To my Readers: Hope this chapter makes up for your wait.
0XOX0
"Your control is getting better." Kakashi commented from the side as I tried to as fine as I could tune Gathering Dew.
"After spending so much time doing this, I better get better." After practicing this exercise for weeks with dozens of my shadow clones, now I could make tiny droplets hover under my palm. "But I still don't get how it is going to help me doing water jutsus. This exercise looks more suited for trainee medic-nins. Any idea sensei?"
"Hmm." Kakashi took thinking pose before continuing his answer. "I think Lord Third wants to make you a second coming Lord Second."
"There is a second, second too many. A little context please."
"Lord Second was famous for his mastery of water style. It's said that he could pull water out of thin air. I haven't taught you nature transformation. But I think after you master nature transformation for water style, this exercise could help you do the same as Lord Second."
"Really?" I was excited.
Among the elements, I was fascinated by water. Especially after watching the documentary Secret of Water. If I was ever given a chance to have absolute control over one element, I would always pick water. And as someone with unmatched ability to control water, Tobirama was my idol in this world. So the prospect of being similar to him in some way in the future made me giddy.
"I was wondering something." Kakashi continued from his thinking pose. "Since you have both wind and water as your affinity, you could possibly have Ice Style bloodline."
I doubt that very much. "I f I had that, wouldn't it have manifested by now?" Naruto was born with wind affinity. So when I took his place, it stayed with the body. More likely my fascination with water in my spirit awakened water affinity. Unless someone pulled a Yamato on me and grafted cells of ice style user in my body, I doubt I am going to run around with an ice-cream van.
"If you try to mold water and wind nature chakra at the same time, you might pull it off."
I disagreed with that theory the first time Yamato showed how his wood style worked.
I had read up on every elemental type bloodlines on narutopedia. Some of them made sense. But most of them didn't.
Take Mei Terumi's two bloodlines for example. Since she was born with three affinity; fire, water and earth, she could wield boil style and lava style. These two made sense as far as mixing elements goes. You heat up water, you get steam and extreme heat turns rocks present in earth into magma and when it erupts, we call that lava.
But earth and water doesn't make wood. They make mud. If you want wood from these two, you need to plant seed that takes nutrient and water from earth and grows.
I think the same goes for ice style. After all, wind doesn't cool water. So what could be the metaphorical seed in this case?
"I can't picture it." I voiced my opinion on the matter. "Mix of water and wind can't be ice."
"It might be because of how they are mixed. I can't say for certain since I wasn't born with it."
"Well, what if, there is a catalyst, a passive element, that determines the result of two elements? And it is so passive that the people who are born with it never notices? And that's why it went undocumented?"
0XOX0
"So what do you think about the relocation of the academy?"
Today, Hiruzen picked me up from the academy after the classes were finished. We had a light meal at Ichiraku. There I learned from Teuchi that Iruka was taking Ayame on second date that next day. It showed on Ayame's face. She was humming happy tune. After hearing that, Hiruzen thought out loud that maybe he should give Iruka a raise so that he could afford dates. After we had our fill, he brought to training ground 19.
On our way over here, Hiruzen explained to me that Iruka thought about a way to utilize my tricks with water clones and submitted a detailed proposal to Hokage's office. After the council went over the proposal, it was met with positive response.
"I guess all the teachers in the academy would be required to perform water clone jutsu and some form of chakra absorption jutsu."
"That's exactly the reason we chose this place for relocation." Hiruzen was talking about the now repurposed training ground. "The council doesn't want to rush to relocate. They want to see if Iruka's proposal would bring good result. So for now, we will move the last year to this campus. If the result is good, then we will make it permanent."
Reason for this training ground was chosen was because of the lake in the middle. A cabin was made at one side of the lake where the final year students would be taught. Although my trick would work on any elemental clone; for the pilot project, water clone was made a requirement for the teachers. After the classes are finished, they could march their clone on the wooden pier adjacent to the cabin to reclaim chakra from them.
Depending on how many clones a teacher could create, students would be divided in groups, one group for each clone. That way teachers could spend more time for individual students. They would be able to learn their students' strengths and weaknesses thoroughly and teach them accordingly.
"Doesn't that mean that the teachers will have to cover more grounds for the final year students?"
"Iruka proposed a solution for that too; which I am ashamed to say that it never crossed my mind before."
"Well don't beat yourself up over it. Maybe you thought about it, then forgot the whole thing. You are old after all." Hiruzen replied my jab with laugh. "So what was his solution?"
"To divide the final year students into three men teams and have them perform D ranked missions few days every week under a chunin overseer. The teams would be rearranged every week depending on chunins' reports and when a team is considered perfect fit, they will be approved for jonins' test."
"That's a good idea. That way jonin senseis won't have to spend first few months to get their teams to function properly. They could focus on their genins's individual skills and they would work on their own to incorporate them in their teamwork and make strategies to implement them."
"Exactly. That's why I am looking forward to this reform. It will ensure that our genins will be more adept and skilled and hopefully more of them will come back from their first C-rank missions."
After that we lapsed into silence. Guess both of was done with talking about changes to the academy. "So, is there anything relating to my first kill you wanted to talk about?"
"What have you done with the body?"
"I warmed him up in lye for three and a half hours." Knowledge from Person of Interest came in handy doing this deed.
Moving Rui's body to Hiruko's lab would've been hard as I didn't have any special scroll for sealing up corpses. But since I wasn't going to perform autopsy on his corpse and didn't care about what kind ninja secret his body might hold, I sealed him in a normal storage scroll. I had already made preparation to dissolve his corpse. Suffice to say I was going to clean the secondary reservoir with bleach at least 7 more times.
"Do I even want to know how did you know about disposing of bodies?"
"Crime series on TV liked to slip this kind of information some times. Though those scenes wouldn't last more than few seconds and they won't be mentioned again." At first, I wanted to go with hydrofluoric acid. But acid of that caliber needed high clearance to buy from chemical store in Hidden Leaf now a days. It would've been easier to get one's hands on it before Orochimaru's experiments became known. One of the fluids he used to buy in bulk was this acid. To get rid of the body of his victims, no doubt.
"Naruto, have you shared it with your friends?"
"No, too much gory details. And lots of puking." I lost count how many times I puked when I was disposing Rui's body. After my stomach was empty, I was dry-heaving. What can I say, first kill is hard and disposing body even harder.
"How are you coping with it now?"
"It's still early, but I think I am doing good. Language barrier helps." At Hiruzen's look, I explained. "His name was Rui. In my old language it means Carp. So whenever I remember that I killed Rui, I get the image of a fish in my head. I know it's pretty messed up but to me, it's somewhat hilarious."
"That reminds me, I was curious about the language difference when we had dinner with Jiraiya." Maybe he was thinking of handing me off to a psychiatrist to find out what was wrong with my head. I mean, who thinks killing someone could be hilarious! "As far as I know, our world only have one language. How come your world had more than one?"
"Well there is a story there. It might seem unbelievable but it is the only answer I got to your question."
"Go on."
"According to the story, once upon time a great flood happened and the whole world was submerged in water for forty days. After things became normal again, the survivors settles down in a place called Shinar. At this point in history, they spoke same language. However, that changed after they decided to build a tower. They wanted to build the tower so high that it would reach the heaven. God didn't like it. He didn't want them to succeed in their venture. But he didn't want to kill those people either. So one morning, they woke up speaking new languages. They couldn't understand each other anymore and thus they failed to build the tower."
"Interesting. It answers the reason behind the origin of different languages. But don't you think it's a bit far fetched?"
"I was skeptical about the story at first. But then I read about some events where similar thing happened. In those cases, it happened after the people were somehow injured. There is a medical term for this, Foreign Accent Syndrome. People who went through this, started speaking in a different accent or became fluent in a foreign language they barely knew. But in every cases, they were injured in their head. So I think there might be some truth to the stories. It made me wondered if every language is already there somewhere in our brain and we have to unlock them someway and people who unlock them by having head injury just gets a big head start."
I thought it might be a possibility after watching Lucy. If there was a chance to unlock them, I surely would've taken it. It would have saved so much time that went spent looking for a satisfying subtitle.
0XOX0
I don't know where it was first said that, a lazy mind is devil's workshop but I totally agree with it. Although being a male gives us the ability to sit there and stare at shits for hours without having a thought, sometimes our mind go on overdrive. So much so that sometimes I backstep through my thoughts to understand where they came from.
One such thought was, 'I can't wait to add genes from other people to my body.
How did I come to this? Well, let's start from the beginning.
As the heiress to Hyuga clan; studying medical ninjutsu would be frowned upon by Hyuga boomers. So Hinata wanted to study medical texts in a place where their eyes wouldn't reach. So I gave her a copy of my apartment's key and set aside a desk for her to use.
It happened when I was going over the translation of In Time. After deeming the work not bad, I spaced out. I don't know how much time had passed, but when my eyes fell on the medical books, Kabuto's face came to my mind. Immediately after, I remembered one significant things Kabuto did during 4th Great Ninja War that was overlooked because of his liberal use of Reanimation Jutsu. And that was, his successful incorporation of bloodline and traits of other people into his body.
Known people whose traits he incorporated were Sound 4, Kimimaru and Orochimaru. How he did that was shown in few glimpse in Shippuden when he tried to absorb Orochimaru and that looked painful as hell.
Being a science enthusiast, integrating a foreign trait from one person was impressive to me. But 5 more? This warrants serious looking into.
When he first integrated Orochimaru's trait into himself, he did it by injecting Orochimaru's blood and all the other kinds of tissue into his system. I could accept that he had enough genetic sample of Kimimaru as he was the only medic showed on Hidden Sound's side. But that couldn't be the case for Sound 4. Though it wasn't shown what happened to their corpses after Sasuke Retrieval Arc, I doubt Kabuto could beat Leaf Ninjas to punch to collect them.
However, during the 4th Great Ninja War, they were summoned by Kabuto and in flashback, it was showed that they volunteered to be part of Orochimaru's collection of undead. So Kabuto must've had their genetic record from their Reanimation scroll.
That was another thing that baffled me, Reanimation Jutsu. One thing scientifically explainable to me about this jutsu is that, it required DNA sample to summon the targeted people. But why would the human sacrifice for the jutsu would get the summoned person appearance? Wouldn't it be logical if it didn't get the appearance? That way people who might know the person in life couldn't tell other about how to counter his attacks.
And another thing was, when the jutsu is released the appearance wears off and the vessel dies. Why would this happen? I never saw a psychic medium in person, but I doubt their appearance change when they channel a spirit and they certainly don't die after the spirit is released. I am sure it's the DNA's fault.
If my memory serves me right, in one of the episodes of Ancient Aliens, they talked about a character from Greek myth called Cersei. According to the myth, she was a witch who could turn a man into animal just by pointing her wand at him. The man who was speaking about her speculated that Cersei might have been an extraterrestrial being and her wand might have been an weapon that was able to change human's genetic makeup in an instant.
With this in mind, I reached a hypothesis. DNA plays a twofold role in this jutsu. First, it makes the summoning of the precise spirit, which brings spiritual energy. Secondly, it transforms the vessel's physique into that of the target's thus granting the spirit access to its jutsu repertoire, bloodline and physical traits. After all, it wouldn't do to have the memory of the First Hokage and be limited by a genin's body.
Anyway, I wasn't interested in spiritual aspect of this jutsu. My situation was weird enough as it was. But if the physical aspect could be applied on a subject without killing him, I had DNA of an ocular ability I had my eyes on.
But it wasn't like I could do research on my own on this matter. Who knows under how many locks and bolts this jutsu's scroll was. I was just starting to gain Hiruzen's trust. I wasn't stupid enough to ruin it this early. Maybe, Hiruko's research note could help me. I know I said that it sounded like human transmutation from FMA, but I wasn't about to experiment them; my stomach wasn't that strong. But surely reading them wasn't going to haunt me.
0XOX0