The Awakened Soul (Naruto SI)

[Lillie Jones]

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[Welydora]

We didn't go straight to the Fountain of Sacred Oil; we stopped by the elder toads' home first. There, Fukasaku grabbed a special artifact staff, and Shima tried to get Jiraiya and me to sit down for a meal. We declined. After that, Jiraiya confirmed I could get back to Konoha on my own, so I sent him there with my help, then continued on with Fukasaku.

"Senjutsu is a very dangerous art," he said as we approached the mountain from which the waterfall-fountain cascaded down, with a stone toad sitting at the base. Stone toads were scattered all around here, and there were plenty of them. "It is the result of balancing three forces: the power of the body, the power of the mind, and the energy of the surrounding world."

To demonstrate, he swept his hand across everything around us.

"What you see before you, Naruto-boy, is a graveyard. These are all those who tried to master Sage Mode. Without finding the balance, their bodies turned to stone!" The toad drove his staff into the ground beside him and looked down at it. "This artifact will knock out the excess sage chakra if you start turning into a toad and petrifying. Now then, take off your clothes and get into the fountain. The oil inside attracts natural energy! You'll learn to feel it. Your task may sound simple, but it's anything but. You must sit completely still. Any movement can break your concentration, and you'll start to transform!"

Taking all that in, before climbing into the oil, I asked the toad to let me examine the staff, so I could, if possible, learn to purge excess sage chakra on my own. One look was enough to understand the rough mechanism. Getting whacked with a stick stopped being fun a long time ago.

After that, I submerged myself in the oil and immediately felt a strange yet amazingly powerful energy flood into me from the cool liquid. It spread through my chakra channels like coarse sand, but fell far short of actually damaging them.

Sitting in the lotus position, I felt a tingling across my skin and sensed energy forming around my body. Power, focus, perception... My body filled with ever-greater strength, while my awareness expanded hundreds of meters in every direction. I plunged headfirst into the properties of this new force.


Poke-poke. Someone prodded me with the staff, and the ocean of energy that had been quietly condensing in and around me lurched, then instantly boiled over, trying to devour me. But before my body could visibly change, my chakra flared with power and gently pushed all that natural energy aside.

Something invisible, something I could barely even register, shot through the air for hundreds of meters. In essence, it was extremely powerful energy! Even if it moved in a peculiar way, without harming the surroundings.

"What is it?" I asked Fukasaku, slightly irritated. He looked absolutely floored right now.

"Naruto-boy, you've been sitting still for five minutes. And you're not turning into a toad... I thought you'd fallen asleep," he explained in a stunned voice.

I just snorted at his reaction. Fair enough, really. Going by the manga, this toad was supposed to be smacking Naruto with that staff almost every second to keep him from turning into a stone toad. But here, no staff was needed at all. Thanks to my understanding of the mechanism and the power of my body, I could purge the excess on my own.

"Didn't fall asleep. Just exploring a new energy... So imperceptible and distant, like it doesn't belong to this world... And yet at the same time, it feels utterly native to it. It's amazing, and strange. Give me another couple of hours."

"Ah... yeah," Fukasaku nodded, then watched with a vacant stare as I closed my eyes. That sage chakra, by the way, kept trying to shift the pigmentation on my upper eyelids and just above them to orange. To put the toad somewhat at ease, I let that color manifest in the form of markings.

Natural energy seemed incredibly useful from the very first seconds. My body and mind were adapting to this type of sage chakra, and over time I could hold more and more of it. It was already multiplying my reserves many times over.

When people spoke of balancing three energies, they meant the state of a Sage at the peak of their power, when no single force could overpower the others. As the mind and body adapted, they grew more resistant to the aggressive properties of ever-greater amounts of sage chakra. The balance shifted while remaining in harmony. However, when sage chakra was actively used, it would gradually deplete, until at a certain point the shinobi's own energies simply pushed the remainder out.

From this, I concluded that true mastery of Senjutsu wasn't just about not absorbing too much, at a minimum not spending your own chakra to expel natural energy (if the user had some experience) or simply not turning to stone, which was almost a guaranteed outcome for any creature first learning Senjutsu. Mastery also meant not letting your own energy push the sage chakra out! The Naruto from the manga had severely lacking control, which was why his Sage Mode was pretty short-lived at first. He was probably using only a tenth, if not less, of the absorbed energy before unconsciously ejecting it. Such is the nature of shinobi chakra affinity; not all its properties are helpful in every situation. Sometimes you have to fight your own instincts. My situation was different. My genuinely titanic body could contain far more sage chakra, while the percentage I could actually utilize, thanks to my control and provided I spent my two hours in the oil, would, I estimated, exceed ninety-nine percent.

"Your body seems made for sage chakra," Fukasaku said when I opened my eyes.

Two hours wasn't enough. Swept up in the spirit of exploration, and with the toad's consent, we ended up staying until evening.

"That's not the case," I decided to clarify a little as I climbed out of the fountain and stood before him. "My body wasn't designed for this. When I was building it, I didn't have the right knowledge. Though it handles it better than any human body would."

"Built it?"

"Exactly. Like almost any creator, I've worked on more than one project. But..." My lips curved into a warm smile, and my eyes lifted to the pink sky, where, despite the sun, I could clearly make out a myriad of stars. "...my most important, my greatest, my endlessly captivating creation is myself."

"Sounds like you've got a god complex."

"Occupational hazard of power," I shrugged, returning my gaze to the toad. "And it's only developing."

"I see..." Fukasaku drew the words out in a tone suggesting he understood nothing at all but had decided there was no point poking the madman further. "Well, it's night now. Will you stay with us? Ma's surely made dinner for you too."

"I won't say no. It's unusual here."

And so we set off. I hadn't paid much attention before, but the toads actually had some real architecture here. The streets were laid out in a recognizable order. As for the houses, they blended harmoniously into the surrounding nature. Many were built into enormous plants of various shapes, while others were ordinary structures in a Japanese style, nestled at the foot of jagged cliffs and along the banks of lakes.

The elders' house, who are also called Pa and Ma around here (the old geezer toad Gamamaru is called, well, the old geezer, or grandpa), stood by a lake, set apart from the rest. A small, single-story building with an almost mushroom-like shape. The roof was covered in something resembling dark tile, while the rest was built from the usual ancient Japanese style materials: bamboo, dark wood, and paper for the sliding doors.

Now dressed, I stepped into the little house, and my face was far from eager. My spherical vision had already clocked something on the approach...

"Welcome back! How did it go?" Shima greeted us cheerfully from the entrance.

"Time well spent," I replied.

"Yep," Fukasaku chimed in, having done essentially nothing.

"Wonderful! Now eat some of my signature marinated caterpillars in moth sauce. Very nutritious!"

The violet-haired toad pointed at a cauldron sitting in the middle of a fairly bare, and therefore spacious, room.

"I don't eat at night, thanks. Diet," I said with a polite smile, lying through my teeth, trying to weasel out of this deeply questionable offer.

This food was exactly what I'd spotted on the way in.

"But Naruto-boy, you haven't eaten in so long! You can't keep going like this!"

"Ma, I'm begging you! Don't scare the kid with your cooking! You'll ruin the whole training if he bolts—"

"You don't understand a thing about haute cuisine, you grumpy old crank!" And as if to prove that her food was the food to end all food, she opened her mouth, from which shot a long, thick tongue with a maw of shark teeth on the end. With that mouth on her tongue, she neatly flipped a caterpillar coated in something green and slimy into the air, caught it, and started chewing with gusto. "It turned out perfectly! You shouldn't be talking, you should be tasting!"

I wanted to shudder. Talk about alien, local variety... And I'm fairly sure that extendable mouth had its own little eyes. And maybe even a nose.

Though I'll admit, part of me was genuinely curious about the internal anatomy of lifeforms like these toads... But dissecting those who are sort of helping you probably isn't very ethical.

"My being has no need of sustenance. Thank you, but this time I shall refrain from indulging in gluttony," I declared with the air of the most righteous monk. And before they could recover, right before vanishing in a teleport, I just tossed at them: "Good night."


Skipping dinner since I wasn't hungry, I crashed out of habit. Come morning, after demolishing a large chocolate cake all by myself in good spirits, I returned to Mount Myoboku.

There, or rather here now, I was met by a very displeased Shima, annoyed by my departure, and a somewhat disgruntled Fukasaku, who'd had to eat a double portion of that filth. We quickly escaped from the former's lamentations.

Soon we arrived at tall, sharp rocky peaks with boulders scattered around their bases.

"Naruto-boy, this is where you'll learn to sense and absorb sage chakra on your own," Fukasaku said, fiddling with his staff. "But first, I want to show you what mastering Senjutsu will get you!"

He planted his staff in the ground, walked up to an enormous boulder hundreds of times his own size, grabbed it with both hands, and heaved it over his head.

"Haaaa!!!" Leaning forward, he hurled it a good ten meters. The earth shuddered beneath us with a deep boom when it landed.

"Not bad," I noted neutrally.

He'd obviously come pre-loaded with sage chakra to put on this show. It was visible from the behavior and resistance of his core, even if I couldn't feel sage chakra cleanly.

"Ha... ha... is that all you can say? Huh, Naruto-boy?" Fukasaku wheezed, obviously fishing for praise, sweat beading on his brow. "Toad Senjutsu is incomparable to ordinary chakra, even if you've got multiples more of it! This is the power of Frog Kata!"

Instead of answering, I simply walked over to the nearest mountain peak and began channeling chakra into my fist, building up visible streams of compressed air. Ear-splitting pressure hammered outward from me, and Fukasaku's cloak started getting blown away again.

Bam!

The ground shook far harder as the air was torn apart by my strike, which simply pulverized dozens of meters of rock into rubble and sent cracks exploding across the rest of the mountain, causing the whole thing to start toppling with a roar.

Bam, the peak hit the ground, smashing into a couple more on the way down.

With a sweep of my hand, I used Wind chakra to clear the rising dust. Behind my back, the view revealed the toad, blown back by the air wave, standing there with his mouth open just staring ahead.

I walked over to Fukasaku.

"That's what I built the body for."

"You... are you actually human?"

"I look like one."

"Hm..." He squinted at me. "Well, you do look like a regular human... Then again, you all look the same to me. I can only tell Jiraiya-boy apart by his hair and the stripes on his face."

What a revelation from the toad. He turned around.

"Come on. The stone slabs are over there. Thanks to luck, the destroyed rock didn't hit them. We'll meditate on top of these mountains, sitting on the slabs. Don't be afraid of the height; I'll catch you... Though I'm not sure I need to."

"I can fly," I mentioned, and followed the toad.

Actually, the slabs weren't spared thanks to luck; it was because I watch what I hit and where it falls. But that wasn't worth arguing about.

Soon we were perched atop neighboring peaks, each sitting on a slab.

Fukasaku again watched with surprise as I caught my balance on the very first slab and simply didn't fall. Then again, given my body's coordination capabilities, there was nothing surprising about it on my end. What I needed to do now was close my eyes, hold still, and reach for that powerful energy I'd felt yesterday through the oil.

And honestly, I was barely picking up sage chakra at all. Its feel was extremely elusive, and I couldn't figure which direction to push deeper. This sage chakra wasn't quite in this world, yet simultaneously was here. Or rather, I figured there was very little of it here, and it was seeping away to wherever it was stored. These games with space, much like the earlier search for Hagoromo's children's constructs, were extremely difficult. As far as I could tell, the oil attracted sage chakra into this world and shoved it into whoever was soaking in it. But it also radiated so intensely that it interfered with my sensory abilities, even in Sage Mode, making it impossible to trace the path to wherever sage chakra actually came from.

It was precisely because sage chakra existed somewhat outside this world that yesterday, when Fukasaku poked me with his staff, I'd instantly invented a reasonably useful technique: dispersing energy across other dimensions, so the rebelling chakra didn't erupt into this world. Otherwise, given the sheer amount of toad sage chakra I'd absorbed and its powerful physical manifestation, the burst from me would have been strong enough to seriously injure the elder toad and badly wreck the surrounding landscape. Luckily, inventing this technique in the fountain happened very naturally. The oil's spatial properties apparently helped, just as they'd apparently helped manga-Naruto not demolish the sacred site. And sage chakra itself, beyond its stone-transformation properties, also pulled toward somewhere in no small measure. Presumably toward that space I still needed to find.

But returning to sensing sage chakra...

"What, already?!" Fukasaku blurted when I opened my eyes.

"No. The marking hasn't appeared. I'd let you know."

He sighed, only to freeze in speechless shock. Because I'd formed a Cross Seal to save a bit of chakra and created hundreds of Shadow Clones. They filled what seemed like every peak around, each sitting on chakra-constructed slabs.

At the local elder's reaction, I grinned maliciously. That's right. I hadn't liked how I was welcomed yesterday, or what they'd tried to feed me, so now I was taking revenge on the entire toad nation through their elder, blowing his mind.

Unlike the search for constructs, here I could easily use Shadow Clones! So we all went still and began meditating together, searching for sage chakra. Not even fifteen minutes passed before one of us found it, and the clones dissolved back into me, passing on all their experience.

"See? Turns out it's not that hard," I said, opening my eyes again, this time fully in balance with natural energy, with the markings of the corresponding mode on my face. I'd entered Sage Mode very quickly. Here, another advantage of some of my specific training showed itself. I'd developed my entire chakra circulatory system uniformly, which made absorbing sage chakra through my whole body much easier, as well as concentrating that same sage chakra outward.

"..." Fukasaku's gaze was vacant. "Long years of training..."

He began.

"Even Jiraiya-boy... He was a genius among geniuses, but even for him it took years..."

"Well, it took me a fair bit of time too. Though not directly proportional to the number of clones, since prior experience doesn't carry over like that. And luck plays its part... Though I can't say I got particularly lucky."

Fukasaku raised his hand, was about to say something, then just waved it and let out a heavy sigh.

"Here, have a drink." I held out a small white bottle shaped like a sake flask. He accepted it with his five-fingered hand. Regular toads, for the record, usually have four.

"Is this... water?" He took a sip, looking at the bottle strangely.

"Yep."

"Then why this kind of bottle?"

"To get exactly that reaction."

"..." Without a word, Fukasaku simply drained it and handed it back.

"Come, Naruto-boy. I'll teach you Frog Kata, and I've had enough."

He got up with a grunt, then jumped off the rock. I shrugged, tucked the bottle into my bracer, and jumped after him, leaving my slab still standing on the peak. Though it'd probably topple from a gust of wind before long.

Then my rapid training in the toad style began. Not because of any rush; I just learned fast, and there was no point in dawdling.

Frog Kata worked through the sage chakra shroud that surrounded a Sage, meaning now me as well. Because of this shroud, which extended beyond the skin, strikes had to be delivered quite specifically: with that very shroud sitting just outside the skin, imperceptible to sensory abilities. Well, for me, only not clearly perceptible; but with senjutsu practice, very much so now. Besides that, Kata focused on using enormous force, which made learning this style useful for me, even if not directly.

In the end, by lunch I'd mastered everything Fukasaku knew. He even taught me a special toad genjutsu, which lifted my mood, and I became kind to this whole world around me. On that impulse of kindness, I offered to help the toads with a little problem, specifically the somewhat aggravating senile dementia of Gamamaru, the Great Most Venerable Old Geezer.

Going with Fukasaku to the relevant temple where the old geezer lived, I carried out what I'd offered, while also examining the internal structure of these strange otherworldly creatures. Toads, that is.

Along the way, I also met one of the toad bosses: Gamabunta. Another walking multi-story toad, rust-colored with red markings, wearing a vest with a kanji on the back and a pipe clenched in his mouth.

He opened right away by mentioning he'd sensed my chakra in the temple with the old geezer, and now, spotting the markings above my eyes, said he flat-out respects me. If anyone gives me trouble, I should summon him. I nodded skeptically and said that if anyone gives him trouble, he should summon me. He seemed to get offended at that. But instead of arguing, he soon said goodbye and left.

With the departure of the toad who looked, honestly, like some kind of mafioso, I decided that visiting is all well and good, but home is better. So after saying goodbye to the two elder toads and passing a large bag of normal, earthly groceries to Shima through Fukasaku, I returned to Konoha.

By that point, Sasuke had been discharged from the hospital, and I rolled up to him demanding he hand over his clan's knowledge. He did. The interesting stuff was mostly genjutsu, while the fire elemental techniques, and to a much lesser degree other elements, were, well, rarely inspiring for new techniques, but still useful.

After that, I went to see Hiruzen, showed off what I'd learned. Stepped out. Watched him for a bit doing his "blub-blub-blub-blub-blub-blub" thing again. Went back in later. Had a quiet chat with him about Sasuke. Turns out the kid had caught hell from Kakashi for what he'd pulled at the chunin exams. "That cyclops is killing it," I remarked, to which Hiruzen nodded with satisfaction and mentioned that Kakashi might become the next Hokage. He then shook his head at the eager look that came over my face at that piece of news, and we got back to Sasuke. Kakashi had wanted to seal the Cursed Mark, but after talking it over with Hiruzen, we decided it was better not to. Better to let Sasuke learn to control that power. Knowing his personality, if you restrict him, he might just bolt. Whereas in a freer course of events, Konoha could put his strength to use on missions... And honestly, I still wanted to keep watching the Uchiha, see how he uses that seal of his.

Then I headed home again, and there, to my surprise, a certain guest was waiting for me. Though, what kind of guest is she? Before long, this house could just as easily be called hers too. But that's another story.

---

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[vtkun]

thanks for the chapter

 

[Lillie Jones]

Thanks for the chapter

 

[sergey54321060]

Poor toads, they were not ready for this bullshit.
On another note, SI!ruto is now properly equipped to study Sasuke's Cursed Seal, maybe he could even incorporate some of Jugo flesh into next iteration of his body to get that sweet permanent sage mode