Chapter 1
"Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change." -Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
Returning to life brought with it such an indescribable pain that the newly renamed Hibiki Senju simply couldn't explain with any language he knew so speak how much it hurt, to the point that even the raw, animal-instinct that every human being had, could not properly comprehend or describe how much pain had coursed through his body for those first few eternities that was his new life. Even comparisons, which was among the easiest ways to describe something and was integral to human understanding, failed to describe it. The closest possible comparison he could make would be getting brained by a drunken driver behind the wheel of a semi-truck, but even that hadn't hurt as much as the act of coming back to life. For three months, the former vacationing graduate had been convinced that he was either in hell, or stuck in a hospital where the morphine and the pain killers simply weren't working, the only solace he ever found was in the sweet embrace of sleep. It had been after that third month did the pain finally begin to dull, when a pale-skinned doctor had taken a good look at his chest and given him some kind of treatment, the effect of which was similar to a large bruise suddenly vanishing on the spot, shrinking down to the point where it was just a simple remnant of a blemish. After the doctor had given him whatever he'd given him, Hibiki had had time to get his head straight and his bearing settled. It took him a week until he got his facilities situated, his head clear and his thoughts coherent.
Initially, he thought he was still in Japan, everyone was still speaking the language, though for whatever reason the doctors and staff had lost typical Japanese characteristics. Where was that US Army base? Okinawa? He'd been in Tokyo, why would they have shipped him there? Further confusing the child was how even the younger nurse in training - the dark-haired, dark-eyed one who couldn't have been older than his sister - was able to pick him up and man-handle him like it was nothing. He was a full-grown twenty eight year old man, and while it may be true he wasn't a built as he could be, four years working in the Fire Department over in the States had gotten him a significantly bigger than the scrawny stick he had been before graduating college. That in mind, how was this teenager able to pick him up and carry him around?
Furthermore, what kind of hospital was he in?! It looked more like some woman's home than the sterile white and generally noisy environment of most hospitals he'd been in. He had once considered he was in some odd kind of hospital, but then one day he'd been placed in front of a mirror and all thoughts of normalcy and rational explanation were thrown out the window.
Hell, they were thrown out the ISS, and left to burn up on reentry, because the face he saw looking back at him was the face of a frigging baby. He'd tapped the glass a few times and done everything he could save for sobbing loudly to make certain beyond any doubt. What was going on? How was something like this possible? Was he dead? Was he alive? Did they do something like Walt Disney and put his head on ice, and then thaw him out? Why did they put him in a damn baby? Was he in a coma? What was going on?
He hadn't realized until the pale-skinned doctor - who had snakes practically falling out of his sleeves and a look in his eye that could kill - had quite literally smashed the door in to his room that the faint noise he'd been hearing was the sound of him screaming his few month old lungs out. The normally quiet doctor - unless he wasn't a doctor and was actually his 'dad', so to speak - practically panicked as he tried to calm down the terrified child, only succeeding by finally giving him food, water, anything that could go in to his stomach - and making a good amount of the snakes disappear. Hibiki wasn't afraid of snakes, he was afraid of not having the physical facilities to make sure said snakes - or any animal, really - stayed the hell away from him and understood who was at the top of the food chain and why. Not afraid at all.
Hibiki had almost defecated himself when the snakes had disappeared in a big 'poof' of smoke. His mind couldn't handle much more than this, death, reincarnation, a magic man that could stuff a hundred snakes up his sleeves and then make them all disappear in a big poof of smoke. That was the kind of stuff that came out of fantasy books and anime, so after he forced himself to calm down and think rationally, he decided that that narrowed his options down to two things: He was dead and had been reincarnated in some kind of universe where magic existed, or he was alive and in some kind of coma-induced hallucination. There were probably more explanations than this - the Walt Disney one being among them - but his tired and addled mind had only come up with the two.
He didn't know what option was the right one, and no matter how much he tried the critical thinking skills that had reliably gotten him through college, he never came up with a definitive answer - and soon came to the conclusion that he would never. So with all of that in mind, Hibiki made a decision that belied his newfound age - or, technically, lack thereof - he decided he'd live out his new life, however well he could. If he woke up on Earth, he'd have a hell of a story to tell, and he might make his million doing it, if he never did wake up on Earth, then he'd just play the hand he was dealt and keep going. That had been one of his father's mottos - play the hand you're dealt, don't bother wasting time and energy trying for the one you want.
Weeks turned in to months, and after several more passed a golden-blonde woman with the biggest pair of breasts he'd ever seen arrived in the house. She took the infantile man up with an almost practiced ease, Hibiki wondered if she was his 'mother', so to speak. Thinking along such lines made him wonder how he would adapt to this new world, 'Mom' and 'Dad' were terms he normally associated with the stay-at-home mom and the retired soldier turned computer engineer father back home, so perhaps he should refer to Miss Blonde - that being the kinder of the names he'd come up with - as something else? Madre? Ma? Mother? He'd decide later.
Time continued passing, and Hibiki learned many things - his name included. The most obvious being he was in a woman's home and not in a hospital - he was in the Blonde's home, with said blonde going by the name of Tsunade Senju. He would be completely honest, if he were still twenty eight and had the body to match, he would have tried to go for her phone number, not that - as he learned later - phones even existed in his new world. That was another thing, this new world he inhabited was some kind of fusion between nineteenth to twentieth century technology - minus the weapons technology, but that was a point to reach in a moment - and anime-esque fantasy; he would have made the connection to Tolkien-esque fantasy, but there was no word on elves and dwarves, it seemed.
It was around his second birthday that Hibiki Senju was able to start moving around on his own, having gained what he would say was around ninety to ninety five percent control over his facilities back. When he started walking, he'd been surprised at how much Tsunade had cheered him on, for as long as he remembered she was an easily irritable woman who put up a pretty convincing act of wearing her emotions on her sleeves. She was like a female Vegeta, brash on the outside but complex on the inside. Shakespeare would have loved her. After she'd stopped celebrating, she actually started bringing him out of the house more and more often, something she had seemed almost supremely reluctant to do during his infancy.
Hibiki's first true exposure to his new world was eye opening, and he used his rapidly redeveloping language skills to learn everything he could. The differences between his new world's Japanese and the one he'd forced himself to learn on his friend's behalf were subtle, but were indeed present enough to catch him up a few times. Tsunade had, fortunately for him, dismissed his mistakes as a child's verbal tics, though she was suitably amazed at how well he'd started speaking and how soon. She wasn't willing to answer all of his questions, but she did answer a great deal.
Cars, guns, television, cell phones, those things didn't exist, she'd gotten a very bewildered look on her face when he'd asked where the cars and the planes were. Radios, lights, fridges, those things existed but not on the same scale as his Earth, if he had to guess he'd say that his new home was around the late nineteenth century, just minus the weapons technology. Unfortunately for him, he couldn't just up and ask 'if we don't have guns, how do we fight?', because Tsunade was an impossibly sharp woman, she'd catch on real quick that something was up and he knew a lot more than a two year old should.
After a few months of her guiding him around by the hand, Hibiki had taken on a somewhat independent role of information gathering. Unfortunately, his first foray in to the world of 'Konoha's library systems had been without much thought - back home, if he wanted to go to the library, he'd go to the library, he was a grown-ass man and that was his right. Here, though, he was two and a half and such oversights would get him in to trouble.
But, he had an unexpected bonus from his stupid mistake: He had his first run-in with Konoha's military force. They called themselves Shinobi - and this specific one wearing a dog mask called himself 'ANBU', which was apparently their Navy SEALs - but he pegged them for what they were the second he saw Dog's outfit: They were ninja. They had the knives and the weird magic to prove it, the latter of which still confused him, but he initially hadn't had any time to dwell on it - his blonde 'mother' had practically screamed his new head off, demanding to know what had gone through his mind when he made that decision, did he know how 'kami' damned worried she had been, how scared he'd made half of the village, bla bla bla. She noticed how quickly he'd turned her out, and after dishing out a particularly harsh punishment, even by his original mother's standards, she did pull him in to a bone-crushing hug.
That wasn't a joke - he felt his very bones begin to creak and crack with the sheer force of her embrace. Though after she told him to never scare her like that again, she'd used her magic to undo whatever was caused with her she-hulk strength, and promised to get him whatever books he wanted.
The first thing he'd demanded - well, asked for, the kind of weakness Tsunade had shown had put him off guard - was writing paper and something to write with. He had the opportunity now, and the things from his home were still somewhat fresh in his mind, so he'd write down and catalog everything he possibly could.
What in Kami's name was this?
Tsunade Senju, after making certain the kid she was not at all fond of and was only tolerant of because Hiruzen needed her to be, was sound asleep, had sneaked in to his room with all of the skill a sannin ninja possessed. She knew some ANBU that wouldn't have sensed her, let alone heard her, so the kid wouldn't have even stirred, let alone woken up. Two months ago, after he'd disappeared and had her convinced someone from Ame had finally tracked him down and abducted him, and most certainly had not terrified her out of raw concern, she'd asked him what kind of books he wanted to read, and his answer had surprised her - he didn't want to read anything, not yet. He wanted blank journals and something to write with - no, he said, make it a lot of something to write with, and a lot of blank journals.
She had never seen something so alien, so unknown as what she had seen in her little dark-haired gaki's journal. She didn't recognize the kanji he wrote with, the symbols he drew, the pictures he illustrated - quite skillfully, she realized.
The first page she'd opened up had sent her mind reeling, with the big kanji at the top spelling out Quotes to Never Forget, its first entry a line of kanji that went "Dad - Never do something half-baked and cocksure, always do whatever it is to the best of your ability.". She literally couldn't read a single thing he'd written, absolutely nothing in this book was even legible, let alone understandable. It couldn't be that he was simply doodling random lines - they were all too uniform to be something like that, and the drawing pages he'd had were very recognizable.
If she had to admit, her favorite of his drawings was the one with the kanji 'ISS' floating above it. Some sort of massive building with glass wings jutting out at the edges, with a massive black void on one end, dotted with small twinkling lights like the night sky, and on the other end an even bigger half-circle with such details that she couldn't describe it. She had no idea what it was, but she did know what it meant: This kid was either a creative genius, or a practical one.
She flipped through a few more pages, moonlight and the chakra flow through her eyes helping her to see it in as much clarity as she could get without a dojutsu. She saw pictures of what were unmistakably people, labeled with various unintelligible words, 'Mom', 'Dad', 'Rick', 'Uncle Tom', 'The Dumbass That Should Not Be Named But Will For Clarity's Sake (Joey)', 'Sara' and 'Jane' were the only ones he'd finished, and they were very clearly doodles - they didn't have anywhere near the detail the 'ISS' drawing did.
I need to get Shizune to watch over him for a day... She's long since out of the academy now, and she owes me for all of this medical study. She thought, squinting at a picture of a rectangle with thirteen bars and fifty odd symbols in an ink-filled box. Jiraiya needs to see this... He's the only code-breaker I know and trust enough to try something like this.
Okay, sure, Shizune Kato was a somewhat respectable teenager, and was definitely smart given her age, she had been the youngest person after Tsunade to get through the medic-classes in the 'Shinobi Academy'. But by god's unkind glare, she was annoying. Hibiki, being a twenty eight - or, by virtue of technicality, thirty - year old man stuck in the body of a two and a half year old knew he had to afford people a little elbow room with how they treated him, but damn it, she still treated him like he was a babbling baby!
"Oh!" She cooed when she saw him drawing his best picture of the moon landing by memory, he was no good artist by any means, but he got his idea across, and an unspeakable amount of time slacking off in class had refined his animesque technique. "What're you drawing there, Hibiki-kun?" She asked, all high-voiced and bubbly.
She and Sara would have been best friends. Jane would have popped her on the nose after about five seconds. He decided to instead disarm her, "moon landing." He said, adding in the shadows, he was no shader at all - he absolutely hated it - so he went the Wind Waker style cell-shade whenever he needed to color or shade. Sure, it sacrificed realism, but he liked how it came out, and given enough time, if he felt he absolutely had to do it, he could at least make a half-way decent attempt at realistic shading.
"Oh, a moon landing, huh?" She asked with an award-winning smile on her face, as she planted both hands on his shoulders and leaned in close so she could see him drawing. "What's that - " She pointed at Armstrong " - supposed to be? The Sage of Six Paths?" She stifled some laughter, probably thinking something along the lines of 'aw, how cute!'.
Should he explain that, no, it is not God, but just a determined explorer? He sighed, no, that would take too much time and would place far more suspicion than he was prepared for on his shoulders. Tsunade had confronted him a few days ago about his drawings, he - hopefully convincingly - payed the dumb card and said they came to him in dreams, before itching his tattoo for effect. He had no damn idea why Tsunade had given him a tattoo above his heart that said 'Soul', but he decided he wasn't old enough to question it. Tsunade had dropped it after his answer, surprising the hell out of the displaced firefighter.
"Yeah." He said simply.
"Wooooow." She drew out with a nice grin, "I didn't know you read those stories!"
He hadn't, he was too busy writing down everything he could remember from Earth, and drawing random Earth things whenever he got bored or too tired from it. In two months, he'd finished writing his family and friends, his most important memories, and the big moments in Earth history - the world wars, the moon landing, when the Dark Knight was released, etc. - and vowed to flesh out Earth History after he wrote down his theories on how and why he was here, and how and why he remembered everything he did. The fact that he did remember such things was revolutionary in and of itself - it showed that memories and experiences weren't held in the brain, but the soul, and that the soul had to exist for reincarnation to be possible. It made his head spin, but he persevered and would keep writing.
He rolled the dice of chance and decided to BS his way through this conversation, "I haven't read them all... But I liked the stories about the moon." He said simply.
He heard footsteps, Shizune stood up and turned around, "Oh, Jiraiya!" She greeted.
Now, this was a man that Hibiki decided he'd liked. Not as much as the far quieter Orochimaru, but he still had the certain 'Uncle Tom' quality he enjoyed in his extended family. Hibiki turned around and saw the white-haired man with the Oil headband on his forehead enter his room, Tsunade in tow. "Hey there, Shizzy! How are you and the little gaki doin'?" He asked, jovially as always.
Shizune kept herself composed, she liked Jiraiya as much as Hibiki liked her - she could only just tolerate him. "We're doing fine, sir, how about you?" She looked between him and Tsunade.
"Aw we're doing just fine." Jiraiya laughed, "Tsunade was just tellin' me about her little gaki's drawing skills." He looked to Hibiki, who frowned just a bit. "Can I take a look?" The Toad Sage asked innocently enough, with a wide grin on his war-painted face.
Well, he couldn't say no, but he could offer up something of an excuse. "It's not done yet..." He wined, looking from the white-haired shinobi to his latest journal, back to the shinobi. "You may not like it..." He suspected the exact opposite of being true, but didn't argue further when Jiraiya assured him that whatever he had in there he would like just fine - it might even help 'inspire' him.
Hibiki handed over the book with little more argument, and Jiraiya started flipping through it, a wide, kind grin plastered on to his face as he did. Tsunade cleared her throat, "Shizune, come help me make dinner?"
"What're we having?" Hibiki asked out of instinct, he would kill for some pasta, even the store-bought six dollar 'totally made in Italy' kind. Unfortunately, that, like pretty much every other food he knew of from Earth and thoroughly enjoyed, didn't exist. Konoha Ramen versus Itallian Spaghetti? He'd take Spaghetti every damn time.
"I dunno, you'll have to find out." Said Tsunade, as Shizune ruffled his dark hair a bit and followed her down stairs.
That was when the atmosphere changed, Jiraiya sat down on Hibiki's bed and, still with a smile, asked Hibiki what he'd been fearing. "Wow, these look amazing!" He complimented with false sincerity, he wondered if the sannin genuinely thought he was dealing with a kid, that book should have been proof enough that he was dealing with some kind of child-genius, right? "Where do you get the ideas for this stuff?" He flipped around the book, Hibiki blanched - that was the page he'd doodled some random weapons on, a gun here, a grenade there, a bow and a sword for good measure. "What're these?"
This man either knew full and well what they were, or had no clue and was extremely lucky in his ability to scare the hell out of the kid. Worse, the man was as sharp - if not, sharper than - his adoptive mother, which meant lying would get him nowhere. But, that didn't mean he had to tell the truth, either, he just had to tell a version of it, a practice he'd become well versed in during his highschool years. "They're just pictures." He said, "whatever comes to mind. I let the pen do the work." Not a lie, not the truth, but not a lie.
He couldn't tell if Jiraiya was buying it. "Do you mind if I keep this for a day or two?" He definitely was not buying it.
Shit. What do I do? He felt like he was an inbred redneck trying to match wits with Sherlock Holmes, he had to play this just right, if at all.
He shook his head.
Jiraiya frowned, over-dramatically. "Aw, why not?"
Hibiki shrugged, and extended his hand again.
Jiraiya seemed hesitant, but he did hand over the book. "I think..." Oh shit. Now what? "That I need to talk to your mom..." He was going to be sent to a looney-bin, he was going to be killed, he was going to be tortured. "About schooling options." No, much worse.
No. He was done with school, he'd done his time, screw that. "I don't want to go to school." He said innocently enough.
Jiraiya smiled and got to his feet. "Well, your genius is being wasted here, kiddo." He said, placing a hand on Hibiki's shoulder. "Think about it, will you? I think you'd make a fine academy student."
Hell no, he would sooner chew his arm - wait. Academy? As in, the place where one learned about Ninja Magic? Damn it, now he had a moral dilemma here. On one hand, school, on the other hand, he could learn how to fling lightning and fire around and become this world's Raistlin Majere.
Damn it, "how old do I have to be?" He asked hesitantly.
Jiraiya smiled wide, "most kids get in at six, that's the minimum age.. But I think I could get you in at five, if you're a good boy." He said gleefully.
Three more years before he had a slightly different daily schedule?
Eh, why the hell not?
Late that night, Tsunade stay awake and waited for Jiraiya to arrive again. The kid was a sharp one, he'd gone on the major defensive after the master had asked a few innocent questions, so they couldn't take any risks, they had to meet well after he was sleep. She didn't rise when Jiraiya let himself in, she simply gave him a sideward glance as acknowledgement of his presence. He entered her dining room and sat down across from her at her table.
"Well?" She asked, "anything?"
Jiraiya shook his head, "absolutely nothing." He said, "I've been a lot of places, and I plan on going to a lot more, but I've never seen anything like what that kid has in his books." He pulled out a scroll from his red coat, written upon it was the kanji he'd copied down from memory. He smoothed it out on the table and began dissecting it like a seal master would. "They make no sense." Exactly like a sealing master would. "The seal on his chest makes more sense than this." He was very clearly channeling everything he had in his not inconsiderable arsenal.
"You can't get anything from it?" Tsunade asked, somewhat helplessly. These revelations were scaring her, not because of what she didn't understand about the text, but what she didn't understand about the kid. Just what was sleeping up stairs in her little brother's old room? Was it some sort of demon? An ancient being waywardly attracted to the soulless body of a monster? Or just a genius child who'd invented his own language after only two years of life?
Jiraiya shook his head, "no." He said, "I showed this to everyone I trusted - the toads." He said simply, "even Ma and Pa didn't recognize it. This text is one of a kind... Maybe it's a language he made, maybe it's just him getting used to pen strokes." He shrugged, "I don't know... But I've seen death seals less complicated than Hibiki's kanji."
Tsunade ran a hand through her golden hair, "have you shown it to Orochimaru?"
"I wanted your permission, first."
"Show it to him, you can tell him everything." She explained, the only men and women alive who knew of Hibiki's origins were the Sannin, the ANBU assassination squad, and the third Hokage himself, so she trusted Orochimaru with this, and reinforced that by telling the Toad Sage what he could and could not do in regards to their secrets. "If he doesn't know anything, we'll bring it up with sensei next time he's got a moment." Jiraiya's eyes flicked above and behind Tsunade, she sighed and let her head slump. "Like right now, apparently." She looked behind her, through the crook in her arms, and saw the aging God of Shinobi standing behind her, just past the sliding glass door. He wore a look of utter seriousness.
He and his damn crystal ball. She got up and unlocked the door, he came in. "So how much do you know?"
"Not nearly as much as you, I'm afraid." The strongest shinobi in the village lamented, as he sat down at a free seat at her table. "But I have seen him write, from time to time."
Jiraiya asked the question on everyone's mind first, only allowing the Hokage the time to answer out of respect. "So what do we think about him? Is he a spy of some kind?"
Though Tsunade had been considering the same thing, she did look somewhat scandalized. "He's two! And he's never been out of the village, who could he be receiving order from, or sending reports to?" She demanded, convincing herself she was simply playing devil's advocate.
The third Fire-Shadow calmed his students down, "there is a great deal we do not know about the child." He stated firmly, "Ever since I gave him clearance, I've had Orochimaru going through the graverobber's notes and trying to dissect the techniques he used to bring the child to life. For all we know, this... Writing, is merely a side effect of being brought back from the pure world." He indicated Jiraiya's copied sheet. "We simply do not know, what Kenichi did was... Is so indescribably horrific, and so simply beyond any of our leagues that literally anything could be possible..." He paused, "but... I do not think the child is a spy."
Tsunade blinked, Jiraiya spoke, "how can you be sure?"
"The grave robber wanted merely to create life for its own sake - to see if it could be done. He wasn't doing it for any specific nation, or do settle any specific grudges, the documents ANBU raided his lab for confirm such things." The aging leader explained, "so while still possible... It is very unlikely that he was programmed to be some sort of spy."
"So what do we do?" Tsunade asked, "we can't just force him in to ANBU the second he graduates."
The Hokage didn't say yes or no to that, "at the very least, he must be trained. With the multitude of families his lineage traces back to, he needs the training, he could be an A-Rank shinobi, without any real effort." He said, "and with the proper training... From proper individuals -"
Tsunade slammed her fist onto the table, cracking it almost in two. "You're seriously suggesting this?"
"Calm down, Hime -"
"Jiraiya, he's suggesting we start training a two year old like sannin." She scowled, "he wants his own little kage is what he wants, isn't even caring about what the damned kid wants."
Hiruzen gave her a blank, if subtly challenging look. "It sounds as if you've learned to care for him, Tsunade."
Had the child not been asleep, she would have started shouting. As she forced her voice to remain low, she made mental note to reach a new agreement with Shizune - whenever she had to talk to her teammates or her sensei, the gaki needed to be out of the house. "I don't." She growled, "I'm only putting up wit him because you can't find him a damn mother." She fixed the Hokage with a look that could kill, unwittingly letting some killing intent leak out of her pores.
The Hokage didn't return it, but he did move past this topic, "regardless of who does it and when, the point is, the child needs to be trained. If only because he is a target."
Jiraiya's shoulders slumped, this old man was not about to do what he thought he was.
Tsunade narrowed her eyes, "what do you mean?!" She demanded hotly.
"Our spies have gotten reports that Ame is sniffing around other countries, looking for displaced war orphans. His description, specifically, has come up, and they're using his Soul Seal as a descriptor."
Okay, so he won't tell her that I told him that. Jiraiya suppressed the urge to glare, but this is still a breech of trust. What is his game? Maybe Tsunade wasn't as wrong as he had thought.
Tsunade's head slumped, she needed either sleep, or a drink, one of the two, either of them would do it. "You're not going to take no for an answer, are you?"
"I am afraid not."
She sighed deeply, "I'll talk to him tomorrow, see what he thinks." She finally said, "but I won't train him before he wants to be trained." She looked up and pointed directly at Jiraiya, "and you and the snake won't even look at him like a student until I've had him for a good long while, understand?!"
Jiraiya grinned, "on one condition." He didn't even wait, he knew that she knew what he'd say, "go out with me."
The cracked ribs, though they made it difficult to laugh, were definitely worth it.
"Chakra?" First things first, he didn't like talking, because he was used to a voice far deeper than the one he had now coming from his throat, and secondly, what the hell was chakra? Was that this universe's excuse for mana? MP?
Tsunade had pulled him aside after she fed him lunch, he should have known something was up when she'd made his favorite. Though things like spaghetti, pizza, hamburgers and sloppy joes didn't exist in this world, grilled cheese and ketchup did, so damn it he'd enjoy it for as long as he couldn't buy his own stuff. She started talking to him about the village - the 'village hidden in the leaves' - and what most people did for a living. There were the merchants, the civilians, the military police, and then there were the shinobi. He'd met shinobi before, he'd been raised around them, and he knew what they could do, but the blonde had started talking in-depth about how they did what they did, finally summing it all up by the universally present macguffin: chakra. Call it what you will, space magic, phlebotinum, chakra was the macguffin that no one understood that allowed ninja to do whatever it was they did.
Tsunade nodded, "do you know what that is?" She asked, "I've seen you reading out of my books, recently." She said, teasingly.
He shrugged, truth be told all he'd been reading were things that could supplement his own knowledge, specifically medical texts. Being an EMT, he had a cursory 'jack of all trades' knowledge, so Tsunade's rather extensive books were good for brushing it all off and updating it. He'd started reading them just a month ago, after his third birthday, when he'd finished writing down everything he could remember from Earth. the last entries in his notebooks had largely just been updates to various other entries, and a quick skim-through to update things with a fresh look at them, but now he couldn't remember anything more than what he'd written, so he branched off, silently vowing to see if it was possible to make guns with 'modern' industry. Though that was for another day, now, he was simply reading medical texts, he knew that the human body had to be different in some way in order to accommodate for the fact that they could breathe fire and shit lightning, so that had been what he'd started reading first.
"Hm." Tsunade only half bought it, he'd gone through two books in the last month, there was no way he hadn't at least looked in on chakra by now. "Well, to put it simply, it's an energy source that pervades all living things. People, animals, plants, the earth itself, it's all got various forms of chakra." She waited for him to nod his understanding, "the two kinds you have to worry about, are the kinds that you can mold: spiritual, and physical."
Physical and metaphysical. Thought Hibiki, "what's the difference?"
"Well, physical chakra comes from your body. It can be enhanced an augmented by physical training and conditioning, and in return, it can augment and enhance you. Whereas spiritual chakra comes from your mind, that gets augmented through focus and study." She explained.
So he probably had an excess of the metaphysical kind, he reasoned. "Okay." He said, "why are you telling me this?"
She grinned, crossing her legs on the ground they sat upon. "Well, it's simple, I'm certain you've heard by now, but mom's something of a big deal in the shinobi world. They call me a sannin." She explained, he nodded. "That means that people may come after you to get to me, or me to get to Uncle Jiraiya, or Uncle Orochimaru. So, I thought it prudent to start teaching you about these things a bit earlier than most kids. That way if something happens, you would at least have something up your sleeve."
Lady, just wait until I invent the world's first handgun. I'll have a lot more up my sleeve than badass magic. Hibiki nodded, "so... what are we doing, then?" He asked.
Tsunade lifted her hand and channeled her chakra through it. After enough started flowing, the hand was enveloped in a bright blue aura of flame. "We're going to be seeing how much chakra you've got, today, and we're going to start you working on the basics of retrieving it and influencing its flow." She explained, cutting the chakra to her hand. "Now, your body has three hundred and sixty one tenketsu in it. These points are responsible for helping direct the flow of chakra, and through various method - the easiest being handsigns - one can control and influence the flow through these tenketsu."
"But... where does it come from?" Hibiki asked, "it's got to have some kind of origin point." Otherwise it would just be a potentially god-like amount of potential energy flowing through every inch of his body, waiting to either be used or explode on him.
Tsunade inclined her head and grinned in her usual, cocky fashion. "Smart kid... Yeah, the center of your chakra pathway system is in your stomach." She answered.
So the Chakra's form of the heart is in my gut. An odd place, but okay, I can work with that. He nodded.
"Alright, now, given you've never manipulated chakra before, we're going to first focus on simply feeling it out. So I want you to clasp your hands together, like this -" her hands were pressed together like a clapping motion. "And close your eyes."
Though he felt incredibly stupid doing it, he decided to trust the 'legendary ninja' and did as she said. He closed his eyes and his world was enveloped in darkness. "Now, feel inside of you, it's different for everyone, but when I do it, I look for a small spark of warmth in my stomach."
Hibiki took a deep breath and tried what she suggested, in truth he had absolutely no idea what he was looking for or how to look for it, so he did the tried and tested method of winging it, and seeing where it got him. As he 'looked inside of him', he wondered what chakra in and of itself was, what it could do, and if it had anything to do with why he was alive now. If he were hallucinating all of this and he was in a coma, the explanations he would get would be contrived and not at all sensible, but if this were real -
"Stop thinking so much." Tsunade ordered firmly, though kindly, "just feel for it, you'll find it."
Okay... Let's try and feel for something... Foreign. He decided, in his last life, he had a pretty bad case of tinitus, but if he never thought about it, the ringing in his ears sort of escaped his awareness, as if it wasn't there at all. He wondered if this was something similar, something that was there, but he just wasn't aware of it because it had been a part of him for so long.
He focused on his stomach, wondering if what Tsunade said would help him. Chakra, a spark of warmth, its heart was in its stomach. Before Hibiki could think anything else, he felt it - just barely, it was fleeting, but when he focused on the warm feeling in his stomach, he saw it. It was just a blue spark, just there, waiting to be fed, to be guided. On instinct, he 'breathed' on the spark, giving it the oxygen it needed to burn brighter, and almost instantly he felt a tingling sensation on his hands.
Hibiki opened his eyes, he first saw Tsunade, grinning warmly, and he looked down, his hands were enveloped in the same blue flames hers had, though it was significantly weaker.
"I'll be damned, it took me days to figure out where to look and how to look for it." Tsunade commented, "but now begins the fun part." Her warm smile turned far too innocent for Hibiki's liking.
Oh... Boy.
Chakra training was, in short, exhausting. There were many kinds of exhausting, but this one counted as many in one - mentally, physically, emotionally, it just left him tired. First had come the simple act of finding and manipulating his chakra, which in and of itself was indescribably difficult - he'd had to force his mother to reveal that masters could manipulate chakra without hand signs, but it was impossible for rookies like him, and she wasn't wrong - one night he'd tried it for himself, he'd barely been able to get a spark of chakra around his hands, let alone the small fires he got with hand signs.
So he had a goal to work towards - because he absolutely hated hand signs.
Years would pass and the training would become just as physically intensive as it was merely chakra intensive. Tsunade seemed hellbent on turning the boy in to a Spartan, three years before Spartans turned their boys in to Spartans. After he'd turned four and had a decent enough grasp over the basics of chakra, Tsunade had started on his physical development, and while the two subjects could be inclusive, she made certain that - for now - they were mutually exclusive. Using her own medical techniques, whenever they started training physically, she suppressed his chakra so he couldn't cheat and give himself a quick shot of fast-acting Red Bull.
When put on top of his chakra exercises, the man in a child's body was barely able to move, let alone crawl his way in to bed and sleep. Add that on to the steadily expanding library he was developing, and he was - on top of it all - conditioning his body to work on far less than eight hours of sleep. He wondered if this was what it was like being in the military, back home - constantly and consistently exhausted to the point where personal time became sleeping time. It would make sense, but he reasoned that if US Soldiers could spit fireballs and fling lightning around, the world would have been a very different place.
Tsunade's excuse, when he'd asked her after they celebrated his sixth year with some of the most intense training he'd ever had, was that she had to break him apart if she wanted to put him back together. Before, he was made of weak, malleable flesh, but he had to be made of iron in order to face the troubles that would no doubt lie ahead.
But, unfortunately for him, the physical and metaphysical parts of training weren't the only things he had to do. He also had the intelligence - and the patience - training to go through - he had to go to school.
Which brought him to now, standing in front of the ninja academy, with children streaming in and parents streaming out; his own 'parent' not present due to various extenuating circumstances she didn't explain to him. Two things were running through the boy's head, the first being that he couldn't believe he was going back to school after working so hard to stay out of it, and the second being that whatever he learned here better be good, else he'd sleep through it all and breeze through on his not inconsiderable education from years passed.
Hibiki sighed and began walking inside, little aware that he was taking the first steps towards a life fraught with hardship, pain, and earth-shaking revelations. His earlier, joking comparisons to the archmage of a criminally underrated Dungeons and Dragons book would, as it seemed, become far more apt than he had at the time thought. But before power, came the road to it - he needed, to put it bluntly, to get there, before he could be there. Legends started somewhere, and in this deceptively large academy, Hibiki Senju's legend would begin in earnest.
All thanks in part to him being bodily slammed in to by a speeding blonde bundle of energy named Minato.
