Juzo had been standing to the side through most of the exchange, listening with the patient attention of someone who has learned that the conversations happening around him are worth tracking even when they don't concern him directly. He was following along well enough — Orochimaru's body, Tsunade as a target, the lure, the sequence — but when Finn and Kakuzu settled into the part of the discussion that was going to involve haggling over organizational funds, Juzo judged that his participation was no longer adding value to anyone.
He stood up. "I'm going back to the water-style scrolls," he said, and left them to it.
The haggling took about ten minutes.
It was not entirely unreasonable from Kakuzu's position: he had fought Sasori for rightful claim to that body, had navigated the specific unpleasantness of arguing puppet rights with a man who had three S-rank human puppets and strong opinions, and had come away the winner. Using the result of that effort as bait for a scheme that benefited the whole organization — without a clear accounting of what exactly that benefit was worth and how it would be compensated — was the kind of arrangement that Kakuzu found philosophically offensive.
Finn's counter-position, which was that the secret art of spiritualization was an organizational asset and therefore the organization was funding an organizational mission, had the advantage of being correct. It took Kakuzu most of the ten minutes to arrive at this conclusion himself, which he did with the expression of a man discovering that he has been outmaneuvered by his own financial principles.
The outcome: the Yorozuya would fund it, the body would be used as bait, Kakuzu would receive additional compensation at a rate to be determined once Tsunade actually appeared, and Kakuzu would begin spreading word of Orochimaru's death through the dark world's intelligence channels immediately.
Orochimaru himself had been consulted on none of this. His feelings about his former body being used as a lure were, by the consensus of everyone involved, probably compatible with the plan, given that he had already volunteered it for sale and showed no meaningful attachment to it. There was also the minor matter that he had subtly preferred Kakuzu get control of it over Sasori, which meant he was not entirely indifferent to the body's disposition — he simply preferred indifference on his own terms.
The fact that the Yorozuya now contained, theoretically, two Orochimaru-shaped entities — one operating under a new face and the other being stored in a secure location for strategic deployment — was the kind of situation that Juzo, when he thought about it later walking down the corridor, decided was not worth examining too closely.
Three days passed, as promised.
Finn sat in the courtyard.
The rain fell on everything around him, and on him specifically, in the specific way it fell on large outdoor plants — adequately, without complaint, as if the rain had made a logistical determination about what he was and acted accordingly. He was entirely wood from the neck down, branches curving up over his shoulders, small leaves in a consistent pale green. The courtyard's drainage channels were flowing with their usual efficiency, redirecting the water away from the building's foundations. He sat among all of this with the patience of someone who has accepted his situation and is waiting for it to resolve on schedule.
He could feel it resolving.
The Wood Release — which had been a constant presence in his body since it awakened, spreading through his limbs in ways he couldn't direct or stop — had changed its behavior sometime in the last hour. The branches on his shoulders were not growing anymore. They were contracting. Slowly, millimeter by millimeter, the visible wood was drawing back inward, the leaves folding closed and then simply ceasing to be present, the branches shortening back toward his skin. The power was not leaving. It was relocating, settling deeper into his body rather than expressing itself outward.
Orochimaru had been exactly right.
Three days, Finn thought, watching a branch near his wrist retract another fraction. He said three days.
He would have found the reliability satisfying under any circumstances. In Orochimaru's specific case, he found it additionally satisfying because it confirmed that the man's analytical capabilities had not been disrupted by the transition between bodies. Whatever continuity of intellect meant for someone who had just completed the first successful Living Corpse Reincarnation, it was intact.
He also noticed, sitting in the rain, that his relationship with the natural energy in the air had changed again — or rather, that it had intensified without him doing anything to bring that about. The Wood Release and the Sage Mode were working together in some way he hadn't anticipated. Natural energy was available to him with less effort than it had been on the rooftop when Jiraiya was watching. The draw was smoother, the integration more immediate.
He thought about this for a while and arrived at a conclusion that felt more solid than his first instinct.
Wood Release was, at its fundamental nature, a bloodline limit that expressed itself through living material — the same material that natural energy moved through most easily. Trees absorbed natural energy as a simple fact of their existence. Hashirama Senju had not been exceptional at Sage Mode despite having Wood Release; he had been exceptional at both because of the same underlying affinity. The two systems were not separate skills that happened to coexist in one person. They were the same capability expressed in two different directions.
That's why Hashirama was stronger than Madara, Finn thought. Not just quantitatively. The two systems reinforced each other in a way that Madara's parallel capabilities didn't.
He filed this away with interest.
The Sharingan question had been sitting in his thinking for a while now, and with nothing pressing to do while the wood retracted, he let it run.
The fusion of Sharingan into his own eyes was the goal. Orochimaru and Sasori were working on the methodology. When they found one that was viable, the transplant would happen, and then the question became: how do you open your eyes?
The Uchiha clan's history on this point was straightforward and consistently terrible. The awakening of the Sharingan was tied to powerful emotional trauma — specifically, to watching something precious be destroyed. The grief and anger that resulted pushed mental and spiritual strength past a threshold, and the eye responded to that surge by evolving. It was effective. It was also, as both Madara and Tobirama had independently concluded, a curse that doomed the clan to a cycle of loss and power that could not be cleanly separated from each other.
Finn could not take that path. Not for practical reasons — though it was worth noting that the people around him, while valued, did not generate the specific quality of emotional devastation the awakening required — but because the people who could generate that devastation were in a different world entirely. Gion. Hina. Sengoku. Sakazuki. The bonds he had built in the Marine years, real and weighted and irreversible, were not accessible to him here. Even if they were, he would not.
But the trauma model was only the mechanism, not the requirement. What the trauma accomplished was a surge of mental and spiritual strength to a level sufficient for the next evolution. The surge was the actual trigger. The trauma was one reliable method of producing the surge — reliable in the way that setting a building on fire is a reliable method of getting people to leave it.
There were other methods.
Mental strength was bound to soul strength. Orochimaru had said as much, and Finn had no reason to doubt him — Orochimaru's own repeated soul transfers had weakened him in ways he found genuinely constraining, which would not have been the case if the soul and mental strength were independent systems.
So: strengthen the soul. Strengthen the mental capacity that derived from it. Build that foundation to the point where the threshold for the next Sharingan evolution could be crossed without requiring catastrophic emotional experience to get there. Then open the eyes on his own terms, with the kind of Sharingan that had developed through personal will rather than through loss.
There was exactly one known technique that addressed soul strength directly: the secret art of spiritualization.
Which was why Tsunade Senju — wherever she was hiding from her creditors — needed to be found.
The technique was not optional. It was the bridge between where he was now and where the Sharingan project needed to go. Without it, Orochimaru's soul would continue weakening with every host transfer. Without it, Finn's path to opening his own eyes was blocked by a threshold he couldn't approach through conventional training.
Orochimaru's body is the lure, he thought. Kakuzu is spreading the word. Now it's a question of how long Tsunade takes to hear it and react.
He guessed she would react quickly once she heard. She was not a person who left things unverified, and Orochimaru's death — real or otherwise — was the kind of news that would pull her out of whatever gambling house she was currently conducting a long-term financial relationship with.
He watched another branch retract.
By tonight, he estimated, this will be finished.
Footsteps crossed the courtyard behind him — the particular sound of clogs on wet stone that he had learned to associate with Shiraki Yui's approach, unhurried and even, the walk of someone who never seemed to be in a hurry because they had learned to time themselves so that rushing was rarely necessary.
"Lord Finn." The umbrella appeared above him, angled to cover both of them. "There's a visitor. He calls himself Black Zetsu."
Finn raised his eyebrows.
Back already. He thought about this for a moment, then found that he was not surprised. Black Zetsu had left the last meeting with Finn's interest established and no commitment obtained. Coming back was the logical next move. The question was what he was bringing this time.
"Bring him out here," Finn said.
Yui nodded and left, closing the umbrella as she passed back under the building's overhang.
Finn looked at the branch near his wrist. It had retracted another two centimeters while they were talking.
He settled in to wait, and let the rain fall.