Do not own Naruto in any way shape or form
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Naruto woke up in his apartment, he looked around in memory of all of the times that he had looked around the room he was in now. It wasn't until the second glance around the room that he noticed that not only was the door missing but, the window was as well. As he jerked himself out of bed he fell to the floor before noticing the huge trap door that lay open by his feet. So he fell screaming into a seemingly endless void, devoid of any markings of passage save for the feeling of falling. Finally he landed in water that seemingly came from nowhere. As he stood up in the waist deep water, he found himself in a passage that led into what looked like a sewer. He waded over to the higher side of the tunnel, and he wondered just where he was. As he moved along the tunnel he noticed the water decreased however it was in long sluggishly moving lines.
Wandering along the passage Naruto couldn't help but wonder to himself just what was causing this strange event. Careful to avoid the deeper sections of water he soon found himself at a crossroads in the path. One path led below the water but had a more pleasant feel to it, while the others didn't dip nearly as far into the water they didn't carry the feeling of light at the end either. All of the other paths lead back to under the water but none held the light feeling that was present at the end of this one. The path above the water held a feeling of greater darkness around it. Taking a deep breath, Naruto dove into the water and started swimming, a fragments of memories became visible before his eyes for an instant before vanishing back into the murky depths. Soon he came to the surface and found himself in a bright corridor with many colored doors that seemed to drive the water away. As he opened each door he would relive a memory and with each memory he relived of pure happiness the water which had seemed so oppressive just moments before was looking cleaner than when he first came in. Every door that he had opened too now bore an image of what the memories represented. The last door that he opened wasn't a memory in the normal sense because it was only an image that seemed to be continuously looping of a red haired woman and a blond haired man both with faces filled with happiness as they looked on the wrapped bundle in the woman's arms. A tiny hint of blond hair was sticking from the blanket as well as the whiskers that were visible on his cheeks. As the last door closed behind him, he moved back into the water returning to the crossroads that had stopped him before. With the weight on his shoulders lessened he once again was moving along the path.
Many bends in the path almost disguised the fact that he seemed to be moving lower even as pipes began flowing along the ceiling and walls, each one with a small circle of what looked like glass showing what passed through them was colors so vastly different from one another that it passed through the rainbow leaving almost no color untouched. As he moved further, even more colors emerged in the intersections, although how in the world there was something that was colored plaid was in those pipes Naruto didn't want to know. Eventually he came to a door upon which a howling fox head could be seen. Almost hesitantly he opened the door and entered the room.
As he entered torches within the room lit, and began shedding their light upon the room. At first it was as if there was nothing in the room, but as the light spread a cage with golden bars came into view. With the lights only barely penetrating the cage he saw at each corner of the cage bound with chains on their wrists and with their lower bodies stuck with in the pillars was the very same blond haired man and red headed woman from the last door that he had opened in the corridor that held his happier memories.
As Naruto started rushing toward the prone figure of the red haired woman a dark voice from the shadows next to the cage spoke, "They won't wake."
Stopping and staring toward the voice Naruto had trouble finding his voice as a figure stepped from the shadows. Wearing robes and carrying prayer beads the demonic looking figure cut a frightening visage as he moved toward Naruto. Suddenly finding his voice Naruto all but yelled, "Why not? Why won't she wake and for that matter why won't he either?"
"Because they are nothing but fragments of souls tied into the seal that hold the cage shut and once their purpose is done they shall be united with the rest of their soul which awaits them in my castle between the borders of this life and the next." the terrifying figure continued.
"Who are you and who are they?" Naruto asked as his fear gradually subsided.
"I, Naruto, am the god of death, kami of all things that reside in the departure of souls, and the ferryman for departed souls to the afterlife. I am the Shinigami and for this moment you have nothing to fear of me." the Shinigami introduced himself. "And as for the souls that bound themselves to that duty, I will introduce you to them soon but first we have more pressing matters. If you would show yourself?"
Echoing laughter echoed from within the cage as two giant red eyes opened and began staring down at them. A momentary surge of fear enveloped Naruto as he looked up and saw those malevolent eyes staring down on him as well as the evil grin that formed within the darkness and added its own feeling of malevolence and insanity to the terror that overwhelmed Naruto. On seeing the terror its smile widened to show more of its huge fangs. In a booming deep evil voice it spoke, "So the child fears the demon, and yet the evils that I have committed pale in comparison to many of the evils that humanity has perpetrated."
"Now isn't the time to discuss philosophy Kyuubi." the Shinigami sadly in a much less evil tone projecting this time. "Now, Naruto, as you know now, on the night of your birth the Kyuubi was sealed into you. And while even I do not wish to begin explaining the story to you, some of it is pertinent to why I brought you here. The technique used to seal the Kyuubi into you was called Shiki Fuujin and it draws its power from the life force of the person using it. Normally it is a suicide technique that allows the user to absolutely kill one other being and placing them both at my feet in judgment, however in this case it was different because the forth Hokage changed how it worked slightly and instead of taking the Kyuubi's soul, I ripped as much energy as I could from the Kyuubi and caused its soul and the remainder of its energy to be sealed within you. A fragment of my own energy followed as well to make sure that it didn't escape before your death. The main reason that the sealing was done this way was that the Kyuubi normally doesn't fall under my jurisdiction as it is truly immortal, and as such normally I cannot affect its soul and being. As for the two souls chained to the cage they are fragments from your parents that are here to help reinforce the seal. They have another purpose however that I can't tell you what it is. There are quite a number of things that I could tell you but because of the rules on the intervention of deities into the lives of mortals I shall not. You see in instances like these the information that I could give you would require that ether you offer payment to me for it or I shall suffer a penalty that I do not wish to pay."
Naruto's head was spinning as he committed all that he had been told to memory and asked, "Could you stop for a minute, this is getting hard to take in?" several minutes silence followed as Naruto went over the information that he had been given and got it straight in his head. Finally he said, "Please continue."
"The only reason that I have given you that break is because some of the things that I will impart to you tonight will be hard to understand at first, however if you will not interrupt me again we can be done that much sooner." the Shinigami continued. "Now, I have given you most of the background information that you will need to understand why I brought you here tonight. As I told you earlier a fragment of my energy entered the seal to make sure that the Kyuubi could not escape and so that I could judge him for his crimes, however that is not the only effect that this energy has had upon you. Until you received your headband I kept the abilities locked away, but the fragment of my energy didn't directly interact with yours however some of your energy in close contact with mine has begun mimicking mine. Currently this energy doesn't give you many abilities however this may change with time. Currently you can call upon any souls that are caught between the borders of life and death and you can see the aura of darkness around people who have broken universal laws or who have committed unspeakable atrocities in their lives." He waved his hand and a small clock appeared upon the wall next to the door that read 10:00 as the Shinigami continued, "more than half of this world has at one time or another committed some act of evil and this clock represents how long I will allow you to summon the souls to your mindscape here and you may get more time upon this clock for all the evils that a soul you send to me committed that you had no influence in. those are the powers that you have now however I do not know what other powers you may develop in the future."
"So right now I can call any soul that is between life and death but you are limiting my to an amount of time equivalent to the amount of evil I send you from this world?" Naruto asked as many ideas ran through his head.
"Yes, young Naruto, but the reason that I am putting a limit on how long the souls may be called is because nothing in life or the afterlife is truly free and if you have to work for the time you will appreciate it more." the Shinigami replied.
"So where did the ten hours come from," Naruto asked somewhat confusedly.
"Ah, that time came both from your own actions which have had several very corrupt men killed and the fact that your parents have been helping my with my duties so that I have had more free time than usual these past twelve years." the Shinigami said as if slightly embarrassed about admitting the second part. "Currently the only souls that you may call are the souls of your parents as they are the only ones who built up a debt to me before their deaths."
"Thank you, Shinigami-sama." Naruto said as he bowed to the god.
"Now, I must leave, but I suggest that you have a talk with Kyuubi and then spend five hours with your parents to use up all of your accumulated time." the Shinigami finished before he began fading away.
After the last pieces of the Shinigami disappeared Naruto began moving closer to the cage and asked, "What did he want you to tell me?"
The deep booming voice from earlier answered, "there are several things that are the direct result of things that I or the seal have done but I think that he wanted me to tell you about the fact that your transformation technique is much different than normal. Because of several factors that happened before your birth and after with the seal your body modified itself to take on one of my abilities. The ability of true transformation rather than just of casting an illusion over your body. The main reason that I mentioned this is that after a certain number of times that you transform into the same form your body will lock it in as a default form. You won't be stuck permanently in the form by any means but, if it gets locked in than there is a chance that you could spontaneously transform into the form and be stuck that way for several days."
"So, how many more transformations do I have before that happens?" Naruto asked somewhat worriedly as he had used the technique quite a number of times for pranks as well as the throw off pursuit after pranks.
"That's just it I think that your usage against the Hokage may have tipped the balance, but on the bright side once a transformation becomes permanent this way it no longer requires chakra to hold up and cannot be dispelled." the Kyuubi said its voice betraying its irritation at the situation. "And once you transform and are stuck you'll have to learn a control exercise to maintain which form you wish to be in rather than it altering randomly with your thoughts. The good thing about this ability is that you have an additional form to get into should one of them be damaged because injuries don't carry across the change and the injury will regenerate back to normal at about half speed until the form is no longer injured. The bad thing about this ability is the fact that while all of your abilities pass over none of the resistances that you have trained your body to withstand will pass over."
"And the other thing that you wanted to tell me?" Naruto asked as his mind wrapped around randomly swapping forms every few seconds.
"Since, the Shinigami explained my imprisonment within you several days after the sealing I have done the absolute minimum for you that wasn't required of me or forced by the seal." Kyuubi said its deep booming voice carrying a hint of amusement. "There are a number of things that I could have done differently, however, as I told the Shinigami when I was first imprisoned you haven't done anything very impressive in my eyes so until you do or it involves our imminent survival I will maintain the bare minimum as I have been."
"I can understand that and thank you for what you have done." Naruto replied before a sudden though hit his head. "The Shinigami never did tell how to summon souls to use the time that has accumulated did he."
The Kyuubi laughed evilly as Naruto began listing off ridiculous solutions of how to summon the souls before its voice filled with mirth, at the mention of some of the various funny thoughts that Naruto had thought up, said. "As I understand it to summon them you place your hand on their name which should be on the bottom of the clock."
As Naruto mover over to the clock, he found that there really were names along the bottom of the clock. Kushina Uzumaki followed by a blurring third name and a completely blurred second name. Tapping each of the names he was rewarded by pillars of light and in seconds both of his parents were there having wrapped him in a hug the moment that they had materialized. The following five hours were filled with many stories, a huge amount of advise, and quite a bit of embarrassment for Naruto as his parents made up for the time that they had lost with their son. The worst part was when his mother was exclaiming over the sexy jutsu body that he was apparently stuck with now and how when became excited and started running him through the female "talk" that his father had finished giving him the male version almost an hour earlier. He also found out why part of his mothers name was visible while his fathers was completely blanked out. It was because he knew his mothers maiden name while he could only guess about his fathers name for now. When the five hours were up his parents disappeared in another pillar of light as the clock struck zero. Exhausted Naruto fell into a fitful sleep almost as soon as they left as he had felt a great many more emotions than he normally did. As Naruto's body slowly vanished from his mindscape the Kyuubi couldn't help grinning about how much fun all of the chaos and destruction that Naruto would cause over with everything that he had learned over the last six years but had hidden. Laughter boomed from its cage as it thought of all of the mayhem that would spring from the things that people thought they knew about the blond.
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The next morning Naruto awoke and blurrily looked at the clock to find that it was almost five minutes after eleven. He was about to write the whole thing off as a dream except for the fact that he was stuck in his sexy jutsu body and he couldn't release the technique and he couldn't retransform back into his normal form. Gathering his things Naruto packed them away into scrolls that he boxed up and then sealed into a large sealing scroll fro their journey across the village to one of the many compounds in the village. One thing that Naruto had been given in the last six years was access to the old Uzumaki compound that had remained empty since his mother had moved out to live with his father. At one point in time the compound had belonged to the Senju clan however when his mother had escaped the fall of whirlpool the matriarch of the Senju clan had given the compound to her as a gift of welcome as it had been built to be close but comfortably far enough from the Senju compound for Mito so that she could invite her relatives to spend time in the village without them being put into rooms in the Senju compound. Mito was fond of her relatives however the same couldn't be said of her husband who wanted some space from his in-laws.
Even though Naruto had known about his owning of the compound he couldn't move onto the property until he was a recognized adult because if he had than the civilian council would have demanded entrance and because of the ways that the laws were written he couldn't have done anything about it no matter what they decided to take. However, with his genin status, that was no longer the case even if it was probationary currently. His genin status meant that he was supposedly allowed more restricted materials than an academy student and as such any and all of his belongings could only be searched and seized with a written order from the current Hokage that was cosigned by at least one clan head or four jonin.
Six years though, Naruto still found it hard to believe that he had come as far as he had in the past six years. Training endlessly, studying scroll and book after scroll and book, and experimenting endlessly to replicate some of the things that the Uzumaki in the past had done.
The compound wasn't very large in comparison to some of the others in the village, however that was because when it had been built it was supposed to make the first Hokage's in-laws, not wanting them to stay for excessive visits. When Kushina had moved in she had modified the house a lot as well as the training ground in the back, currently the training ground was more like a flower garden and though it had fallen into disrepair after his mothers death he had fixed it back up long before. Before the previous night he had hung onto every fact that he could get about his parents and he had come up with only a few facts, his mothers name, her love of gardening and cooking, his parents were powerful ninja, their addiction to ramen, his fathers dream, and the fact that they both died the night he was born. Sure it wasn't much but it was what he had had to go on until he got to the proper rank or age to be given the information. But he had taken the information and ran with it, trying in some way to be close to them. He kept the garden in very good shape with almost professionally grown quality flowers and herbs well tended, he had studied and tried over half of the numerous recipes that he had and he had used shadow clones extensively to train in various things since he learned it when he was eight. But in his mind his greatest achievement was the somewhat mediocre ramen that he could make from scratch after spending a six month stint working under Tuchi Ichraku.
Shadow clone training for almost four and a half years with almost two hundred going on average and it was plain to see that Naruto had quite the number of tricks that he had yet to uncover.
After he got the last of his things he still kept in his apartment settled where they belonged in the house it took Naruto three days to grasp and control how to swap forms. However it wasn't until a week later that he was able to get good enough control of the ability to not change forms unless he wanted to.
This increase in control was a good thing as the day after he managed to acquire it, one of the few people who knew about his change of residence stopped by.
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"So, still trying to get the right setup for that control technique?" a voice intruded on his meditating causing him to fall the three feet to the ground.
Scowling slightly Naruto returned, "Couldn't you have left me alone for another few minutes, Tenten? I almost held myself on that platform for half an hour."
"Ya, you have told me that, but you missed your delivery yesterday." Tenten replied, "And, you said that you would have that other thing ready for me soon so I decided to check up on it."
"The new sword you commissioned?" Naruto asked as he moved toward the back door to the house. Inwardly he was annoyed because of the fact that whenever Tenten was in his workshop she was fan girlish to a high degree. He usually tried to keep his deliveries on schedule so that she wouldn't have an excuse to go into the workshop. Two years since they had become friends and he had showed her the hidden training ground below the compound and she had first seen his workshop. That had been a terrifying day with how hard she had begged him to let her use some of the weapons that he had made. In the end, they had come to a deal that he would sell so many a month to her grandfathers shop and she could get her weapons from there. One thousand kunai, three thousand shuriken, one thousand senbon, and various other items a month, delivered on the second Friday of each month.
Moving to the stairs to the lower level Naruto was surprised that Tenten hadn't already beaten him to the ladder to the training ground. In the basement of the house there was a trapdoor that led down to a hidden underground training ground that he had used for secret training for almost as long as he had known about the compound. He didn't use it when he first started exploring the house because he didn't know about it but when he was cleaning the house he found the loose section of flooring in the basement. Opening it he had been shocked to find a ladder down into a dark pit. Along the edge there was a seal that powered lights in the secret underground room. Since then Naruto had learned of two other similar training grounds, one under the Senju compound and the other secreted away for the Hokages and those they trusted to maintain their training and develop new attacks hidden from spies. Within this training ground he had found out where his mother had kept her forges and extra weaponry. Going back almost three hundred years the Uzumaki clan had in almost all of its branches taught the art of creating weapons as well as how to use those weapons. Every member of the family had been taught how to perform the basics of the craft even if they never advanced past that point and once Naruto had found that out he had pushed himself well past the basics.
Finally reaching the actual training grounds Naruto was pulled out of his thoughts and memories as he looked around the huge underground room. Hordes of clones were moving everywhere around the room doing what looked like anything and everything. Half the giant room looked like it had been damaged and repaired repeatedly while the other had been segmented off and stone walls thrown up to keep each area separate from the others.
Looking at the clone army working on the various things that they were in the damaged section Naruto nodded to himself because it looked like all of his projects were on track so far. He moved toward what seemed to be a hallway between the walled off areas with Tenten trailing after him as she tried to make sense of what the clones were training in.
Tenten always enjoyed coming to this room after the first time she had come in here and seen a shadow clone army of her friend working on various things. Of coarse at first she hadn't understood what was going on but having a friend who could make hundreds of expendable mobile practice dummies was almost heaven in her mind.
Reaching the doorway to the storage room for completed weapons, Naruto pulled down one of his larger sealing scrolls and began gathering all of the weapons that he needed to fill the current months order before stopping to ask, "Did you have anything to add to this months order?"
"Oh, I had completely forgotten but anbu Neko stopped by and said that she had finally saved up enough for the one katana that she has been drooling over in the catalogue you left in the shop." Tenten answered as she was broken out of dreams of the thousands of projectile weaponry around her flying toward targets.
"Tenten, you know that the weapon that she wants isn't actually made until its ordered because of the more personal nature of weapons like that." Naruto said as he got the last items from their storage shelves and packed them closely enough to seal into the scroll that he had gotten earlier. Carrying the now full scroll toward the door, Naruto stopped at a small shelf that only had two scrolls on it. Pulling the scrolls off the shelf he continued toward the door. Giving her all three of the scrolls he said, "There is the order and the sword that you commissioned from me two weeks ago. The last scroll are some techniques that you can use with it as well as the instructions on how to maintain the blade at maximum efficiency for battle."
The shriek that emanated from the room could put all but the most persistent of fan girlish shrieks to shame for its shear volume and decibel. It left Naruto's head ringing and by the time he could think straight again Tenten was gone.
The rest of the week leading up to team assignments was almost bleak in comparison as most of the time Naruto was making armies of shadow clones to train in all kinds of things and to continue his on going projects and training himself in many odd ways. The one last bright point of the week was the day before team assignments when he went to turn in his paperwork for ninja registration and he met the Hokage's grandson. What had followed was a testament to how weird the world was sometimes as he taught Konohamaru the sexy jutsu and gave him a couple scrolls that he quickly copied from memory for about five different chakra control exercises and another detailing several e-rank techniques in each of the five elements that were useful for numerous things while still being easy to learn and use for the academy student. Naruto should have known that his luck couldn't have held out that long and Konohamaru's jonin tutor showed up and got into a fierce argument with Konohamaru about the best way to become Hokage with Konohamaru being firmly on Naruto's side of the thoughts on the matter. The matter ended with a huge burst of chakra and an huge nosebleed for Ebisu. So all in all Naruto had had a nice week and even a last day before team assignments.