Another chapter, chapter four in fact. seriously, give some kind of feed back if you're reading this. not knowing whether or not anybody even likes this drains my enthusiasm.

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The Third Hokage was to say the least, surprised by Naruto's question.

"hmm, sand cipher, where did you run across that particular term." He asked.

"it was written in my ninjutsu text book." Naruto replied.

The Hokage sat back in his comfy looking chair and thought for a moment

"well, I suppose that's a valid question" he said finally.

Naruto didn't know what valid meant but he understood the rest of what the Old Man had said, and he knew from the tone of voice that he wasn't being scolded.

"well first, do you know what a cipher is?" Sarutobi asked.

Naruto shook his head in the negative.

"a cipher is a way of mixing up a plainly written message into something totally unreadable to all those who don't know how to… un mix the message" the Old Man said. "the sand cipher was a cipher used in the second great shinobi war. it was rather simple compared to most ciphers being used at the time but that's what made it so ingenious…" The Third Hokage paused when a blank look fell over Naruto's face when upon hearing the last word, "smart" The Hokage clarified. "it's simplicity is what made it so smart. while everyone else had ciphers that relied on complicated mathematical equations or the use of symbols in place of letters, Sand made a cipher so simple that nobody could solve it because they were all thinking too hard. it wasn't until after the war ended that the key to the sand cipher became common knowledge." The Hokage paused here, before continuing on to say, "but you're not interested in the history of the sand cipher, you're wondering what it actually is. to use the sand cipher you simply shift the letters of you're message three letter forward in the alphabet, and you solve it by shifting the letters back. here let me show you" The Old Man pulled a blank piece of paper out of his desk. and gestured Naruto over.

"here's an example. hello becomes khoor when put through the cipher, you understand?" The Hokage asked Naruto.

Naruto nodded.

"alright so, using the same method but in reverse, can you figure out what qduxwr means?" The Hokage queried.

Naruto thought about what he had just learned and ran all the letters through his head, going through the entire alphabet multiple times to figure it out before replying "it's my name"

"yep that's right, good job Naruto." The Old Man complimented, "do you have anymore questions?" he inquired.

"no, thanks Old Man!" Naruto exclaimed, as he waved while jogging out of the room.

"we'll get lunch together next weekend Naruto, i want to hear about how you've been doing" The Old Man said.

"Right! cya!" and Naruto was out of sight.

when Naruto got back to his apartment he had a decision to make. he needed to decide if he was going to bother deciphering the ninjutsu text book. on one hand he already had a copy of the text book that wasn't coded and he could just read that without all the hassle of slowly decoding the information inside. on the other hand; if he did decode the ninjutsu book, he would probably be very good at using the sand cipher by the end of it. Naruto could see the use in being able to write in and understand a code that not many others knew how to read on sight. while yes, information of the code was easily available; if he didn't include the name of the cipher he was using, people wouldn't think to look it up. which meant that if he did start writing everything in a cipher his writings would be safe from the understanding of all but the most knowledgable and most determined. it was an easy decision to make, he would get to work on decoding the ninjutsu book right after he studied his intact copies of his other text books. he would start with taijutsu while he still had some daylight hours to burn.

this was a short chapter, if i write another one after this, and i'm starting to think i probably will, i'll try to make it longer