A 65-foot (20-meter) Sealing Scroll and only 177 cubic feet (5 cubic meters) of storage? President Maya was deeply unimpressed.
You're TWENTY meters long, you piece of junk—not two! Even if you're dirt cheap at 2,200 points, you're putting me in a real bind here! Toss it and I'll feel wasteful. Use it? I'd be better off carrying an oversized backpack. At least that wouldn't make people think I'm a weirdo.
In the end, Maya stuffed the scroll into a cabinet. She'd take it home tonight and use it as a pillow core.
The main attraction was Shimura Danzō's Research Notes—Gold Lv. 3, valued at 23,000 Influence Points.
Like a Skill Card, the notes didn't manifest physically. They existed solely in her mind.
President Maya closed her eyes and began reviewing the contents...
How to put this? Danzō's ideas were simultaneously genius and idiotic.
Idiotic because his entire research direction boiled down to organ transplantation.
Oh, this Sharingan is nice. Rip it out, slap it in.
Hey, Kaguya's bones are pretty formidable too. Dig them out, graft them on.
Holy cow—are these cells from the God of Shinobi himself? Quick, quick, harvest and transplant immediately!
Ooh, a Hyūga Main Branch Byakugan? Something this precious absolutely must be extracted and transplanted!
What? Not enough room on the face for more eyes? Are you stupid? Just transplant them somewhere else! The arm, the chest—you could even stick a pair on your rear end. Check for hemorrhoids on your off days. Win-win!
In summary, Lord Danzō's guiding philosophy was: if something's good, rip it out and sew it onto yourself. Brutally simple.
As for the inevitable rejection reactions?
Please. A man of my stature isn't going to personally climb onto the operating table. You, you, and you—lie down and let Orochimaru run experiments on each of you. Once the side effects are managed, THEN come find me.
Any sane person would refuse to turn themselves into a Frankenstein's monster. A genius beauty like President Maya? She'd avoid it like the plague.
In Maya's estimation, this Danzō and Strucker would get along famously.
So why did Maya also call the notes genius?
Because buried in there was a brilliant theory on immunological rejection. Its core principle was essentially: the wolf pack versus the tiger.
The core principle: use multiple competing foreign elements to achieve a relative equilibrium through mutual antagonism.
Take Danzō himself as an example. Transplanting First Hokage cells triggered rejection. Transplanting Sharingan eyes also triggered rejection.
His solution? Transplant both simultaneously and let them fight each other, canceling out the host body's rejection response.
The First Hokage's cells were the tiger. Each Sharingan eye was a wolf. The end result: a wolf pack keeping the tiger in check.
The Sharingan could be substituted for other elements, and the base didn't have to be Hashirama cells specifically. As long as the final configuration achieved a "one large element versus many small elements" equilibrium, it worked.
But the part most useful to President Maya wasn't the overarching theory—it was the research on anti-rejection pharmaceuticals embedded within the notes.
She couldn't replicate any of the specific formulas. Most of the materials didn't exist in her world, and the underlying physical laws differed. But the guiding principles were invaluable.
Put it this way: give President Maya a top-tier biology laboratory and enough research time, and she could develop a drug that would eliminate organ rejection in mutants.
For example: take Wolverine—Logan. Harvest Cyclops Scott's eyes and transplant them into Logan, then have Maya synthesize a customized anti-rejection regimen. Logan would be able to use optic blasts at will.
Granted, the notes were extremely niche. In the parlance of classic wuxia cultivation novels, this was the definition of "heterodox side-path, never reaching the Grand Dao."
But Maya had already figured out how to apply it—and her application was anything but heterodox. It was orthodox. Mainstream. The widest possible road.
Think of Danzō's notes as the Nine Yin Manual. The lofty opening verses about "the Way of Heaven" were of limited use to Maya. But the Soul-Shifting Technique buried within? That unlocked an entirely new understanding of how to manipulate spirit and soul.
Of course, none of this was actionable during elementary school. Conditions were far too limited—she couldn't even get her hands on proper cleaning-grade ethanol. She'd need to wait until high school at minimum, secure an internship at a decent lab, and then the notes would truly shine.
(Don't assume lab-grade ethanol grows on trees. Qualified cleaning ethanol has a very short shelf life. You can't just crack open a bottle and use it years later. That's not how it works.)
At 23,000 Influence Points, the notes weren't a steal—but they certainly weren't a loss.
After the two purchases, President Maya had 52,654 Influence Points remaining. The Black Market had auto-refreshed a few times over the past two days, but nothing useful had appeared, so she'd passed.
The question now: spend the rest, or save?
If spending, should she roll the gacha or burn 100 points per Black Market refresh?
Maya's indecision wasn't without reason. She didn't have any particularly dangerous enemies right now. The wind-element Rasengan development and the Shadow Manipulation Technique modifications both demanded enormous time and energy. By that logic, she shouldn't be pulling for more jutsu.
But anyone who'd watched Naruto knew that plenty of techniques were specifically designed to support training.
Take Tsunade's medical ninjutsu. With healing abilities, forget the foot injury from last time—even during wind-element development, the Rasengan inflicted damage on the user's arms. When Naruto was developing the Wind Style: Rasengan, he'd had Kakashi and Yamato standing guard, and the Fifth Hokage Tsunade herself had personally healed his injuries.
President Maya had learned the basic Rasengan in just over a dozen hours, but incorporating wind element had taken more than two weeks with zero progress.
Why? Because she was terrified of injuring her arms.
Then there were space-time techniques. Those required enormous investment to study, and the earlier you started, the better. Not to master them immediately, but because understanding space-time jutsu principles would let Maya search for relevant materials in the Marvel world with actual direction—instead of her current approach: knowing a little of everything, mastering nothing.
The problem was that gacha pulls were fundamentally unreliable. For a certified unlucky soul like Maya—with none of that VIP luck—rolling the gacha was about as productive as throwing money into a river.
And the Black Market refresh was expensive: 100 points per attempt, with no guarantee of anything good. The shop had originally been designed for free-to-play grinders—meant to be refreshed with gameplay points, not premium currency (Influence Points).
Now that the system was offline, couldn't connect to any network, and couldn't run any games, there was no way to earn gameplay points. The Black Market had mutated into a whale trap.
A tragic irony for its designer, President Maya herself.
Ultimately, Maya the perpetual penny-pincher decided to save. Even if she lucked out and a "Flying Thunder God Technique" appeared in the Black Market, she couldn't afford it at current prices. It would just sit in a slot, gathering dust—functionally identical to saving up anyway. What a painful thought.
And so the days rolled on. Every afternoon around three o'clock, President Maya personally led a pack of school troublemakers on their mandatory marathon run.
To keep them from completely falling apart, she'd negotiated a deal with the old principal and sold their school's front gate to Gatorade.
Well, "sold" as in plastered it with ads. Product placement wasn't exactly mainstream yet in the early '90s.
From that point forward, the elementary school entrance featured two half-person-height iron Gatorade bottle replicas flanking the gate.
Gatorade's end of the bargain? An annual supply of sports drinks for the school's athletics program.
Naturally, the early shipments all went straight to those hoodlums running laps.
This was the last sponsorship deal President Maya would close during her elementary school tenure.
Reportedly, a certain French football manager on vacation in Manhattan happened to spot this little operation and found himself profoundly inspired. He later copied Maya's playbook and sold his own stadium's naming rights to Arabs.
After that, the addicted Frenchman taught himself the fine art of selling captains. And thus began a truly beautiful career.