Time Braid

14. Idyl

Disclaimer: I don’t own Naruto. Of course, he doesn’t even appear in this chapter, so maybe I should say I don’t own Sakura instead?

Life on the mountain was lonely at times, but not having an audience to fool or an act to keep up was an enormous relief. For the first time in decades I could just relax and do whatever I wanted to, without having to worry about what someone would think or whether I was going to blow my cover. I was in heaven.

In the mornings I trained my body. My original self had become a taijutsu master the hard way, and my demon had stolen ever style three hidden villages had to offer, but blending the broken fragments of those skills together into something that worked well for me took effort. I started with bits of speed-based styles meant for kunoichi, with their mastery of dodging and precision strikes and conservation of chakra. The fluid evasion of jyuuken complemented that approach, as did the confusion and invisibility genjutsu I’d learned in recent years. As my skill solidified I began to weave replacements and clones and more elaborate illusions into my kata, regained my old deft touch at regulating my jutsu-born strength on the fly, and finally found the key to applying the same technique to my speed.

When I’d begun I was still a young girl, but as my ability to wield high-level techniques gradually returned I began to perfect my body as well as my skills. Unfettered by the need to avoid attention I aged myself a week or more every day, until by the time the winter snows stopped falling I was a young woman of twenty instead of a child. I made myself lean and strong, restoring all the resilience and endurance I’d developed in those long loops of taijutsu training. I’d thought to make myself beautiful after that, but when I was done I looked in the mirror at the sleek, fey creature I’d become and realized there was no need. I didn’t have to compete with Hinata’s figure, or Ino’s hair, or Anko’s aggressive sexuality. For the first time in my life I found I was comfortable with the body I wore, and that was enough.

In the afternoons I meditated, turning my senses inward in an effort to restore order to my battered soul. Some days I dropped all the way to my innermost vision of myself, and spent hours sorting through the heaps of thought and memory that lay there in jumbled disarray. Other days I stopped in the place I called my mindscape, and worked at pushing back the swirling chaos and coaxing life from the barren earth. Both projects were exhausting, painfully slow and prone to triggering long episodes of confusion and self-doubt, and for a few weeks I wasn’t sure I would ever make any progress. But then one day I was meditating in the more conventional way, trying to achieve some tiny bit of serenity, when I hit on the idea of contemplating my name.

Three syllables. Seven notes. A single symbol, if I ever chose to write it down. Yet somehow everything I was or had been or could be was there, only hints at the surface, but as I teased at it the tiny snatch of song blossomed in my mind into a symphony of hidden complexity. It was exactly like the more advanced seal arrays, where you cover an entire room with a complex diagram of thousands of symbols and then they shrink to a single unremarkable character on command.

I spent a day and a night and most of the next day in wordless contemplation of the promise and possibility that I’d discovered in that one word. So many paths. So many dichotomies. So many choices. But the same themes underlay them all, and I emerged with a truer understanding of my own nature than I could ever put into words. As the sun set I stood on the barren earth of my mindscape, and sang a song of life and hope and redemption in the key of my true name. Then I laid down to sleep, and for once my rest was untroubled by nightmares of misery and madness.

When I awoke, what had been bare earth was dotted with fresh green shoots reaching up to meet the dawn.

Even in the depths of winter the mountains were full of life, and despite having a ninja’s appetite I never wanted for food. There were rabbits everywhere, and once I learned to glide soundlessly over fallen snow I could catch them bare-handed with ease. There were deer in the lower valleys, that I could outrun easily and bring down with a deft flick of a kunai. There were fish in the frozen ponds that I could catch with chakra strings, and mountain goats that never seemed to figure out that I could run up a cliff face to reach them. Gathering food took just enough effort to be satisfying, although a diet of pure meat did get old after awhile.

There were also wolves in the valley, and a snow leopard that lived on the higher slopes of my mountain, but they were smart enough to recognize me as a predator rather than prey. This amused me at first, but after the second time I ran across the wolf pack while hunting and they quietly slunk out of my way I resolved to leave them alone. Anything intelligent enough to spot the difference between a normal human and a chakra adept is too close to sentience to have a place on my menu.

By the time the snows began to melt there were fresh saplings springing up in my mindscape, and what was once a tiny patch of bare earth had grown into a wide field of soft grass dotted with wildflowers. But between wind and weather and the inevitable training accidents my clothing was reduced to rags, and my efforts to make something wearable out of the hides of my kills were less than appealing. So one fine spring morning I made my way down the mountain to the valley below, and followed the stream at its foot in search of civilization.

Twenty miles to the south the stream fed into a small but navigable river. A mile further on I found a little trading post with a dock and rooms for rent, surrounded by a modest cluster of farms and a few shops of the sort that cater to trappers and hunters. I must have been an odd sight, with my long pink hair and ragged clothes, because all conversation stopped when I walked in the door.

There was a cluster of chairs around a massive chunk of granite that apparently served as a table on one side of the room, next to a fireplace big enough to warm the place even in the dead of winter. A long wooden counter that apparently doubled as a bar ran along the back wall, and a row of wooden cabinets behind it held a variety of goods — bows and arrows, tents, bolts of cloth, a couple of bear traps, and a considerable array of packs and pouches and assorted small items.

I nodded to the burly fellow behind the counter as I approached, ignoring the cluster of rough-looking men eating lunch by the fire. “I’m looking to make a trade,” I told him. “I need new clothes, and blankets, and some other odds and ends, but I don’t have any cash. Is there anyone in town who needs healing?”

He eyed me speculatively. “We got an herb lady,” he said. “But she don’t fix everything. You a real doctor?”

I nodded.

“You can heal me, angel!” One of the customers interrupted with a laugh. “Just sit that fine ass on down in my lap, and uncle Jiro’ll make sure you get just what you need.”

“Excuse me for a moment,” I told the guy at the counter, and vanished. I reappeared next to laughing boy, and bent to pick up their cute little boulder-table. I lifted the three-ton mass over my head with one hand, and put the other on my hip.

“Boys, I know what I look like, and I’m sure you must be short on women up here, so I’ll let that one slide. But my ‘fine ass’ belongs to a man who turns into a dragon, and the next guy who mouths off to me is going to need be lucky if he just needs a new face. Got it?”

“Y-yes, ma’am!” Laughing boy stammered, as the others all nodded frantically. “Sorry, ma’am. Won’t happen again!”

“Good.” I vanished in a little swirl of softly-scented sakura petals, letting the boulder crash back to the floor with just enough force to rattle their teeth as I reappeared at the counter. “Idiots,” I muttered. “Is it really that hard to see what I am? Ah, well. Yes, I’m a fully qualified doctor and chakra-healer.”

“Old Kaneda took sick over the winter, don’t seem to be getting better,” the counter guy observed amiably. “His wife’s the local seamstress, could probably do you up something.”

“It’s a start.”

Tanner’s End was a rough little place, but I found myself visiting again every month or so. There were so many little things I couldn’t make for myself, and found that I didn’t want to live without now that I had a source of supply. Clothing and blankets, herbs and seasonings, cooking implements and food that wasn’t meat. Such a small settlement didn’t need a doctor often enough to pay for it all, but I soon found a comfortable side business selling the stone crockery I’d learned to make while practicing earth control. My first efforts were heavy and fragile, but by midsummer I’d worked out how to fuse earth and stone into thin, hard shapes with a variety of colors and textures. Experimenting with such subtle effects was a relaxing change from the massive brute force of earth-based combat techniques, and I spent many a weekend playing with ideas and learning what I could do. Selling the results of those experiments wasn’t going to make me rich, but it made the difference between hunting for most of my food and buying it in town.

By the end of the season my combat effectiveness was easily back to the level I’d reached before my little misadventure with the Sharingan. My chakra was stronger than it had ever been, probably due to the merger of all my aspects, and the hole in my psyche that Hinata had patched for me was finally healed. I was healthy enough to rejoin Naruto and Hinata without being ashamed of myself, and sane enough that I wasn’t afraid I’d say or do something crazy and ruin things.

But I didn’t want to go back.

There were trees in my mindscape again, but they were young and fragile and a pale shadow of what I felt they could become. I had memories of whole schools of ninjutsu I’d stolen with the Sharingan, that I could easily reconstruct with a bit of time and effort. I’d begun to see how I might go about separating into aspects again without damaging myself in the process, but I was a long way from being ready to try it. My earth techniques were improving by leaps and bounds, enough to make me suspect there was a higher level of earth mastery I could reach if I just continued my training.

I didn’t want to be a child again.

I stood atop the highest peak of my mountain as the sun set on the last day of summer, and shook my head at my own foolishness.

“I’m not on a schedule. I can stay here as long as I want. I’ll keep at it until I’m finished, or I hit a block I can’t get through without help, or until being here alone stops being a pleasant break and becomes a burden.”

I’d promised myself to find a way to defend my mindscape against intruders, but it took the better part of another long winter to find an approach that might work. A castle would be no barrier against ninja, and the same was true of anything else that could exist in the real world. But my ability to alter my inner world grew quickly with practice, and at length I realized that I could do more than raise walls or rearrange the trees or sing new growth into being. This was my mind, and there was no reason it had to abide by any rules but my own.

So I called to mind a wild jungle, filled with savage beasts and poisonous vines and blood-sucking insects, and sealed my garden of cool grass and sakura trees inside it. The dichotomy somehow made both places more real than they’d been before, and the next morning I found that my chakra had grown substantially. Apparently making my mindscape a better mirror of my nature had all sorts of benefits, but I was too busy constructing defenses to experiment further at the time.

In the first version of the defense there was a portal from jungle to garden, built on seal techniques that would probably work in the real world if I had the strength to power them. But in the weeks that followed I warped the portal and the seals that formed it in my imagination, bit by careful bit, until the portal was simply the space between two hanging vines and the seals were no longer needed.

Then I made it so the portal wasn’t there unless you walked three times counterclockwise around a little hill first. But the hill wasn’t there until you walked down a particular trail whistling the right tune, and the trail wasn’t there unless you held a sprig of mistletoe, and there was no mistletoe to be found unless… well, you get the idea. It took months of effort, but it was worth it. When I was done I raised a little fake garden surrounded by rose bushes in the middle of the forest, and smiled.

“If an attack comes from outside, this is as far as it gets. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Yamanaka, or an Uchiha, or a rampaging bijuu. If they’re careless this decoy should fool them, but even if they’re not they won’t find the real garden. No amount of brute force will open the way, and no technique based on the real world will bypass my defenses. There are still flaws to correct, but this is a barrier that could stop even an S-rank enemy.”

“Which is a good thing, since that’s the only kind I seem to have these days.”

The first snows of my second winter on the mountain were beginning to fall when my solitude was briefly interrupted. I was out hunting the morning after a blizzard, when I picked up what felt suspiciously like human chakra in my valley.

Feeling a bit annoyed by the intrusion I followed the trace downhill to a little copse of trees near the stream, where I found a crude lean-to and a scruffy-looking man trying to start a fire. He wasn’t having much luck, since the wood was damp and he was using flint and steel instead of a fire jutsu. But after a moment’s observation I realized his left leg was broken, which would make it a bit difficult to forage for dry tinder.

There was another blizzard rolling down from the north, and a lean-to wasn’t much of a shelter. He probably wouldn’t survive the night.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to go hunting up here alone?” I asked as I stalked into the camp. He started and reached for the boar spear that was laid on the snow next to him. I rolled my eyes. “If I was here to kill you, you’d already be dead. Answer the question.”

“My partner got spooked and headed off to town a couple days ago,” he admitted reluctantly. “Saw some funny-looking rocks and said he didn’t want nothing to do with no earth ninja. Crazy git. My name’s Kenichi, by the way.”

“Sakura,” I said, and lit the fire with a camping jutsu. Kenichi’s eyes went wide. “And your partner was smarter than you are. Lucky for you I’m just a hermit, and not a team on a secret mission. Let me take a look at that leg.”

“Ah, yes ma’am,” he stammered. “Um, you’re a ninja?”

“I’m retired,” I informed him. “Hmm. Clean break in the fibula, but that’s a nasty compound fracture in the tibia and it looks like your right hand isn’t in such hot shape either. What did you do, walk off a cliff?”

He suddenly became fascinated with the ground. “This area is pretty treacherous,” he admitted. “But you have to keep trying new hunting grounds to get good furs. Mink aren’t that common these days, and snow leopards are hard to trap.”

“There’s nothing in my valley but wolves, deer and rabbits,” I lied to him with a frown. “So tell your buddies to stay out. I like my privacy.”

“If I make it back to town,” he said.

“You’ll be fine,” I told him. Then I focused my will, and transformed his leg and hand back to full health with a carefully regulated effort. He gasped, poked at the spot where the break had been, and gave me a dumbfounded stare.

“But… that’s impossible,” he muttered. “Even ninja doctors can’t do that, can they?”

“Don’t ask questions when you know the answer would only bring you trouble,” I advised him. “Now, there’s another storm coming in so you’d better find some real shelter. But the next time I come down the mountain to hunt I expect to find an empty campsite and no sign of a lost trapper. Clear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he promised. “I’ll be off your land as soon as the weather clears.”

The dead of winter might seem an odd time to practice fire techniques, but it worked out splendidly. At first I’d simply thought the snow that blanketed everything would be a convenient protection against accidental fires, which would otherwise be a common problem with all those Konoha ‘breath fire out your mouth’ techniques I’d copied. But the cold, wet environment also made such techniques harder to perform, which in turn led me to notice subtle details I might otherwise have missed.

My first day it was a struggle to make a simple Fire Breath come out right, but within a week I had a workable level of control over Grand Fireball and even Fire Dragon. Fire wasn’t my best element, and the fact that I had to actually run through all the hand seals for each technique would be a limitation in battle, but I was improving quickly enough that a few months of practice might overcome that problem.

Which was odd, even for me. Lots of ninja can work more than one element, but doing it without seals is supposed to be impossible unless your own chakra nature matches the technique you’re trying to perform. Otherwise you need to convert your chakra’s elemental nature to the one required by the technique, and no amount of practice will let you internalize the conversion seals for a foreign element. Some people do have more than one affinity, but I’d tested myself years ago. Earth was my element, with a secondary affinity for water that had always seemed too weak to be worth training.

Of course, that was before I scrambled my aspects. Come to think of it, hadn’t the Kyuubi said something to me about kami using aspects to master contradictory powers?

I didn’t have any chakra-reactive paper, but that isn’t the only way to test affinities. Frowning thoughtfully, I returned to my little stone house and dug out a jar of bay leaves I’d bought earlier in the year. I retrieved one, centered myself, focused my chakra senses, and tried the leaf-drying exercise.

The familiar task was as effortless as usual, and I could see the earth-natured chakra flow through my system normally. I nodded, and pulled out another one.

This time I went for the fire-natured version, trying to burn the leaf to ash without invoking a formal technique. I’d never tried this before, and it proved to be much more difficult. I tried to remember what the fire-natured chakra had felt like earlier in the day, when I’d laboriously worked the Fire Breath technique with a full set of seals. It was hot, yes, but that was superficial. Merry. Dancing, floating, hungry, beautiful and dangerous…

Fire, I sang to myself, trying to match the feel of my chakra to the word. There was a twinge of pain as the cool crystalline patterns of thought and memory I’d worked so hard to restore flexed, stretched, let go of their moorings and awkwardly began to dance. A surge of hot chakra rushed up my arm into the leaf, and reduced it to a fine cloud of ash.

I laughed in delight, and twirled through a few steps of some half-remembered dance before I realized my hair was on fire.

“Oops.” I quenched it with a giggle, and paused to take stock of myself.

“Did I just change my chakra nature? I did, didn’t I? And it affected my personality too, just like switching aspects used to. This is so cool! I wonder if I can do it other elements?”

Water came as easily as fire, though again I had to speak the element’s name to make the shift. Returning to my default earth nature was nearly effortless, and with a bit of a struggle I even managed air briefly. Then I came to lighting, and discovered that I didn’t know a word that meant lightning-as-a-chakra-nature, rather than electrical-current or static-charge or a dozen other more specific manifestations. Without a precise name to use as a focus the inner nature of lightning chakra eluded me, and I found myself unable to make that shift.

But it was still a neat discovery, with all kinds of potential uses. Not least of which was the fact that changing chakra natures seemed to rely on the same mental flexibility that I’d once used to switch aspects, and practicing it might make my eventual goal of recreating a second aspect attainable.

It was a busy winter.

The spring thaw found me with what I considered a good chuunin-level mastery of all three of my new elements, although most chuunin could never have managed C-rank techniques without hand seals the way I could. It still took me a minute or so to shift my chakra nature, which made the trick useless in a real fight, but making the change didn’t tire me the way it had at first. I was becoming confident that I’d be able to re-aspect myself along elemental lines if I wanted to, and I was seeing hints that I might be able to take on two compatible natures at once with a bit more work. So I was in a good mood when I dropped into Tanner’s End for my first supply run of the new year.

I had considerably more business waiting for me than expected. Apparently Kenichi had talked, and the story had grown in the telling as they often do, because there were a dozen people from nearby villages waiting in hopes of cures for all sorts of ills. Most of them were the sorts of medical problem I’d treated before, but the six year old girl with the cleft lip was well beyond the limits of any village healer. I thought at first she must have been hurt in an accident, until my scan revealed that the problem was congenital. Most medical techniques simply increase the body’s ability to heal itself, which makes them useless for defects that the body thinks are natural.

“Please, say you’ll help,” the little girl’s mother said anxiously. “All the other healers say it’s hopeless, but there has to be something you can do.”

“That’s a tricky problem,” I temporized. “The major ninja villages have medic-nin who could do reconstructive surgery to fix it. But it’s an expensive procedure, and it usually leaves scars.”

The little girl gave me a hopeful look. “Can you help me?” She asked. “So Rei and Yoko won’t tease me anymore? Please, pretty kami lady?”

I sighed. I didn’t want to attract attention, but I didn’t have the heart to turn her away. “I’m not a kami, sweetie, but I can help. Just hold still for a minute, and I’ll give you the prettiest smile in the village.”

That evening I sat on a rock overlooking the little lake at the heart of my valley, and contemplated the gulf that separates the world of elite ninja and supernatural beasts from that of these simple country peasants. I’d always known that a jounin can defeat hundreds of normal opponents at once in battle, but somehow I’d never quite noticed that the rest of our abilities are equally outlandish.

But here, it was hard to ignore. With my strength and speed and endurance I could do the work of a hundred men. With my earth techniques I could throw up a whole town’s worth of buildings in a matter of days, and my handiwork would probably stand for centuries. With my healing…

I turned a stone into a knife of glass, and used it to sever the smallest finger of my right hand. I chose not to feel the pain, and with my will already focused on the wound it didn’t even bleed. I grew it back with no more effort that it would take to form a shadow clone, and noted absently that using my transformation technique to heal was getting easier with practice.

I could cure almost any physical ill, as long as I could sense the cause, and I was beginning to suspect that even old age wasn’t beyond me. Spiritual injuries were more difficult, and I couldn’t raise the dead… but I’d seen it done. Was this what it meant, to be an S-rank ninja? To stand so far outside the ordinary limits of humanity that normal people mistake you for a kami?

“Maybe that’s why elite ninja are so prone to megalomania,” I said with a chuckle. At least that was one flaw I wasn’t likely to fall prey to. My demon self’s memories made it clear just how insignificant our tiny world is in the vastness of the cosmos, and even the greatest ninja are no more than insects to the higher kami. A class one deity can erase an entire world’s existence with a word, and I had the distinct impression that there were higher levels of celestial powers above even them.

“But we have so much power compared to normal people. Why do we only use it to destroy?”

I’d learned hundreds of ninjutsu in my life, and could still use dozens. But aside from my medical techniques they were all meant for war. Shouldn’t there be techniques for peace? Earth users could be fantastic engineers. Fire specialists could work metal and power industrial equipment. Water users could call rain and control floods. Air adepts can fly, one of the most useful powers I can imagine.

I shook my head sadly. “We’ve spent so many generations locked in an endless power struggle that no one even thinks about anything else. Ninja wars turn on subterfuge and the personal power of our elites, so why bother worrying about how the common people live? Why should they have doctors, or roads, or warm homes with roofs that don’t leak?”

I’m sure some people felt otherwise, but it was so easy to let the constant struggle for an edge in battle crowd out everything else. I’d done it myself, despite having limitless time and what I was beginning to realize must be a phenomenal talent for jutsu engineering.

“Not anymore,” I vowed. “I have to become as strong as I can, because if I can’t protect my home nothing else matters in the end. But I’m not going to forget about the ordinary people. Somehow, there has to be a way to help them too. Maybe we could train civilians in peaceful techniques, or use seal mastery to build helpful machines, or somehow give more people control of their chakra. Maybe I just need to invent those peaceful techniques, and teach them when the loop ends, and the rest will follow.”

“Or maybe we need to end the wars,” I mused. “Unite all the elemental countries under a single government, and bring stability to the world. If we were strong enough that no one thought they could challenge us…”

I thought back to Naruto’s last battle with Gaara, and smiled. “That just might work. What do you know, maybe wanting to conquer the world doesn’t always make you the bad guy.”

Fortunately my corner of Snow Country was remote enough to discourage visitors, so only a tiny trickle of ‘hopeless’ cases found their way to Tanner’s End to seek my help. I took to visiting the place two or three times a month instead of once, just to make sure no one died while waiting for me, but the patients were still rare enough that treating them didn’t interfere with my training.

Which was a good thing, because over the long lazy days of summer I made two breakthroughs that I felt would serve me well in the years to come. The first was shifting my chakra to take on both earth and fire natures at the same time, a difficult trick that opened up all sorts of technique possibilities. The second came when I tried to do the same thing with water and earth. For some reason this was a much more difficult combination despite the fact that I’d originally had a weak affinity for water, and I spent hours at a time shifting my chakra from one element to the other while I tried to find the right balance to encompass both.

Then one afternoon I pushed a little too hard, and lost my balance. I fell in a sudden tumbling confusion, and found myself lying in a jumble of limbs in the garden of my mindscape. I’d been through this enough times to know what that meant. I disentangled myself from another pink-haired girl, and we frowned at each other.

“If this is another—” we both began angrily, and stopped. Blinked, in unison. Slowly smiled, still in unison.

“I’m earth-natured,” I said.

“I’m water,” she confirmed.

“So that’s how we make an aspect!” We both exclaimed. Then we embraced, and flowed back together.

A moment later I opened my eyes on the real world, once more alone in my head. The split had been purely temporary, and easily reversed. But this time I had only a little bit of a headache, and after a short rest and an hour of trial and error I managed to do it again.

Once I’d found the trick it was easy. I could split myself temporarily along any pair of affinities, and merge again just as easily. While I was split my aspects could trade control of my body back and forth just like I’d done with my original healer/warrior dichotomy, and one of us could make a clone for the other to use as a body. Better still, once there were two of me we could trade bits of personality and memory back and forth just like I’d done with Naruto’s version of me. That was more of a strain, but as long as I was careful about merging in an orderly fashion when I was done it didn’t seem to do me any harm.

But my chakra was noticeably weaker when I split myself, and I found that I didn’t always like the tradeoff. Besides, newly-formed aspects based on different chakra natures turned out to make for poor company. They were essentially me with a slightly different emotional mix, which meant we tended to talk in unison and think exactly alike most of the time. Maybe if I kept the same split for a few weeks that would change, but at the time I was still fascinated by the splitting process itself. If I could learn to do that as fluidly as I wove my combat techniques I’d be immune to three-fourths of the mental attacks I’d ever heard of, including Sharingan genjutsu.

So instead of settling on a new division I practiced splitting and merging myself in different ways, until the process was as natural as water walking. That, and my ongoing project to master fire and water techniques, occupied my training time all through that summer and fall.

“Lord Tashimoto requires your presence in the capital, to attend to his pregnant wife,” the samurai insisted. He had three men with him, all armored and armored in traditional fashion, and from the strength of their chakra they had better training than your usual soldiers. They might actually be able to match a genin team in a fair fight.

I crossed my arms and scowled at them. “If I go to the capital I’ll get dragged into your politics, and I have no interest in wasting my time on court intrigue. If Lord Tashimoto’s wife needs healing she can see a doctor there, or come out here and wait for me just like everyone else.”

The samurai’s hand fell to his katana. “That was not a request, honored healer. If you will not come voluntarily we will bring you by force.”

I called up the full force of my chakra to form a swirling blue aura of power around me, and focused a Killing Intent genjutsu on them. The leader paled and took a step back. One of his men passed out from fear, and another wet himself.

“You have no power to compel me, little man,” I growled. “Now take your arrogant presumption and go, before I change my mind about letting you live!”

They left in such haste they almost forgot to take their unconscious companion with them. I dropped the aura as the door slammed shut behind them, and turned back to the cluster of patients waiting by the fireplace.

“Now,” I said with a friendly smile. “Who was next?”

Fire and earth make a lovely combination.

I’d never been very impressed with Konoha fire techniques. I mean, how many different ways do you need to be able to breathe fire at your enemies? After mastering Fire Dragon I’d quickly used my knowledge of shape manipulation to experiment with other approaches, and for awhile Fire Claw and Flame Shield were part of my close combat style. But without the air influence of a big exhalation it was hard to get any range out of a fire attack, and harder to get enough intensity to do fatal damage to a serious opponent.

It was a cold winter, and a mountain covered with several feet of snow seemed like a good place to experiment with alternatives.

Making a fire-natured Rasengan was the obvious way to beat the penetration problem, although I must have blown up a hundred shadow clones before I got it to work. Considering that I usually master A-rank techniques in two or three tries I doubted anyone else would be duplicating that little trick. Flame Rasengan created a whirling ball of plasma that gave off an eerie keening sound and carved through stone as easily as air, and for a few weeks I thought that was going to be the big payoff from my extended foray into fire techniques.

But mixing fire with earth made lava. I could shape it like water, throw it, project it in streams that would melt steel and vaporize living tissue. Ok, so it took a lot of chakra to make, but it was incredibly useful. I burned my arms off a few times before I got the hang of fireproofing myself, but that project led to a neat little Lava Clone technique and hinted at the possibility of actual elemental transformations. Of course, screwing up a technique to turn myself into flame or lava or even earth would be instantly fatal, so that research would have to wait for a series of short loops.

Still, it was the biggest increase in my combat power I’d seen in years. I couldn’t afford to throw around big, slow-moving blasts of lava that a serious enemy would just dodge, but over the course of the winter I carefully crafted efficient techniques for forming weapons out of the stuff. First kunai, then a proper sword, then a whip. They were all made of white-hot liquid stone, which was impossible to parry and did horrendous damage to anything they struck. I could one-punch just about anyone I normally fought with a weapon like that.

I’m sure Orochimaru would just hit me with a water jet and let the resulting steam explosion flash-fry me, but he’s not exactly your normal opponent.

Astoria’s business card was one of the last things I found in my mental housecleaning. At first I wasn’t ever sure what the little rectangle of paper was, since the last time I’d seen the thing it was still glowing from her touch. It said:

I gave the long string of digits a contemplative look, and groaned. My demon memories informed me it was a comm code, but I didn’t have access to either of the celestial systems. I couldn’t just summon a terminal and call her, and she probably wouldn’t appreciate being the target of a demonic communion ritual.

“Well, there’s bound to be another way,” I said to myself. “Maybe the Hyuuga know a communication technique that isn’t based on human sacrifice? I’ll have to ask Hinata.”

Aspecting myself was a neat way to gain an instant ally, but the fact that I had only one body was a serious limitation. I could give her a clone to inhabit, but shadow clones are fragile and elemental clones are much weaker than my real body. I’d actually hit the limits of human ability in that department, and I was loath to give up the advantage of being as fast and strong and tough as it’s physically possible for a person my size to be. So one fine spring day I set out to try something different.

I knelt on the soft new grass in a hidden hollow on the lower slopes of my mountain, and drew a sharp shard of glass across my wrist. The blood that rushed out was full of my chakra, and I shaped it into a ball with an improvised technique. After a moment I healed the wound, and turned my attention to the blood.

It was still alive, and every cell in it bore a copy of my genes, so it was as viable a target for my personal transformation technique as any other part of me. I gathered my chakra, called to mind the same template I’d used to shape the body I currently wore, and activated the technique.

A river of chakra flowed out of me as the ball quivered and grew, sprouted bones and tendons, developed organs, sheathed itself in muscle and skin. In less than a minute a perfect replica of myself lay on the ground before me. I split myself into aspects, and bent to touch my lips to the copy. My new-formed water aspect surged through the point of contact and into her new body, which jerked convulsively and began to cough.

I was momentarily alarmed to see blood on her lips, but she waved me off with a smile. “Just… gack… didn’t transform it all,” she explained. “Got some other flaws too, but nothing major. I’ll have myself fixed in a minute. What about you?”

“That took about a third of my chakra, but I bet we can get it down with practice. Nice. This could be a viable clone technique.”

My water aspect started to agree, and then stopped with a frown. Then she laughed. “Wow, talk about tunnel vision. Do you really not get what we just did? This is a real body, not a clone. If you die I can make you a new body, and you can do the same for me. We just invented a self-resurrection technique.”

I sat back, stunned. “You’re right,” I said after a moment. “Also, we can be in two places at once, and fake our own death in a way that would fool anyone, and…wow. This is big.”

Making bodies was hard, but it got easier with practice. For that matter, it was good practice for healing in general. I’d already reached the point where I didn’t need formal techniques to do minor healing on myself, but a few months of serious body-making work strengthened that talent into something more like chakra control than normal healing. At first I had to laboriously construct a transformation template for each variation on my form that I wanted to try out, but each template I built taught me more about my own body and techniques than I’d known I had left to learn. Soon I could change little things like age and physical conditioning on the fly, without sacrificing the detailed realism that made my transformations more than just a disguise.

Yes, age was a little thing. By summer anything that fit my own genetics was a little thing, really. Taking Hinata’s form was much harder, despite all the medical scans I’d done on her in our time together, because I didn’t have a copy of her genes to focus the transformation. I couldn’t duplicate he Byakugan for the same reason, though I felt certain I could give myself Sharingan eyes again if I ever wanted to.

Of course, if I did that in full knowledge of what it meant there was no way I’d get out of the contract a second time. No thanks.

I could turn a tissue sample from someone else into a complete, healthy body, but the chakra cost was near the limit of what I could manage even now. Worse, wearing someone else’s body was profoundly uncomfortable. After a few abortive experiments I turned my attention back to self-transformation, looking for ways to make larger changes for less chakra. It was by far the most complex technique I’d ever set out to master, but as the months passed I felt that I was making slow but steady progress.

By the end of summer I was actually feeling lonely now and then, and I’d started spending a lot of time split just to get a little company. That told me it was going to be time to end my long period of isolation soon, but I wasn’t quite sure how I wanted to go about it. Should I just stop my heart, and let the loop take me back to my childhood again? Or should I go back to Konoha, and see what my old friends had made of themselves by now? That could be tricky to pull off, but I was curious.

I thought about it off and on as I worked on my transformations. I’d also started working on my chakra capacity again now that I had techniques I really needed more power to get the most out of, and was rather pleased that I was finally approaching Gai’s level in that respect. Then one morning I spotted a pair of visitors who felt like ninja making their way up my valley.

They were clearly making an effort to let their presence be felt, so I moved to a clearing a mile south of my home and let my own masking slip. There was something familiar about their chakra, which was odd in itself. I hadn’t been able to feel auras so clearly before my little misadventure in loop-crossing, so there weren’t many people I had a clear impression of. It must be someone I’d known for a long time before then, but hadn’t met in my last few loops.

I caught a glimpse of them through the trees, but it didn’t help. The woman was old and wrinkled, with long white hair and a slightly stooped walk. The man seemed younger, though his hair was equally white, but it was the blood-soaked bandages covering the stump of his right arm that caught my eye. So, they were here for help. Normal techniques could never replace a lost arm, but I could.

Then they emerged from the trees, and I gasped.

“Tsunade! Jiraiya! What happened to you?”

Tsunade looked old, closer to seventy than her usual early-thirties, and her face was worn with pain and exhaustion. Jiraiya was even worse off, wrapped in bandages from waist to neck and leaning on Tsunade for support.

Tsunade gave me an appraising look. “Ah, the mysterious Sakura,” she said. “I thought you must be a missing nin.”

“Well, yes,” I admitted. “I was a Konoha nin, once. But I can’t imagine the Hokage sending the Sannin to hunt down some mountain hermit healer, so what on earth are you doing here?”

“You have a true regeneration technique,” she replied. “I can tell, from the stories. Can you restore Jiraiya’s arm?”

I gaped at her. “Tsunade… the world’s foremost medic-nin… is coming to me for help?” I said weakly. Then I smiled.

“I guess all my hard work has finally paid off,” I said. “Yes, I can do it. Come on up to my place. You obviously need rest, and maybe you can fill me in on what’s happening while I get the old lech put back together.”