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

 

[Welydora]

Shuffling around in the entryway with bags of stuff piled around her, radiating awkwardness in every way possible, Hinata arrived at my rented manor. Still drowning in that same awkwardness, she asked to move in with me.

Pleasantly surprised, I asked what wind had blown her my way. What I got in return were even more flustered, and equally vague, explanations. Apparently, the whole thing was Hiashi's fault. He'd changed a lot recently and had basically gone off the rails. A man who'd kept himself on a tight leash his whole life, while actually being a pretty warm person toward his loved ones on the inside, had apparently decided to unleash every last drop of bottled-up fatherly affection in the shortest time physically possible, going full-on "coochie-coo" mode with his daughters. Constantly asking how they were doing, whether they needed anything, showering them in sweets and whatnot, and so on and so forth.

Hinata found this deeply mortifying, but beyond the baseline embarrassment, it was also throwing her completely off-balance, leaving her feeling totally out of her element. Her sister Hanabi had managed to adapt, according to Hinata, but for Hinata herself, the change in their father was just too sudden, too sharp. And so, here she was. On my doorstep.

That's how my house acquired a permanent resident, who soon enough got acquainted with another one: not a resident exactly, but a "regular visitor." Karin, who'd already met Hinata before the move, began drifting closer and closer to the soft-spoken Hyuga once Hinata had settled in. The reason was simple: the red-haired girl just physically liked her. Both as a person and for her chakra, which, according to Karin, was "sweeter than honey, and seriously just whoa."

To the Uzumaki girls duo, by the way, I passed along one very interesting little document, which promptly had them cackling with wicked satisfaction over the fate of Kusa's former leadership, and the village's situation in general. Understandable. Life in a place that had openly exploited them in the worst sense of the word hadn't exactly been a highlight reel, hence the reaction.

But back to Hinata. Now that she'd walked right into my web, I offered her the chance to become fully mine... As in, to undergo a body enhancement.

After she came to from the fainting spell my offer caused and expressed her consent and trust, just one day later Sakura and I stood watching my clones at work and Hinata's body inside the chamber.

We silently watched as the first stage reached its conclusion. With time, I'd gotten the hang of it and had grown considerably stronger, so the process moved at a much brisker pace. The whole thing would be done within the hour.

"Mesmerizing," Sakura noted, watching new fuinjutsu seals lace themselves around the capsule.

"Yeah. Nice to just watch other people do the work," I remarked with a smile, though I was simultaneously feeding my own chakra to assist the clones, a process that was quietly consuming a solid chunk of my processing capacity.

While we chatted, nothing seemed amiss. Until Karin, driven by curiosity, decided to "discreetly" slip inside the lab.

She'd been handling the paperwork, pretty decently at that, but she'd never actually been inside the lab, and the curiosity had been eating at her. Today, it finally won.

Cracking the door open, Karin began taking in the large hall: me and Sakura, the fuinjutsu seals and the clones at their points, and the capsule with its shimmering seal-lines rippling across the surface.

After exchanging a few more words with Sakura, I decided it was time we stopped jointly ignoring the gaze that kept sweeping over our backs.

"Karin..."

"Eep!" came the sound from behind.

"You can come in," I said, turning around.

The door swung open a little too abruptly a moment later, and out stepped a girl doing her absolute best impression of someone who had nothing to do with any of this. Still, the sparks of curiosity were practically jumping off her eyes, though she couldn't quite meet mine, giving away a fair measure of guilt.

"So... what's going on here?" Karin finally asked, stepping closer.

"An ascension, in short," I explained. But seeing only growing interest, I gave a more detailed breakdown.

"Oh-h-h!" Karin breathed, visibly impressed. A tremor of awe passed through her, along with a barely concealed desire to go through something like that herself.

I gave her a patronizing, knowing smile at that. Sakura let out a quiet sound in a similar tone.

"Naruto," Sakura began, slightly uncertain, after her own reaction. "Are you sure you should be getting distracted during the process? Could this be dangerous for Hinata?"

At those words, Karin froze.

"Positive. The process is stretched out over time, and if anything comes up, I'd have time to—"

"How dare you?!" Karin exploded, which made me go wide-eyed, while Sakura merely lifted her eyelids slightly. "Who do you think you are to lecture him?! Naruto knows what he's doing! After everything he's done for you! How could you doubt him like that?!"

The red-haired girl looked ready to keep going, but froze again when she caught my reproachful look.

"Karin. Calm down. I like the dynamic Sakura and I have. People who aren't afraid to say what they think straight to my face aren't exactly common. I value that."

Apparently, my clanmate, who was very enthusiastically devoted to me, had seen disrespect toward me and my decisions in Sakura's words. An attack on her idol, essentially. Hence the explosion. It was a strange feeling, being someone's idol.

At my words, Karin choked on air like a duck grabbed by the neck. After which, guilt crept back into her eyes.

"Um, I'm sorry," she said, turning to Sakura and apologizing awkwardly but genuinely.

"Hot blood is not a crime, merely a temporary flaw. Forgiven," Sakura declared in an even tone, and at the same time her gaze toward Karin shifted into something considerably more patronizing.

My cheek twitched, barely noticeably. Something distinctly samurai-like had just wafted through the room.

Nothing of note happened after that until Hinata's body enhancement was complete. Nothing after it finished, either.

Karin, at my request, so as not to embarrass Hinata with her particular nature, left us with a pitiful sigh. Then Sakura and I gave my Sunshine a guided tour through the features of her new body. We got flustered yet grateful reactions in return, after which the three of us spent the rest of the day together, until in the evening Karin joined us on a walk through Konoha. Persistent girl... She'll probably go far.

By the end of the day, Sakura had made up her mind about moving in, and the next day her things appeared in my not-really-mine rented house as well.

These moves by future grown-up girls... Their lives alongside mine, in close proximity to me and to each other... You couldn't really call any of this "accidental," and I could clearly see the sort of scandalous future this trajectory was steering all of us toward. But me, secretly cackling in the dark corridors of the lab when no one was watching and rubbing my hands together, I was absolutely on board with all of it, even if the timing was clearly terrible.

The next day, while my vacation was still technically ongoing, I busied myself with observing Sasuke during his training sessions, continuing to study how his body behaved under senjutsu chakra. Easy enough: walked up, told him it was for his future power-up through awakening the second stage, and then proceeded to watch from the front row, sometimes even closer, on those occasions when I was wiping the training ground floor with the Uchiha during sparring.

On one such occasion, having just used Sasuke to make the grass on one of the training grounds a bit cleaner and heading home, I ran into someone.

"What are you doing?" I asked, sidling up to a completely unsuspicious patch of green vegetation on a branch of a tall tree that happened to overlook the women's hot springs not far off.

The leaves shuddered. Then, practically with a creak, they turned toward me. Tucked among the foliage was a well-concealed short spyglass, which now also focused on me.

"What do you want?" Jiraiya whispered. Because it was absolutely him.

"Just felt like busting your chops," I shrugged. "So how's it going?"

"Was going great," came a reply so deeply annoyed that the unspoken "until you showed up" hung in the air. "Keep it down. They might hear us!"

"Hear us?" I said, and then added even louder, "Come on, those women you're peeping on are way too far away! They're not gonna spot you!"

...

Silence settled between us. I smiled happily, having satisfied my natural petty streak.

The spyglass snapped toward the springs and just as quickly froze. Jiraiya had clearly spotted something other than what he was hoping for. Meanwhile, my hearing picked up a suspiciously sudden silence at those very springs, followed by waves of bloodlust rolling in our direction.

Whoosh. Within seconds, a kunoichi with chestnut hair appeared via Shunshin beside us, one hand clutching a towel and the other gripping a sharp kunai.

The kunoichi, spotting, next to a "suspicious-as-hell bush" whose spyglass had even retracted to see up close, none other than Uzumaki-san himself, didn't immediately figure out how to proceed. I used that pause.

"Personally, I'm a firm believer in mutual consent in these matters. It's..." I snapped my fingers. "Unethical, yeah. Inuzuka-san," I said, addressing the girl, identifiable by the red fang marks on her cheeks and the distinctly feral quality of her chakra as being from the dog clan. "I won't stand in the way of justice."

And with a flourish, I waved my hand with a materialized illusory red cape and, like a master matador, sidestepped the furious woman. Jiraiya, meanwhile, had already launched himself out of the foliage and was sprinting into the distance at full tilt so no one would catch him.

Five minutes later

"Fast runner," I complimented Jiraiya, who flinched again.

He was sitting in an inconspicuous little grove under a tree, notebook out and ready to jot something down, when I dropped right in front of him.

"Experience," he remarked, with something genuinely resembling pride. "So what do you want?"

"I'm just bored, so I'm entertaining myself at your expense." His face twitched. "Also, wanted to brag: my training with the toads is finished."

He gave me a deeply skeptical look.

"So they didn't actually teach you senjutsu," he nodded to himself. "Makes sense. You're still too young for that."

"Hey." That particular assessment did not sit well with me. "They did teach me senjutsu. Wanna bet?"

The skepticism in Jiraiya's gaze went up by about two tons.

"Kid, I spent years training in senjutsu. And I still never fully mastered it. Besides, what would I even bet against you for?"

I raised an eyebrow. He was seeing a child again?

"Been a while since you last took a flight?" I asked casually, and the "Gallant" instantly sat up straighter.

He snapped his notebook shut, tucked it in his pocket, straightened his haori, and stood tall.

"No, look, I heard from the old man that you had some kind of venture. But mastering senjutsu in a few days? That's impossible," he said, acknowledging that my business at least gave me something worth betting, while still being confident I wouldn't win.

At that, I smirked and laid out a few options for the stakes. We settled on this: if I was full of hot air and hadn't actually mastered anything, I'd pay a million ryo out of my own pocket. If Jiraiya was the one who'd misjudged, he'd spend a full month wearing an outfit of my choosing. A "shameful" outfit, by his standards.

We shook on it. Then I went still for one second, just long enough to watch the "Immortal Spirit's" eyes go wide as the orange markings bled onto my eyelids.

"Belly button," I said, poking him in the stomach with a Sage Mode-coated finger. I'd wanted to go for the nose, but given the height difference between us, that would've looked stupid on my end. "Well then. I'll deliver a few wardrobe items to you tomorrow. See ya, future ballerino, mwa-ha-ha-ha!"

Erupting into the most theatrical villain's cackle I could manage, I vanished in a Shunshin, leaving Jiraiya just standing there gaping.

The next day, barely holding back my laughter, I observed the scowling "Sage."

His well-defined legs, wrapped in snow-white tights, ended in matching snow-white ballet slippers. A white tutu flared out from his midsection, covering him to mid-thigh, and above that was, of course, an equally snow-white leotard with a wide chest cutout. All perfectly standard ballerina attire. It would've been, anyway, if not for the fact that it was stretched across the frame of a near-two-meter, beastly looking man. Even from a distance, you could see his thick, muscled legs practically bursting the white fabric at the seams, and what was on display in the chest cutout was very definitively not feminine. The finishing touches were the makeup: white greasepaint and powder giving his skin a light, matte pallor, with glitter on his cheeks sparkling like tiny stars in the sunlight. The look was completed by his long white hair, worn loose, complementing the entire getup perfectly.

Having savored the "content" expression on Jiraiya's face, I left him to get comfortable with his new look.

I had somewhere to be.

Today, I had a meeting scheduled with Guy, who intended to make good on his promise to teach me his ultimate technique.

In his characteristically polite way, he eased into it from a distance. Guy, for all that he'd developed the techniques, had, up until today, only ever had them exist in theory at full power. During training, he rarely opened even the Seventh Gate, because it was genuinely dangerous. The Eighth was something he could only look at and shake his head. So what he could actually perform was nothing more than a pale shadow of what he'd designed.

Daytime Tiger, Hirudora, had been built as a large-scale technique against massive opponents. Something to have in your back pocket if, say, a bijuu came calling, or something else monstrous decided to surface.

Opening the Eighth Gate gives you exponentially more power, and to harness it effectively, Guy had devised techniques built on a different principle: concentrating. Rather than the collateral devastation of Hirudora, they focused on instantly killing a smaller target. Though of course, landing a Hirudora with the Eighth Gate open would be incomparably more devastating than landing it with only seven.

Before Night Guy, the true crown jewel of Maito's work, there was a preparatory technique, similar in principle: Evening Elephant.

After running through the theory, I set about performing it on the same training field, while Guy stepped to the edge and beamed his encouraging smile.

To pull off even a basic version of the technique, I didn't need to open the Gates at all, beyond the First, which was always open for me. Opening the Second and Third would bring my output to roughly the absolute ceiling of what Guy could produce with all eight. But I decided to push harder, to fold in some control training, since a good share of what the technique demanded was precisely that control.

Again, without bleeding chakra into the outside world, I felt Yin and Yang lock together inside me with a metallic clang, then spread through my body in a deep, vibrating hum. My muscles coiled, clamping down on bone, as I also opened the Sixth Gate to make sure the technique would actually work. My heart, normally so quiet, merged with the chakra's pulse and beat in unison, pumping blood dozens of times faster until my entire skin flushed crimson. Through my pores, instead of sweat, blue chakra began seeping out, taking on the role of cooling my body from the heat it was putting out.

Tension. A light push off the ground. And I rose effortlessly to just five hundred meters. High enough for altitude, low enough to stay beneath the clouds, and close enough that Guy could evaluate the form.

My hands balled into fists, clenching tighter still, until the energy around them growled in a low roar. Then, drawing back, the arm snapped straight with a deafening blast, launching an impossibly dense projectile of compressed atmospheric pressure. Space seemed to bend, bleaching white. The sphere, vaguely resembling an elephant's paw, shot away instantly, leaving a visible trail of disturbed air in its wake.

Then, using the air itself as a foothold, I kicked straight down beneath me, launching my body sideways. Another punch, another cannonball-like projectile punching out, its trail slicing across the path of the first. Then again. Three more times. Five intersecting, faintly translucent white beams piercing the sky.

I then teleported back to Guy's side and watched the beams race outward at staggering speed, spreading across kilometers in seconds.

The technique came out many times stronger than anything Guy could have produced. But given its nature, that would only show in the length of the beams and their "density," while the actual destructive force you'd only feel by standing directly in their path.

"Ha-a-a-h... That was intense," I exhaled, then flexed and released my hands a few times. The skin had taken serious burns. They were already knitting themselves back together before my eyes. "But not a single bone even cracked. We can move on."

"...This is extraordinary, Uzumaki-san!" Shielding his eyes with one palm, Maito looked up at the clouds, several of which now had holes punched through them. "Behold, the dawn of youth's power! History itself leaves your hands! We move to the next stage immediately!"

And so we did. Some time had passed since our spar, time during which I'd grown stronger on every front and had grown considerably more comfortable with my newer power, so that with proper energy direction, I could avoid bringing excessive damage to my own body.

Now. Night Guy.

Hovering at altitude, I sort of crouched, extending one leg forward and angling myself skyward so the strike wouldn't hit the Earth. All to let my body explode with energy again, while an even denser fog of chakra began billowing off me.

Then, without completing the technique, I began absorbing senjutsu chakra as well, and the aura shifted from blue to grey. It then began shaping itself into an enormous dragon's head, many times my own body in sheer scale.

Already, just from the concentration of energy, space was warping across dozens of meters, bending light instead of letting it pass straight. The chakra's hum resonated as a fine tremor in the bones.

Concentrating everything into a single point, I gave it a forward vector, and launched after it, faster than any fighter jet. Physics itself briefly stopped working right. I felt incredible gravitational pull, and then the world around me collapsed to a single point before blooming outward into the dark of space.

Maintaining my protective chakra shell, I reflexively tried to breathe out of habit and got nothing. Grimacing, I deliberately relaxed my tensed body.

With a chuckle, already generated from air chakra, I turned back toward the receding Earth, myself now a grey comet. I eased my grip on the dense, barely-maintainable shell by choice, letting my protection drop significantly.

Tap. I felt the faintest brush of contact, and then, in the span of an impossibly brief moment, I watched as a chunk of rock several kilometers across simply exploded before my eyes as I accidentally flew straight through it.

There it is. The shadow of those consequences: lose control and let the manipulated energy transfer to, say, the Earth. This monstrous charge would ripple across an entire area.

Though, to be fair, even if Guy's techniques that he'd created for his Eight Gates do fly straight through, destroying everything in their path. Even if I'd angled into the Earth instead of the sky and drilled a multi-kilometer-deep straight hole, the consequences for everything around it would still have been catastrophic.

Anyway, enough sitting around. Engaging flight, I killed my momentum, then vanished in a teleport and reappeared next to Guy, who was staring into the sky in panic.

"Everything's fine," I said, and he noticed me, exhaled loudly, and immediately perked up.

"Ha-ha! That's the power of youth!" Tears welled up on his face. Of happiness? "That is the most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed!"

And all he'd actually seen was a grey beam that appeared for an instant and then vanished. And yet, for him, that clearly meant everything.

"I am so grateful that there is a person in this world to whom I have not only completely passed on my legacy, but who has surpassed me!"

His reaction made me feel awkward.

Guy was a man who truly lived for taijutsu. With firm, clear principles. And the thought began creeping into my mind: shouldn't I offer him a body enhancement too? He wasn't a pretty girl with a future, of course, but as a person overall, he was genuinely worthy. I'd never heard of him being mixed up in anything shady. So why not? And following that logic, I could eventually offer the same to Hiruzen.

"Yeah," I confirmed. "Though I think your mission isn't over yet."

"Oh, you're absolutely right!" Wiping his snot and tears on his sleeve, he blazed even brighter and looked into the distance. "I still have three magnificent students! And I will do everything in my power to make sure they don't fall too far behind you, Uzumaki-san! I'll double, no, triple... No, they'll train ten times harder! A new program is forming itself in my head! I need to write this down! Uzumaki-san, I won't take another moment of your time!"

He swung his arms behind his back, gave them a jerk, and, like a cartoon character, launched forward so fast that only a rising speck of dust was visible for a couple of seconds before even that disappeared beyond the horizon.

I guess my offer should wait. He was going to be busy.

The faces of Guy's students surfaced in my mind: Lee, Tenten, Neji. I let out a heavy sigh.

"Let us pray for them..."


The weeks that followed moved quickly. Having learned Guy's techniques, I practiced them occasionally, hoping I'd never need to use them on Earth. Because one mistake on my part, and an apocalypse would descend over dozens, if not hundreds, of kilometers.

Beyond that, I spent time with the girls, lately more and more with all three of them together. I also continued slowly studying the use and influence of Sasuke's Cursed Seal. My body was top-notch, of course, but back when I'd designed it, I had no knowledge of senjutsu, so it was poorly adapted for it. By studying senjutsu's effects not only on my own body but on someone else's, I was building the knowledge base for the next stage of body enhancement. A body that would be far, far better suited for senjutsu. Even more so than the Jugo clan, whose genome I also wouldn't pass up the chance to study.

But not now. I was also dedicating time to refining senjutsu and my elemental techniques. And while I had no shortage of ideas on what else to try: attempting to sense some other spectrum of senjutsu chakra on Earth, dropping in on Kurama for a chat, messing with someone. But my vacation was still ongoing, so I kept the workload light.

At that pace, the end of July arrived, and at the close of the month, acting on a "bad feeling," I sent the Uzumaki mother and daughter to my little manor in Wave Country.

The next day, the Third Stage of the Chunin Exams began.

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