"Amazing...", Orochimaru exhaled as he emerged from his deep meditation.
Instead of the three days he had allotted himself for partial rehabilitation, Orochimaru, to his little surprise, was able to stand on his feet the very next day.
After making sure that his body was able to fully recover in this short time, Orochimaru immediately decided to sit down for a long meditation session, as he quickly realized that the secret of this body was not on the physical level.
So, after creating a shadow clone to take him out of meditation in case of unforeseen circumstances, and giving him chakras for a full day's existence, Orochimaru fell into deep meditation.
He didn't see much at first, until after a few hours, out of nothing, he tried to feel the natural energy around him.
That's when he felt something inside himself that he never expected to find in this body.
It was like a second chakra core, but in the chest, and without the chakra channels connected to it. But instead of producing chakra within itself from the two energies of the body, this hearth seemed to be drawing some other energy from the environment, and until he concentrated hard on it, he could not guess that it was exactly natural energy.
"This hearth doesn't just collect natural energy from the environment. It also seems to recycle it under my body in the same way."
Once again sitting down to meditate, only not as deeply, Orochimaru, who, though indirectly, already had a lot of experience with natural energy, tried to reach out to this strange core with his chakra.
"No use", he exhaled, coming out of his meditation and leaning back on the pedestal, "this core doesn't allow ordinary chakra to pass through."
"It takes a long experiment. Maybe if I can sprout chakra channels to it, and connect it to the CPS, I can access senjutsu", Thought Orochimaru, climbing down from the stone high ground. "But it's likely that there is an easier way to access this natural core."
Walking to the exit of the room he had specially arranged for meditation, Orochimaru took from the rack a short white kimono that he had specially ordered to be tailored, passing his measurements through the henge of the random passerby whose wallet he had stolen.
"Likewise, the search for a way home must not be forgotten. Shin should be entering the stage of puberty very soon, and I must see to it that he does not begin to break down."
With these thoughts in mind, he headed toward his lab, which he had just begun to equip with the right equipment, tying his thin purple rope belt on the way.
"No, no, no... There he is", Dumbledore exhaled, hunched over a large, ancient-looking book.
On each page of this book were written thousands of different names that belonged to every wizard ever born on British soil. All the names were written in two colors: green for those wizards who were still alive; and black for those who had already died.
"Alive...", Dumbledore exhaled, confirming the information from the memory that Snape had given him.
One of the peculiarities of this book was that no one could open it, except the acting Headmaster of Hogwarts, or his deputy. And that, it was only opened when one of the potential students turned eleven. Then it would signal to a special bell that the headmaster must always have. And after that, the principal has exactly one day to open it, and transcribe the name with the applicant's residential address.
"But that still doesn't mean that Tom's horcrux couldn't have had any effect on Harry. It may not have taken over his body, but I'm afraid his mind is already warped. And then there's that pale skin...", Dumbledore pondered, remembering that cadaverous hue of Voldemort's skin the last time he encountered him.
"It's been a month and I haven't heard from the Aurors", He sighed heavily. "The book won't give me any information on Harry's whereabouts until he is eleven years old", Dumbledore pondered, closing the book of names. "We have to wait another year before I can find out where he ran off to and what really happened to him."
Leaning back in his throne-like chair, Albus sighed.
"Just don't let it be too late..."
In a rather large man-made circular cave, a momentous event was taking place.
After a year of intense training, as well as much research and practice, Orochimaru finally decided to widen the gap in his seal.
Standing in the middle of the training area, in the form of a large circular cave thirty meters in diameter, Orochimaru, whose hair had already grown to his shoulder blades, began folding a long series of hand seals:
"Rat, dog, snake, rat, horse...", Mentally he chattered. "Monkey, snake, tiger, bird, boar, boar, bull, tiger."
After folding a dozen more seals, Orochimaru began to say the seals out loud:
"Ram, bird, ram, snake, bull, rat, Concentration!", Toward the end he shouted as he folded the last seal.
The five-element seal, which had manifested itself while the hand seals were being folded, began to flash with a dull scarlet light at slight intervals, each time throwing off a small pulse of chakra.
Finally, after a minute, when the level of chakra in the seal was down by a third, the glow disappeared, and Orochimaru exhaled tiredly.
But Orochimaru didn't stop there.
Sitting in a lotus pose, and placing his open palm against his knuckles, thereby folding the seal of dense concentration, Orochimaru went deep inside himself, trying to feel the core of natural energy.
Orochimaru began to slowly separate a rather large amount of Yin-chakra in his chakra core, beginning to slowly wrap it around his natural core.
The surrounding natural energy, which had been flowing steadily down to his core in a slow whirlpool, suddenly stopped.
Immediately a shadowy clone with a brush in one hand and a long, thin needle in the other emerged from the darkness, which the dim light of the paraffin candle could not reach.
He immediately enveloped the needle in chakra, and began to methodically pierce the body of his creator in the place of the marks left in the form of small dots.
When he finished, the clone immediately threw the needle away, and began to draw thick and thin stripes of various fuinjutsu symbols with the blood that slowly flowed from Orochimaru's body in quick and smooth, carefully rehearsed movements.
After only thirty-seven seconds, the shadow clone created one chakra thread on each finger that he immediately hooked to the punctures on skin and began to pour into them a huge amount of previously accumulated Yang chakra, causing the previously invisible chakra threads to glow a bright red light.
The bloody inscriptions left behind also began to glow crimson, beginning to slowly soak into the whitish skin.
In the next instant, a new small network of chakras began to form in Orochimaru's body, channel by channel, which began to connect to the main network of chakra circulation through the punctures in the central channels left by the charged chakra needle.
And so, when the last channel was formed and the clone finally dispersed, Orochimaru let all the Yin chakra out in dense black smoke, and neutral natural energy began to flow rapidly through the new channels, which immediately began to mix with the circulating chakra.
And then the world of natural sensory energy suddenly opened up to Orochimaru in a way that had never been seen before.
Today Albus Dumbledore was more excited than ever.
After all, it was the day he had been looking forward to most this year: Harry Potter's eleventh birthday.
Before that incident with his sudden disappearance, Dumbledore had planned to equip to accompany Harry, his good-natured forester Hagrid, who by his directness would certainly win the trust of the kind and modest boy, who grew up in the strict style of Muggle upbringing.
But what Albus did not expect at all was the regular beatings at the hands of his only relatives, which they had managed carefully to conceal even from the watchful eyes of Mrs. Figg's cats.
"No wonder the boy eventually snapped", Albus sighed incessantly. "We're all very lucky that the boy didn't end up turning into an obscurus. It would have been the greatest tragedy of the century, that with its casualties would have eclipsed even the incident in New York", Dumbledore shuddered.
"I need to meet the boy myself, and explain everything neatly to him", Thought Albus, getting ready to leave. "There's no telling how much the horcrux has affected his way of thinking. Even though the sixth horcrux shouldn't have any intelligence, but the influence should. Otherwise, the boy would not have purposely killed his relatives. Even if they had treated him so cruelly..."
Albus still shuddered every time the little boy so casually threw a kitchen knife at his own aunt, even if it ended up flying by. And Dumbledore is still praying to Merlin that young Harry got where he was going after all.
Finally, his deputy came into the office.
"Here, Albus. This is the letter you asked me to deliver," Said McGonagall, handing Dumbledore a yellowish envelope with a large wax seal.
"Thank you, Minnie," he replied affectionately, taking the letter from his hands. "And the portkey?"
"Yes, of course," Minerva replied dryly, looking at her superior unhappily for being too familiar, but still holding out her hand with the portkey in the form of a thin rope. "But Albus, there's something you should know before you go," she said earnestly, taking her time handing over the portal.
"Yes, Minerva. I am listening carefully," He replied, deciding to heed his deputy's warning.
"I have serious concerns about Harry's residential address. You've read it, haven't you?"
"A... Ahem," Albus coughed into his fist, "I seem to have forgotten a bit about it," He replied embarrassedly. "You know I'm not in my fifties anymore," he excused himself, ashamed to say that he'd simply neglected to do so because of the automatic creation of the portkey.
Shaking her head disapprovingly, Minerva said:
"I didn't expect something like that from you. Although you should have, given your careless attitude in choosing guardians for Harry," McGonagall pursed her lips, still angry at Dumbledore for the case of his disappearance. "Just look at the envelope."
Dumbledore's heart immediately dropped on his heels as he read the delivery address on the back of the envelope:
Surrey; suburb of Little Whinging; wasteland; Orochimaru's underground laboratory.