A Hole in One's Village [Kakashi Hatake]

Chapter 8: A Day in the Lab

There was someone in this world with the ability to create a chemical compound that should be impossible to create without the knowledge that I had brought from my own world.

That was a frightening thought.

What if I wasn't the only to have jumped between worlds?

No, I banished that hypothetical immediately, ruling it implausible. Orochimaru, despite being a warped psycho, is the greatest scientist of the Elemental Nations, and it took him years to create the jutsu that brought me here. Besides, no one else within the Shinobi Union had ever encountered a case like mine before, and I couldn't believe that something as major as that could slip past a large, prolific group of extremely skilled spies.

The toxin was probably created by accident, stumbled upon like so many other discoveries of the past. Someone was just messing around with infusing an acid with chakra and happened upon a jackpot. I was blowing this out of proportion in my mind, making it into a huge conspiracy.

Maybe I wanted it to have something to do with my old world and was just projecting.

My visions were over, my family dead, my home forever out of reach. I was grasping for the past and letting my longing for it warp my present.

Besides, if I had thought that figuring out how the toxin worked was hard, it was nothing compared to trying to synthesize a way combat it.

Shizune, Sakura, and I had spent the last three days cooped up in a lab together trying to find a way to bind chakra to molecules that were defined by their stability and how hard it was to get them to react. Luckily, there was a lull in missions for the time being, so only Tsunade had been needed in the hospital proper, but this was a state that would not last. In fact, I had a mission that I had to leave for within the week, delivering scrolls to the Kazekage with an added short period of helping the Land of Wind by visiting their harder to reach outposts along the edges of the desert. I did not want to leave without having found an antidote for the acid.

What if someone else encountered it while I was gone from the village?

"Cha! Nothing is working!" Sakura stood up from where she was bent over a test tube, stretching her arms upwards and audibly cracking her stiff back. "I'm getting nowhere with the hexaflorine, and it has to be after dinner now."

I sighed as well, looking up from my work and finally letting my eyes focus on something that wasn't within a foot of my face. My temples gave a quick throb, and I wondered when I had last had something to drink.

"The problem is that we still have absolutely no idea how they managed to replace electrons with chakra in the first place," I groaned. "It would take an absurd amount of energy to remove so many electrons. Like a collider or nuclear energy, maybe? The Ten Tails? I'm at a loss."

Shizune removed her gloves and goggles, clearly done for the day. "That's not the question that needs to be answered, though. We are not trying to remove any more electrons ourselves, that would just compound the effectiveness of the acid, but to instead provide some way with chakra to make up for the ones that are already missing."

Sakura removed her gloves as well and propped up her chin with a palm, deep in thought. "Hm, but we know that chakra is absorbed by the body, so what if instead of chakra we used loose electrons?"

I smirked, "What, are you suggesting that we just pummel people with beta radiation? Missing a few electrons? Here, have some burns on top of the acid damage." Sighing once more, I too internally admitted that we were done for night and removed my safety equipment. "We would just cause more damage and who knows if it would actually work?"