AN: I do not own Naruto, nor any of the ideas or copyrighted or trademarked material. This writing is for enjoyment only.

This story is centered around an OC, but it is not self insertion. He will be strong, but he, like most characters in the Naruto universe will get his fair share of a beating with the defeat stick. As well as can be expected from an OC insertion, the majority of the story, if not the entirety is AU. If neither of these status' are your cup of tea, there are plenty more fanfics out there.

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The sky was a cloudy gray.

There, he thought it. His cognitive processes returning to him, Jin suddenly felt the odd perception of a snowflake landing on his open left eye. He blinked a few times to dissipate the blurry spot floating on his eye.

I'm awake. What happened? Why am I lying in the snow?

A hand reached up to massage his temple, his fingers coming away bloody. Shocked, he looked to his hand to see the small slit of a cut on his thumb that had broken open. A scab he had often seen on his fathers hand... "Chichiuwai!" Jin tucked his chin down to his chest and kicked his legs up around and behind him as he bent at the knees, the young man somersaulted backwards into a half crouch. Fervently, he looked left and right then spun in a tight circle looking for any sign of his father. Nothing could be found to indicate any person had stood anywhere near him for days.

Obviously, that was not the case. Anyone left alone in the mountain passes of the Kooritsume Mountains for anything more then a few hours never came back(alive anyways). Checking the sun and his memory Jin took off at a trot towards where he had left the Michisuji commune, immediately concerned with getting to the bottom of whatever had happened in the time that he had missed. In one step, he accelerated to proper Shinobi running speeds and then in two steps he promptly fell for two reasons.

The sword his father had given him had jabbed between his legs, simply thrust into his belt as it had been. It was facing the wrong angle for Jin himself to have put it there, so sense dictated another had put it here. The most likely party being his father. As it turned out, his father was the second reason he tripped so shortly after regaining consciousness for around his left ankle was the strap to a large scroll almost 3 feet long and 2 inches think.

A contract, --here? Whatever, no time to examine it. Kicking his leg up and right almost to his shoulder, the Michisuji caught the scroll and lashed it to his back with the same strap that had bound his ankle. A short twist of his wrist brought his sheathed sword out of it's awkward position and held it firmly in hand.

New bundles in hand, literally, Jin took up a sprint towards the place he had woken up this morning, the bottom of his intestines feeling as though they were coated with lead. His eye were fixed in a wide stare that matched his harried breathing. There was no mistaking it, the young man was in a panic.

All pretense forgotten of approaching calmly fled in the face of dread; propelling his legs to a berserk pace, Jin left behind a steaming trail as soon as he rounded an outcropping and saw a dozen small columns of greasy smoke waxing their way into the sky to dissolve up into the low and ominously dark cloud cover. When he reached the camp, and was greeted with a normal sight of prepared tents and cooking fires, his mind nearly blew a circuit until he remembered the initial genjutsu seal that his mother would place to throw off attackers.

Bringing his fingers together into a concentration seal, Jin spoke aloud as he formed the chakra into the neccesary 'keys' to unlock the seal to his eyes. "Hitotsu." Ox. "Futatsu" Snake. "Mittsu" Horse. "Yottsu" Ram.

With the 'pang' sound of a completed jutsu, Jin felt the illusion melt away around him, yet he did not want to open the eyes he had closed once he reached the second obligatory seal to unlock the seal his mother placed. He could smell, hear and even taste the death in the air.

No need to see it. No need to see it! Don't look! Run run far away! DON'T LOOK!

But he opened his eyes anyway. Between pursed lips came a small whimper. In front of him lay three bodies all near or at his age. Shoari and his two friends, Michisuji and distant cousins to Jin, dead. Behind them, half laying in a puddle of slowly freezing water that was inked with congealed blood lay his Uncle Setsumo. He could smell the light peach sent in the air that most of the girls and women of the clan wore, all of it carrying with it the metallic smell of copper and the sickly sweet smell of death and. Not unlike burning meat, a small perverse part of the young man's mind spat out.

All around, he saw relatives and friends laying, mangled, burned and eviscerated. No body was left intact, everything had been desecrated beyond humane allowance.

"No..."

There it was, the first assurance that nothing was wrong, that everything was okay. I must have unlocked the seal wrong, this..this has to be wha-what Mother would do to throw p-people off! He ran through the set of seals again, "Oushi, Hebi, Uma, Hitsuji..." Nothing changed; not that it would have as everything the shinobi saw was the truth. His deep green eyes took in all the carnage, all the destruction unabated as he ran from corpse to corpse shouting names and shaking shoulders hoping desperately to awake someone as if what he saw them with was nothing but a costume and this was an impromptu nap. This wasn't fair, how...who could have done this to... The young man stopped, considering which word to use, "us" would entail the clan as a whole, but if he said "me", it would assert that he was the only one left.

"No...!"

The second denial came out louder, and was drawn out a little longer then the first. Aimlessly, he roved the came of family sized tents, searching each. Each yielding the same prize, his own dead clansmen. His mania would have gone on, building upon itself until he cracked, if he had not heard the oncoming sound of fierce wind.

Fate had a cruel hand to play against Jin yet. Two, in fact. Screaming out of the higher peaks of the mountain range came a fierce snowstorm, ready to gobble up any of the unprepared into it's freezing maw. And the young man was less then prepared. Diving into the nearest tent, he grabbed any sort of warm material he could then raced back into the center of the camp towards his own families tent. The same part of his mind the had commented of the smell of the Nomad camp recommended the young boy just use the nearest tent.

A more rational and conscious part of his mind refused, citing some pointless line of home being where the heart is. And his best chance for survival in the coming storm would be in the bulkier lower tents set up for the larger or more important families in the center of the camp. Crouch walking into the tent he had woken up for the first time for the day in, Jin was met with the serene sight of his mother, her body rather. She seemed to have been killed peacefully, with a single thrust of some weapon through her middle. One of her hands covered the wound, but had been unable to staunch the flow of blood.

In her other hand was a small leather book with many pages with a single word scrawled on the front, "Fuuin."

Partially ashamed of himself, Jin reached out and pocketed the book, knowing that if he did not, what was probably his mother's legacy of seals with fly away in the wind. Reason did little to salve to wounds of pride from taking from the dead. There was little time left for anything but swathing himself in his procured blankets and hunkering down in a secured corner because outside the wind began to blow and immediately the temperatures dropped.

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Hunger and Thirst were bad enough enemies to the attempt of continued life upon the Kooritsume mountains. Weather only served to complicate matters. But the natural order of things would pale in comparison to what came next.

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Curled into a fetal position, Jin shivered uncontrollably underneath his layers of blankets. Cold, even of this magnitude did little to sap the vitality from the young shinobi. What ate away at him the most was that his mother's cadaver was but 3 feet from him, exposed to the elements as all the rest of the Michisuji were. The wind and the blowing ice would be grinding away their clothing and flesh as sure as a desert sand storm in the lower deserts would have. The effect was something Jin was not likely to ever forget, once being lost in a similar, but much more inferior, storm. Back then, his 2nd youngest uncle had found him wandering the freezing wind looking for his own tracks that would lead him back to camp, for he was too young to realize the snow was erasing his own tracks and leading him in circles. Grinding his palms against his eyes in both frustration and to wipe away tears that had welled up. "Otooji Teijo... Obasan Kaede.." a sob broke his account momentarily, " Shiro-kun... Kyoko-chan, Shiaori, Takeo... Why? What happened!"

Everything, in that moment, completely and utterly came to a grinding halt. The wind didn't gutter out, it halted in place with it's small spears of ice redundantly frozen in place mid-air. Underneath all his layers of clothing, Jin suddenly broke into a cold sweat as an overwhelming sense of dread and apprehension swept over him.

He heard footsteps.

Not the regular light tap-tap of a shinobi's practiced quiet footfalls, but a dragging and scraping sort of sound. A lazy or un-practiced sort of step that belied laziness or weariness. In a regular state of mind, Jin would have thought his reaction through, prepared a possible escape route or combat jutsu. But the young man was far from in his regular state of mind.

Springing upwards and swatting away the covering blankets he had amassed, Jin turned with a huge smiled upon his face in hope that another Michisuji had survived the massacre surrounding him. In a way, all of the clan had survived but saying that they had survived and that they still lived were two very different things. Surrounding the young man was a small horde of his deceased family, silently eying him down. Each still bore their wounds, some indeed were even missing limbs, and no longer maintained any of their personalities or conceptions. Their eyes even held no more of the previous life they had in hours before. Had he already not been on the brink of freezing, the return of his extended family would have drained the color from Jin's face and made his blood run cold.

Each body sported bits of frost and small amounts of cold burn making a patchwork of light blues and browns amongst their blueish skin tones, giving them a complete cadaver appearance. For as high up in the Kooritsume as Jin was, the bottom of his stomach had dropped out from underneath him.

"This... can't be happening...NO!"

Like a cat set to pounce, the last sound that came out of Jin's mouth caused the group of wights to spring into action. A chorus of low pitched shrieks vibrated the air, causing the motion-frozen ice to vibrate and tremble as it hung motionless in the air. Jin froze in shock as they lunged at him, fear and shock overriding all instinct. The leading cadaver closed the gap between Jin and itself before the young man could even blink. Her hand, the body was that of his own mother, grasped for him and he couldn't gather the mental where-with-all to move out of the way.

It was then that the same slowing of time that had halted the storm reached both Jin and the wight. A mere inch from the green of his eyes, the hand had been halted. Likewise, Jin himself had no ability to physically move. Held suspended and immobile, he was qnow in a situation in which no harm could come to him, but he was still unable to remove himself from possible harm. Frenzied to an almost frantic state, Jin was unable to comprehend what, or even where he was until heard a voice that almost sent him to the brink of tears...

"Jin...Jin you must hear me..."

"Oka...-san?"

"Jin!"

Looking to his left without turning his head, an image wavered in and out of the young shinobi's vision, an image of his own mother. Her expression was one of pure worry, and strangely, a small bit of pride.

"Jin... you have lived. But you have not lived enough, yet. There is still one thing that you must do..." a small tear welled up in her right eye, and was slowly wiped away, " We have all talked, and have agreed. You must use our strengths, all of our strengths, to accomplish this."

---What does that mean, Mother?

Her feet floating a few inches off of the ground, Ai floated to behind the immobile boy. "Only I could. Do not fight it Jin." With those simple words, she plunged her hands into those of the boy she had given life to once before. Now, she would be giving it to him over 200 times again.

For his body, time resumed a normal flow but to Jin's mind it moved as in fast-forward. His hands flew through hundreds of seals, periodically swiping a finger out towards the claw of the wight to employ bio-logical aid toward the jutsu's end. Specifcally, it was a seal very similar to one that Ai had taught only to one other, only slightly modified. The use and methods of the seal had died with the only other person who had ever used it. That person, however, had been able to use it to save precious people. Ai now used it to even more selfless ends.

Quietly, as the last seal was formed by Jin's hands she whispered to her son, " Remember Jin, we ask only one thing in return. Only one. Make our gift worth our deaths."

"Fuuin: Chihou Ikioi Jougo" (Seal: Area Spirit Funnel)

There was a incredibly bright yellow flash, and then Jin's eyes stopped working. It crossed his mind later that he had perhaps simply closed them, but his conscience was better sated with thinking he had no control at the time. Slowly at first, the very essence of all of those around him flew toward and into him. At first, it was a warming sensation that progessed to an even heat all over his body. But from there the feeling grew exponentially. His skin crawled, and then felt as though he were close to a very large fire. Would he have been able, his scream would have highlighted his pain to all who would have been able to hear it. But it only got worse.

Each finger felt as though broken in a thousand ways, each nerve burned with a fire to rival a thousand suns, each thought was being cut in a thousand pieces. More and more the pain stacked upon itself, emblazoning the moment that Jin was given all of the chakra strength of the Michisuji with raw bold and undeniable pain. For each persons chakra forced into his own body, a small amount of an inked seal began to write itself onto Jin's skin. As each member of his decimated clan contributed their chakra ability, the pattern grew more complex and intricate. Slowly but surely, the process intensified and increased in speed until the green of the young man's hair was the only color visible against the torrent of yellow light. Inside that storm, his own mind was imulsed in every form of pain the mind could conjure.

It would seem simple burning was no longer enough.

Cold, shocking tremors, crushing and cutting sensations all tried to rend his sanity from his mind, and failed. Through an effort not even his own, Jin managed to hold on. Soon though, his body reached the limit of chakra possibility. The effects of the seal had not ended though. Into the written seal flowed the remaining chakra of the Michisuji, living and regenerating as would a living being.

Then, in an abrupt moment, the screaming winds and rivers of chakra flooding into the poor boy stopped. For a moment, everything was like it had been; frozen in time.

Then the backlash from the impossible amount of growth reared up in the form of an enormous chakra burn off. Jin could only watch as the bodies of the entire clan instantly turned to ash as a wave of chakra pulsed up into the night sky like a pillar of light.

Okasan...

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"Yosha! Ramen! Ramen! Ra-aa-men!" Naruto literally danced through the air as he and Jiraiya walked down the street towards a promise of free ramen after an un-disturbed session of 'material gathering'. "Ne ne, Ero-Senin, what are you going to have? I, FOR SURE, am going to have at LEAST three," Naruto indicated with three finger thrust nearly into Jiraiya's face, "...bowls of miso ramen and then a bowl of pork ramen..."

Zoning him out, Jiraiya suddenly felt his sixth-sense kick in. His stomach turned as he felt an extremely distant and extremely powerful chakra focus flare up. What is that? It's huge! It rivals even what I felt from Naruto at The Valley of the End. This can't be good.

As if to underscore his statement, a short flash was followed by a seemingly endless pillar of light...

No, that's CHAKRA!

...lanced out into the night sky, then guttered out like a fuel-less fire.

"Kirei..." Naruto murmured behind the Sennin, "Ne, Ero-Sennin,what is that?

"Stop calling me Ero-Sennin, damnit!" Jiraiya had even been asking himself that, but had been un-able to come to any conclusion. Seeing it as something he was unable to do anything about for the time being, he had to simply let it be, and hope it wasn't something that he wished he took care of when it finally popped up.

"Don't worry about it, lets just go eat...for now."