AN: Another chapter already! Well, yes, it is. With this story being as new as it is, I have plenty of ideas to put down, and it needs something to kick start it so it doesn't languish on my hard drive, abandoned. Here we have the first of Naruto's childhood adventures with youkai, and they'll be several little 'arcs' of this. After that, the next arc would be Naruto's Academy days, and then we move onto Genin stuff. However, it's not going to be anything like canon. For one, he won't have Kakashi as a sensei, and he won't be on a team with the traditional team seven, though that might change in the future, depending on how things go.
Forum link is on my profile or use this: topic/139203/149040634/1/#149279336
Beta'd by: The trolling SnarkLord
Chapter 4 – First Signs
It was early October now, and Naruto would be six in a few days. It had been almost half a year since Naruto had first met Benio and the other youkai, and the blonde boy was very happy. He'd applied himself in his lessons and was advancing rapidly on the human side of things.
He'd memorised all of the Hiragana alphabet, and because it was a phonetic lettering system, all he'd had to do after that was learn more words, which he did. Kanji was another matter though, and while he was making progress, it was nowhere near as easy as other things he was learning.
Speaking of other things he was learning, Hinoe still had him on the same exercise she'd had him doing for a while now. While he could now call upon his spiritual power in around a second when he was calm and relaxed, he had trouble doing so when he couldn't focus on it, such as when he was dodging balls that the kappa threw at him, the childish youkai treating his 'training' as a sort of game.
His control also slipped when he wasn't focused, and the blast he fired was sometimes strong enough to knock an unsuspecting Riou off his feet – which Naruto had apologised profusely for – or it was weak enough to not even rustle the leaves in a bush.
Still, being able to do something awesome like fire blasts of force from his hands was amazing to Naruto, especially when Hinoe had copied the seal she'd used onto a pair of fingerless gloves that Naruto had taken to wearing all the time. They were black, like his shirt, with the word youkai on the back, written in the youkais' own language!
That was one of the other things that Naruto had been learning, the written form of the youkai language. While they spoke Japanese – or at least what sounded like Japanese to Naruto's ears – their written language was totally different, and while Naruto could somehow naturally read it, writing it was another matter.
It was useful though, because it was what all of the seals Hinoe knew was based in, unlike human seals which had a Kanji base to them, and were structured completely differently to youkai seals. Naruto wanted to learn human seals as well, but unfortunately he didn't have access to any way of learning them. He'd have to wait until he was a genin to have access to even basic stuff for ninjas, beyond the academy grade books.
Aside from the writing the youkai used and controlling his spiritual power, the only other thing that Naruto was learning from them right then was what Hinoe called 'alchemy', which was the mixing of ingredients and spiritual power to produce something useful.
It sounded amazing to him that he could brew potions that could heal people, cure illnesses, or even do something crazy like allow someone to breathe underwater or turn invisible! Of course, before he could do anything like that, he first had to know what reagents he was working with.
To that end, he'd started putting together a notebook of everything he learned in these lessons. On each page, he'd have the name of an ingredient, its positive and negative effects, how it could be used, and if he could get hold of a bit of it, a preserved sample as well. So far, he mostly had different parts of different plants in there, but his notes also mentioned the different uses of things like blood, both youkai and human, as well as insects, animal bones, and other things.
Hinoe had said that, for his birthday, she would watch over him as he brewed his first potion. Granted, it was only going to be a mild fortifying draught, and wouldn't do much more than make him slightly faster and stronger for a few hours, but that was still amazing by itself.
He was really looking forward to that, but for now, he had school to get to.
xxxxx
Splash!
Sputtering and cold, Naruto's eyes flew open as he shot up. Shaking his now soaked hair and wiping the water out of his eyes, Naruto pouted at the small group of kappa around him, as well as Benio who was cackling away in a tree.
"Come on, brat, your school starts in two hours, and these guys want to play with you before you go." Benio called out to him.
Naruto stood up and looked at the tree he'd spent the night under. He only really slept at the orphanage now when the weather was too bad for a human to sleep through the night. He grumbled to himself about it being too early in the morning, before spinning on the spot and running at the nearest kappa with his arms reaching forwards.
With a delighted laugh, the kappa began running away from the blonde boy and towards the small lake where they 'lived'. Chasing them the whole way, Naruto also let out a happy laugh, this being something he hadn't been able to do before meeting the local youkai, what with other children not being friends with him.
When they got to the lake, the kappa dived right in, followed immediately by Naruto, who had been taught to swim by the kappa themselves. They spent more than half an hour swimming around in the lake, playing an unusual form of tag, though who exactly was 'it' was up for debate.
"Hey, hey, Naruto!" One of the kappa called out when Naruto got out of the water to get ready for school. "We heard a rumour about a strong water youkai being seen a couple of miles away, and we were thinking of going to see if the rumours are true. You want to come with us?"
"I've got school now, and my lessons with Hinoe after that, but if you can wait that long then sure, it sounds great." Naruto replied.
"Sure, we'll wait." A kappa replied. "We were going to ask one of the stronger youkai to come with us anyway, in case there was trouble. Maybe lazy Madara will even go with us if we can find enough sake to bribe him with, or something sweet."
"Madara, who's he?" Naruto asked, not recognising the name, and by now he'd met most of the local youkai.
"He's an inugami, and he's really powerful, but all he does is sleep and drink." One of the other kappa told him. "He snagged some stuff off a human merchant's wagon before, and he loves… er, what's it called, manju?"
"I've never had it before." Naruto admitted. "But I think that's what it's called."
"Hey, hey! That's an idea." One of the kappa said. "Manju is a human food, so maybe Naruto can get some for us to bribe Madara with!"
"Sorry, guys, but I don't have any money." Naruto apologised.
"Money?" One of the kappa asked. "You mean those round bits of metal with human writing on them?"
"You also get ryo bills, but yeah, those are coins." Naruto answered them.
"Humans drop them and leave them lying around all over the place!" The kappa exclaimed. "We have a plan! While Naruto is at school, we'll go and collect all of the lost and forgotten coins we can. Then Naruto can buy manju for Madara, and we can go see what's going on with these rumours!"
Without another word, the group of kappa charged headlong towards the village, leaving Naruto to wonder what the hell just happened.
"Are they going to spend all day looking for loose change?" He wondered.
He shook his head. It wasn't important, and he had to get ready for school anyway.
xxxxx
The school teacher gave Naruto an odd look as she saw his eyes, once again, focus on something outside of the window, but when she looked herself, she didn't see anything. Maybe it was a ninja doing their roof-hopping thing or something, it would make sense for Naruto to see that, being a fighter was in his blood after all.
Oh, Akiko recognised the name Uzumaki, she definitely did. She remembered the red-haired ninja woman quite clearly, and if someone actually looked at Naruto then they would see that he had the same shaped face she did. In fact, he looked a lot like her aside from the hair and eye colour.
That was why she didn't give him as hard of a time as she heard some of the other teachers did. While he was an orphan with no parents, she thought it far more likely that he was the son of Kushina Uzumaki, and probably one of the Yamanaka ninjas – they were mostly blondes – rather than a demonic fox forced into human form with its memories erased, or whatever the current theory was.
In fact, Akiko was actually secretly rather proud of her blonde student. The way he dove into learning everything he could really impressed her, and she found herself occasionally slipping a slightly more advanced textbook into the ones she placed on his desk, and adding an extra sheet or two of homework for him to complete, which he always did. With his determination and drive, he was going to go far in life, whatever he decided to do with himself.
She saw Naruto's eye twitch again, and once more glanced outside the window, completely missing the kappa running about the place with a bag full of loose change.
xxxxx
At lunch time, Naruto sat apart from the children, took his lunch out of his bag, and put Benio, in butterfly form, on his knee. As he ate his lunch, he wondered just how much money the kappa would have managed to gather by the time he would finish his lessons with Hinoe.
"Hey, Benio, I didn't think of this, but maybe the manju place won't serve me properly. Can you transform into some random civilian and buy the manju for us?" Naruto asked.
"What's in it for me, brat?" Benio asked.
"Some of the manju, maybe?" Naruto shrugged. "You saw as well as I did just how much money the kappa seem to have collected. That'll get us a fair number of manju, and this 'Madara' won't know the difference between however many we give him and how many we bought."
"Hmm, tempting." Benio mused. "I've never had this manju stuff either, but if Madara likes it so much, then maybe it's worth a try."
"Do you know Madara then?" Naruto asked.
"I do, and he's possibly even more powerful than lord Riou." Benio told him.
"Really?" Naruto's eyes glittered at that. "I thought Riou was super powerful."
"Well, he is compared to the small fry." Benio admitted. "However, as a lord amongst youkai, he's actually on the lower end of the scale. Rokka is more powerful than he is, and so is Misuzu. Madara doesn't actually rule over anyone, so he's not a lord, but that doesn't stop him being really powerful anyway."
"Why doesn't he rule over anyone if he's that powerful?" Naruto frowned.
"Why doesn't Hinoe? She's about on the same level as Riou." Naruto then saw what it would look like if a butterfly attempted to shrug. "Madara's also… a bit grumpy, and with his laziness, there's not many that really want him as a lord. As he's never really bothered trying to rule over anyone, he's kind of… just there really. He's not part of Riou's underlings, but he lives nearby anyway, so he sort of is and isn't counted amongst us."
"Okay then." Naruto shrugged. "So, will you buy the manju in my place?"
Benio sighed. "Fine, I'll possess someone and buy some, but I'll snag one or two myself just so you know!"
"With how much I saw the kappa have been collecting, I think we'll have plenty to go around." Naruto told her.
"Very well then." Benio agreed. "While you are at your lessons with Hinoe, I will purchase these manju you and the kappa want to bribe Madara with. Also, I shall accompany you as you investigate these rumours of a strong youkai."
Naruto snorted. "Wouldn't have it any other way, Benio, you've barely left my side since I met you."
The blonde continued to eat his lunch while chatting quietly with the butterfly youkai, but his thoughts were focused on what he and the kappa were going to be up to later, and just what this 'Madara' person was like.
xxxxx
After school was over with, Naruto headed to where he knew Hinoe would be waiting for him while Benio went off to find where all of the kappa were so she could buy the manju they needed.
When he got to where Hinoe was waiting for him, Naruto was surprised to see that she had a new scroll out that he didn't recognise. Normally she had the one that she taught him the 'force' technique from, so he could check up on it when he felt himself getting frustrated with his progress. This one, even if he couldn't see much of it, was a different one.
Hinoe tossed something small and round to him, which he caught. When he took a look at it, he found it was a wooden ball, about the size of a tennis ball, with symbols cut into the surface of it. Unlike his gloves, which had three symbols and a binder, this one was unbound with five.
"Tell me what you can work out of that seal." Hinoe told him.
Naruto took another look at it before answering. "Well, there's the input part of it here, then two symbols I don't recognise. After that is one that looks like the changing symbol that my gloves use, but different, and lastly there's an output symbol, but that's also different to the one on my gloves."
"Can you guess the purpose of any of the new symbols?" Hinoe asked him.
"Um… well the output seal is round, like the ball, so that means the direction is… outwards?" Naruto guessed. "Am I going to have to try and hover this ball over my hand or something? Is it a control exercise?"
"That's a good idea, but no, it's not." Hinoe then corrected him. "You're right in that the last symbol sends the result outwards in all directions, but the conversion symbol isn't a motion one, but a light one. The symbols you don't recognise at all represent storage and regulation. Now can you guess how this works?"
"Well, the input is still spiritual energy." Naruto started. "Then the storage part holds it and the next symbol leaks it out a bit at a time. The converter symbol then turns it into light… and the final symbol makes the entire ball light up."
"Correct." Hinoe confirmed. "Now pass it back so I can bind it all together." Naruto tossed it to her, and she caught it, before taking a knife to the wooden ball. "Now, I've decided to move onto light for two reasons. One, the only way you're going to get better at motion is with practise, and two, after this we are going to be working on combinations."
"Combinations?" Naruto asked. "You mean, with seals and techniques?"
"Seals primarily." Hinoe answered. "Once I think you've gotten light down well enough and know the symbols used, I'm going to give you a little project. I want you to make your own light orb, but rather than simply glowing like this one will, I want it to also hover over your shoulder. Can you guess how that will work?"
Naruto thought about it for a moment. "Well, it'll use the stuff on that one to actually light up, and it'll need constant motion to stay over my shoulder? I'm guessing that'll need both storage and regulator symbols, won't it?"
"Once again, correct." Hinoe told him. "Once you learn to start creating entire seals from individual symbols, then seals are like another language entirely, with plenty of grammar rules and everything else." She huffed. "I took a look in a 'shinobi' store earlier, and all of their seals are standardised things, primarily explosions and item storage."
"Wait, you can put actual physical things in a seal?" Naruto wondered. "I thought you could only store energy and spiritual things in them?"
"Human seals are different to youkai seals, remember?" Hinoe reminded him. "Theirs includes a physical aspect to them, which means they're constructed differently and can do different things."
Naruto huffed. "I sooo want to learn them though."
"Yeah, just remember not to share your seals with others. Because ours are purely spiritual, they'll react really badly to mixed chakra, and it'd probably be best to avoid awkward questions." Hinoe cautioned him. "Now, carefully start feeding your spiritual power into the ball, and let's see how well you can work with light."
Hinoe watched in silence as Naruto sat down cross-legged, with one arm held out, palm up. On that hand was the wooden ball that he was using as a medium for the technique. She knew he could call up his spiritual power, his reiryoku, in a mere second when he had the chance to focus on it, but it looked like he was being cautious with a new technique.
That was good. Recklessness was almost never a positive trait, especially when you were dealing with something you weren't familiar with, and she approved of the way he was working. A moment later, the wooden ball began to light up in Naruto's hand, and the boy himself opened his eyes.
"Well done, Naruto, you did it." Hinoe congratulated him. "Now, before going any further, can you tell me what two things about your spiritual power affect the light ball, and how they affect it?"
"Well, there's the amount I put in there." Naruto said. "The more I put in, the longer the light lasts."
"Up to a limit, yes. Put too much in and you'll overload it." Hinoe added. "What about the other thing?"
"The… quality of the power?" Naruto guessed.
"Sort of." Hinoe granted him some leeway. "It's the density of the power, just how much of it you can compress into each drop of spiritual power you use. The denser it is, the brighter the light will be, and vice versa. As you can see, the light is quite bright, showing us that your spiritual power, and likely your chakra overall, is quite dense, more so than the average human at least."
Naruto gave her a confused look. "How do you even know what's normal for a human? I thought that youkai tended to keep their distance."
"Oh, we all have our secrets, Naruto." Hinoe smiled. "Now, keep practising with that light ball. See if you can cause it to brighten and dim, or if you're really feeling good at it, try and work out how to change the colour of the light."
As Naruto went back to his task, Hinoe's eyes darkened.
She knew as much as she did about how humans worked from those notes she'd looked over. Those labs that Riou had come across belonged to Orochimaru, a rather despicable human if ever there was one, and his experiments could be roughly broken down into three categories.
The first lot of experiments were attempts to extend a human's lifespan indefinitely, immortality in short. Some of the corpses she'd looked at had been horrifically deformed, their cells having mutated in strange ways due to what had been done to them, and their expressions had been twisted by agony.
The second set of experiments Orochimaru had done had involved inserting genetic patterns from other humans into his test subjects, attempting to graft bloodlines onto the bodies. From the notes she'd read, Hinoe had found out that he was actually starting to have some successes, even if the survival rate was lower than three percent.
The third group of test subjects was the one that Hinoe was focused on at present. Orochimaru had created a seal that was absolutely beautiful in effect, if rather crude in the way it was constructed. The seal had many layers to it, the first of which was a simple chakra storage seal. An attached layer was a compression seal, to increase the potency of the stored chakra, while a third layer facilitated the absorption of nature chakra.
After that is where things get… weird. The seal also contained some form of biological mutagen that forced the recipients body to change. On top of that, there was a final layer of the seal, one that attacked the mind of the one it was attached to. That last layer of the seal tried to make the carrier submissive and loyal to Orochimaru.
Hinoe actually wanted to steal parts of that seal to make something new. After all, having a chakra battery you can use is never a bad thing, and making Senjutsu easier is hardly a bad thing. Heck, if you can find something compatible for the body mutation part of it – like something with wings – then that could be useful too.
The problem was that human seals, unlike youkai ones, required a certain balance, and she couldn't remove the subjugation aspect of the seal without collapsing the whole thing, and she didn't know enough about human sealing methods to construct something to replace it.
Perhaps when Naruto gained access to the relevant materials she might pick that project up again. For now though, she had plenty to teach to her student.
xxxxx
After his lessons with Hinoe were over, where he practised the light ball thing, his force blast technique, and revised the different plant reagents he knew, Naruto headed straight towards the kappas' lake, where he found them waiting for him alongside Benio, who had a large bag of manju with her.
"I can see why Madara likes these so much." She told him when she saw him. "They are certainly quite delicious."
"Was there any problems getting them?" Naruto asked.
"None, really." Benio waved him off. "I just transformed into a random human, black hair, brown eyes, and so on and so forth. The effort it took me to do so reminded me just how long it's been since I've made myself visible to humans in any form other than as a butterfly. Anyway, I think the woman was more annoyed by me paying for the manju with so much small change than anything else, but she accepted the coins regardless."
"Well, that's okay then." Naruto shrugged. "Shall we take these to Madara and see if he'll take us to this place… and I just realised I don't know where Madara is or where we're supposed to be going."
"I know where Madara will be lazing around right now." Benio offered.
""And we know where we're going!"" The kappa chorused.
"Well, shall we get going then?" Naruto asked.
"Follow me then." Benio said, before heading deeper into the forest.
Naruto and the group of kappa followed her, greeting a few of the other youkai they met along the way. Naruto, to keep himself busy, practised using his light ball, awing the kappa who, as rather low class spirits, didn't really use any techniques at all, though they could do a few tricks with water, which they promised to try and teach Naruto to do.
Naruto absolutely loved the kappa. They were just so… childish, they were like kids his own age, and they were a lot of fun as well. All of the youkai filled a role with Naruto. Hinoe was his teacher, but she was also the most maternal influence he had. Tsuyukami was like a father, or maybe an uncle, always willing to listen, and always with a bit some advice to give.
Riou was more distant, but he was still there, even if he had some other duties to attend to. The kappa were like the friends he didn't have amongst humans, and Benio… she was harder to describe. She irritated Naruto, and he played tricks on her in return. The both of them had this need to annoy one another, but Benio was also the first one to speak up for him against someone else, and Naruto looked up to her a bit, though he'd never say that out loud.
The other youkai around the forest were like… his neighbours, or people who lived down the street from him. Vaguely friendly and polite, but not people he was particularly close to or knew much about. He had yet to meet any youkai outside of Riou's domain, not even Rokka's, so he didn't know how that would turn out, but he hoped things wouldn't go too badly, and there was no way he was going there alone until he could look after himself.
"Madara should be just ahead." Benio called out to them. "The clearing ahead is one of his favourite places to nap in the sun."
Naruto went on ahead of the others, and when he came out from the trees and into the clearing he had to stop in surprise. Madara was a lot… fluffier than he was expecting, and he was quite large as well.
He took the form of a large white canine, who could probably have swallowed a grown man whole given his size. He had yellow-brown eyes and red markings on his head. There was a design similar to a question mark in the middle, with three flecks at the top in a pattern around the curve of it and a dot in the middle. There was also red around his eyes, following the natural lines of his face.
"Madara?" Naruto murmured quietly, somewhat in awe of the youkai before him.
Madara had sensitive hearing though, and replied. "Who wants to know? I don't recognise you."
Naruto found Madara's deep, growling voice to be quite rich and appropriate for such a being. "Um, I'm Naruto, Naruto Uzumaki… I don't know if you've heard of me or anything..."
"The human who isn't blind." Madara said. "Yes, I know who you are, but why are you here?"
"Well, the kappa heard a rumour about a powerful water youkai being nearby, and we wanted to check it out, but we didn't want to take too much of a risk, so we thought about asking if you wouldn't mind watching out for us on this trip." Naruto told him.
"I'm not a babysitter, brat, find someone else to do it, I'm not interested." Madara replied.
"Um… we have manju." Naruto offered. "We heard you liked the stuff, so… if you take us, you can have the manju."
Now Madara appeared interested. "How much manju?"
"Um, Benio, could you bring them over here." Naruto asked.
"Sure, sure." Benio answered, carrying the large back of manju over to them. "Here, a bag full of manju for you, Madara, are you interested now?"
"How far did you want to go?" He asked.
"The rumours have the newcomer in the river at the Valley of the End." One of the kappa offered.
Madara nodded. "That's not too far then, we can be there and back again in a few hours." Madara was then covered in a large amount of grey white-grey smoke, from which appeared… a maneki-neko? Madara then proceeded to pull several manju out of the bag and begin to eat them.
Naruto wasn't the only one shocked by the transformation, even Benio's jaw had dropped in shock at seeing the great and powerful Madara turn into a little, fat cat.
"Umm, Madara, is there any reason you changed form into… well, that?" Naruto asked as politely as he could while his brain tried to superimpose the great and powerful youkai he'd seen a moment ago over… this.
"Idiot! If I'm large, the manju wouldn't even be a mouthful!" Madara told him. "Like this, it'll last me a few days!"
Naruto leaned towards Benio and whispered to her. "I'm not imagining his voice changing like that, am I?"
"No, I can hear the whiny noise too." Benio replied, still in shock.
Madara finished devouring a third manju, before he turned to his observers. "Let me just hide these and we can be on our way." The youkai said, before hopping off through the trees.
When he returned, barely a minute later, he was once again the massive inugami they'd first seen him as.
"Get on my back." He told them. "The quicker we leave and return, the sooner I can get back to my delicious manju."
Naruto and Benio climbed on behind Madara's head, and the half a dozen kappa climbed on behind them as well, and they all held on as tightly as they could as Madara leaped into the air.
"So, to the Valley of the End it is then." Madara said, before beginning to fly off in that direction, though how exactly he could fly without wings or anything, Naruto didn't know. Perhaps it was a youkai skill, and maybe Hinoe could teach him how to do it himself!
Flying was awesome after all!
xxxxx
Back at Naruto's school, the teacher known as Akiko was marking homework.
It was dull, repetitive work, but it had to get down, and she always did it as soon as she could, so it was done and out of the way. She had just finished marking one of her student's pieces, who needed to work on adding repeated values (or beginner multiplication as it were), when she moved onto Naruto's.
She quickly went through it, marking down everything as correct, before she took note of what else was doodled on the page. There were a few random squiggles and symbols that looked like they were supposed to mean something, but while she was curious about them, that wasn't what really caught her attention.
No, what caught her attention was a slightly damp hand print, one that was not human, and most definitely not Naruto's.
After all, Naruto didn't have webbed fingers, did he?