"S-Sasuke?" I said weakly.
It felt like the world stopped spinning as everything around me happened in slow motion. As I looked down at Sasuke, I found it easy to believe that none of this was real. Nothing felt real. This had to be a dream. The man in my arms – my friend – could not be dead. That notion, in and of itself, made no sense even in the slightest, simplest form. Sasuke is not allowed to die…
My nose suddenly grew stuffy and I felt the sensation of a lump forming in my throat that is usually associated with when I am about to begin crying. My breath became short and it hastened as the beat of my heart picked up a pace rapid enough to give me chest pain. The sound around me muffled as less of what was happening made sense to me, and I felt as though I was dying.
"This cannot be real," I thought to myself.
Just when I felt myself breaking down, a voice in my head told me "Do not give up."
Then, in that moment, the world returned to normal as I regained my composure. This was not the time to break down; I had to use my head to save his life. So, with my heart pumping and my hands shaking, I fought hard to hold back my tears and to push any hindering emotions to the back of my mind. I thought of anything that I might have learned in my experience of being a kunoichi that could help Sasuke, and after remembering a technique that Sakura taught me when she first started learning medical ninjutsu, I gently laid Sasuke on his back on the ground in front of me immediately to perform it.
I inhaled and exhaled to prepare myself to perform what she called cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Sakura had said that executing this can break a few ribs, however, that should not stop one from continuing the technique so long as it saves someone. I have only done this once three years ago on a practice dummy, so I forced myself to recall all of the steps to execute this correctly and efficiently.
After opening his mouth, I tilted Sasuke's head back, lifting his chin as I did so. The next step would be to check for breathing, and since I already knew he was not, I moved onto the following step, which was to breathe into his mouth. Once I pinched his nostrils closed, I placed my mouth on his, breathing hard enough into it to make his chest rise. Upon completion, I put my hands on top of the other in the middle of his chest and I braced myself for what was to come.
Using my body weight to add strength and speed to my compressions, I pushed repeatedly on his chest as hard and as fast as I could. Sakura said that one must attempt to deliver one-hundred compressions per minute so I did just that. When I finished delivering the compressions, I removed my hands from Sasuke, listened for breathing, and when I discovered that he was not breathing yet, I pinched his nose and tilted his head back once more to breathe air into his lungs. Immediately after that, I resumed the compressions. I repeated this until I saw results.
It took several minutes before I saw signs of life, but once I did, I felt as though life was breathed back into me as well. Alive, yet still unconscious, I checked Sasuke thoroughly to make sure that he was well enough to be moved. In normal circumstances, I would not have moved him and I would have decided to made camp here until he recovered completely, but we were being pursued so I had to get him as far away from here as possible.
Sasuke is taller than me, resting over one-hundred and eighty-two centimeters, while I rest at one-hundred and sixty-three centimeters, so I found it rather difficult to travel with him in his current state. He is not too heavy for me to support, but he is quite tall. As I pressed forward with his arm around my shoulders and my hand at his waist, I realized that his legs were dragging along the ground. I would not worry about it if not for our pursuers. Surely they will see the marks Sasuke's legs are leaving behind, causing them to find us, so I limited our walking to a minimum by using chakra concentration to allow me to jump from wall to wall in the narrow passageway.
The closest village is the Hidden Stone Village, but I can no longer get inside now that the route leading to it is closed off by boulders. I could climb the mountain, but with how it is structured, getting over it is a feat that will hinder our progress as opposed to facilitating it. So, to determine where to go next, I activated my visual jutsu to see where the path will take us. Relief washed over me when I discovered that the path will take us to the Land of Waterfalls.
If the ronin follow us down this path to the Hidden Waterfall Village within the Land of Waterfalls, they will more than likely assume that our course of action is to find an inn at the village so that Sasuke could recover. With that in mind, I decided to sprint as quickly as I could towards the country, but I did not plan on entering the village. To enter the village, we must venture through the Cave of Waterfalls, which is an underground cave littered with an abundance of winding pathways, but only a few connect to the village. I plan on taking Sasuke to a remote waterfall on the outskirts of the village to recuperate.
It usually takes the average shinobi two days or slightly less to reach the Land of Waterfalls from the Land of Earth, but that is only if urgency is nonexistent. I, however, do not have the luxury of resting, not when men are chasing us and not when Sasuke is in serious need of medical attention. I grew tired during the peregrination, though I refused to stop no matter how exhausted I became. It was tough to keep going while fatigued, but I eventually reached my destination once night fell.
Beyond the waterfall laid a moderately sized aperture that I knew would keep Sasuke hidden from the bloodthirsty ronin. I gently rested Sasuke down on the ground of the aperture, providing his head some comfort by lying it on the coat he gave me. I folded the coat as many times as I could to give him an ample amount of comfort, and as I sat by his side, staring at him, I wondered if he could feel it.
Despite harboring a fever, sickly pale skin, and a body covered in perspiration, his breathing was steady and his face looked peaceful. He may be stable for now, but it could only be a matter of time before he stops breathing again or displays new symptoms, so, to figure out what is going on inside of his body, I activated my Byakugan.
His nodes are still thin, though they now appeared to be thinner than what I saw a couple of days ago. Looking beyond that, I directed my attention towards the area where our chakra generates – our lower abdomen. At first I saw nothing, but as I inspected further, I noticed that the color of his chakra was slightly darker than it should be. I thought back to every abnormality pertaining to chakra that I learned about in my childhood, and thanked the heavens when I remembered what illness he had.
The good news is that Sasuke has chakra poisoning and the cure can be found only in this country. The bad news is, the herbs required to cure this illness are spread out in the far north, east, west, and south of the country in the woods that surround the Hidden Waterfall Village, and they are extremely rare. While not impossible to acquire, they will be frustrating to attain.
Chakra poisoning is an illness acquired through constant contact with a foreign airborne substance that compromises the chakra network system. It causes the victim to have trouble breathing, periodic moments where they lose consciousness, occasional fevers, lack of stamina, and it thins out the chakra nodes within the body, which if the victim afflicted with chakra poisoning uses a jutsu, it will deplete a hefty supply of chakra from the user, often causing them to faint, incapacitate them, or, in extreme cases, kill them.
Sasuke was one of those extreme cases…
I clenched my fists, angry that he must go through this suffering. If not for the energy vessels, then he would not be in this predicament. He would not have had to overexert himself to keep up with me. He would not have almost died.
I knew that I needed rest, but I could not do so with Sasuke in this state. He needed the cure for the poison immediately, so I left the cave and headed towards the Hidden Waterfall Village to search for the herbs.
With the help of my Byakugan, I easily found my way through the cave and I entered the village without incident. Given that it is night time, not many people were bustling through the village. I had hoped that the general store was open so that I may gain more information on the herbs I needed, but the store was closed and the owner was nowhere in sight.
Knowing that it will take me several hours to locate the herbs on my own even with the help of my bloodline trait, I decided to head west to obtain one of the four herbs – the herb of spirit, seishin no habu.
From what I can recall, it is a small, blue plant that grows underneath a large maple tree. This might be the easiest to find out of the four since rumor has it that the seishin herb glows when hit with moonlight. I knew that I would reach the area it resided before the sun rose, but I sprinted as fast as I could to find the herb anyway.
The Hidden Waterfall Village is surrounded by a forest that has very few landmarks to show the average person where they are, so I had my Byakugan activated at all times to prevent myself from getting lost. It also aided me in locating the herb, which I managed to find much faster than I expected.
Now five kilometers away from the seishin herb, my vision suddenly distorted, telling me that an energy vessel was somewhere nearby. I cursed under my breath in agitation as I scanned the area to find where the vessel was hiding, soon locating it not far from where I initially saw the herb.
Quickly, yet cautiously, I headed towards the vessel deeper in the forest.
When I came close enough to my target to see if any threats were guarding it, I realized that it was sitting out in the open without any protection. This peeked my curiosity. The other vessels I encountered were tucked in the back of caves or underground where they are out of the sight of the public eye. This is the only one out in the open where anyone passing by can see it, so why is it sitting there unprotected?
I did not have time to wait and ponder on the idea of the chance of someone watching over it, so I approached the vessel, leaving my guard up as I did so. Now in front of the golden sphere, I listened to make sure that no one was approaching me, and when I found that no one was coming, I attacked the vessel, breaking it into dust. Once it was destroyed, I activated my Byakugan to be sure that no other vessel lingered in the area. I soon discovered that there were none nearby, but when I focused my vision twelve kilometers to the north, my sight distorted again. After furrowing my eyebrows, I decided that I will destroy it before I search for the herb in that area.
The west of the Land of Waterfalls is predominantly covered with maple trees, each harboring very minute differences to tell the other apart. It is said that the maple tree that the seishin herb grows under looks identical to the other trees around it during the day, but at night the leaves have a blue hue to them when touched by moonlight. Given how much the tree will stand out in the midst of night, one would assume that finding it would be easy; however, it is not. People exaggerated how much both the tree and the herb glowed, and when I reached the seishin herb, I was left disappointed in how little they illuminated.
Regardless, the appearance of it was not what I needed, so I picked it and placed it securely in my knapsack. With no other business required here, I prepared myself to head north when I froze.
Someone was watching me.
Remaining still, I scanned the area with my visual jutsu. I saw no one, but I still felt eyes on me in the depth of the forest. Whoever was watching did not have a chakra network system, which told me that they were not human. I could not afford to engage in physical combat right now, not with Sasuke suffering alone, so I dashed north in the hopes of losing my stalker in the trees.
The second ingredient is called the herb of life, jinsei no habu. It resides on a hill so tall that it overlooks the forest and the Waterfall Village. Sparkling in its wake, it gains life through direct sunlight, but when the sun goes down, the herb is very difficult to find. Without the sun shining on it, it becomes dormant and it is often mistaken for an ordinary plant, but it is said by those with visual jutsu that it glows blue like the color of chakra whenever the sun is not present. Unfortunately, when I tried to search for it, my vision became twisted from the energy vessel, meaning that I would have to break it in order to find the jinsei herb.
Crossing over rivers and passing by countless trees, I did my best to lose my unknown pursuer. They were persistent, chasing me relentlessly for many kilometers, but in the long run they could not keep up with me, and they suddenly stopped following me. After they had left, I wondered who had been chasing me. If it were the ronin, they would have chased me with unrelenting aggression, but this one seemed to have just been watching me, leading me to think that they never had the intention of fighting me.
Soon, I entered the jinsei herb's domain, heading to the energy vessel with immediate urgency. I spent little time planning on how to approach it when I realized that this one had no one guarding it despite its exposing position, and I disposed of it just as I did the others by hitting it with an impact so great that it shattered into golden dust.
With the aid of my Byakugan, I found the jinsei herb easily. Had I not used my visual jutsu, I would have passed it by, especially since it rested relatively close to where the vessel once stood. Without my visual jutsu, it truly looked like a regular plant, but as soon as I had the plant in my line of sight while my kekkei genkai was active, it glowed blue just as the rumors claimed. Happy to have found it, I carefully picked it, putting in my bag next to the seishin herb.
Having two herbs out of four in my possession, I sprinted towards the east just as the sun was beginning to rise to find the herb of recuperation, kaifuku no habu.