Soon they were standing in front of the Hokage.
"Mission successful." Asuma stated puffing a bit of smoke from the cigarette he always seemed to have in his mouth.
"Good… anything of interest?"
"Besides wondering why Naruto hasn't chosen to abandon Konoha and live in Iwa? Other than the fact that Iwa knows about the kyuubi, nothing much."
"Why would I want to live in Iwa, Konoha is my home." Naruto said instantly.
Sarutobi pinched his nose, "I figured Iwa knew about the kyuubi, how could the not with Naruto making thouse bombs of his." Then he looked at Naruto. "I have to admit I do also wonder why you see konoha as your home."
"It just is. I plan to prove to the citizens that they can trust me, that I will protect them."
The third gave a slow nod. "So Asuma, will you tell me what the tournament is?"
"Man when I learned you didn't know what it was old man I was surprised, I had known for a years now myself."
Sarutobi looked hopeful.
"But since you don't know I won't tell you."
"That's it! I'm sending Ibiki with you." The third said pouting after Asuma informed him that he would not tell him.
Asuma just shook his head in amusement, "Good luck on your tournament next year… your going to need it to deal with Ibiki."
Naruto gave a confused look. "Alright, well you're dismissed Naruto."
Naruto left. He returned to the house he now lived in with Jiraiya, on his birthday he had finally told the man about seeing shimmers, and he told Hinata about his parents and the Kyuubi, like Shino she chose to stay.
As for Jiraiya when he learned that it was Naruto who upstaged him as spymaster, well he laughed, he continued laughing until he abruptly stopped and said he needed a drink. The pervert had disappeared for the next three days reappearing on Naruto's couch completely smashed. Anyways the two now lived together in a small house.
Soon it was the beginning of the second year of the ninja academy, it was the same class as last year only it taught different material.
He still slept through most of it, his grades once more earning him the title of the dead last. Though he didn't really care about that, it just meant people would underestimate him. Well unless they were from outside of Konoha. They might recognize him.
Anyways he was still training in his free time, he was now actually registered as an on-duty Anbu, though he didn't have to do any of the missions since he was technically undercover, he even had the Anbu tattoo. Though he still was training with them, learning how to wield his three tail state. And he carried quite a few pouches on his waist filled with a bunch of premade tiny marbles in most of them, though the front one and easiest to reach was just filled with a giant lump of clay. Though Naruto could only make 3 T-3 bombs a day, since Kurama had to replenish it's chakra.
He also sold the marbles to the Anbu for them to use, the T-1 was sold in packs of Ten for 1,000,000 ryo.
The T-2 was sold in packs of 5 for 1,000,000. The T-3 was not for sale at the moment, but Naruto gave them to the Hokage who would give them out to the Anbu he felt would need that much explosion. Naruto also after experimenting with the different amount of clay and different amount of Kurama's chakra developed some 'Suicide bombs.' With just enough yield to completely vaporise your body, and possibly burn your captors to a crisp if they were close enough.
He gave them to the Hokage, as he had originally just been experimenting around to see if there was any useful yields besides for his low yield, and high yield, which was when he used the lowest amount of chakra into either a pound of clay or a marble size of clay. His clay pouch held clay made with a low explosive yield. Which meant that his standard marble of clay was about the explosion of an explosion tag.
Other than Anbu and Kurama, he was still learning that infernal three-step from Tobirama, including now lessons on Konoha's laws, when the man wasn't teaching him the theory behind sealing, while Jiraiya handled the physical aspect of. JIraiya was great at shoving something at Naruto and telling him what to do, but not why he should do it that way, or what would happen if he were to interchange one aspect for another. That's what Tobirama was good at explaining. Naruto had seals on all of his pouches, so while they seemed small on the outside, the inside was quite different as they could hold a lot. He also had a water canteen that could hold a lot of water, and the water was kept at a cold temperature, as if chilled by ice.
He had created only one new and original seal, it was a modification of the storage seal, and the food preservation seal. The food preservation seal could usually keep food fresh for a few days longer before it burned out, what Naruto wanted was for the food to be kept fresh and ready to eat, even years after the food was placed in it. So he started experimenting, at first nothing came to fruition, but eventually he managed to create a seal that should keep food fresh indefinitely. It had already kept a bowl of ramen fresh and hot for a month, as pristine as when he had put it in the seal. Six months after he designed the seal he pulled out his bowl of ramen, it was still perfect.
Grinning he called the seal a success. The seal used storage as its basics, but it had a time stopping mechanism, which meant that whatever entered the seal came into a permanent stasis. The only problem was the limit of the seal. For an item such as popcorn Naruto could pour in more and more and just pull out handfuls at a time. But for something like ramen where had to put it into a container before he stored it in there the storage scroll only held one for some reason, and he needed to have the container or else how was he supposed to bring the ramen out to eat, it wasn't like he could just pour the ramen in there and then stick his chopstick in there to pull out the noodles and other goodies. He paused, or could he? Pulling the bowl of ramen he opened the seal and slowly poured the ramen in. grabbing his chopsticks he stuck them partially in the seal then lifting them up he grinned at his success. "Yatta!"
Pulling out a scroll he started drawing seals, on top of them he wrote things such as Miso ramen, Pork ramen, Beef ramen, and all the other kinds of ramen. Then he made it so the scroll could be unrolled and rerolled easily. For the final decoration he crafted a scroll sleeve with the words Naruto's Ramen supply on it. Putting the finishing touches on it he made his way to Ichiraku's ramen, intent on buying up all the ramen they could make. Luckily since the Anbu liked having his higher tier explosives he had quite a stash of money.
"Hey Teuchi-oji! I'm wiping you clean today, make all the ramen you can!"
The ramen maker's eyes widened. "How much will it cost?" Naruto asked.
"I don't understand, why are you buying all the ramen we can make? Surly you don't plan on eating it all."
"I'm stocking for the future!" He said excited pulling out his scroll. "I finished the testing of a new seal that will allow me to preserve food indefinitely, or at least six months, I called it good after that. I figured I'd stick up on your ramen as much as I could, for whenever I'm away from Konoha, or if I can't come here to get my normal ramen for whatever reason, like lunch at the academy."
"I see." Teuchi stated and he and Ayame got to work.
For the rest of the day Naruto sat their sealing away the different flavors of ramen the two chefs made until there supplies rand out. The total for all the ramen was around 500,000 ryo. He payed them 1,000,000. It was his thank you to the ramen stall, he had faint memories when he was 4 or 5 and they found him cold and hungry and fed him without asking him to pay, and they offered him free bowls all the time, even now when he could pay for the food.
He would a couple months later and do the process again, wanting to fill up his scrolls even more. He also spent a week straight constantly making as much popcorn as he could to fill up his popcorn scroll.
Choji found out about the seal and since the two boys were friendly acquaintances Naruto drew the friendly boy a seal which he could store his favorite chips in, though he would have to mix them together, though Naruto said he would be willing to draw him a scroll similar to his ramen scroll if Choji was willing to pay 400,000 ryo for it. It was 4 times more expensive than a normal storage scroll, and twice as expensive as a standard preservation seal, but honestly when Choji heard the price he said he expected Naruto to ask more for it.
Which led to the Akimichi clan inviting him over for a casual meeting.
So here he was sitting at the dinner table eating a meal with the Akimichi clan, and unexpectedly the Nara clan and Yamanaka clan head families. "So, Naruto-san, I'm sure you figured we invited you here to talk about making a deal with you to get some more of those food scrolls."
Naruto nodded.
"We have our own proposition for you after having heard some rumors of the things you are doing, your making quite away in the clan's and the higher ranking Ninja, yet to the civilians and lower ranking ninja you remain quite unknown except for your burden." The Nara clan head stated.
"I am just interested in meeting you, when Choza here said he was having inviting you over I asked if I could come." The Yamanaka clan head explained.
"Ah, well since Akimichi-sama here is the host, I assume he will be directing what happens first."
"Please feel free to call me Choza," The akimichi clan head stated with a grin.
"Very well than Choza-san." Naruto told him with a small tilt of his head in acknowledgement. The two then worked out an agreement, Naruto would get a list of Akimichi who wanted the scroll, and what food they wanted to store, for Each seal Naruto had to draw it would cost 100,000. The scroll itself was 100,000. So if they just ordered one scroll with one seal it was 200,000 thousand. Choji's scroll which he had listed ten kinds of chips would have actually been 1,100,000, but Naruto said that Choji's would still only cost 400,000 since it had been agreed upon before the deal.
They told him they would pay him as he completed the scrolls, and that he had no deadline. He wouldn't get the list though for a week or two so that the clan had a chance to put there order on the list if they were interested.
Next was the Nara's proposition, which was to design a seal that when activated created a flare that would stay in place of wherever the scroll was when activated for 1 minute. If Naruto was able to do it they would pay him 10,000 ryo for each seal. The Nara clan head, who introduced himself as Shikaku, stated that if Naruto was able to make the seal into a small marble like his explosives, then that would be cool since them having a bit more weight made it easier to predict where it would go when thrown, unlike paper.
Naruto told the Nara clan head that he would work on that. After that the meeting was over since the Yamanaka clan head had just been there to observe mostly.
So he was doing plenty of seal work and getting paid a good bit of money for it. Since he really had no use for the money now that he was living with Jiraiya he just stored it.
It took him a month, but he designed the seal the Nara's asked, and he wa able to paint it onto hardened clay marbles. As for his father seal's book, it was no longer giving him a headache trying to make head or tails of the words written inside of it. He still couldn't make out much of the seal work, but he could understand his father's words and ideas behind the seal, the portions he wrote down anyways. The book seemed to focus on the Hiraishin and his deciphering of Tobirama's version to create his own. He put the book away again though as even the first entry was to complicated for him to figure out. The journal broke down the Hiraishin and gave examples of Tobirama's and Minato's differences for the seals made, but some of the entries didn't explain how that wasn't quite good enough to be able to figure out something like the Hiraishin.
Other than the interesting breakthroughs he had with his seals, his training with Madara and Hashirama was going well, his Sharingan now had two tomoe each. He was becoming proficient in the gunbai and his Taijutsu skills were at chunin level according to the commander. The only thing he really lacked was experience in actual combat scenarios. According to his Madara the standards of Konoha had truly fallen, even if the old education system had been implanted and that according to him and Hashirama he was only at genin strength.
But until he graduated he could keep training. And sure he could pass early if he wanted, but he would much rather get in as much training as he could before he had to graduate, because after that he wouldn't have as much time to train how he wanted, he would have to do team training and do D-rank missions.
Anyways he had received the Akimichi list and a lot of his free time was making the scrolls, he had the scroll with the number of required seals inside of it, and he was to design the scroll sleeve of each scroll. Which was mostly just drawing the Akimichi clan symbol on either side of whichever Akimichi name it was.
He still spent time with Shino and Hinata each week, as well as spending time with the Ino-shika-cho juniors, thought that was mostly shogi with Shikamaru, ramen contestes with Choji, and Ino just kinda tagged along. Speaking of shoji though he occasionally participated in the underground tournaments, he never made it to the final rounds. But each time he felt like he was improving and learning.
His colony was growing as well. In another half a year or so he would have to replace his ten galleon gourd with the twenty galleon gourd.
His birthday came in went the celebration even larger than last year's as more people came to celebrate it. He was now eleven years old.
Nothing else of any real importance happened though and so the academy's second year came to a peaceful end. Naruto grinned excited, In just another week it would be time for him to once more go to the tournament.
A/n: 4 chapters left until the end of part one. I know the tournaments may be seeming to be repetitive, but I'm trying to show that time is passing by in a relatively fast manor. Once Part two happens than there will be a lot more stuff happening in the year and time will seemingly be crawling along. Anyways a lot of you have mentioned pairings in the reviews. I do not have any plans to pair Naruto with anyone. I don't care for romance. And I hate whenever people have teenage romance in their stories. Like seriously Naruto's twelve and hes dating a girl, sometimes even having sex with her. Even at 16! I do not like the ideas of teenage romance so If there were to ever be any pairings it would most likely be an epilogue stating when hes like 30 or something. Anyways Sorry for the little rant about dating in story's. I hope you enjoy!