With Tenten's upcoming graduation, the rest of my erstwhile students had exams scheduled as well, so I'd canceled most of our tutoring sessions. I still met every other day with Yakumo and Satsuki still showed up to buy kunai, shuriken, and wire that I'm sure she didn't really need, but I pushed for as much personal time as possible. Even Guy's grueling training sessions faded into the background as he prepared for his own genin team to take shape. Overall, the next month was perhaps some of the quietest time I'd had in at least a year, ever since allowing myself to slowly slip into the motions of friendship and camaraderie with the various young kunoichi I'd come to know.

All of this was a very good thing, because it gave me time to think about what had happened during the last full moon.

I'd lucked out and had a blue moon, a pair of full moons within a single calendar month, just before New Year's, but this had been different. I'd gotten two flares of power coursing through my mind at the same time.

After meditating on the subject for several hours, I'd come to various possible hypotheses.

The first was simply that my ability, which so resembled the Inspired Inventor talent I vaguely remembered reading about once upon a time... simply grew. I had used it, in my first burst of potential, to understand the broad strokes of the metaphysics behind it, but I was far from a master in understanding the true mechanics. Unless I felt I needed to change that and believed I had the time to do so, there was every possibility that after a little over two years of gathering potential, the conduit from the Pure Land had just widened.

I doubted it, but it was possible.

The second idea I'd had related to the sheer amount of chakra I'd been channeling by using Naruko and Satsuki as makeshift batteries and myself as a capacitor somehow triggered a greater release of potential within me during the full moon. Given that there was a significant amount of flow between the gates in general, I was more inclined to believe this hypothesis... all things being equal between this and the former, at least.

The third was some combination of the chakra I'd received from either Satsuki, Naruko, or Kurama through Naruko. Assuming that Naruko was still the reincarnation of Ashura and Satsuki was the same for Indra, one of their unique and powerful blends of chakra could have triggered something. Tailed Beast energy was on a similar level as well; exotic, poorly-understood, and extremely reactive. Assuming what I knew of the deeper mythos of the Elemental Nations was accurate, that power could do whatever was required of it in the hands of a user of sufficient skill and knowledge.

The fourth possibility... was that it had been all three, or at least the combination of two of the three. In particular, I'd never really made the link between my ability triggering at the full moon and the moon being, well... an artificial satellite created by a pair of ancient half-alien, half-human ninja wizard brothers to imprison their mother. Also, there was some kind of ancient super-tech chakra-generator powered by ninja-magic eyeballs that probably had some kind of effect beyond simply supporting life on the giant hollow sphere.

...this fucking world. Just... goddammit, people.

Goddammit.

So to make a long and very weird story short, my best guess is that I may have accidentally synthesized the legendary 'Six Paths Sage Chakra' used by the Sage of Sixth Paths himself and it had somehow increased the resonance between the celestial body and my own chakra network. I hadn't really considered the possibility of replicating the 'true' sage chakra and had been spinning up an idea to copy Yakumo's mysterious dark chakra to fake the Creation of All Things technique close enough for me to make raw materials. That had seemed easier than fully resurrecting the lost technique's unique chakra requirement. But if I had used my single expenditure into Hagoromo's personal skills to combine his reincarnated progenies' energies and increase some strange 'resonance' with the moon...

All of this was very fucking strange for a variety of reasons, not the least of which meant that my condition and abilities likely weren't the result of my aberrant reincarnation. Or, at least, not solely the result of it. If receiving knowledge every month during the full moon was... well, not normal, but a function of something entirely in line with the native universe's metaphysics, then...

...well, it raised questions.

A lot of them.

Could I reliably get more potential each month? Could I get stronger, faster? Could I make an impact on the world? Could I make it better? Did I want that kind of responsibility? Did I want that kind of power?

...was I the only one?

Questions which, after realizing they existed at all, I also realized I could get the answers to with all the ease of asking them. The problem with all of this was that I wasn't sure I wanted those answers. Knowing them would only obligate me to act on that knowledge. There was... comfort, if not bliss, in ignorance. Even knowing as much as I did made me uncomfortable, anxious, and scared.

That was what this was all about, I knew.

I had known, actually, for a long time, that I was scared. Scared of being someone, scared of having people rely on me, scared of having people die because of me. That was the truth I'd shared with Obito months ago, but it was also the truth that had motivated me to want to leave. To leave and go somewhere other people dying wouldn't hurt me.

I'd avoided confronting the fear because it gave me something to hide behind, a reason to pretend to be less than I was. As long as I had my fear, I could justify not being able to try to save people, so I wouldn't need to see myself fail. I could embrace the comfortable lie, squander my talents, and content myself with the hollow lie that the Elemental Nations weren't something that could be saved, wasn't a place I could try to save.

I had friends now, though. There were people who enjoyed my company and I found solace in, respite from the loneliness I'd endured growing up with in the orphanage. I doubted I could convince them to abandon their world in the face of the horrible odds we would be facing.

'We.' There I go again. Another stupid decision made for stupid reasons.

I stared balefully up at the waning moon and confronted my demons.

If I could grow, if I wasn't limited to just the tiniest trickle of power and knowledge... if I could get smarter and stronger faster, maybe I could challenge the norms of this world.

I took a cleansing breath and twisted my limbs into the lotus position.

"I must not fear." I spoke, low and level in the small hours of the night. "Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing."

"Only I will remain."

I will try.

…

"You're working harder than usual."

I didn't raise my eyes from where I was carefully sharpening the blade I was nearly finished with. "I need to make up for lost time. That crazy jounin took me away from too many chores."

Sagara grunted, but I didn't hear the sound of his footsteps moving away.

Instead, the burly man grabbed a wooden stool and sat down opposite me.

I blinked, cautiously looking up at the frowning man.

"You sure you don't wanna' be a ninja, kid?" Sagara asked, his voice not quite as harsh or gruff as usual.

I hesitated a moment. A childish part of me would always want to be a ninja, but there were more important things at stake. Ultimately, I shook my head. "No. I like making things."

Sagara stared at me hard for a moment, his thin eyebrows furrowed before snorting and looking away. "Likes making things, he says. Ugh, alright then." He stood, cracking his back with a flexing motion. "Gonna' change some things around here, then." He jabbed a finger at me. "Thanks to all your weird-ass shit, my store's too busy. Got customers coming out my back-side and no apprentice to help with the work 'cause he's runnin' off with those clan kids all the time."

I opened my mouth to interject, but Sagara simply crossed his thick arms and glared at me.

"Like I was sayin', there's gonna' be changes." He looked around the back of the shop, then knocked on one of the walls. "Talked to Hiroshi next door. He's gettin' up in years an' his son's gone ninja, so no one's taking over the kiln since his apprentice moved out to start his own shop a decade ago. Made him an offer to buy out the shop, knock down a wall or two and we'll use his pottery shit to make those clay kunai and shuriken."

My eyebrows rose as I ran over the logistics. I was certain we had enough money to do something like that, especially since Sagara had happily foisted the accounting off on me a few months ago, but the workload...

"Okay..." I replied, drawing the word out slowly as I nodded. "I guess you want me to put more time in on the forge and furnace, then?" I'd have to work out a way to break it to Satsuki and Naruko, especially with how I'd need to keep giving Yakumo her lessons, but-

"No, I want you teaching the new kids I've got coming in." Sagara grinned with that slightly-nasty way he had, a quiet air of menace daring me to object.

"New kids?" I asked, finally setting down the blade I'd been sharpening and dusting my hands off. "More apprentices?"

Sagara grunted, jabbing another thick finger at me. "You're senior apprentice now, so you gotta' teach these new little shits the way around and get 'em workin' right."

"When do they get here?" I asked, mentally shuffling around my chores and thinking about what would be something good to start on.

"Next week." Sagara stated with a nod, turning to contemplate the wall he'd knocked on earlier. "Have to hire a genin team to help do construction and move Hiroshi wherever he likes, probably next to his kid's apartment. Then need to move you into the bedroom up there."

My eyes widened and I visibly started, to which Sagara snorted.

"Can't have my senior apprentice livin' in a closet." He growled out, almost rubbing my nose in the fact I was getting a promotion, more personal space, and underlings. I suppose for a man who'd been set in his ways until recently, all of the change was aggravating in one way or another and it gave him some level of pleasure to inflict it on the one person he could do so without consequence.

I... didn't really care that much, which would have spoiled his vengeance, so I kept quiet.

"Then I should probably get to work and finish up as much as I can of the orders so that I have time to show them around." I stated, picking the blade back up and returning to sharpening it.

Hopefully the new apprentices I had to teach wouldn't be assholes, at least.

…

"Where... did you say you found them?" I asked Sagara casually, watching my two subordinates scurry about the shop doing their work.

Sagara snorted, shaking his head. "I didn't, brat, but if you have to know that lunatic Uchiha, the one that wears orange? We go back to ou-er, his genin days. I was bitching about how you'd been off playing ninja so much and how I'd have to scrounge up someone to help out. Obito was actually helpful for once and told me he knew two shinobi who'd been stripped of their rank for some political shit. Insulted some noble at the chunin exams a few months back."

I sucked in a breath through my teeth, nodding. "Right, yeah, that makes sense."

Because I could entirely see Sai telling a noble, to their face, that their wife looked like she'd been hit with an ugly-bat too many times.

The other one, Aburame Torune, likely just had the misfortune of being in the blast radius of his teammate's complete lack of social niceties.

Well, that was if I believed the crock of shit I was being fed.

No, it was far more likely the entire thing had been staged and Danzo was making an indirect move to start assessing my capabilities to understand how valuable I was. Given the man's pull, it would have been child's play to have the two burn a pair of aliases in order to get into a position where they could enact long-term surveillance over me.

I doubted Obito was in on it. Kakashi had only realized what kind of monster Danzo was after an attempted assassination on Hiruzen. If that hadn't happened in this timeline, Obito could just be doing the old councilman and his old friend a mutual favor, unknowing of the danger it would put me in.

Yeah, that seemed about Obito's intelligence level.

...now the question became, what was I going to do about it?