I couldn't remember the Samsara Breaker's face. Well no, that wasn't accurate. I couldn't remember a lot of things about him. Height, build, race, age—all of it was a blank. I could remember the clothes. They had been richly made, mid 21st century fare.
But the man who wore them was completely empty. Really, apart from his words and the idea that he was, well, a he, there was nothing there. Worse, I had only noticed this by a fluke—it wasn't like I had suddenly lost the memories. If I had ever known what he had looked like and had lost that, it would have been fairly blatant—I wouldn't remember, per se, but I would remember remembering.
But I suspected that I had never seen the truth of the other Breaker at all.
And at the time, when we had first met, I hadn't even noticed it.
Shinobi had a word for that type of thing. Genjutsu. But compared to what little we had been shown, this was on a whole different level. Genjutsu could create illusions or false surroundings, but there always had to be a point of transition—if you wanted to create a false world, you had to give the victim of that world a reasonable narrative to sell the lie. You had to conserve consistency, because breaking a genjutsu was as easy as punching yourself in the face, even if you had no chakra.
What the Breaker had done was create an inconsistent world—he had no face—and then prevented me from realising it even as I had stared into the truth of the lie across our entire encounter.
Even the Shodaime hadn't been capable of that. His famous darkness genjutsu created an obvious falsehood that couldn't be escaped, but it couldn't conceal the falsity of its own nature.
Well, me, I thought, that's just another excellent reason to stop being a living example of mediocrity, isn't it?
"Yes," I murmured, "it is."
Of course, the problem was that I had all the reasons in the world, but none of the access needed to make it happen. I needed to get into the Elite string, but all Kazu knew was that transfers were possible. Whatever the precise details of his assignment, it had nothing to do with observing Konoha's training methods, which made the question of why he had infiltrated the orphanage of all things all the more interesting.
But no, I was losing focus. Kazu's knowledge of inter-string transfers had ended there. My inquiries, however subtle, bore no more fruit. It could be done, Kazu told me. It couldn't, said everyone else. My benefactor had no reason to lie to me—the further I got in Konoha's hierarchy, the more useful I would be if Kiri ever decided to tap me. So it was likely that this was the sort of Shinobi crap that would have made a real ninja—a ninja from the quantum worlds—smile.
Hidden tests. Layers of deception. But possibly—just possibly—entirely unintentionally. It wasn't like most people were supposed to have a foreign spy feeding them information on the test. Perhaps there was no deception at all, and promotion was simply a matter of sole the time being, all I could do was continue to gather information.
Even if I did have the method, odds were I wasn't yet capable of using it.
It all came back to math.
Math was different. Logic was different. That meant that every. single. thing. that depended on math and logic was different, too. Sometimes, the convergence was surprising. Geometry seemed to be predicated on something vaguely analogous to infinite series here, but even though you needed to carry out long, long calculations to get the area of a square, it was still in essence a square. Of course, pi did not exist, and circles along with other curves always produced results that were similar in simplicity to getting the area of a square in the quantum worlds.
The problem was, I was terrible about it.
It was all still pattern-based. This world was consistent, and so its laws were not things of pure randomness. But, a scenario: You have spent your entire life playing classical music. On a trip, you encounter a culture that calls anti-music their music. Instead of looking to create finely structured compositions, they declare beauty as transcendent randomness. It isn't structureless—the lack of structure is still a pattern, and one that is as finely designed as one of Mozart's pieces, because they don't value ordinary randomness, which emerges after you listen to static long enough, no—they value something that is random no matter how finely it's sliced. Endlessly fractal infinities of noise.
So their music is deeply patterned, and poignant, and beautiful, and after seventy years of playing and listening to the best works of the finest classical masters, to you, it sounds like static.
That, at its core, was the root of all of my academic problems. There were a few areas—chief among them, tactical simulations and decision theory—where the patterns of the Shinobi Rikugou resolved into mirrors of my own experience. They would have to, for humans to exist. But the other areas were things that were actually worse than my little analogy.
Music—not elemental listening, but seeing the finest details and levels of structure in it—is an acquired skill. Learning to ignore something like that in the face of that is difficult, but it can be done with the right investment of time and effort.
Our minds have the necessary math burned into them by a billion years of evolution. That was what I had to learn to ignore. It helped—barely, but it helped—that I was no longer just thinking with just my own mind. As Shinigami had said, in arriving in this universe, I had accreted a soul. That soul, which I assumed was like any other, had come with the instincts of someone born to this world and all the implicit understanding needed to function.
I just had to learn to listen to it.
It was a major undertaking, and, in some sense, the problem that I had taken most personally to solving.
But in absolute terms, the larger concern was that something about my chakra was wrong.
I learnt about it when we were introduced to a very basic exercise meant to begin developing the foundation of our abilities. It was simple. Bring chakra into your hand. Press your hand against the ground. Pull up dead leaves.
While the other students took hours to figure out how to channel the chakra that they had created, I pulled it out in ten minutes, got it into my hand in another five, and reached out to touch the ground. I did manage to pull up a leaf. But then, the dirt wavered, then flashed black and vanished.
Akagai Senju, who instructed the class, was of no help. He had no idea of what was wrong. So this was how I spent the next two months—slowly beginning to learn to trust Kaede's instincts, and falling further and further behind my peers in the core discipline of what it was to be a Shinobi.
I think that if it had just been a matter of external chakra difficulties, Konoha might've written it off as a particularly bizarre and useless Kekkei Genkai. The problem was that, as it stood, my chakra only affected nonliving things. I couldn't even enhance my own stamina. Eventually, Akagai pulled me aside one day, and simply told me not to come back. Then he misinterpreted my trepidation for shame, and told me that I could still serve Konoha. Maybe I had considered apprenticing to a blacksmith? Konoha definitely needed arms, and arms dealers were a vital part of the machine that kept the war going—if everyone was a Shinobi, he exclaimed, then nobody could win.
I almost sneered at the man, but I controlled myself, nodded, and began to walk off, trying to think of another plan.
And that was when Yamanaka Shio made her move.
I was out of the gates quickly when I heard rapidly approaching footsteps approach behind me.
"Hey!" Young voice, a classmate. Here for a juvenile taunt?
I was not in the mood.
I increased my pace, hoping that the nonverbal message would be enough... but I had forgotten that I was dealing with children instead of adults. Eventually, the owner of the footsteps caught up to me, and I stopped—we were both winded, but the person following me had some ability to properly use chakra. I did not.
"You -" The voice panted behind me, "rude."
I felt myself begin to snarl and halted, smoothing the expression into a pleasant nothing as I turned to give my pursuer my undivided attention.
She had blond hair, brown eyes so dark you couldn't really see the pupil, a narrow face and the typically perfect proportions of a clan child. Her hair was tied off into a lopsided ponytail, and the clothes she wore, were not of the rougher weave that you saw in children coming from middle-class families. At the time, though, her name eluded me. This was probably because I hadn't bothered to remember the names of any of my classmates back when I was still treating life as a game. I was considering the best way to deal with her when she spoke.
"Akino Kaede?"
I nodded sharply.
"I'm Yamanaka Shio, and, um. I want to make a deal."
Yamanaka? One of the founding clans?
Perhaps this wasn't the minus-sum interaction I had thought it was going to be.
My anger slowly drained away, leaving me feeling an empty sort of curiosity. The strange thing though was that Shio saw it. Lack of enhancements or no, I wasn't bad at hiding my emotions. They shouldn't have been so easily accessible to a six year old girl. Her eyes got a little wide, she took a step back, and I... sighed.
"I'm sorry," I said although I wasn't, really. "I thought you were chasing me for... something else." Which purchased me a look of confusion, and not much more. "Your deal?"
Shio nodded, regaining some of her confidence. "I know what's wrong with your Chakra. My family has a similar problem all the time. Just not so... extreme."
Well, wasn't that convenient?
"Your price?" I asked, not quite able to keep the curtness out of my voice. Shio had probably waited for this moment to make her offer, and she had me over a barrel. What she didn't know was that she literally held my life in her hands, and that I might have traded the same for it. If what the Samsara Breaker has said was right, I would just be reborn anyway—and until I could end him, life... didn't really have much appeal.
"I've been watching you. I know you're smarter than you've been letting on, and -"
"-Your argument for that?" I interjected. I was already going to be doing something I didn't like. Might as well get what let her put it together.
Shio's eye visibly twitched, but with utterly remarkable control for a six year old she answered smoothly, "I saw the math you were doing."
She wasn't talking about my failures. That should have given her the opposite impression. She was talking about trans-versal logic. Ever since I had realised how alien a world I had actually found myself in, I had begun trying to bridge the differences. I hadn't gotten anywhere, but the thing was, I had written that in a purpose-built script. To an outside observer, it should have looked like a simple code writing system. Should have being the operative term. One of the necessities of good notation was a certain sort of sparsity, though. A conservation of complexity.
In principle, anyone could have figured out my script was notation for some kind of formal system.
In practise...?
Kazu had called me a genius. Now, I suspected that I was seeing the actual thing.
"All right," I said, and left it at that. Now wasn't the time to test Yamanaka Shio's strengths and weaknesses. Now was the time to hear her terms. "Talk."
S_N_I
A/N: And finally, Kaede is starting to interact with the larger world. About damn time.
Edited by Enbi. Any errors still present are my own.
