Sealing Salientia - Chapter 19: Training - Author: PenSmoke

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

Previously on Sealing Salientia:
Setting off for Kumogakure, mission scroll in hand, Jiraiya readied to discover what he could from the town. The information discovered could reignite the flames of war, or encourage an alliance of two of the strongest countries in the world.

Mount Myoboku
July, Year 69

Naruto was learning one of the hardest lessons in the entire shinobi world. One that nearly every shinobi who lives long enough to be called such has to learn. Legendary ninja to average chunin to academy students alike all have had this lesson beaten into them.

Training sucks.

He shivered as he sat under the ice-cold waterfall that cascaded down the cliffs of Mount Myoboku, water droplets constantly splashing onto and dripping off of his skin, whisking away what little warmth he was able to generate. His clothes were completely soaked through and were of no use to help protect him from the freezing splashes that battered him from above. His tangled and matted blonde hair hung in strings down his face, unkempt from the harassment of the water. Rivulets of water streaming down from the tips slowly froze in place, keeping his hair in a constant state of dishevelment.

Ma called out to him from the shore. "Make sure you are concentrating on remaining centered and in your meditation. I can see you losing focus from here!"

Naruto yelled back, "It's easy to focus from out there! It's freezing in here!"

The retort came floating back, "Well, I guess that's another hour!"

The scream of anguish could be heard for miles as Naruto poured his soul out. This sucked! Jiraiya had never pushed him like this and he had been doing just fine back there. Now he was trapped in this realm for at least another six months, with only the occasional note from the outside world and a monthly delivery of ramen and other goodies via messenger toad. He wanted nothing more than to just go back to his own realm and never come back.

But, if nothing else, the toads were insanely effective. By not letting him get away with anything and pushing him to his limits both mentally and physically each day, he felt stronger every day. This also meant that he fell asleep immediately upon laying down, due to being dead tired. He loved his sleep, it was the only time of day that he was allowed to rest. He wished that he could do it for much longer.

That was because as soon as he opened his eyes, one of the toads always knew. Ma or Pa would immediately have him up and dressed, rushing off to gather up breakfast for them. This involved catching dozens of bugs by hand, which trained both his stealth to sneak up on them and his agility to snag them. He had grown to the point where he could even grab some of the larger ones out of the air while they were flying.

And, unless Naruto had leftover food from Jiraiya's last shipment, the boy had to catch some for himself too. He still didn't like it, but the disgust at having to eat bugs had finally worn off after about four months. He preferred the stuff from his own realm, but he was too darned hungry to even consider not eating. He was already eating far less than he ever had before.

Once breakfast was collected, he was to do physical exercise while they ate, able to take a bite each time he completed a lap around the house. Or they would put his food above a bar and he could take a bite for each pull-up. Or a sit-up. Or a push-up. Whatever exercise the sadistic toads could come up with.

Then he was to practice meditation with Ma. This happened multiple times per day, as the warty amphibians always said that he needed to learn more balance. Meditation involved a couple of different things. One of which was getting soaked while under a waterfall like he was now. This was actually his favorite of the three main methods they used. The others bordered on cruel and unusual punishment as far as he was concerned.

Method number two involved balancing on top of one of the hundreds of toad statues while attempting to meditate. Keeping his balance on top of the singular point they gave him to sit was hard enough in itself that he could barely even start to concentrate. If it had been just that though, he could live with it. However, the toads thought it great fun and 'better training' to throw pebbles at him while he was up there. Either he'd dodge them, lose his balance and fall 15-20 feet to the ground. Or he'd block them, lose of his balance regardless and still end up with a sore butt.

The last and most cruel method had him sit in the swampy area at the base of the mountain, where most of the mosquitoes existed. He was to sit there, motionless and meditate. All the while, the voracious bugs tried to bleed him to death. Every session ended with hundreds of bumps and pockmarks as the insects did their work. He was thankful that the itching would only last until he fell asleep. The toads forbid him to scratch at anything after these sessions, under the guise of furthering his mental abilities to withstand anything.

Meditation training lasted most of the rest of the morning, only getting a break at lunchtime where he had to catch some food yet again. During lunch, more physical exercise, followed by light sparring against various toads, who invariably defeated him soundly in combat.

After the spars, Pa and whatever toad he had gone against would take him in go over tactics in battle. This included whatever he had done wrong in the fight and how to do it better. He was slowly lasting longer against the toads, which he was told was quite the accomplishment. That meant nothing to him though, he wanted to win. He was getting tired of losing all the time.

Later on, after battle tactics, came more meditation until nightfall. He would again go out and catch food for himself and the two elder toads and they'd eat in peace. Unlike the previous meals, they allowed him to sit for dinner and they'd talk about the day. Often there were words of wisdom tossed in and small lessons to be taught that were less ninja related.

His Yin chakra had gone through the roof though. He was able to use ninja techniques now, the toads knowing some of the basics from their work alongside humans over the years. The clone skill was extra difficult for him unless he spammed an absolute monstrous number of them. Similarly, the transformation skill was hard to do unless he really concentrated and put an absurd amount of detail into it. And doing a replacement went easier the farther he tried to go, or the bigger item he tried to change places with. He found that he had no talent for the few illusions the toads could do, either his control was simply not up to par, or he just couldn't get them right.

The toads had even taught him a couple of the toad combination techniques. While he didn't feel like the fireball one that Jiraiya had used really worked well for him, he was able to create a small stream of fire when needed. The ones he was really taking to were the wind techniques. They had shown him how to take in a big gulp of air and release it like a wind bullet, creating a compressed ball of air that could be used in multiple ways. Naruto had subsequently torn up multiple acres of mountainside testing it out.

That actually gave him an idea. He was sitting under the waterfall and completely unable to meditate because of how cold it was. But the only reason that he was cold was because of the water around him that constantly soaked him, carrying away all warmth. If he could find a way to repel the water, that should keep him dry for the rest of the time, allowing himself to dry off and warm up. He started to mold his chakra around and make a handseal to channel the beginning of the one wind technique he knew. Not a second had passed when he heard to voice carry through the water. "No ninjutsu! You're supposed to be focusing, Naruto-chan!"

Muttering some choice words that he had picked up from Jiraiya under his breath, he gave up on it for now. Ma watched him too closely during training for him to get away with it then, he would have to think of another tactic. For now, he would just sit and suffer the unbearable icy agony.

As he sat on the top of the pointed rock being doused, he began to think introspectively. It wasn't his strong suit, but he had nothing else to do while sitting there under the watchful eyes of the toad elders. He attempted to let his mind free itself by thinking just on the problem at hand, 'how to not be cold and not get caught doing it'.

His first ideas were ridiculous and thrown out. Simply getting off the rock would solve his problem only until the toads made him get back on it. And Ma had already sniffed out his attempt at ninjutsu, telling him not to use it. That reminded him of something Jiraiya had told him every so often. 'There are no rules to being a ninja. You do everything you can do to get the job done. Nothing is off-limits.' Even though Ma had told him no, that only meant don't get caught. He just had to be sneaky about it.

Now, the real question was how could he be sneaky? He was aware that he likely couldn't start a technique before they started without the toads knowing it and he doubted that he had the concentration to hold it while moving around like that anyway. And if he did something too big, it could easily be seen.

His brain started to roam with possibilities. There was the simplistic option of just shooting the air like a bullet from his mouth upward. Since that was the only wind skill he knew, it made sense to start here. It would cause the water to be blasted away from him. The problem was that it would be in a spray that would be easily noticeable. Too obvious.

Next though was to create a dome of chakra around him. A bit sneakier, but still not good enough. He didn't know if he could even do such a thing. Nor did he know if he could hold it in place for any length of time. He had never tried to make anything like it before, but it wouldn't really matter anyway. The toads would easily see the water bouncing off the barrier, feet away from him.

What he needed was a way to have a wall of air right next to his skin that would bounce away the raining cascade from above. That way, there wouldn't be a big spray of water that the toads could see away from him. Added bonus, maybe it could keep the mosquitoes and the pebble from getting through to his skin too. He had just started thinking of ways to do such a thing, when a voice broke into his thoughts.

"Alright Naruto-chan, it's time to be done for now." Ma called from across the clearing. "You did remarkably well on your focus today. Whatever you did, you need to do it more as we go forward. Care to share what it was that you discovered?"

Naruto smiled to himself. He had been planning and plotting ways to pull a fast one on them for three hours and it had felt like minutes. "I found my happy place." He told Ma, not wanting to give away all of it.

The blonde boy sat down that night listening to the cricket's chirp and the toads croak. For the first time since he had arrived on Mount Myoboku, he didn't immediately fall asleep when he was sent to his chambers. He pulled out Jiraiya's book and started reading it, trying to gain as much information as he could. Pops was a genius in seals, that was certain. It seemed to his mind that the man could make a seal for anything that he wanted. The toad sage had even proclaimed nearly as much multiple times.

Naruto went through the basics of the sealing techniques that he found. He copied down a completed advanced storage scroll seal, being extremely careful to copy it perfectly.

He tried adding chakra to it, but nothing happened. He tried over and over, drawing the seals repeatedly and pushing the lifeforce into them. After hours of failures and dozens of scribbles all around him, he read something that he hadn't seen on his first time through. The seals needed either a special chakra ink or to be written in blood to conduct the energy properly.

Wanting more than anything to get some progress of his newfound inspiration, he decided blood it would have to be, since he had no idea how to get specialized inks. He found a sharp corner on his bed and ran his finger across it, wincing at the slight amount of pain and the skin tore. Pulling his finger up to a small ceramic cup he had ready to grab the life-giving fluid, he wondered if he had made a mistake. Maybe the cut wasn't deep enough to bleed. He put the finger back to the sharp edge of metal that jutted out from the corner and this time watched as the metal sliced his skin open. Flinching at the pain but satisfied he had done the job correctly this time, he grabbed his ceramic vessel and then had to do a double-take.

The wound wasn't there anymore. The small droplet of blood still existed on his index finger, but there simply wasn't a cut underneath it. He shook the tiny amount of crimson into the cup and then tried again. Growling in frustration, he watched as the cut he made healed directly in front of his eyes. Just when he had thought of a plan too! Something had to go wrong.

Jiraiya had mentioned this before. Apparently, Naruto had gotten a pretty bad slice when he was learning to walk. Jiraiya had rushed him to the nearest hospital, which was a few dozen miles away. By the time they got there, the wound was already closed and all he was left with was some black blood-stained pants that had a hole in them. The toad sage had talked to him on the night of all the bombshells about the Kyuubi and explained to the boy that the Fourth's seal was likely using the fox demons' chakra to heal him from injury, as well as plenty of other things.

Naruto had always been pretty hard-headed and he didn't know any other way of solving the problem, so he did the only thing he could think of.

"Kyuubi?"

A moment later, he tried again. It was kinda dumb, he supposed, but he didn't have a better idea.

"Kyuubi? Are you there?"

Only silence met him in response.

"Hello? Kyuubi? Can I talk to you?"

His own voice was the only sound in the room. Naruto let out a huff of air. That certainly hadn't worked like he wanted. He wasn't sure what he would've done if it had been successful, anyway.

He tried one more time in vain to obtain enough blood to do more than make a brush slightly sticky. Failing that, he decided that there wasn't much point to staying up since he couldn't do what he wanted anyway. He lay his head down on the pillow and closed his eyes, letting the sweet song of the crickets start lulling him to sleep.

At least, that was the plan. It was rudely interrupted by a voice, though.

"That's not my name."

Naruto sat up and blinked his eyes a couple of times. He looked around the room to see what that voice had been. The room looked identical to how it had just moments ago when he lay his head down and there were no intruders in the space. But it sounded different. There was a dripping noise that he hadn't heard before. It didn't sound like rain, but rather like the steady drip of something leaking. Not particularly loud or obtrusive, he still felt that it would be something he noticed before tonight.

Feeling satisfied that nobody had entered his bedroom, he laid back down. Just as his eyes were about to close, he heard the voice again.

"You humans gave me that name."

His small eyes as wide as they could get, he became alarmed when there was still nobody in his room, but the voice continued.

"That name is shameful, a moniker given to me by a pestilence upon this world."

The disembodied voice was guttural and loud. There was no chance that it hadn't woken up Ma and Pa, who should be arriving any second to rescue him from the intruder that had snuck in. Naruto froze in place hoping that whatever was there that he couldn't see, also couldn't see him. He just had to wait until help arrived.

But nobody came.

Naruto watched as the window that contained a mesmerizing view of the night sky slowly grew dark. One by one, the dimmer lights blinked out, erased from existence. As the number of dots of starshine grew less, the brighter sparkles dimmed and faded as well. Until only an inky blackness remained. The corrosion of the place that he had considered to be his room until moments ago continued before his eyes. The window frame melted and dripped onto the floor, changing from the light brown of dried bamboo into the stained dirty brackish color of destruction and decay. Spreading outward like a disease, the rice-paper style exterior wall of the simple house slowly melted away into a dark and foreboding expanse filled with detritus. The floor faded from wooden slats to a field of rubble covered in thin layer of water. His bed changed underneath him from a soft mattress into a hard cement slab, littered with pieces of metal and concrete.

After the corruption of the environment around him seemed complete, he was able to better assess where he was. It was pitch-black in all directions but upwards, where a field of transparent lines filled with an electric blue substance the same color as his eyes criss-crossed all the way across the sky, shimmering with energy as their contents swirled in various directions. What appeared to be the liquid contained within flowed and sloshed in the tubes in a manner he couldn't describe as anything but mesmerizing. The rest of the enormous chamber that he found himself in could not be described the same. Broken pieces of what looked like concrete and steel ranging from tiny pebbles to steel beams hundreds of feet long lay haphazardly around the area, creating a field of debris that looked hazardous and painful.

In the distance, he saw that tiniest amount of movement illuminated by the light glow from the blue energy above. In what could only be described as a terrifying experience a pair of gigantic red eyes opened. Easily a hundred feet off of the ground, they belonged to a massive creature. The crimson eyes glowed with an ethereal fire that radiated hatred, the elongated vertical slit enhancing the visage to create an atmosphere that was suffocating.

He fought to catch his breath against the sight. The eye locked onto his form and the blonde boy had never felt so hopeless in his entire life. He felt the overwhelming urge to crawl inside of himself and just die. It took everything he had to not scramble away from his current position and go hide anywhere that wasn't here.

"My name is Kurama."

AN: And here we go! They're about to meet. Two legendary figures set on an intertwined path throughout the history of shinobi. What will happen? You'll just have to wait until next time!