A/N: Concept fic for an original shinobi village. Chapters will detail a specific clan while furthering the telling of the village history. May eventually include the Hyūga, Uchiha, Kaguya, and Haku's clan. Written to take a break from my current other, jumbo-epic Naruto project ... which involves no Sasuke. Amazing.
Chapter Rating: PG...? (Some mentions of violence/killing but no descriptions.)
Reviews: Constructive crit is very, very welcome.
Village of a Thousand Bloodlines: Tales
The Nitai
Yamagakure no Sato wasn't a well-known village in the world of the five great nations of Wind, Water, Lightning, Fire and Rock, but in the ninja world there were many such places. Minor countries lined the borders between Lightning and Fire, Fire and Rock, and so on, somehow holding their own despite the lumbering powers they bordered. However, for all of these countries, Yama wasn't even on the map, or, if it was on the map, it was unnamed, unknown, and too far off into untamed wilderness.
Maybe it would be marked. Someday. If it could play its ninja right.
In the shinobi world, the worse of all potential threats start small, like black mold in a damp basement. By time the threat is even visible to the naked eye, the whole area is infected with the problem. It then takes time and effort to fully stamp the spreading infection out. Large villages like Kirigakure, Konohagakure, Kumogakure, and the like, were far past the point of initial visibility. If they were mold in basements, they had long ago grown into riotous patters all over basement walls, sending their spore-fumes into the air and morphing into incredible structures one would not think that something that once floated invisibly in the air could generate. For best results in attempts to exterminate such vigorous threats, fire should be used, but even this is no guarantee. Few have to resources to undertake the creation of appropriately sized conflagrations in the case of larger villages, and of those who possibly do, even fewer feel daring enough to try.
For now, Yama was one of the many villages of the world that did its best to mind its own business and ensure that, when it came to them, others minded theirs. Like most young villages, it had gotten quite good at staying out of the affairs of larger villages, but unlike most villages, only got better at this the longer it was around. Yama liked its privacy. It watched the tumultuous wars of the great countries not with a fearful, shrinking eye, but a passive, aloof one. Yama waited for something. More accurately, it waited for many somethings.
They thirsted for bloodlines. They wanted their power. They believed in the superiority of bloodlines to all other ninja arts. Their ultimate goal was to someday see all the bloodlines of the world living under one village roof. The power of a village filled with nothing but overworked genetic pools was a frightening concept, and blew out the imaginations of most "non-breed" shinobi. Most villages simply dreamed of having a few really good bloodlines in their midst—not every last one of them.
Yama had no country, no lord, and not even a kage in the sense that other hidden villages did, but it was organized well enough to serve its own ends, with the heads of several bloodline clans serving as the de facto rulers in all but name. Those who made up the core leadership of the village had been thoroughly disillusioned by the rest of the shinobi world, thinking it out to do little for bloodlines besides make use of them. The influence of these people in the village thoroughly disillusioned everyone else living there in a similar fashion. So it was that Yama became a village filled not only with people endowed with a great sense of superiority (their pride stank like putrid decomposed fish washed up on the beaches of Mist,) but also with people who believed that the rest of the world was filled with weaklings who didn't deserve their self-rule. In other words, they were bugs to be squashed, dogs to be domesticated, or barbarians to be subjugated to the will of a more glorious power.
Not many people ask questions when they already believe they have all the answers.
Yama made its first great bloodline catch in its founding clan: the Nitai, otherwise known as the "Two-Existence" Clan. A lesser bloodline of Kirigakure, they would vanish from war-torn Mist long before the demon-man Momochi Zabuza would adopt one of the last of the users of the Hyōton as his personal weapon.
This vanishing was orchestrated by the then-head of the clan, a far-sighted sort of man who was eerily good at predicting the next major political upheavals and world events of significance. The moment that the Mizukage began calling up bloodline clans at every turn to fight his battles, and the moment that bloodline clans began banding together to their own ends, were the moments that he foresaw the downfall of all the bloodlines of Mist.
"This does not bode well for us," he told his son, a twenty-four-year-old who shared a similar ability of foresight (although later descendants proved that this trait was not part of the bloodline inheritance.)
His son's response was simple and direct, lacking surprise. "We will leave Mist, then, Chichiue?"
"When another bloodline joins the fight, we will leave. For now, we watch, and make plans," he said with a nod.
It was that simple. When the head of the Nitai Clan said what the future would hold, and what they should do to avoid the worst parts of that future, his clan believed what he said. If other bloodlines of the day had also had as an observant and logical clan head as the Nitai, they might have survived the later turmoil.
As it stood, however, it was only the Nitai Clan which vanished from Mist less than a week later, leaving their empty homes to dumbfound a messenger who came with the Mizukage's summons and requests for assistance. After all was said and done, however, most would say it was a good riddance. A few stalwarts would call them traitors, but no one was in the mood to go looking for more bloodlines to fight with when they had plenty to hunt down in Mist itself.
The Nitai got as far away from Mist as they could. This was not such a hard task, just a tricky one. Their bloodline allowed them to body flicker over abnormally large distances. There was one big problem with this, however: whereas normal shinobi usually used a good body flicker to reappear in a nearby, known location, more often than not, a Nitai would be flickering into an area of unknown terrain. Admittedly, finding oneself speared on a tree trunk was not all that pleasant, and, if it happened, had a high fatality rate.
This was why most Nitai had common sense drilled into them from a young age: even if the Mizukage himself directly orders you, never, ever long-distance flicker without knowing where you're going.
There was also a second difficulty with the bloodline which made it far less known than it might have otherwise been. Emergence of the bloodline in any given clan member, purebred or not, was a complete toss-up. While odds were around fifty-fifty, these were poor given that almost all other bloodlines had at least eighty percent emergence. One unfortunate Nitai father-son line, for example, despite all having been born Nitai, married Nitai, and produced children who were Nitai, hadn't had a bloodline emergence in five generations. (There was said to be a curse on them. Some believed that it was an Uchiha curse that had been put on the Great-great-grandfather during a mission into Fire. It was a known fact that there was something evil about those Uchiha, not to mention that they were the enemies of Mist. It made perfect sense to blame them.)
Compensating for the problem, however, was the ability of a large group of emerged Nitai to combine their abilities. When doing so, they could transport not only themselves, but others, in an amount approximately equal to one less person than the Nitai performing the technique. Those who could not be taken straight out of Mist were a small enough group that they could escape on foot without detection. Although this second group was never able to rejoin with the main one, a particular area of southern Fire became known for producing individuals with exceptional skill at body-flicker and other related techniques, although such talent came nowhere near what a full-blooded Nitai could pull off.
The rest of the clan went west, at first appearing on the western edge of Wind Country, where they knew the land was flat and barren. Travel after this was done on foot, and the clan eventually settled on the other side of a mountainous region where the borders of Wind faded along with the desert sands. Here was near virgin land, sparsely populated with small farms owing no one allegiance. The land was just fertile enough and just remote enough for them to retain independence. Mist had never even been heard of here.
The clan was satisfied, and they promptly took the area. Their deal to the farmers: provide us with food, and we will protect you from bandits. Undoubtedly many of the farmers thought that they were getting the short end of things, but since the deal was of the take-it-or-be-dead kind, most opted to accept. Anyone who didn't had their lands divided up among those who did.
"A necessary sacrifice for the insurance of regional peace and our future," declared the Nitai Head. The clan, as usual, believed him.
The Nitai set about establishing a village for themselves directly afterward. It was, after all, a key feature of any ninja-dominated country. Be sides which, they wanted to have a village up and running first, before any of those annoying political dead weights called daimyo entered the picture and tried to throw their money and their false nobility around. If the Nitai had their way, none of these affronts to their superiority would ever emerge, and they would be left in peace to simply be.
And then someone had that idea, born of their pride for bloodlines, the one idea that would forever change the course of their history.
The Nitai, someday, wouldn't be Yama's only clan.
They would be farther from that than they ever thought possible.
Yamagakure no Sato (山隠れの里): Village Hidden in the Mountain
Chichiue (父上): Older style term for father. Common among samurai before the Meiji Era. In the Japanese version of Naruto, Neji addresses his father using this word.