"Well, they accepted your application," Nyūdō-san announced, sounding as baffled as I felt by the development. Yoshiro-sensei had kinda told me it was coming earlier in the week, but a part of me still hadn't believed him.
Disbelief soon gave way to excitement, and wariness. "So, what happens now?"
"Now, I guess I teach you how to make exploding tags. It is customary and much less dangerous to begin with them. They are far simpler."
"You're going to teach me yourself?" I asked, a bit surprised by the revelation. I imagined there would be a school of some kind, or that there'd be some devoted instructor. This whole process seemed even less regulated than the firearm industry back in the USA. At least there, kids couldn't produce fucking explosives.
Perspective.
"I'm a licensed seller," he explained. "That means I have to know how to make explosive tags and storage scrolls perfectly, so I can tell if any merchandise I receive from my suppliers is defective. I have a vested interest in your thorough education."
That makes sense, I suppose. Money was the best motivator.
"I'll teach you while it's slow," he decided. "If you want to start now."
"Yes, please," I said immediately.
I had so many questions, and I was incredibly frustrated that I couldn't ask any of them. Nyūdō was nice, but he wasn't my friend. If I showed even the slightest hint at proficiency and interest, he would blab, and my second life might as well be over.
"What do you know about seals?" He asked.
"Absolutely nothing," I lied. "I've seen a storage scroll, though. It's just a bunch of symbols; I don't understand how they do things. But, I mean, do I need to? I just need to copy them, right?"
Nyūdō snorted. "I wish. That right there is the biggest misconception about fuinjutsu. Seals can't simply be copied; they have to be tailored to fit the chakra signature of the person creating them."
This time, I didn't have to pretend not to understand what he meant.
"Do you know what a chakra signature is?" He asked.
"No, but from the name I'd assume it refers to the distinct characteristics of a person's chakra," I guessed.
"…that's correct," he said, probably not expecting that level of shrewdness from a four-year-old. "This relates to seal craft in several ways, most notably in the very first step. Seals aren't written with regular ink, you see. They require a special ink created from ground charcoal, sourced from special trees in the Land of Mountains, mixed with purified water. That is only half of the equation, however. That ink then has to be saturated in chakra."
So my attempts were doomed to fail before they began. I was just using regular ink. Some fics I'd read theorized that fuinjutsu needed special materials, like uncommon ink or paper, but there wasn't anything in canon to suggest that idea had any merit. I didn't think there was, anyway, but I didn't have an eidetic memory, and Narutopedia didn't exactly exist here, so who's to say?
Nyūdō wasn't finished.
"Once you have the ink, then you can work on seal creation. And I don't mean simply copying existing seals; those matrices won't work for you. You have to devise your own."
"Woah, woah," I said. "What do you mean they won't work for me?"
"There is a concept in fuinjutsu called chakra resonance," he explained. "If a seal matrix doesn't resonate with your chakra signature, it won't work at all. So, you see, you do need a little bit of background in fuinjutsu theory, even for something as simple as this should be."
"You're saying I have to come up with a seal from scratch?" I repeated, dumbfounded. What the fuck was this shit? It didn't make any sense! "How am I supposed to do that?"
"Not completely from scratch, don't worry," Nyūdō reassured. "There are plenty of examples to look through, and most of them contain the same core elements. You just have to figure out how to connect them yourself, in a way that's tailored to your specific chakra signature. Also, I have this."
He took out what looked to be a manual of sorts. It wasn't especially thick, but the pages were uncommonly large.
"This guide will help you craft your own personal explosive seal," he told me. "It has a bunch of examples in its pages. But more handy is the stage guide. Seal craft is usually broken down into stages, which, in essence, are miniature seals that, when combined together, create the final product. When each stage is completed, they can be activated as if they were their own seal. Their effects are usually pretty lackluster, but when put together, the effect should be a deadly explosion."
Leafing through the guide, I was kinda reminded of the manuals included in Lego kits. Where they'd have you build a bunch of elements and combine them all in the end. Except, you know, if those kits exploded when you finished them.
I fucking loved Legos. Especially Bionicles (the water ones were my favorite, of course). And now that I think about it, my main complaint about Bionicles was that they didn't explode, so, honestly, this was like a dream come true.
At the end was another section I quickly became the most excited about. An index of "words," complete with a description of their effects and a short blurb on when to use them. It was clearly limited to whatever words I would likely need to make my own personal exploding tag, but still it was a great start.
"This probably goes without saying, but you cannot, under any circumstance, test any of the steps, much less the final product, without my supervision. These are not toys; these are deadly weapons. You have to promise me, or I'll call this off right now."
"I promise," I said distractedly, my attention much more captivated by the text in front of me. Over the next couple months, my patience would be put to the ultimate test. If I advanced too quickly, it might indicate talent in fuinjutsu, so I should err on the side of caution. Maybe one step a week would be okay? Over the next couple weekends with Nyūdō, I would try and gauge how long the process would take.
Because Nyūdō was right. It would be really stupid of me to test seals without his supervision. Really, really stupid. So I would definitely not be doing that.
- - - { ワナビー } - - -
It was five o'clock that night, technically early Sunday morning. I hadn't slept a wink. Instead, I was at the kitchen table, with over thirty sheets of paper and a well of ink Nyūdō had lent me. He called it an investment.
The act of imbuing the ink was surprisingly intensive. I put twenty-four Hikari into it, which left me a touch woozy, before it began to glow faintly, signifying that it was ready.
The first step, out of eleven, was to create a seal that would vibrate the paper it was drawn on for four seconds. Not a moment more or less. There were five recommended words to create the effect, though the text theorized I would only use a handful of them. One of them, notably, was the symbol of the Snake seal.
It wasn't a cakewalk, even with the symbols given to me. I had to piece together their orientation and their connectors, and the information I had to go on regarding the effects of these variables was incredibly vague. I eventually decided to arrange them in a column (that was what this step looked like in four fifths of my examples) with the Snake seal on top.
Connecting them was the real issue, especially at first. But then, I had a realization about ninjutsu and hand seals. In written fuinjutsu, multiple words were tied to one another to form sentences, but in ninjutsu, the hand seals were disjointed. Saru, then Tori, then Uma and etcetera.
Or so I thought. But upon further inspection, after performing Doton: Dojō no Jutsu twenty or so times consecutively, I noticed similarities between my chakra's behavior and the fuinjutsu stage concept Nyūdō had described. As Kazuhiro had demonstrated long ago, hand seals weren't complete without a pulse of chakra. That chakra, I found upon examination, was then transformed by the seal itself and stored in either the tenketsu nearest to my wrists, or in one of two tenketsu next to each other in my palms. If the chakra is moved into my wrist, it is being temporarily held for safekeeping. If it settled in either point on my palm, it would be added to and transformed by the next hand seal I was making.
My light jutsu and my elemental jutsu had so few seals that it was hard to notice, so I tried it with the Kawarimi many times before aborting the jutsu at the last second (which grew uncomfortable after an hour). The first two signs, Hitsuji and Ii, combined and settled near my wrist. Then, Ushi and Inu were combined in my palms, before being shepherded to my wrists as well, where the two amalgamations themselves merged. Then, the final Mi seal was formed, combining with the rest, and the product moved back into my palms to be used.
How was this relevant? Well, because I realized that if hand seals weren't disjointed after all, the methods of connecting seals must be present in my canals, just like the seals themselves were. So I looked to my own chakra network for inspiration.
I felt like I was being given the answers to a test everyone around me was struggling with. Something that normally took hours and hours of guess and check, turned into a simple matter of effectively Googling the answers (though it still took a considerable amount of mental gymnastics to interpret the results). It was fantastic, and I needed all the advantages I could get.
"Crikey, I think this is it!" I decided, sleep deprivation and excitement turning me into an Aussie for some reason. "Let's fucking go!"
I slapped my hand on the paper and channeled my chakra, immediately feeling a buzz under my fingertips.
One.
Two.
Three.
"Fucking four!" I whooped, and the chair clattered to the floor as shot to my feet and fit pumped. "Let's go!"
Then my brain caught up. "Ah. I wasn't supposed to do that." Nyūdō told me not to activate any of the steps without his supervision. But this only took me—I looked at the clock—sixteen hours!
If I wanted to keep Nyūdō from thinking I was a fuinjutsu prodigy, I couldn't go back tomorrow with step one completed. It probably wouldn't even be believable to come back next week with it done. I should give him some failed attempts as well to throw him off too, if I really wanted to be careful. It would be weeks before I should even go back to him with a finished step two.
I didn't want to wait that long. I had already learned so much from stage one alone, and steps two and three built off it and one another. I could theoretically skip to step four, which was separate, and then step five. But the rest of the steps built off of that one, so they were a no go as well.
But what good would it do if I couldn't test any of the parts myself? I wouldn't be able to advance any more quickly.
"I'll be careful," I muttered. I had the advantage of being able to look at my own chakra network for guidance. I could do this without blowing myself up. And by the time I got Nyūdō's approval on my exploding tags, I would have already surpassed him in the art.
Yeah. I liked that. There was zero chance that I would come to regret that decision.
- - - { ワナビー } - - -
"Imouto?"
I awoke to a gentle poking on my shoulder, and I groaned, blearily opening up an eye.
"Five more minutes," I mumbled.
"Jeez. No love for your Nii-san, who you haven't seen in a whole week?" his voice grew concerned. "Are you okay? You're usually an early riser; are they really pushing you that hard in the academy?"
My eyes shot open. "Nii-san! You're back!"
"You must be tired," he teased, the smile returning as I hastily threw off the covers.
"Sorry, I got really caught up on something, and I forgot to go to sleep until, like five am."
"Kasaiki-chan, you can't do that," he reprimanded. "If I can't be here to make you go to sleep at a reasonable time, you have to promise to take care of yourself."
"...I'll try," I said, sheepishly. "It was just something really exciting. Unusually exciting."
"Even more than your other obsessions?" he wondered.
"Much more exciting," I confirmed. "I can't wait to tell you all about it when I'm done. If you can promise to keep it a secret, because it actually is a huge deal."
"Now I'm kinda scared," he said. "Maybe I want plausible deniability instead."
"Don't be a baby. You'll like it, and you'll probably benefit from it a lot too."
"Okay, okay. I'm excited to hear about it, then. Any hints?"
"Nope. So, what do you want to do today?"
"Nothing that involves exercise, that's for sure," he said, and I could hear the weariness in his voice. See the tenseness in his posture too, now that I looked.
I was suddenly struck with a great idea.
"I know what you need!" I said, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. "Let's go get massages!"
Massage was a Thing™ here in this pseudo-Japanese culture. The massage parlor was a place for social gathering, as well as tranquility and relaxation. But also a place of vulnerability. As such, there was a fifty-fifty split between people (especially ninja) who loved them, and people who avoided them like the plague. It seemed Kazuhiro leaned more towards the latter camp.
"I don't know, imouto," he said slowly. "I've never gotten a massage before. It's always seemed a bit strange to me."
"I get that," I mused. Having a stranger touch you so intimately for such an extended amount of time was a bit daunting, especially here, where physical contact was shied away from in general. "But it will probably help you a lot with your recovery. It's good to try new things, even if they're a bit strange. Maybe it will become your favorite thing in the world?"
In the U.S. military, our domestic bases had masseuses on staff. They were in such demand that appointments had to be booked days in advance, however, so it was a luxury that I still could only rarely enjoy.
"Don't your muscles hurt a lot? They might not after a good massage."
That seemed to be the clincher. "Okay," he decided with some trepidation. "I'll give it a shot."
"Great! Maybe we can get breakfast on the way?"
"It's almost noon," he deadpanned. "It'll be lunch for me."
"Brunch, then!" I decided, and he chuckled. That wasn't a term people used here.
He gave me some privacy to change, and then we left. There was a Crêpe stand nearish to our house, though they weren't called that, and they didn't look all too similar either. Instead of being flat or folded over, they were rolled into a cone shape, and we could pick what toppings to stuff them with. I took jellied berries and sweetened cream, and Kazuhiro went savory with natto and pork.
Then, I dragged the still visibly reluctant Kazuhiro to one of the parlors I spied on my way to the academy each morning. Under the rocky dome most buildings in Iwa were capped with was an oddly rustic storefront, which looked almost out of place in its surroundings. It heavily featured bamboo, and there were paper lanterns, unlit at this time of day, hanging under each corner of the awning.
It was moderately busy, as it often was, and Kazuhiro's stride grew noticeably more wary. His eyes flitted from face to face, as if expecting someone to know and tease him.
"If someone recognizes you, then they're here for a massage too," I pointed out.
"...right. You're right."
I spoke to the lady at the front desk, who seemed amused that I was the one addressing her, and we were told to wait. But not for long; a middle-aged woman, probably around fifty, called us back.
"Nii-san's nervous," I muttered, and the woman gave me a slight smile to signify that she heard.
"Shinobi?" she wondered, just as softly. Kazuhiro wasn't wearing his headband (contrary to popular belief, most people did take it off when they weren't on duty), but from his physique it wasn't a huge leap in logic.
"Yep."
She nodded, and her countenance changed.
"Right," she said, more brusque. "Changing rooms are through there, along with shelves of garments, organized by size. Once you're in the proper attire, return here, quickly."
She gave me a little wink as we did as directed, and I gave her a grin. They knew their clientele, that's for sure. Kindness, warmth and the whole honored guest thing would only serve to make shinobi more uncomfortable. Giving orders and making this seem more like a medical procedure would make them feel more at ease.
As directed, we both returned with flowy shorts reminiscent of boxers, though I had a matching top with two large buttons holding it together at the back. Not really necessary at my age, but I donned it anyway.
"Who's first?" she asked, and I fielded the question to Kazuhiro with my eyes. He clearly didn't want to go first, but he also didn't tell me to. He probably didn't want to throw his cute little god-sister to the wolves. To preempt an awkward pause, and Kazuhiro's embarrassment, I volunteered. Insisted, more like—I probably laid it on a little too thick.
I settled onto the cushioned bench, resting my face into the ovular opening. It smelled like incense.
"Hard as you can, please," I grunted.
"You sure?" she asked, voice less strict now that she was addressing a child and not Kazuhiro. "It might be a bit much."
"I'm training to be a shinobi," I said. "Destroy me."
I imagined she gave me an obliging nod, and opened my shirt from the back. She paused for several long seconds, and I belatedly realized that she must have been taken aback by my muscles or my scars; both looked out of place on this body. She was professional, though, and made no comment, to which I was extremely grateful.
She set into me without fanfare, working oil into my skin with forceful precision. I didn't hold back my groans of satisfaction, hoping they might make Kazuhiro a bit more eager for his own turn.
"You do your stretches," she observed. "That's very good. Most don't."
"I need every advantage I can get," I grunted.
"You also seem to hold a lot of stress in your muscles. Especially in the lower back."
"I sit at a desk most of the day at the academy. And a fair amount over the weekend too. And I meditate sitting for long periods of time before bed." Sometimes hours. My meditation nowadays blended into sleep seamlessly, as I lost myself to the thrumming waves inside me, created not by wind but by my own heartbeat. "Plus, there's all of the strength training. My shoulders probably need some attention too, and my traps. And probably my calves."
I could have laid on that bench for hours, but unfortunately I only had around forty minutes. Then, the masseuse buttoned my top back up, and I rolled off with a groan. I could feel the blood flow through my muscles more freely than it had before, and my back felt lighter than it had in…ever. In this life, at least.
Looking back, I was glad to find Kazuhiro looking at me in amusement rather than trepidation.
"Nii-san, I feel like I've been reborn," I said, seriously. "Like the kami switched my blood with theirs."
"I didn't know you were a poet, imouto," he joked.
"I didn't realize how beautiful life could be until this moment."
He laughed. "Okay, okay. I get it."
After our masseuse wiped it down with a damp, perfumed rag (the source of the smell), Kazuhiro laid down upon it, taking up a lot more of its length than I had.
"I'll start off lighter, and then increase the pressure."
"I can take it," he protested, and the woman rolled her eyes to me.
"It's not about taking it. It's about what's most effective for your body. I didn't start off heavy with the little one either."
She set to work, and though Kazuhiro didn't make any of the noises I had, I was pretty sure he was enjoying it. Though the woman had to tell him to untense his muscles several times at first.
"You need to work stretching your legs after you run," she noted seriously. "I bet you experience a sharp pain in your lower calves, and right above your knees. You're young, but after some time it will lead to a pervasive weakness."
"You can tell all that?"
"There is a lot I can tell from a person's muscles. A massage isn't about simply feeling good in the moment; it's about long-term health. I've spent many years learning the secrets of the human body, and I work quite closely with medic-nin on occasion. They sometimes send me patients who are in the process of physical rehabilitation."
"I never knew that," Kazuhiro said, and I grinned. I loved beating stigmas. Too many people, especially shinobi, would do anything to avoid admitting weakness, even if doing so might help eliminate it. Maybe this would keep Kazuhiro from joining their number. Whilst in the village, at least; sometimes, in this world, it paid to be cautious.
"How do you feel?" I asked him when his time was up.
"Actually? Amazing." he rolled his shoulders and twisted at the hip several times. "There was a sharp pain under my shoulder blade that is completely gone now. Wow, this is incredible." he hopped off the bench and bowed low to the woman. "Thank you so much for your service."
"It was my pleasure," she said with a soft smile.
"What's your name?" I asked. "Maybe we can request you in the future?"
"I am Hara Kinuyo. I would be pleased to attend to you again."
After she led us back to the changing rooms, where we retrieved our clothes, we were about to leave the parlor. But then, I saw a familiar face in the lobby.
"Hirose-san," I greeted Daigo, who was standing with an older man who was extremely tall and bore the same piercing eyes.
"Imai-san," he greeted in return. "I was not aware you patronized this establishment."
"This was my first time," I explained. "My first time getting a massage at all, actually. I dragged nii-san here, because I thought it would help him, but I think I enjoyed it more than he did. Do you come here often?"
He nodded. "My father and I come here on Sundays after intensive training. As you doubtlessly discovered, it is good for recovery."
I snorted. "You shouldn't work so hard on the weekend. It's supposed to be a break."
"From the bags under your eyes, I don't think you're one to talk," he shot back. This is why I liked Daigo, aside from the fact that he didn't quite have the physical strength to utterly fuck me up in taijutsu (he usually won, still, and he could disrupt my hold, but he hadn't sent me to the hospital yet). He had a sharp tongue.
"I have to maintain my advantage somehow," I said with a shrug. "Anyway, this is my god-brother, Asano Kazuhiro. Nii-san, this is Hirose Daigo. He beats me up a lot."
"In taijutsu sparring," Daigo said quickly, shooting me a glare.
"I would be very surprised if anyone her own age could beat her in anything but taijutsu sparring," he said with humor. It was only after living with him for so long that I could tell it was forced. His eye darted upward to meet Daigo's father's.
"Not if I was allowed to use genjutsu," he muttered, only really intending for me to hear it. I doubted he was successful.
My grin sharpened. "I wonder about that." I looked up at the senior Hirose. "Your father, I presume?"
"Hirose Akikazu," the man introduced. "It is a pleasure to meet you. Daigo doesn't speak much about his classmates."
"That doesn't surprise me," I said. "Few are worth mentioning."
Unseen by the Hiroses, Kazuhiro flicked me on the back in admonishment. I ignored him.
"You certainly don't lack confidence," the jonin said, giving no clue as to what he thought of that. "I'm curious if it's well-founded."
Then, the hair on my neck began to stand on end, as the shadows all around us darkened. They flickered unnaturally, and the sound of a thousand whispering voices prickled my ears. I strained to hear what they might be saying, but I couldn't parse out anything intelligible. My heartbeat quickened, though I didn't know why, and I thought I could see figures appear in the shadows.
I'm not an idiot. I immediately dove into my canals, searching by feel for whatever didn't belong. I found a tendril of sludge creeping around my chest, and another through my brain. It curled around my Gate of Healing, plucking at it delicately like a harpist would their instrument.
It was at that moment that I realized I had severely underestimated the art of Genjutsu. I had always thought of it as a fragile thing. Subtle but delicate wisps of chakra, which could only remain as long as the target was unaware of their existence. I had even fantasized that, with my impeccable control and awareness over my own chakra system, they might not affect me at all.
I was wrong. Genjutsu was dominating, a firm hand that wrangled your senses into complying instead of gently guiding them. And when I tried to dismantle Hirose's chakra, it fought back.
I followed the anime's instructions; halting the flow of chakra through my system, and then flaring it. But instead of the imprint shattering, it stretched like hot gum, pulling itself back together when I released my chakra.
Fine, I mentally snarled. If I can't break you, I'll just push you out.
I pulsed my chakra, forging a current through my canals. Despite its attempts at clinging to the walls of my coils, I quickly manage to contain it in a fast-flowing stream. Then, I used my own chakra to sweep it towards the nearest tenketsu, flushing the entire globule out of my canals altogether. The bit in my chest soon followed.
I immediately felt a concerned hand on my shoulder.
"I apologize," I said immediately, not having a clue what was going on around me. "It seems as if my training has caught up to me."
The grin found its way back to my face as I looked the older Hirose, stoic as if he hadn't just mentally assaulted me, dead in the eye. I just had my first exposure to genjutsu, and though overcoming it was much more difficult than I thought it would be, I still managed the feat.
"It was a pleasure to meet you sir. Thanks for the lesson."
I turned back to Kazuhiro, who was staring at me with a raised eyebrow. "I'm tired. Let's go home. Ja na, Hirose-sans."
I needed to come up with a better way to combat genjutsu; that was way too inefficient. And even more urgently, I needed to find a better way to detect that I was in one. If the technique the older Hirose had snagged me in wasn't so unsubtle, I might not have been able to get rid of it until it was too late.
I'll add that to the to-do list, I guess. Maybe I'd try harder to befriend the Hirose family. I could see that becoming incredibly beneficial in the future, especially once war broke out with Konoha.
The Sharingan versus my internal chakra control. I needed to make sure I would come out on top.
- - - { ワナビー } - - -
Once the god-siblings left, Daigo turned to his father with a frown.
"Did you really just genjutsu my classmate?"
The elder Hirose raised an eyebrow. "What makes you think I did anything of the sort?"
"Imai is usually spacy, but not like that. And I saw her eyes flicker—she was checking her peripherals. Plus, her breath hitched."
"Good observations," his father praised. "As I've taught you." He looked back at the door the little girl had just left through. "An early enrollee?"
"Yes."
"Is she good?"
"Unfortunately. Taijutsu is really the only subject anyone can touch her in, and even then she makes us work for it. You know how Yoshiro-sensei let me test out of math for a couple semesters?"
"And allowed you to complete some of the theoretical work I've given you instead?"
"Yeah. Well, Imai-san was the only one in the class to answer every one of his questions correctly. And at the end, he said she never had to take a math class in the academy ever again."
Hirose Akikazu hummed. "So she's intelligent."
"And she knows ninjutsu."
That was more of an impressive reveal.
"I've heard rumors that sensei let her join an affinity class, and she learned an elemental jutsu on her first attempt."
"That would be interesting," he said, speculatively. "She can break a genjutsu, that's for certain. Though I did use one with a physiological stimulant."
Some jutsu created visions meant to influence an emotion. Others fabricated emotions, and allowed them to shape what the target saw or felt. The jutsu he targeted the little girl with fell into the latter category.
"What did you use? An offshoot of the Temple of Nirvana?
"No," he answered, eyes narrowed at the little girl's back until she and her brother rounded a corner. "An offshoot of the Hell Viewing technique."
Daigo blinked in surprise. "Isn't that…a bit much?"
"Clearly not. She dismantled it somehow before it reached the six second mark."
The Hell Viewing technique got pretty bad after that. He would have canceled it at that point, before it could do real damage to her psyche.
"You didn't cancel it yourself?" Daigo asked, surprise coloring his voice.
"No. And, frankly, I'm not certain how she did it either. She didn't starve it, she…moved it? Pushed it out of her body? I could feel my connection to the jutsu, even after it was clear that it was no longer affecting her. It was very odd."
His eyes settled on his son. "Befriend her. I want to know how she did that. It might seem small, but in a genjutsu battle…"
If he could replicate the technique, he could potentially trick opponents into thinking their genjutsu still affected him for a brief window of time, when it had actually already been neutralized. That would give him the chance to counterattack while they were still focused on maintaining their ineffective jutsu.
"Hai," Daigo said, seeming entirely unenthused by the prospect.
- - - { ワナビー } - - -
AN: Another chapter complete! I'm pretty satisfied with this one. Had to come up with headcanons for how a bunch of things in the Naruto universe worked, which was fun. From some of the reviews you guys leave, it seems like you enjoy them too, so I hope you like what I've come up with!
The world of Naruto has a lot of Deus Ex Machina, but none is more infuriating to me than fuinjutsu. I did a lot of research, trying to find some explanation of why seals couldn't simply be copied and used by anyone. I found almost nothing, so I scrapped what little I did find and came up with my own system. Only people who understand fuinjutsu can make seals in this universe, and that's why masters are so damn valuable.
Speaking of Deus Ex Machina, genjutsu. Basically useless in the anime unless you're an Uchiha. But at the same time, they're capable of enslaving biju? Like, what? They simultaneously need a nerf at the higher levels, and a buff at the lower levels. So that's what I'm going to do. Expect genjutsu to actually have a role in this story, but hopefully a believable one.
Also, genjutsu as a discipline simply doesn't make sense in the Naruto universe. Isn't it stated that foreign chakra can't exist in a person's body without poisoning them? Isn't that the whole point of medical ninjutsu? I'm still working on an explanation for this.
My DMs are open if anyone has material they can direct me to about any of this. Or if you have your own headcanons, and you want to offer them to me for inclusion. Can't promise I will, as I already have solid theories of my own, but I'm not one to turn down great ideas if I can make them fit. I will definitely credit you in any way you desire.
Last thing. Have y'all seen the new Spiververse? Holy shit. The first was already my favorite animated movie of all time. Now it's my second. How they managed to make a sequel even better than the first…serious props to everyone involved. Currently, I'm living in a state of shock—any of y'all get that? That pseudo depression you get after finishing a long, amazing fic, TV show or movie? Good thing I finished writing this two days ago, before I saw the movie. I straight up would not have been able to write this chapter; Across the Spiderverse really is all I can think about. I barely had it in me just to edit.
If anyone has any Spiderverse fic recommendations on any platform, I would be incredibly grateful for them. Hell, I might write one myself, if I ever find time. Thank you, and I'll see you next week!