Takara deeply regretted everything when all was said and done. Not because the operation itself proved complicated or any unexpected issues arose; they barely took ten minutes to complete.
But because Katsuyu seemed to forget to mention that the digestion would be anything but smooth.
Setting aside the fact that his stomach visibly bulged, and he couldn't move to avoid reopening the freshly closed incisions, the sensation of having a large live slug being decomposed in his stomach was truly unpleasant.
By his own idea, the slug's size was considerably larger than Katsuyu's initial concept to maximize the benefits, but his stomach was so overloaded that he felt like vomiting alongside a terrible stomach ache.
Two weeks passed before he could move, during which he consumed nothing and actively employed chakra to accelerate digestion every moment except when sleeping.
By the time they reached the Water Country docks, he had to use a puppet of himself to avoid arousing suspicion due to his sudden swelling.
"How much longer will I need to endure this?" he asked with an inevitably irritated tone, though it wasn't his intention.
He could barely work on his puppets during this time!
If he hadn't breathed life into his creations and delegated planned work, many things would have been delayed. Katsuyu even vetoed the idea of using shadow clones, saying it would hinder the process if he didn't have all his chakra available.
"The worst part is over," Katsuyu replied, keeping a clone of herself near him at all times to monitor that nothing went wrong. "Your body has already begun to adapt, and digestion will become increasingly faster. Within a week, you'll return to your normal appearance, and within another, you should finish this step and be able to begin practicing senjutsu."
It turns out that the step he thought would be the quickest would take more than a month!
Releasing his swarm of toxins once they arrived at the capital, he located the assassination target of the mission in a brothel and didn't even bother sending a puppet to kill him. He simply had a toxin fly towards the back of his head and detonated it, blasting several meters around without leaving a whole corpse.
Having completed his mission in this place, he redirected the toxins to explore the entire Water Country in search of Utakata and Hotaru.
While these two would have a master-student relationship, it would only happen after two years, and they still didn't know of each other's presence, so he needed to search for them separately.
He had no idea of Utakata's whereabouts, but Hotaru was much easier to locate since her house was in a place known to the locals.
Mount Katsuragi.
Not only was it the information collected by the toxins from local conversations that facilitated finding the place, but also the fact that it was the only mountain surrounded by a fairly powerful barrier and with a large number of traps.
"Hidden Rock Trap, huh..."
Takara had to admit that while the traps were a shoddy job in his opinion, the barrier was ingeniously constructed, and unless someone acted from within, it was difficult to penetrate.
It was ironic that a place like this had a barrier much better than the major ninja villages.
Perhaps its consumption was only suitable for a small area?
There should only be two people residing in the place, Hotaru herself and an elder acting as her guardian named Tonbee, who was fiercely loyal.
Takara couldn't replicate what the Magaki group did to break the barrier, so he would have to think of something different.
"It's best to wait," Takara concluded after deliberating while observing the mountain.
Its two inhabitants would need to descend from the mountain at some point to replenish supplies and everyday needs in the nearby village, which would give him the opportunity to study their patterns and also gain time to continue digesting.
As he expected, four days later, he found his opportunity when a young woman with long, wavy blonde hair secretly descended from the mountain.
The toxins were monitoring the elder, and he didn't seem to sense anything wrong while chopping wood by the lake at the summit, so Takara concluded that Hotaru had simply escaped for a while to enjoy some freedom.
This wasn't the Hotaru who learned to walk on water in a single day and who could use water ninjutsu with barely a demonstration; although she had some training from her grandfather as a kunoichi, her skill was tremendously superficial at the moment.
She would barely qualify as a genin, which seemed like a mockery of her monstrous talent.
If only she had received proper training since childhood, she probably would have been able to reach elite chunin level at her current age. Of course, if she had complete control over the forbidden kinjutsu on her back, she would jump to a Kage-level threat at minimum.
It all depended on the cooldown time of the forbidden technique.
"Hmm?" Hotaru looked around, sensing a strange feeling.
Since her grandfather implanted the Tsuchigumo clan's kinjutsu on her back, she became a bit more sensitive to her surroundings, and at this moment, a bad premonition began to accumulate in her heart.
Or it could be the suspicious-looking kimchi she had for dinner the night before.
She discreetly moved her arm towards the ninja tool pouch she carried on her waist as she looked around, and just as she was about to reach inside, she felt her footing disappear.
"Eh?"
Unconsciously, she looked down and saw that at some point, the ground she was standing on had been replaced by an open sliding door, whose interior and her imminent destination were completely dark.
With the sound of the biwa string, the door closed the instant Hotaru realized she had fallen into a trap, and the floor returned to normal.
Takara knew that capturing her wasn't the problem but preventing her from using the Kinjutsu against him as a desperate measure. The solution was to leave her isolated in a chamber full of sleep-inducing gases for a few hours, preventing any possibility of resistance.
He hoped the young woman wouldn't resort to that, as it would mean that the Tsuchigumo clan technique on her back that interested him so much was destroyed in the process.