Sealing Salientia - Chapter 11: Luck - Author: PenSmoke

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto, nor make any profit from writing this.

Previously on Sealing Salientia:
Nono Yakushi was settling in for bed when she heard the melancholic and depressed laughter echoing hauntingly through the halls of the orphanage. Terrified of what it might be, she rushed through the halls looking for an intruder, but saw nobody unusual there. The only other person awake was Iruka, who smiled at her and waved from his bed.

Fire Country
Late September, Year 66

Jiraiya cursed his luck.

He had tried following his female teammate across the country. Completing forays into several foreign lands and even enemy territory, he always seemed to be one step behind her. He had been trying to track her down for almost a year now and was growing frustrated with the lack of progress. Every town that he visited had rumors of her visiting, sometimes as closely as the day before. But she was always gone when he arrived. By the time he picked up her trail again, he was too far behind to catch up.

Tiring of the chase, he had decided to go stay in the Fire Capital, Shihonhi. Not only could he have a steady source of income, as the main banks were there, but having an ear close to the ground near the daimyo was always a good idea. Besides, the daimyo tended to favor the Sannin, as they had brought a large amount of military prestige to the country during past conflicts. Additionally, Jiraiya's writing was often considered a taboo pleasure by many members of the upper court, the daimyo himself being a secret admirer of his work.

Naruto had grown significantly in the past year. While the boy wasn't eye-catchingly huge, he was definitely larger than Jiraiya felt a one-year old boy should be. So much formula had been consumed those first few weeks that Jiraiya thought he was never going to keep up, but eventually the battle was won as the child graduated to softer foods, which then transitioned shortly after into normal foods. The boy was a bottomless pit, consuming every single thing that was presented to him, with nary a complaint.

While he hadn't made much progress on his own chakra issues, he had made significant progress on Naruto's.

The first thing he had done was to examine the seal as closely as possible. Minato, the tricky genius that he was, had made some last-minute changes to the seal that he didn't fully understand yet. One thing that he noticed was that it appeared only the Yang half of the Kyuubi's chakra had been sealed inside of the child.

Upon realizing this, he had snuck back to near Konoha to see if there was any remnant of Kyuubi's Yin chakra that could be obtained for harvesting, perhaps given to the child to help to restore the balance. Sadly, there no been no luck to that endeavor.

The boy was still overflowing with Yang chakra, which he suspected was part of why the child grew so fast. With work though, he had been building Naruto's own Yin chakra, by making sure his mental state was stimulated and learning. It still paled in comparison though, as a normal human usually would to a tailed beast.

He had even recently started Naruto on chakra development exercises, disguised as games. Simple things, nothing that required insane amounts of concentration or skill, such as trying to push a ball without actually touching it. Jiraiya had demonstrated a little bit of this and the child had taken some time to understand how but had learned quickly once he figured out how to expel chakra from his system.

Jiraiya had also tried to ascertain how much chakra the boy had. After several experiments, he concluded it was steadily growing at a rapid pace. Whereas previously it had barely been noticeable against his own, he'd now equate it with a child in the Academy. He had been fascinated by this growth and studied it intensely after realizing just how astoundingly advanced Naruto was for chakra capacity.

Every human currently had chakra in their system, some were blessed with more than others. Those with parents that had large pools of energy usually had more than others and some families had a tendency to have enlarged bases to draw from as well. Naruto had his Uzumaki blood providing one pillar towards his growth, as well as Minato's kage-level reserves providing another. That had explained the enlarged capacity at birth. But Naruto's just kept growing at what seemed like an exponential scale.

A few simple observations had noted a very interesting result. A typical human would have what they would consider normal chakra output when awake, elevated chakra emissions if they were actively using the energy and a highly reduced signature when sleeping. Not Naruto. The boy simply glowed with the energy constantly. His body shined with the lifeforce every minute or every hour, awake or asleep. Jiraiya believed this to be tied to another part of the design of the seal that he had deciphered, which linked the Kyuubi's system into Naruto's own. It appeared that the tailed beast was constantly giving the boy chakra. The toad sage wasn't exactly sure if this was intended or not, as he hadn't discovered anything in the matrix that would force the Kyuubi to release chakra, simply a way to transform the vile energy into something usable by humanity. He had kept an eye on it, but there seemed to be no negative side-effects that he had noticed.

If anything, it was having a positive impact on the boy. His senses were incredibly sharp and his mind was very quick. The advancement over other children that were only one-year old seemed like comparing a child to an adult. He was leaps and bounds ahead of any child near his age they came across. Already walking around, talking incessantly in his gibberish and understanding Jiraiya, the boy was an amazing learner.

It probably helped that Jiraiya spent basically every moment possible with the boy. The sannin didn't trust anyone else to actually look after the child. While he had started this journey feeling like Naruto was more like a grandchild than anything else, he had resigned to the obvious a couple months ago. Naruto, for all intents and purposes, was his son. He had been with the boy since birth and had almost never even been out of sightline with the blonde mop of hair on his head. It was impossible to ignore the bonding that had occurred since that first fateful day they had left Konoha. Rocking Naruto to sleep, feeding and caring for him, changing dirty diapers and especially just holding the little bundle of joy in his arms, gave him a feeling that he now wished he had found earlier in life.

He may have been a little over-protective, but what good dad wasn't? He had to be extra careful, considering that he was technically on a long term S-rank assignment that carried a great risk of discovery.

He was going to train and raise his son to be every bit as good as Minato had ever been. And that was final.

Orochimaru cursed his luck.

He had been appointed as the head of Konoha's Scientific Research department almost a year ago. At first, everything had been going swimmingly. He had gone through with his idea to visit the Kyuubi battle site and harvest what remaining spiritual energy remained there and it had been a great investment of time, as he collected several motes of wandering energy before they had dissipated. They were minute, but still reeked of demonic energy.

He had tried to keep them stable to try and use them for experimentation. However, they had slowly been disappearing despite his best efforts. Desperate to save them for future use, he had attempted to do a live transfusion into a test subject that had been graciously granted to him via the Torture and Interrogation department after they had finished with the poor man.

As the man had been completely broken by them, physically and mentally, he had hoped that by imbuing the tiny fragment of energy into the man, he could energize it with a chakra system that was still operational and by some means, 'feed' the demonic energy.

And, in a way, that had worked. The chakra immediately grew in size and intensity. The problem was that it grew so much, so rapidly that it burned out through the man. Literally. The crater didn't stop smoking for two days. And the energy that had been transferred was released in an explosion that had rocked his laboratory. Thankfully, he had been able to pass it off as research on new, more potent exploding tags, which was also underway. What the Hokage didn't know wouldn't hurt him.

He had tried putting a small sealing matrix on the next test subject that had been acquired, but that had only caused the explosion to be more contained, this time only sending a few tremors through the building as the corpse of a missing-nin smoldered in the corner.

He had used his final subject as a go-between, testing sealing the energy within a non-living thing and then sealing that entity within the body, but that had simply caused the energy to immediately die out. It seemed the energy needed a living system to sustain itself and Orochimaru was almost out of research material. He had managed to collect five jars of essence, one was wasted when he realized that they were not stable and in fact would still fade out and three expired during testing. He had no other source of demonic energy left outside of this one jar.

Failure would not suffice, he needed something better. It was almost too late and if he didn't act soon, the opportunity would be lost forever.

In desperation, he decided to try talking with Fugaku to garner access to something a little more risky. He had posited if there was anything that could help research creating a seal to contain energy for later release that was better than anything he had come up with. The snake summoners' initial plan was to try and see if his old teammate Jiraiya was around, as the man was an absolute genius with seals, the only area of study in which Orochimaru didn't exceed him. That was shot down rather quickly, as he was been informed Jiraiya was on a long-term spying mission and likely wouldn't return for years. Which made the serpentine man immediately dismiss that idea as a possibility.

However, things took a turn for the better when Fugaku suggested that they both look through the Forbidden Scroll to see if there was anything to use for knowledge inside there. After all, most of what was in the forbidden, had been placed there because of danger to the user performing it, rather than to the target. Most ninja skills were indeed meant to hurt the target. So, as long as the party performing was careful about what was done, there was minimal risk. The scroll's first skill demonstrated that effect, Shadow Clones. A simple technique really, it wasn't even that hard to perform. It was that without a large enough chakra reserve, even someone with jonin level reserves could immediately deplete their capacity into near nothingness with a couple of clones. And a genin could easily split their reserves into civilian levels if they tried to summon a few. So long as you read the precautions, there was no real danger.

And so, they perused the scroll for a while until Orochimaru skimmed over something that he found interesting. Pretending to not care about it on the outside while quickly committing it to memory, he carried on as if it didn't help him. They reached the end of the scroll and acting as though he was disappointed in the lack of findings, they parted ways.

The snake summoner then practically sprinted by to his lab to write down the technique that was still reeling in his mind, fresh from discovery. It was purported to be a way to break off a piece of one's own consciousness and energy and seal it within another vessel, which sounded near perfect for his needs. He sank back into his desk and started writing the words from memory. The title of the scroll in front of him quickly forming with a flash from an ink-tipped pen, 'The Cursed Seal of Heaven'.

Tsunade cursed her luck.

She had always had horrible luck when gambling and for a long time had used it as a indicator of upcoming luck in the world outside of gambling. Whenever she had done well at the games, her luck in the rest of her life had gone terribly wrong. And the inverse was true, if she lost even more than normal, something great was about to happen. She clutched at her necklace, a blue/green crystal that dangled elegantly from her clavicle, as she won yet another hand. Shizune made a happy noise from behind her as the dealer pushed a large stack of chips in front of her, not realizing the issues that were certainly the cause of the streak. She flippantly pushed them all back onto the table, betting on double zero for the roulette wheel, expecting that such an outrageous bet would finally break the streak and make things right again.

As the ball tumbled around the spinning wheel, she thought back on what had been happening over the last few months. It had been the same over and over. She'd get into a new town, start playing and would have her normal losing take hold. After a few days in each town though, her luck would start turning and she'd win continuously, until she called it quits and left. It was like whatever was causing her to win had been following her from town to town. In a way, she was happy, because she had earned enough to pay off most of her debts over the past several months, while attempting to be reckless and betting on ridiculous gambles that still miraculously worked out for her.

The small metal sphere clicked and clacked as the whirligig motion played out in front of her, black and red streaking across her vision, with the flash of green from her chosen betting spot being glimpsed once per rotation. She hated this life. Hated running away from her problems and hated drinking away everything. Sure, she put on a front for everyone to see of the loud boisterous drunkard that lived up to her reputation. But underneath, she was still stuck in the singular moment in time, body splattered with crimson streaks as the noise of blood dripping off of her fingertips echoed through her eardrums, standing above the freshly deceased form of her lover. Everything since that one moment was lost to her, the gamut of binge drinking and gambling being a way to pass the time until her own life left the mortal world.

"We have a winner!" the call of the croupier rang against her subconscious thoughts as she startled back to reality. An exorbitant amount of chips was being pushed in her direction, the stack far surpassing what she had seen in ages. The chip towers crumbled while moving forward, cascading her with a shower of tokens.

Allowing Shizune to gather up the chips, she immediately stood up and prepared to leave. She knew that she was going to end up paying for all this luck in a horrifying way soon. She worried for Shizune, as that was the only person left close to her. The options were very few. She needed to run and hide, that much was certain. But, the question was where? She had been to every gambling city within travelling distance and the luck continued to find her. She needed someplace safe, where she couldn't be tracked down by whatever was following her. As strong as she was, she knew that whatever it was wouldn't take out misfortune's rage against her directly, it would instead continue the psychological torture until the very end.

Watching Shizune cash in her chips, she made up her mind. She needed to take care of the one person she had left, even if it meant doing something that she had sworn not to do. It was the safest place she knew of. And, perhaps if they went there, she could distance herself from Shizune by creating new opportunities for the girl and thus saving the teenager from being a plaything to be used and discarded by fate in her eternal quest to torment the slug princess.

"Shizune, come here." Tsunade uttered commandingly to get her young apprentices attention. "I've decided that a teenage girl like you needs to not just be traveling all her life. She should have friends and a steady lifestyle, not being dragged into casinos and bars all the time. The decision is that we're going back to Konoha. You need some stability that I can't provide." While Tsunade did not want to go back to her home village at all, she wasn't making this choice for herself. She was making it for the only person she had left in this world to not be cursed by her own bad luck. And judging by the cheer let out from her apprentice, it very well could be the correct decision.

Kyuubi cursed its luck.

He had now been wedged inside a broken seal, trapped by debris for 12 cycles of the moon now. While he had continued to force his chakra into the blonde container's system, it never seemed to amount to much more for him aside from let him sense what was happening. No matter how he thrashed or squirmed, he was never freed from the prison he found himself in. His attempts at sending out chakra threads to the far expanses of the system had been fruitless in finding a way outside of the boy, though they had netted him access to many of the different parts of the boys' body.

The three different plans that he had laid out to try and escape from the accursed imprisonment he found himself in, all had had some progress made, but not anywhere near as much as he would have wished to have accomplished.

He had been making the container's body strong. While he still wasn't sure of the details of human anatomy, there were plenty of similarities with the kitsune that he had a natural connection with. Muscle fibers controlled movement and the electrical signals that triggered those reactions were able to be enhanced with chakra, creating a stronger reaction. And just as with kitsune muscles, if you provided too much energy, negative reactions occurred. That was learned the hard way the first time he had tried to augment the child's walking. He had been sending the normal amount out when he sensed the different behavior. Triggering the muscles to activate faster, he had caused a muscle to spasm and the child toppled over from the imbalance it caused. Thankfully the boy was as resilient as he was stubborn and got right back up to try again, this time without the Kyuubi interfering and had been successful. He was careful in his interventions from that point on, but knew that his flooding of the chakra system should have been beneficial.

Additionally, his plans weren't really off-track. While he hadn't met the death god yet to establish a deal between them, that was only viable after his container was self-sufficient. And the man that smelled of amphibians was still around, so his secondary and tertiary plans were still intact, as the man appeared to be studying the seal from time to time. So, in a larger scale, he was perfectly on-track for all of his options.

But, the slow progress of a human infant growing up was a nightmarish pace for a being used to roaming free. He hated how long it took to do anything. A lunar cycle would complete and he would feel that absolutely nothing of importance had happened. It was maddening. He had to keep reminding himself to be patient. His plans would advance with time, his eventual release was inevitable.

AN: And we start moving forward. I plan on writing a chapter or two detailing various events in a year timeframe until something big happens, in which case there will be a deeper dive.

I know my style isn't the most interesting and this is more of a filler to help establish things later on, so that they don't come out of the blue. Constructive Criticism welcome. If I can do something that will help entertain or grab your attention more, let me know!

Lastly, if you ask a question but have direct messaging turned off, I cannot reply! Please be aware!