while, he said: "Not a serious problem."
Finn looked at the arm. "I'm becoming a tree. Define 'serious.'"
"Let it continue," Orochimaru said, settling into the chair beside the instrument console with the ease of a man delivering a recommendation he finds perfectly reasonable. "Three days, approximately. When the process completes, the Wood Release will have fully adapted to your physiology."
"And then?"
"And then you will be able to control it." Orochimaru turned to look at him directly. "The Wood Release is doing what a foreign system does when it integrates with a host — it's rewriting itself around your body rather than your body accommodating it. That requires time and a complete cycle. You can't interrupt it partway. If you let it finish, the result is total integration. You'll have full control, and you'll return to your normal appearance."
Finn was quiet for a moment. "Full control. So the True Thousand Hands, Tree World Descent, that kind of scale — those become accessible?"
"Whether you can perform those techniques depends on whether you know them," Orochimaru said. "Wood Release is a chakra property and a bloodline limit — it gives you the foundation. It doesn't give you the techniques built on that foundation. The same way the Sharingan gives you the eye, but Izanagi requires separate instruction." He paused. "Do you have any of the relevant ninjutsu?"
"Some," Finn said.
Orochimaru raised an eyebrow. "Including the True Thousand Hands seals?"
"I know them, yes."
"Really." Orochimaru looked at him with what appeared to be genuine surprise. "When I was conducting Wood Release research in Konoha, even with the village's cooperation I could only access a limited range — Sea of Trees Birth, Tree Binding Eternal Burial, a few others at that level. The advanced techniques were classified. You somehow have the Thousand Hands seals."
Finn waved his hand. "You underestimate me." He brought his hands together in front of his chest — a firm clap, leaves trembling on his forearm — and said, in a tone of complete confidence: "True Thousand Hands."
He held the pose. Orochimaru watched him. Nothing happened.
Orochimaru waited an additional several seconds, then said: "What exactly am I looking at?"
"The Thousand Hands," Finn said.
"Nothing appeared."
"I clapped," Finn said, as if this was the core of a misunderstanding that could be resolved by stating it clearly. "That's how Hashirama Senju did it. He clapped his hands, and the technique appeared. I clapped. Where is it?"
Orochimaru's expression remained entirely level.
"The First Hokage," he said, with the measured tone of a man choosing his words precisely, "could perform virtually any technique with that motion — because his mastery was complete enough to compress the seals into something reflexive. That wasn't a property of Wood Release. That was a property of Hashirama Senju. What you're suggesting is that you can replicate the endpoint of his capability before you've completed the intermediate steps." He paused. "I'll be generous and call it optimism."
"I thought it might be a bloodline limit thing," Finn said.
"It is not."
"Specifically?"
"Specifically, Wood Release is not magically simpler than other techniques just because it's a bloodline limit. You still need to learn to use it." Orochimaru looked at him with the particular weariness he reserved for Finn's occasional lapses into wishful thinking. "Was any part of this actually a serious question, or were you trying to see my reaction?"
Finn considered this. "Both," he said honestly.
Orochimaru exhaled. "I'll compile what I know into scrolls for you over the next two days. Sea of Trees Birth, Tree Binding Eternal Burial, the Wood Ingot Wall formation — those I have fully memorized from my Konoha research. Once you've completed the integration cycle, they should be immediately accessible to you."
"And the advanced techniques? Wood Dragon, the Wooden Man, the flower tree birth variants?"
Orochimaru's expression shifted toward something more considered. "Those are a different matter. When my research was still sanctioned, Konoha was forthcoming with the fundamentals — anything that helped me understand the mechanism. The strategic techniques they kept separate. The advanced Wood Release scrolls were held first by the Senju clan and then, I'd estimate, transferred to the Scroll of Seals." He paused. "That's conjecture. I don't know for certain."
Finn was quiet for a moment.
The Scroll of Seals. It kept appearing on the list of things he was going to need eventually. The timing of the Nine-Tails Rebellion was not yet certain — Kushina's pregnancy was moving forward, which put it within a year, roughly — but when that night came and Obito made his move on Konoha, the entire village would be turned inward. Every resource directed at the immediate crisis. The Scroll would be in the building and the people who guarded it would have other things to worry about.
It was, Finn thought, about as clean an opportunity as he was likely to get.
He didn't share this calculation. Orochimaru didn't ask. The arrangement between them had always included a certain amount of productive non-disclosure, and this was one of those instances.
"I'll find a way," Finn said.
"With your current capabilities, you could simply go to Konoha and take it," Orochimaru observed.
"I have a cleaner method in mind," Finn said.
Orochimaru moved on without pressing the point. His attention had sharpened into something more specifically excited, the quality he got when research had confirmed itself. "The Sage Mode. You completed it?"
"Fully," Finn said.
"And the mechanism I developed — using the seal structure as the door, the body's chakra volume as the key — that held?"
"Worked exactly as you theorized."
Orochimaru sat back with an expression that was, for him, a very close approximation of satisfaction. He looked at the marks on Finn's face — the black diamond between his brows, fully solidified now, the lines crossing his eyelids — and studied them with the attention of a man whose hypothesis has come back positive.
"Do you want to learn it?" Finn asked. "Now that we know the methodology works, you could—"
"No." Orochimaru said it without hesitation, then softened it slightly with an explanation. "The Sage Mode operates on the physical body. It integrates natural energy into the chakra system at a cellular level. That integration is body-specific." He gestured to himself — to the new face, the new vessel. "My Living Corpse Reincarnation requires a new host every three years. Even if I mastered Sage Mode in this body, the integration would be lost when I transfer. I'd be starting from nothing each cycle. The time investment would never compound." He shook his head. "I don't do futile work."
Finn was quiet for a moment. "That's a genuine shame. You built the methodology that made it possible, and you can't benefit from it directly."
"I benefit indirectly," Orochimaru said, with the equanimity of a man who has made his peace with an outcome and is not performing the acceptance. "My research produced a correct result. That's satisfying on its own terms. And there may be other approaches in the future — the curse seal's evolution has properties that might eventually intersect with natural energy in ways I haven't fully mapped yet. I'm not closing the door. I'm just not walking through it today."
He said this without visible regret, which was either an achievement of genuine philosophical acceptance or a very accomplished performance of it. With Orochimaru, the distinction was not always clear, and Finn had long since decided it probably didn't matter.
"Great scientist," Finn said, meaning it.
"Obviously," Orochimaru said, and meant that too.