After that mishap, Hitomi couldn't continue her sensitivity-related training until her reserves were replenished. Children as young as she was weren't supposed to be able to mix chakra or use it, Ensui explained, and even less to the point of exhaustion like she had. He listened very carefully as she told him about her Library, how it worked and how she had built it. When she was done, he sighed and shook his head, mumbling something about Yamanka bitching when they'd think he had stolen clan secrets to give them to her. Yeah right, as if she would ever be that reckless. The Yamanaka were telepaths, for fuck's sake.
It was time for Hitomi to put the theory into practice with her chemicals. After a few tries, carefully supervised by her mentor, she succeeded in creating a nice, strong explosion, enough to shake the ground and make dozens of birds fly away in panic. At night, she consulted Ensui's chemical notebook, where he wrote down all the formulas and procedures he used for his creations. The notebook was locked by a seal that used his chakra as a key, which she found absolutely fascinating.
She couldn't grasp everything on those pages, far from it, but she still had a lot to learn in that field. Delayed reactions, doses, projections, … The possibilities were endless, and one day they would all be hers. The first step was just reading the notebook, as Ensui had instructed her: she just had to look at the pages to remember them for when she'd be ready.
Ensui made sure she'd seen it all before taking it back. "You won't always have me around," he said "when you want to make things go boom. That way you'll have everything you need in your head, you'll just need to find the chemicals for the situation."
A week later, they left the inn behind and hit the road again. Their progress toward the Sunajin Desert was slow, but the weather was colder every night, a sign they were closing in on the border. The first night outside was difficult for Hitomi. She wasn't used to that kind of temperature, to the hardness of the ground, to the thousand noises that kept her up all night. After that though, she did better.
"The first thing you need to know to survive outside is how to hunt. You can't expect food to come to you nice and prepared just like in a village. Take your kunai and follow me."
Hunting was not a problem for Hitomi, but skinning and gutting were another story. She couldn't prevent her hands from shaking as she followed Ensui's instructions, the rabbit's dead eyes looking at her like they could still see her. She had to prepare dozens of preys before she could do it without hesitation. Each of the lives she took, even if they were just animals, made her heart a little colder, a little harder.
She had to be honest with herself: she needed this. It was one thing to plan violent acts and fights in the safety of her Library, and another one altogether to spill blood in real circumstances, to see pain and fear on some opponent's face. Sometimes, they might even be kids, just like her.
When she stumbled while training, Ensui showed no mercy. He made her attack again and again, made her pitiless, even if she couldn't hurt him; it was the spirit that mattered. And when night reached the cave he always managed to find to shelter them from the elements, he hugged her and cradled her until she stopped crying then fell asleep. When she had nightmares, he always woke her up and appeased her so she could get back to sleep.
After a few months, she had mastered all the basic Konohajin katas. To celebrate, he bought her a dark green outfit, nicely cut for fighting, the fabric breathing like nothing she had ever worn and tailored so she had plenty of room to move. He showed her how to tie her kunai pouch to the belt, then got her started on another set of katas only Nara used.
He sharpened her, like he would a weapon. Hitomi liked the idea. He didn't coddle her, wasn't afraid to push her just a bit harder. Every morning, she woke up stronger, harder, but, more importantly, she woke up more ready to face the opponents that she would drag back by the hair to face her if need be. They dared to be assholes, they couldn't whine when they got trouble biting their ass back. Trouble being her, of course.
After almost five months, they reached the edge of the Sunajin Desert. They had been slow, while Hitomi could walk fast for a child, she was no match for even civilian. She wasn't a ninja yet, wasn't even an Academy student. It frustrated her to no end, but Ensui always appeased her. They found a caravan, bound for the Desert and equipped to cross it. Those people were merchants, and not only from the Elemental Countries. They hired shinobi so they could be protected: bandits rarely dared to attack a protected caravan. This time, it was a team composed of two Genin, one Chūnin and a Jōnin to lead them. Obviously, they had a lot of experience as a team: they didn't need to use words to coordinate their efforts and protect the caravane.
"Shishou?" Hitomi asked.
"Hm?"
"I think the Chūnin is a puppeteer."
He groaned. "Please don't go harass the man with questions, kid. We don't need a diplomatic incident."
With a pout, Hitomi took refuge under one of the tarpaulins protecting the goods from the sun. A ninja only needed a few days to reach Sunagakure from Konoha, but a caravan moved much slower, even slower than a walking civilian. They could only move during the early and late hours of the day, when the air was neither too hot nor too cold. The time spent moving, Ensui used to make Hitomi work on her meridians.
One day, while she was meditating under his ever-watchful eye, she felt something click in her mind, almost like a touch or the noise of a branch snapping under the pressure. This time, it wasn't a book appearing in the crystal cage, but a ribbon cut from white light, flowing quietly above its floor.
She snapped out of her trance and fell on all four, trying to catch her breath. For the first time, people around her felt a bit faded. Not enough for her headache to disappear, but still, it was progress, she couldn't deny it. Beaming, she stood up and looked at her mentor. "I think I'm starting to get it, shishou!"
He smiled too, unable to stop it. To hell with the empty face shinobi were supposed to wear in all circumstances, he couldn't resist when she looked at him like that, so happy, so full of hope for the future. "Congrats, kid. You've done the hardest part. I'm very proud of you."
She froze, her eyes staring into his own, a red as rich as wine against dark, quiet grey. After a few seconds, she understood how much he meant it, the strength he put in those words, the dignity, the righteousness, the faith. He didn't know any other way to get them out and she wondered. She wondered if she really deserved them. After all, she was good at fooling people, lying, manipulating her way into their heart with the sweetest smile. But she hadn't done anything like that to Ensui. She wanted to be worthy of him.
Her progress had been a temporary fix, unfortunately. Sometime in the middle of the night, she woke up with a start as the light ribbon slipped away from its cage and faded away. Ensui was up, as if he knew it would happen. He probably knew, since he'd been through that well before her. She was exhausted – in her case, it seemed that keeping her oversensitivity at bay had to involve using chakra. Yet she knew she wouldn't be able to go back to sleep. Wrapped in her blanket, she went to join her mentor, who was reading a scroll. "Shishou?"
He answered the question she hadn't asked, shifting sideway on his futon so she could sit with him and read too. Fascinated, Hitomi stared at the elegant strokes of black on the cream paper. She identified a seal structure, but she didn't know which one. It was magnificent, so complex it would make any calligrapher pale with jealousy, and her palms tingled with the desire to be the next one drawing it.
"You remember the day when we left Konoha? I told you I'd teach you some fūinjutsu. I'm not a Master like the Sannin or the late Fourth Hokage, but I have some skills, which is more than can be said of almost everyone in the whole world. This knowledge is on the verge of disappearing, and we don't ever teach it to people who wouldn't be good at it. I think you're gonna do great in this field with your memory, kid. Since you're awake, we can start right now."
Her eyes shining with adoration, the little girl nodded so vigorously her neck protested. She didn't care about this kind of pain, not when fūinjutsu was on the table. Since the day he had mentioned the topic, she was obsessed with it. What she knew about the art of seals made it look insanely powerful and the idea of endless possibilities was enticing to her. Imagining herself with such a flexible tool satisfied something deep and dark in her mind.
Whispering so they wouldn't bother the other sleepers around, Ensui started explaining the basics of seal drawing. Every seal had an outer and an inner circle written with modified kanjis all connected to each other and almost impossible to decipher if one didn't have the knowledge of the language used to write them. You couldn't allow the brush to leave the paper even for a moment as you traced them, and the seal would be activable as soon as both circles would be connected, its function hidden in plain sight. Then there were the ornaments, between two and a hundred chains linking to two circles togethers, their number and complexity an indicator of how much power the seal could draw from its surroundings and rely upon. Those ornaments had to be equally spaced or the seal would become unstable and often dangerous. Finally, in the space left between the ornaments, the seal master added characters that looked like simplified kanjis and would define how the seal behaved: how much chakra the user needed to inject, the self-timer if the seal needed one, the area of effect, its shape, … The possibilities were truly endless.
For example, for a storage seal, she would have to trace the two circles using kanjis that could be roughly translated as 'I store and release at will', then add enough ornaments for the volume of storage needed. The finishing touch was adding precisions as to the place relative to the seal where things would appear or disappear – two manipulations that needed different characters. It got even more complex if the seal master wanted a precise storage place for each object, so they wouldn't end up buried in a mountain of clutter each time they wanted one precise item.
Fūinjutsu was rarely an innate skill and, even when a shinobi had such a gift, they had to work precisely and repeatedly to master even the simplest seal. The special ink used to draw them, infused with chakra at least, was only produced in the Fire Temple. Any seal had the potential to fail catastrophically if mistakes were made in its conception. Fortunately, they all needed chakra to be activated, so it was possible to train without blowing up something by accident.
Hitomi was fascinated. Her left hand, the dominant one, almost twitched with impatience. Her whole body called for those yet unknown sensations, the sound of the brush against paper, the heady smell of ink, as if something deep in her knew what it would feel like. If Ensui noticed the urge running through her, he didn't say. Was he, too, captivated by the seal he was looking at? Did he feel like he instinctively understood how it was drawn, and did he feel the need to lose himself in seal mastery? She couldn't tell.
The sun was rising when he finished his explanations. He didn't need to tell Hitomi to get up, she was already jumping on the ground. Her movements slow and steady, a thousand times more at ease than she had been even a year earlier, she started greeting the sun under the amused stare of some of the civilians, used now to her strange behaviour. In the afternoon, when they couldn't continue traveling, they often sat in a circle around her as she fought against Chiki, one of the Genin the caravan had hired for protection. He had agreed to help her in her training: against him, she could practice her katas and try to adapt them to her future fighting style.
Sometimes, more rarely, she fought against Ensui or Takano, the Jōnin leader of the team, but it was like trying to break a mountain with a blade of grass. Despite this, she was learning, no matter who her opponent was. She also saw the foreign shinobi, or even the civilians when she took the time to look at what they were doing, tense under her focused and voracious stare. Were they afraid she would steal the secrets hidden in their minds? She wasn't a Yamanaka, for fuck's sake.
Hitomi's fighting skills were becoming really impressive for her age. She immersed herself in training without counting the hours or aches. Most of the time, it was Ensui who had to call it a day before she exhausted herself. She had already shown some worrying tendencies in that regard. This kind of instinct was great during a mission, but when she was just training? It was asking for trouble, and Ensui was worried.
The following days, she continued to work on her oversensitivity. She got better and better at it, but the ribbons always escaped their cage after a while. When she explained what she had created in her mind to her mentor, he assured her the space between the bars wasn't the problem. The only way she would get them to stay there was by practicing again and again. With his constant support and because he never focused her on just one topic, she still felt good about herself.
And it paid off. Slowly, it paid off. In her master's eyes, Hitomi saw a quiet kind of satisfaction, and it made her feel honoured, more than she could possibly say. When they weren't training, they talked a lot about their personal lives. He told her about all the missions he had accomplished with her father, described the sensei they had had in common. As a sign of respect, he never toned down his tales: he knew that, like Shikamaru, she had been forced to grow up faster because of her intelligence. He was wrong about this, at least in part. She would have placed her life in his hands without hesitation, but she would never, ever tell anyone about reincarnating. Her safety depended on it.
Fortunately, because he was raising a genius himself and was used to their ways, Shikaku had never suspected a thing. When Kurenai had told him about the fact that Hitomi had tried to learn how to write all by herself, Shikaku had just taken her to have her IQ, and other parameters she hadn't understood, tested. Those had declared her Shikamaru's equal. No, Shikaku didn't know a thing about her previous life. He was just grateful when she pushed her cousin to do more than the bare minimum.
How was he doing back in Konoha? She missed him a lot, but at least he was surrounded by peers and friends from his clan, the Yamanaka, and the Akimichi. She only had Ensui. He was an adult, and she didn't know him since he was born like she did Shikamaru. She really liked her mentor, but having him around wasn't the same as having a friend, an equal.
The next day, an hour and a half after the end of their afternoon break, they got their first sight of Sunagakure. They walked the whole evening before really standing in front of its huge sandstone doors, then another hour before they could enter the city. Hitomi had quietly decided to watch and learn. Fortunately, her oversensitivity was manageable enough now that she could spend days without meditating to cage her meridians back in. Curious and giddy, she walked behind Ensui and waited until being given permission to go explore.