From the memorandum of Namikaze Minato,
Chapter 2
The genin team I was assigned to after I graduated the academy consisted of Isayama Yoshiaga, a civilian born like me and Iwasaki of the Nara clan. Our sensei was Jiraiya-sama. I knew the moment it was announced that despite not knowing all that much about Namikaze's original childhood that I must've kept pretty close to it for that to remain the same. I thought it odd at first that one of the legendary sannin would be the sensei to three no-names like us. That is until I remembered that the second war was still very much ongoing and that Jiraiya-sama probably hadn't earned all that fame yet.
Our team number was team seven. Maybe it was fate or maybe just the shinigami laughing at me or something. But my extra training had paid off so that when I graduated, my good taijutsu and bukijutsu, together with my perfect theoretical score and expert performance of the ninjutsu portion of the exam made me the top student. Iwasaki was the deadlast of the class, though with him being a Nara, chances were good that he only ever did the absolute minimum to pass because he was lazy. Or maybe he was just smart and wanted to avoid graduating early and getting dragged into the war. He was the only one of us who graduated at the standard age of twelve, having failed his last exam when the academy tried to fast-track him together with the other clan kids. Isayama had pretty average skills overall. He was enthusiastic about being a ninja, having eaten up the brainwashing of the academy hook line and sinker.
The first day I expected to be given a team test. Maybe not exactly the same as Kakashi's bell test but something similar. However, there was no test at all. We did our introductions and discussed a bit about our strengths and weaknesses but after that Jiraiya-sama started us out on training right away. I wondered why for a while but when we got our first C-rank mission only three weeks after our team formation, I realized that it was the war. Konoha simply couldn't afford to fail any new students. They were all needed, even if it was just as cannon fodder.
So we had three weeks of training and doing some basic D-ranks before we were sent on our first supply run to the front. Jiraiya-sama was a jovial person. He laughed and joked a lot with us and though he sometimes lamented that he'd gotten an all boys team, I know that he cared about us. He did drag us on 'infiltration exercises' to the woman's only onsen and into bars more often than I'd have liked but he also invested a lot of time overseeing our training when he didn't have to. Especially Iwasaki probably would've just continued to slack off if Jiraiya-sama hadn't personally dragged him out of bed each day.
Having Jiraiya-sama as a sensei did of course provide a fabulous opportunity for me personally. I had my eyes on learning fuinjutsu for a while and right now, Jiraiya-sama was probably the only fuinjutsu master in the whole village. He was surprised but elated that I wanted to learn about this almost lost art. He gave me a couple of scrolls to start me off on the technicalities but I have to say that nothing can replace a teacher when it comes to sealing.
I had always thought that sealing was a mixture of math, geometry and science or something like that.
That was entirely wrong.
Fuinjutsu was art. Fuinjutsu was like painting or writing poems. Every seal told a story. That's why Jiraiya-sama, himself an author, was so good at it.
Once I realized that this branch was right up my alley, there was no stopping me. It was a lot like what I did with hand seals. I started researching and memorizing the meanings and functions of basic components and designs first. After that it was a matter of learning what went well together and how to formalize a harmonizing whole.
Take an exploding tag for example. To the casual observer it looks like a bunch of kanji that goes boom. When you dissect it though you realize that it's actually like a little poem describing the effects of an explosion. Sure, there's the circle in the middle that defines the round shape of the fireball and the obvious kanji for explode in the middle. But that's really just for the amateur user, so they can tell the tag apart from, let's say, a flash bang tag. The writing around the circle is what actually makes out the seal. It describes the shape, the temperature, the size on one side, further defining it to be an attack that is timed and needs to be activated. On the other side it describes how much chakra goes into it, where the chakra comes from and how it's supposed to run through the seal while it's inactive.
Jiraiya-sama once showed me the very first original explosive seal that those commonly brought tags are based on. There were significantly larger, building an entire sub-dimension to store a full sized fireball in them. The seals you can buy at a shop were all prepared by the same artist, in this case the weapon shop owner. He only knew the basics of fuinjutsu, how to make explosive tags and storage scrolls and the like but that was enough for him to shorten the original seal work and put it on a small paper slip. Just like I practiced to shorten the number of hand seals necessary to perform the academy three.
If the original tag was an essay on the properties of fire, the store-brought one was a haiku. The key to a working tag laid in the way you powered the seal with chakra. Without chakra, a seal is just squiggly lines. Just like you have to focus on your yin chakra and visualize in your mind what you want it to do while performing the ram or dog seal, you have to focus on the properties of the fire while you charge the kanji determining its characteristics so the seal will know what you mean.
Now you're gonna say: Wait a moment, seals can't think for themselves! And that's true. However, have you ever looked at a masterpiece painting or read a really good novel and felt as if the author put a piece of his soul into that work of art? It's similar with seals. Your thoughts and emotions influence your chakra and your chakra influences your seal. Replicating a seal is so difficult because while you can copy kanji, you might not know what the artist was thinking or feeling while charging it, especially if a shortened seal is being used.
Jiraiya-sama gave me a free pass to experiment with seals as much as I wanted as long as I presented the prototype to him before charging it with any chakra. The first seal I designed myself looked something like this:
In the dark I grow
You don't notice me although
the changes you undergo
from tight to toe
will make you fast as light
when the moment is right
Now a part of doing seal work is to encode your work as much as possible, trying to make it so that nobody but you can use it. In the case of the aforementioned explosive tags, that means having horrible hand writing and reducing a large design to a handful of characters.
In this case, I wrote the poem first and then shortened it as such:
Darkness – Growth – Perception (this kanji was turned up side down) – Change – Leg – Speed – Opportunity
I showed the design to Jiraiya-sama. He looked at it for a while and then asked me what it was for. I showed him the complete poem and explained that I wanted to have a repeat of the short version written on a bandage that I'd wrap around my ankles. They were supposed to basically work as chakra weights, helping my muscles to grow denser and stronger so that once I took them off, I would gain a burst of speed.
Jiraiya-sama laughed at it for almost five minutes. He said that nobody had ever taken his explanation that literally and that people usually stuck to a highly technical description of what they wanted to archive. But if fuinjutsu was like an art form, then emotions and intentions were far more important to create a working seal.
Jiraiya-sama explained that a beautiful design like a poem was alright as a centerpiece but you still needed to fill out details to make it work. Nowhere in my poem did I specify how much the muscles should be affected for example. Even if managed to correctly bind my expectation of the result to the seal, that would still only put as much pressure on my muscles as I deemed fitting. I needed to do some actual medical research to learn how much was appropriate or I could accidentally draw all strength out of my muscles and end up crippling myself.
So I went back to the drawing board, researched how weights were normally used during training and then started adding details to my design. I kept the center piece just because I wanted to know if it would work. It took me about two weeks of back and forth and checking with Jiraiya-sama before I managed to write something he said I could charge up. My final seal was adaptive, increasing the weight of my feet and ankles the more chakra I stored in the seal. Sensei warned me it was still inflexible – it could go horribly wrong if I ever tried to wrap the same bandages meant for my feet around my arms for example – and the amount of time and effort it took to finish the simple seal was quite high. But in the end I had a working pair of chakra weight bandages.
I still use those bandages today and only take them off when I'm about to go into battle. Well, I still use chakra weight bandages but the seal on them is a completely different one, one much more flexible and cost effective. It still has a little poem as its center piece though.
I always thought that one of the main things separating Konoha from other villages was their emphasis on teamwork. However, I did not see nearly as much of that as I had expected and eventually came to the conclusion that this too was something that developed over time.
Personally I got along with my teammates well enough but I had the same problems connecting to them as I had with the other academy students. I got along with sensei fabulously though. Our passion for sealing brought us together.
Seeing as fuinjutsu turned out to be such a creative work, I forced myself to slow down during my free time to empty my head. Sometimes working too hard and too long on a project can blind you to obvious mistakes. So I found myself wandering the village occasionally. I met Kushina one day. She was at the ramen stand, slurping down her mission pay and I started a conversation with her. I told her I was learning fuinjutsu. Knowing her history (and future) I hoped that she had some knowledge in that area as well and might be willing to discuss fuinjutsu theory with me. As it turned out, when she became genin Kushina had been given access to whatever Konoha had managed to salvage from Uzushiogakure. Many of their scrolls could only be opened by those with Uzumaki blood so she was the only one who could read them. Seeing as this was her heritage, she devoured everything she could get her hands on but she'd been stumped on how to make anything of it work for herself.
My comparison of fuinjutsu to poem writing stumped her. She had some sort of epiphany during our conversation I think because she ran home without even paying her dinner (that huge bill was for me to pick up).
A week later she ambushed me in front of the orphanage and excitedly told me all about how my hint had helped her figure out some of the basic guides her clan left her.
From there on we met more often to discuss our progress as we learned the same art but sometimes we also met just for fun. Once I had saved up enough money from the C-ranks we did (mostly supply runs but also a few patrols) I moved out of the orphanage and into an apartment of my own and she helped me with the packing and transport. As a thank you I invited her for ramen. It was the start of a friendship both of us needed. And it was because of the time we spend together in that period that I was the first person who noticed when one day, she was gone.
Kushina's abduction by enemy ninjas from Kumogakure almost turned the three front war into a four front war. So far the slaughter had been focused only on Konoha, Suna and Iwa, carried out in the land of rain. Kumo had been bidding its time, ready to pounce if any of the participants looked weak. Apparently, Konoha was the one who looked weak that month because they decided to and try to snatch our jinchuuriki.
When Kushina didn't show up to our meeting – it was not a date, not at that time yet anyway no matter what Iwasaki says – I was worried for her. I checked her home, her favorite training ground and the ramen stand but she was nowhere to be found. I told my sensei about it and he said not to worry, that women sometimes needed time for themselves and no man could understand why. But he must've tried to check up on her behind my back anyway because shortly after he showed up with a squad of trackers at his back and urged me to remember every detail about our last meeting and where she could've gone afterwards. Once I realized that she might be in danger I volunteered to help in the search. I was a sensor and I was very much used to the feeling of her chakra. I could track her down as well as any Inuzuka dog.
They allowed me to tag along and we managed to find her before she and her kidnapper could cross the border. Jiraiya-sama killed most of the Kumo-ninjas who abducted her. One of them fell to my blade though. It was the first time I took a life and back then I felt bad less about the kill itself and more about how easy it was. I was just faster than my opponent. Though to be fair, I doubted the group consisted of anything more than chunin and maybe one jonin leader. Wouldn't want to waste actual talent before the war even started, would we?
And if you ever read this, Kushina, I'm sorry but that thing with the trail of red hair? Jiraiya-sama only said that to tease you. Mind you, I do think your hair is beautiful but I was hardly the only one who noticed the trail you left with it. But, it made you blush so prettily so I didn't say anything. (I hope you can forgive me for that small deception, my dear.)
In any case, my performance on that mission was deemed enough to grant me a field promotion to chunin, which showed just how much they needed fresh blood at the border. I was still only twelve at that time after all. The day after I told Kushina of my new rank she asked me out on our first actual date. I said yes mainly because I didn't want to squash her surprisingly weak self-confidence. In truth I felt rather uncomfortable dating a thirteen-year old girl, seeing as I felt so much older than her. Luckily, the date went horrible. It ended with her crying as she tearfully confessed her biggest secret to me – that she was the kyuubi's jinchuuriki. I had known that before of course but couldn't think of a way to justify that knowledge that wouldn't make me sound like a mad man. I had decided long ago that I would not tell anyone of my future knowledge. I didn't know enough about this era for it to be useful. There were only two major things I wanted to change, Obito's near death experience and, if that failed, the kyuubi attack. Both of that I could prevent best by continuing exactly as the story went, becoming Obito's jonin sensei and eventually Hokage. If I managed to survive past the start of the Naruto-series, I would have all the power I needed to make all the changes I wanted in time.
So, I didn't tell Kushina that I already knew and merely told her that it didn't matter to me and that I liked her for who she was, regardless of what was sealed inside of her. It was the truth too. I had been so wary at first, thinking that fate might push me together with her. What if I didn't like her at all? But once she allowed me to gaze past the walls she'd build around her heart, I found her to be kind, passionate, loyal and possessing an uncanny ability to pull me out of my obsessive training or writing phases. She was an anchor to the real world for me and reminded me of why I loved Konoha and the Naruto universe.
We did agree to stick to being friends until we were a bit older though.
The second shinobi war lasted two more years. Isayama died on a mission shortly after being field-promoted and Iwasaki eventually joined the T&I department to get away from the front lines. Jiraiya-sama continued to teach me fuinjutsu whenever he had time but the opportunities got rarer and rarer. I studied together with Kushina instead when I had time. I was honored and touched when she invited me to read the Uzumaki scrolls together with her. They were a well of inspiration to me.
As a young chunin and possibly during to Jiraiya-sama keeping his protective hands over me, I didn't get send to the front often. I was mostly doing supply runs and patrols. There were only two battles I took an active part in and they were horrible. I barely survived and to this day, I sometimes still have nightmares about them. I've lost count of how many people I killed half way through my first battle. It was during that time that I did away with whatever was left of the morals my old word taught me. I remember that when I was young, I wanted to be just like Naruto. He never had to kill anyone, he just had to beat them up and they'd see the error of their ways. I didn't have that talent. I didn't have that opportunity. If I didn't kill my opponents, they would kill me or my comrades. And the worst of it was that in this world, I was praised for it.
I got field-promoted to jonin towards the very end of the war. At that time my jutsu repertoire included the kagebunshin, which I used to train myself, learn more fuinjutsu and finally get the hang of the rasengan. I would've improved it further with elemental chakra, just to prove that I could. Unfortunately my chakra nature is water and coating a ball of spinning raw chakra with water actually reduces ts destructive potential. I did invent a similar jutsu that shot three dozen high pressure water bullets at once though. Nobody ever talks about that, even though I used it to great effect against larger groups of enemies… Wind is my secondary affinity but it took me years to be half-way proficient with it and it was never enough to improve the rasengan.
I also started to become capable enough at fuinjutsu to be able to use it in battle. Normally you need to prepare a seal beforehand to use it because it takes a lot of time and even then it has to be tailored for a specific function. I wrote a few basic seals though such as a paralytic seal, one that drains chakra and transfers it to me and even a seal I can put over an open wound to close it. I've got a storage scroll with me with about two dozen pair of gloves with different seals stitched into them. A pair of paralytic gloves for example basically gave me the ability to paralyze whatever body part I of an enemy I managed to hit with my flat hand, similar to the Juuken style. Some seals I used so very often I could even draw from memory. Many times I could only continue with my mission because I captured an enemy ninja and drew a seal of chakra absorption on him to refill my own reserves. I also had my own communication seals, inspired by Konan's origami jutsu. The seals go and find the recipients I specify after I fold them into paper planes. It's not very useful during battle of course but within Konoha, I often used them to send messages to Kushina, Jiraiya or Iwasaki.
One of my greatest jutsu that is not very well known though are my sage clones. It was that jutsu that earned me my jonin promotion actually, not the rasengan. Jiraiya-sama had tried to teach me sage mode. I did sign the toad contract and I worked well together with them. I got the meditation part down well too but my body wasn't strong enough to support sage mode for more than a few seconds. Sage mode does consume normal chakra besides nature chakra, even if it's not a lot. You have to mix nature chakra with normal yin and yan energy to use it after all.
I did find a way to incorporate nature chakra into my fighting style with the help of fuinjutsu though. I tested it with kagebunshin first. My limit lay at four I could do at the same time. I would outfit my bunshin with a seal that would make them automatically draw on nature chakra every time they used normal chakra. The seal filtered the nature chakra and transformed it into normal chakra. That way the potent nature chakra couldn't overload their delicate coils and make them dispel (or in my case, turn me into a toad). For the bunshin that meant they could maintain themselves for much longer than they normally could and they had enough spare chakra to reinforce themselves, making them tougher. The only limit was that the seal worked relatively slowly so if they used a lot of powerful techniques in short succession, they would still run out.
If I used the seal on myself I found that it messed with the natural regeneration of my chakra that my original, flesh and blood body produced. I could use it when I was really exhausted and had a limited time to recover myself but it would scramble my chakra control for a while. That was why I mainly used to for clones.
When I was sixteen and the war had been over for two years, the Hokage approached me and asked me to become a jonin instructor. So many good ninja had fallen that they were short on teachers and yet the academy program was only starting to slow down again. There were more students than they knew what to do with. I didn't think I was ready for such a responsibility. I was still very much learning myself. But then he showed me the file on this year's graduates and I read the names of Kakashi, Obito and Rin and I knew that whether I was ready or not, I had to take on this team.