-Kaiten-
-3-
The mission that changed things, changed everything about her life thus far, was supposed to be an easy pay C rank: deliver aid supplies to the border towns by Tenchi Bridge that barely survived the ninja skirmishes between Stone and Fire, gain the civilians' favor, and make sure to report Konoha's dutiful actions to the leaders in this world whom matter. Whoever ranked the mission had assumed absent bandit activity in the area or, with the Third Shinobi War peace treaty signed with the blood of kages, low risk remnant armed enemy forces. Whoever ranked the mission deserved a swift kick in the ass and all the wounds that had been inflicted upon Team Saito, including the ones that killed.
Saikuru Taniko ducked into the undergrowth, running on all fours, mindful of leaves that would crunch under her palms and twigs that would snap under her heels. Saikuru Taniko belonged on this mission only because her team belonged on this mission. Hyuuga Hiroto had the eyes, Shimura Yuto had the seals, and Saito-sensei had the experience. Taniko's specialization was in guerilla warfare, hit and run (mostly run) - nothing suited for a typical cell's public image – and honestly she probably would've (should've) joined the Genin corps and fast tracked to ANBU if the Academy hadn't been short of competent kunoichi to fill the empty spot of a three-man team.
Having a Shimura and a Hyuuga on her team did not help her life goal of retaining anonymity and preventing her name from entering onto the Bingo Book. The two 'high' clan kids (unlike her lowly clan) were arrogant in their own right and had developed an understanding with one another through their superiority at the start of their formation. Six months in and the two boys were only just beginning to act cordial and somewhat warm to her (she was allowed to use the suffix 'kun' if they were in a good mood) – and then this mission - They were probably the reasons why this mission upgraded to an A-rank.
Her grip was slippery, hands caked with blood from her wrists to her nails from when she had to enhance her fingers with chakra into claws and reach through an Iwa nin's mouth, straight past the sphenoidal sinus, to the pituitary, and ripped and rendered. Shimura had been impaled by a spike from the ground at the start of the ambush – Stone obviously had a bone to pick with the Shimura clan with how the earth pierced Yuto's body in a way that guaranteed to hurt, to experience death in the slowest manner – he had twitched and spasmed for six minutes as the battle raged around him. Enemy jonins then flanked Saito-sensei and beheaded him with a garrote. That was when she ran. "Come back girl!" The nins shouted behind her but she didn't look back- she dared not to. As for Hyuuga Hiroto… She clutched two eyeballs in one hand and ran to the nearest outpost and prayed for aid.
After what seemed like hours, she ran into a man and a boy, blond hair and white, allies who were fresh from a day's rest, who did not hesitate to cut down her pursuers. Kismet, she thought wearily, Hitsuzen. After the bodies, seven of them (who knows how many lie by the bridge) were neatly piled and ready for storage, the man turned to her and raised an eyebrow. She swayed on her feet and answered the unspoken demand, "Genin Saikuru Taniko, registration number 009632."
The man gave a bark of surprised laughter that successfully broke the sudden tension of uncertainty and lingering paranoia, taking her shoulder and guiding her into the secret passage to the hideout, "It's not that, Saikuru-san. Hyuuga branch members have a seal that prevent kekkei genkai theft."
"Oh," she stared down at the white pupils, slightly squished into something less circular from her dash through the forest. "I didn't know." But would the Hyuuga clan appreciate her efforts? Did they know how she steeled herself before pressing her thumbs into Hiroto-kun's sockets, popping the eyeballs out, picking off the fat globules that stuck to the cranial nerves and blood vessels, and cleanly slicing the ocular muscles. The outpost was a small room, dark from the lack of windows but if she squinted she could make out shelves filled with jars, books, boxes, piles of scrolls, and the silhouette of three men. She squirmed under the hand, "Namikaze-san, what are you—"
From her right, the boy suddenly thrusted a first aid kit into her arms and glared her into silence as the Yellow Flash conversed in quick low tones to the new company. In no mood to argue, she silently began to clean her wounds with liberal splashes of rubbing alcohol and check inventory: shallow cuts, bruises, aching fingers, ruined chainmail, a long gash down her back still open and oozing, a matching one at her front, singed hair, the feeling that she would never be clean again, and an inexplicable exhaustion that has finally began to set into her bones. "Tragic, but there's nothing we can do," the man in the long ponytail concluded gravely after the men's huddle, "Iwa can easily claim that not enough time had passed for them to give the order to retreat."
A large man with a mane of hair snorted at the comment, "Intel never messed up this badly before. Do you think it's deliberate sabotage?" Their voices dimmed further until she could barely make out their words from her own thundering heartbeat. Slumped at her side, the boy wordlessly gave her a tub of ointment. She warily side-eyed him as she applied the cream to her burns: he was her age with very distinctive coloring – there were not many active clans with white hair, pale skin, and black eyes in Konoha. Kato? Hatake?
At some point, she must have dozed off, because she suddenly jerked awake from a dream (dead Hyuugas look like little porcelain dolls) to the words, "- very young." She stared up at the ceiling and strained her ears for the sounds of idle tinkering of pots and pans. "We'll see if she bounces back from this incident." Someone hummed in agreement. Twisting her side, Taniko settled into a more comfortable sitting position, hissing as she pulled some cuts and rubbed against others, and closed her eyes, imagining Maemi-nee's music drifting from room to room in their shared apartment.
"I would like to know who the main target was. Hyuuga or Shimura. Inoichi, do you suppose Sandaime-sama would-"
"-deliberate antagonism, Namikaze-san. We've had similar incidents in the past that are rising in frequency and this sort of oversight cannot continue. Perhaps Saikuru-san can offer-"
"There isn't much proof. Orochimaru is still claiming that his targets have backed-"
"Genin Saikuru-san?" She twitched from her daze and blinked awake, sluggish. The rank smell of medicinal herbs had her swallowing back her gag reflex. Her clothes were stiff and crusted with dried blood. Her back aches like something burning. A man with a tight ponytail and a scar on his right cheek knelt down to her eye level at stared at her as if he could, without touching, slowly peel back the layers of her skin– she eyed him apprehensively until he held out a bowl of soup. She stared at the offering and, deciding to trust him, took a hesitant sip and nearly gagged again – hard stems, purple leaves, rancid roots, but… better than nothing – and despite the taste, the mouthful triggered a hunger – and started eating. "I am Jonin Nara Shikaku. Are you ready to give your report?"
She swallowed the last of her meal and nodded. She spoke – faltering at some points, growing louder at others. She hoped that she did not waver too much, that her words did not slur, and that she was concise. Her delivery was perhaps too monotonous, if judging by the grimaces on her audiences' faces, who were listening over the Nara's shoulder. Namikaze-san and the boy, Kakashi-san, went out to collect bodies for clues. A small part of her wished that she could join them, if only to leave this stiffening atmosphere made by the presence of powerful men. "I noticed how you treaded carefully over the description of Shimura Yuto's death," Inoichi finally said after a few minutes of silence.
That statement earned him a nervous shrug. "Elder Shimura will be devastated. He would place some blame onto me as the sole survivor, regardless of rational thought." Shimura Yuto is was the elder's last remaining relative – twice removed, but still a relative. "If I go in depth about Yuto-san's death, Elder Shimura will just remember Yuto's death more and he'll remember me more." She had seen the elder once in her short life, stalking out of the Hokage's office with a dangerous aura surrounding his features. Maemi-nee had pulled her closer and told her to suppress her chakra as the man passed them. As the pair partially hid in the shadows of the halls, Taniko observed: Shimura Danzo was a bandaged ghost – his body betrayed a strange weakness but his eyes betrayed an impotent rage. It makes him dangerous and not to be trifled with.
Yamanaka Inoichi tilted his head thoughtfully as he stared at the young girl (skimming her surface thoughts, ignoring the temptation to delve deeper). "You are perceptive. Perhaps you are not so young," he mildly observed, keeping his voice low, treating her like a cornered animal. "Do you have your clan's kekkei genkai?"
She hesitantly nodded. "It's not a kekkei genkai," she corrected, "I have an old soul."
Yamanaka frowned, "Your clan head was supposed to have registered your abilities upon discovery."
Saikuru Taniko stared at her audience in confusion, "We've had no clan head since the beginning of this war." But she couldn't fault them for not knowing. The Saikuru clan had lost face due to the follies of their clan head, Saikuru Ran. Maemi-nee wouldn't divulge the details but she wrings her hands every time she references the incident. The result was the entire clan retreating back into the shadows and hopefully out of the sight of their political enemies – Shimura Danzo being one of them. …Maybe her placement onto Shimura Yuto's team was supposed to be a message to Maemi-nee. What sort of message – Taniko could only guess.
Many days later, upon hearing the news, Saikuru Maemi nibbled on her bottom lip, tapping on the corner of her desk with a biro, and calmly announced, "This is troublesome," in a manner similar to a Nara, before asking if Taniko would like any more coffee. "On the bright side, they won't send you to another team." Taniko scowled as her hair was mussed, "Keep your chin up and your head down. We'll need to pull you off the active roster." The candle light withered in the last hours of the night – Taniko imagined Iwa nins with wires coming for her limbs. "I didn't know that our clan had to report our abilities to T&I," Maemi-nee muttered absentmindedly, "I know I did but not that it was a requirement. Saikuru Ran really did not leave us with much." Saikuru Ran angered a lot of important people. "Enough of that," the woman waved a hand, as if waving out all the problems they faced, "How are you feeling, Tan-chan? Ready to go back to bed? How have you been sleeping?"
"Not well. But better." She rubbed the heel of her palm (she can still imagine blood on them in her worst moments, even two weeks after the failed mission) to her eye and yawned. "I have to get a few more hours tonight or else." She promised Maito Gai a quick spar tomorrow morning, after she goes to the memorial stone to lay down more flowers. Gai-kun will be insufferable if she can't perform her best because of poor sleep. Tomorrow, she will be formally introduced to Hatake Kakashi, apprentice of Namikaze Minato, by Team Choza and in the moments between Gai's introductions, given with flowery prose, and her handshake with the genius, she and Kakashi will meet each other's eyes and come to a vague and silent understanding about tragedy. But that is then and this is now: Saikuru Taniko leaned up and deliberately, sloppily, kissed Maemi-nee on the cheek, "Night," she mumbled as she turned back to her bedroom.
"Love you," Maemi-nee turned back to her work, jotted down a notation onto her composition, picked up her violin, and resumed playing.
-2-
She had expected Konoha Academy to be boring – considering that she has a concrete foundation on most of the things that they taught, save for language – but she hadn't expected the propaganda. She should have, considering that this was, under the charming streets and architecture, the happy shopkeepers and the mourning doves, a military village. Konohakagure is not like all those other Hidden Villages, those barbarians, those that kill their own clans, those that abandon their teammates, those that do not possess the Will of Fire. Jingoism left a sour taste in her mouth. Her first mistake was having the instructors notice her grimace during those special lectures which was bad because there's a mark on her record but good because her scores suddenly were not as high as they should be. (Is it a good thing? Keeping her head down and grades low? Maybe. But not in this manner.)
However, some of her classmates and schoolmates noticed the discrepancies between her shown skills and her ranking. "Midget." Shiranui Genma made a swipe at her head which she ducked under. That move, however, did not faze him, "You have to take it up to the instructors if you want to dispute your marks. They won't fix their mistakes if you don't tell them."
Shiranui Genma is one of the few in this school preventing her from joining the easy life in the Genin Corps. "Sempai," Nohara Rin said delicately from the side by the fences, "It was presentation day yesterday. You know Akiyama-sensei's opinion won't ever change." With those simple words, Genma sighed and visibly drooped. After shooting her classmate a grateful look, Saikuru Taniko ducked into the building, breathing a sigh of relief when she slipped into her regular seat, between Nara Maen and Uchiha Obito, the latter which would most certainly be at least twenty minutes late.
Her previous life emphasized the freedom of thought, encouraged her to ask questions and to discover the disparities between what was said and what was shown. As the teacher began to berate Obito as he entered the class with excuses spilling from his mouth, flinging pieces of chalk at the back of his head until he found his seat, she imagined a scenario where she could go to any intellectual Konoha citizen and ask for a philosophical debate without the fear of being dragged to T&I for endangering minds or some equal bullshit trumped up charges that corrupted authoritarian governments tended to use in her old life. "Is the Hokage Locke or Demothenese?" she once asked Maemi-nee as the other was chopping vegetables.
"The only philosophers I am familiar with from the old world are Mora, Gasset, and Unamuno," Maemi-nee replied with a bit of regret as she moved from the daikon to the zucchini squash, "So I can't help you there, Tan-chan. I think Saikuru Ran was interested in the philosophies of his first life, maybe you can look through some of his works?" Taniko decided not to tell her that she already has and found nothing worth noting save for a complete script of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in Russian.
The closest the class discussions have ever gotten to the topic was when Akiyama-sensei had asked, a couple weeks ago, "What is war?" The answers that pleased sensei all had a commonality: that fighting can, in some way, be romanticized, have reason, and is therefore forgivable. War is necessary. War stops bad people from doing bad things. War is where heroes are born.
When sensei had finally reached her, Saikuru Taniko had ended up replying, "Blood begets blood," and refused to elaborate on that phrase any further and as a result got sent out into the hall for the remainder of the class to think about discipline and what her cheek had costed her. The incident garnered interested looks from her fellow students and some wise words of caution.
"Whoa. I think Akiyama-sensei hates you more than she hates me!" Obito had loudly exclaimed when the student body was dismissed for their lunch break, struggling to open his bento.
"Why must you be so troublesome?" Nara Maen had groaned, "I can't take naps if sensei keeps looking in your direction and now I see Shiranui-sempai coming over like the big hen he is." Taniko blanched when she caught a glimpse at the figure stalking towards them and searched frantically for signs of Rin to hide behind but Maen grabbed onto her sleeve before she could bolt, "Oh no. Where do you think you are running off to? You are not leaving me here to deal with sempai, you're going to suffer through his fussing with me."
Yakushi Nono was the only one who offered an answer, as roundabout as it was, "Based upon what you've explained, the leaves would be the first man and the roots would be the second," she declared with surety as they moved from ward to ward in the Konoha Hospital doing clinical rounds. "But hush, you didn't hear that from me. Understand Tan-chan?" Nono was the original Florence Nightingale, the angel of salvation, the light at the end of the tunnel – she was also Taniko's mentor. "Now here's a question for you. Our last patient was hit on the lateral side of his knee: what should he worry about?"
"Maito-san will need to worry about the stability of his anterior cruciate ligament, medial meniscus, and medial collateral ligament – because they are all connected to each other unlike the lateral side," Taniko answered dutifully as they passed by medics that gave a cursory nod before continuing their own businesses. After the first few months, nobody batted an eyelash at the little child that had taken to follow The Wandering Miko around with big ideas. "Will we be testing Inuzuka-san's prosthetics today, Nono-san? I heard that he's still arguing that we don't need to make adjustments on the little toe."
"Now now," Nono chided as she picked Taniko up and placed her on sturdy shoulders, "remember the rules. That man is ANBU. We have to call him Inu-2, not by his name." They visit two other patients – one civilian who had fallen off a ladder doing construction work and cracked his hip and a shinobi who worried about virility after ingesting some leaves from Grass. "Do you have the lab work for Shin-san?"
"His angina wasn't a heart attack. His troponin levels are steady after twelve hours. So that means…"
"Poison," Nono hummed happily, as if the notion of more diagnostic tests was pleasing. "I'll need to write to my superiors about this one – its slower than what most of our protocols are prepared for." Taniko knew that; Taniko helped write most of the protocols for bioterrorism. Nono then assigned her literature to read regarding chakra pathways and their relationship to arteries in comparison to lymph pathways and their relationship to veins.
"Sometimes," Maemi-nee sighed as she placed a plate of leftover paella on top of Academy homework, "I wished that I held hobbies like yours that lends itself to something less… frivolous." She shrugged with a helpless air, "but it's all I've ever known." Before Saikuru Maemi, Mariposa Llora Castell Villaverde was the Concertmaster and occasional soloist of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, born practically with a violin in her hand. "But I had the good fortune and timing to not be involved, so maybe it's a blessing?" Maemi-nee flushed, "I'm sorry. That's a bad thing to say, considering…"
There were so many problems to address with that statement. One: Taniko thought that working at the hospital with enough dedication to the point that she kept filing in sick absences at the Academy, did not count as a hobby. Two: Taniko wanted to tell her cousin that Sarasate's Zigeunerweisen was not frivolous, and was, to some level, the only thing keeping her sane during the long hours at night, when familiar sounds of bow on strings, unique to any other sound in Konoha or any part of the Ninja Continent, would drown out the noises of kunais piercing tracheas. The sounds of the violin past midnight was another thing that did not endear the remaining members of the Saikuru Clan to their neighbors.
"But you're a clan," someone might say, face pinched in puzzlement, "You have a kekkei genkai." You should be venerated. Blood lines are a valuable commodity. To which Taniko will calmly explain that what her clan has isn't a blood line and while Konoha values kekkei genkais as much as Kiri hates them and Kumo wishes that they had more of, Konoha contains some of the weirdest genes that has slowly became the butt of everyone's jokes. Wasn't there that clan whose members turned into smoke if they so much as sneezed, vulnerable to the slightest wind that can scatter them to the four corners, never to be able to reconstruct their bodies ever again? And when you compare that with clans who have doujutsus, who can read minds, who can manipulate shadows... Saikuru clan wasn't at the point where they can't show their faces to the public: they probably sit a step below the Kurama clan. Of course, when given that non-answer, someone would still continue to frown, "So what does your clan have?"
"Old souls," Taniko would answer. "And it's not genetic. We don't know why they come. We don't know why they exist."
"And what is an old soul?" Someone might press further.
Well, for one, you remember facts from a previous life.
"Habugu jaw?" Uchiha Fugaku's mother spat the phrase out as if the word itself could turn in midair and infect her. Yakushi Nono slowly back into her chair with hands held up in a placating gesture. "What, pray tell, is Habugu jaw?" Taniko cringed – she had meant to say that in a sotto voice, but she had underestimated the power of ninja hearing.
Habsburg jaw means that if you don't marry someone who is at least three times removed from your family line, your grandchildren will all be born drooling with twelve fingers and small heads. "Don't mind Tan-chan here," Nono hummed as she pulled out some journals, "She's shadowing. I had her reading some of our more esoteric works before this consultation. Now, at hand, Uchiha-dono, she has a point, and I will try to word it better," she cleared he throat, "your son's mandibular prognathism is worrisome and we recommended looking for advisors for his match in the future." She placed a folder in the middle of the table that was labeled: GENETIC COUNSELING.
That incident was possibly the closest, before the mission that resulted in the death of her entire team, that anyone outside of the hospital had an inkling of her unusual expertise. After the meeting, in which the group settled on four potential marriageable women, one in particular stood out as a jonin renown for her proficiency in shurikenjutsu named Uchiha Mikoto, Nono had breathed a sigh of relief behind closed doors and then gently chastised Taniko, "We agreed that you could accompany me to meet patients as long as you kept quiet. What if you make a mistake that I can't fix?" Taniko's presence in the hospital was welcomed by doctors and nurses due to a couple of elements: her knowledge, the Wandering Miko's sponsorship, and her ability to not be a nuisance like other kids her age.
"Doumo Sumimasen." She murmured as they moved to an adjacent room to scrubbed in: a surgeon had asked for a second opinion on a patient with above average number of anastomoses of chakra nodes.
"Aww, Tan-chan, don't look so sad," Nono cooed, "I'm only worried. Your sister might have told me most of the details of your circumstances but that stills mean that you look like a six-year-old." She straightened, "Now, let's push that behind us. Our next patient here has his celiac ganglion overlaid with a larger than expected network that sustains the Third Chakra in his solar plexus. Give me three strategies to bypass the energy."
At the end of the day, facing a glorious sunset of pastel reds and purples, Saikuru Taniko walked home at a leisurely pace, biting her lip as she contemplated some questions that had been tossed about in a deceptively idle manner in the break room between shifts. Some medics had been theorizing a child's ability to recover from traumatic experiences, citing both anecdotes and empirical studies of how a toddler always forgets the first three years of his or her life. A nurse had jokingly turned to Taniko and asked what was her worst memory. Taniko conjured up a lie about bullies.
Tanikos's worst memory is her childbirth. That squeezing pressure, the blinding light, the premature departure of her old life that had stopped before it had truly begun. Old souls tend to result in dead birth mothers because the moment of awakening occurs at the first sign of contractions in the womb and the panicked actions of the baby results in a… rough delivery, to say the least. Her father did not wish to be known. A child should be a tabula rasa. No adult truly wants to look after a child who is beyond their years – its unnerving, unnatural. It's a kekkei genkai that creates orphans. But Saikuru Maemi was willing to take her in. When asked why the good will, the young woman had shrugged and demurred, "Ran-sama looked after me, it's only right that I pass along the courtesy, now that he's…" dead, along with half of their clan, leaving behind broken pieces of the remaining half.
Saikuru Ran did not belong in this fantastical world of chakra and ninjas, of people spitting fire and water, raising the earth and summoning lightning into their palms. Like Maemi-nee and Taniko, he did not belong, but more than that, he did not adapt. In the last few months of his life, he spent most of his time locked in his study, muttering about the nature of oligarchies and conspiracies that plagued the Konoha Council. In the end, he grew desperate and did bad things. In the end, his psychotic break resulted in a slit throat with no one accused as the killer.
-1-
A little child that couldn't be older than four stared at her clan head from her crossed-legged position on the mat. She hugged her favorite pillow, sky blue with embroidered clouds, closely to her chest and patiently waited for the elder man to start talking. Saikuru Ran (once known as Miroslav Ivanovich Timoshenko) leaned back in seiza, steepled his fingers above the kotatsu, and wished for vodka, "We usually wait until the age of five when your development catches up with your mind and allows clearer articulation, but Shimura Danzo is starting to inquire about you." Ran-san's voice did not match who he was: middle aged, austere man with gray at the temples – his tone flowed in the lower octaves, deep enough to have ribs vibrating from the bass.
Taniko shrugged and tucked a strand of hair, pitch black like that of her clan, behind an ear, "Isn't Elder Shimura supposed to know?"
Ran drummed his fingers against the wood, "It would be better for you and I if he didn't. Fortunately, he only suspects. And even with this setback, I hope that no one else will find out. We'll need to give you our standard orientation and coach you in responses that are not too base… not to mention update our profiles of those who in power who bear watching." The Saikuru clan head sighed and kneaded his forehead, a gesture that Taniko will learn extensively in later years as a nervous tic, "I'll confer this with your guardian. Now onto the second topic."
"Also about me," she lilted the last syllable in a questioning manner.
Ran leaned forward and scrutinized her carefully, eyes taking in the unkempt hair, the little fingers, the small stature, "You are older than the average old soul."
She blinked once, solemnity strange on such a youthful face, "You're perceptive, Saikuru-sama," her voice slid over the hard consonants. Her teeth had yet to fully grow in.
"So I'm right, Taniko-chan? This isn't your first cycle?"
Humming an affirmative, she toyed with the fraying edges of her pillow as, through the thin walls of their compound, violin music drifted through the air. Saikuru Maemi favored Romantic era music from her once homeland of Spain and Sarasate above all the others. "My fourth." Ran fought the urge to make a sound of disbelief: the ancestral records never reported any member who claimed to be on their fourth incarnation – that usually implied past lives full of… "And I know," the girl continued heatedly, clearing responding to his expression of judgement, "If I misbehave, I'll be reborn again. If I kill myself, I'll be reborn again. I know I have to be good."
What atrocities did you do in your past lives for the Fates to be dissatisfied so? He did not wish to ask."You know what to do to escape the cycle of karma?" He clarified and got an enigmatic smile in return.
"A little," she tugged at her hair, "I know why I'm here," she then vaguely answered his unasked question, "Before I could do any good last time, I got a lot of people angry. From what little I know of this world, it'll probably be why I'll die this time too." She spoke with no inflection. (In his old life, Ran had a sister, Lizaveta, who was a neurologist. Lizaveta had been studying brain scans of sociopaths and experimenting upon mice cortex-amygdala relationships around the time that Ran had been hit by a drunk driver from the opposite lane. Ran wondered if there was some way to tell her that the lack of conscience is not only seen as proof of activity in an fMRI, but intrinsically embedded into the soul.)
The conversation degenerated from there – the little girl quickly grew disinterested when it was clear that Maemi-chan had finished her last piece and was packing away her instrument. With a wave of his hand, Ran dismissed her. He remained at the kotatsu as sunlight began to peek through the curtains, peering intently at the grain pattern in the wood as he pondered upon the manner of things.
There is a secret passed down from clan head to clan head, sworn to never share, never disclose, never tell. Down the hall, two rights, second door on the left – there is a chamber with vaulted walls and tall pilars that smells of old parchment and ink. The ancestral records are easily accessible to any clan member – but there is an inconspicuously placed aged oak plank that can only be removed by an application of three drops of blood from a pendant that a Saikuru clan head must wear. In that small pocket beneath the floor, there is a box. In the box, there are scrolls written by an unsteady hand, entries of one particular individual, the only one to not only claim third reincarnation, but also knowledge of the world – this world.
Saikuru Kaede's style was one of eccentric disjunction – it's been noted that she suffered from some psychiatric illness that had her nigh uncontrollable by her caregivers when she was in her manic phases. Written in English, out of all languages of the old world, was a story of a ninja boy named Naruto. It wasn't an impressive story to tell – however, a few details in the scroll had jumped out at Ran and made him uneasy. In recent years, more and more names that were mentioned offhandedly were popping up in the Bingo Books and in birthday columns of daily newspapers - more and more names of children being born were beginning to match those in the scrolls. Whatever the events that Kaede-san dictated, they would start in Taniko's generation – kicking off a series of war and blood shed, culminating into the end of the world, the reveal of this world's own rebirth of two brothers, a ten-tailed monster, and the moon falling to Earth.
The implications frightened him.