Chapter 5: Brains and Chains

Following our meeting with Kazuo, and my successfully testing a seal to become an official apprentice sealer, I decided to pick up the pace in my personal explorations. For Uzushio and the Uzumaki to survive, we needed a force multiplier. For me to have it ready in time, I needed something to increase the speed at which I worked and learned.

Two years.

I had to be ready – more, to be sure that I'd be ready in time. Any extra time would be nice, but ultimately, not something I could be sure of. For me to be ready in two years, I needed to learn faster. I may have been a genius, with one of the best developed chakra systems ever, especially given my age, but the challenge I faced was daunting.

Looking at the numbers, it was a tough situation. The “village” of Uzushio had a population at time a little higher than thirty thousand. Of those, officially, a little under a seventh were in the reserve combat forces or some active formation. That was four thousand people who were at least nominally combatants.

But, of those four thousand, about a quarter were sealers, and only one in five sealers would be any more effective than, say, a logistics corps genin from another village. Of the remaining two hundred sealers, about one hundred could fight as well as chunin, and the other hundred could match jonin; they'd be glass cannons, since the enemy jonin, probably even chunin, would be faster and have more jutsu, but the battlefield control, both defensive, mobility, and destructive that a good combat sealer could achieve was pretty impressive, especially on a prepared field. Most sealers were in the reserves, or part of logistics units.

Of the remaining three thousand who had been trained as clan or village guard, about one thousand were in the reserves for a long time and had lost their edge or were logistics units and not particularly combat effective leaving two thousand to provide the bulk of actual combat-focused personnel. Five hundred of those were genin or apprentice warriors (remember, our village had samurai types too). Of the fifteen hundred remaining, about five hundred could match jonin, while the other thousand would probably be better qualified as better-than-average chunin.

At any given time, about a third of the combat forces were on patrol, attached to National Guard soldier units, or otherwise unavailable. This meant a decapitation invasion targeted at my home would face the following:

Four hundred jonin-equivalent

Eight hundred chunin-equivalent

Two thousand genin-equivalent

These numbers were actually really good considering our population. In general, as a martial village, there were a number of private citizens who could fight (particularly the women in samurai families, many as well as chunin, some as well as jonin), but they were less organized and more for a “the village is already broken into, how much can we make them bleed” scenario.

Uzushio didn't really run active combat missions, just protection details for any sealers that left the village and national defense, and we didn't do repeat business with villages that didn't take appropriate steps to protect our sealers. Some, volunteers, would go and serve a tour or two with the Leaf, as per our alliance, and bring back new techniques so we stayed current.

Because of our generally defensive outlook, our men didn't die nearly as frequently as in other villages, and so tended to reach higher levels on average. On the other hand, our forces were a bit older on average, and had less experience of actual blooding, though all had desensitization training. Our village was wealthy, and had a high proportion of sealers; our troops reflected that, and were on average better equipped and outfitted than our potential foes, especially for things like explosive, protection and trap seals.

The biggest problem was one of scale; Uzushio was relatively small, and our culture and military planning were designed around being too tough to hit, rather than actually being able to win a war by defeating an enemy nation.

For comparison, Konohagakure at the time had above two hundred thousand citizens, and a nominal military force of twenty thousand, weighted much more heavily towards semi-crippled reserves, with higher proportions of genin, and a large number permanently committed to supporting the Daimyo's forces and intelligence gathering operations.

If they went all out, Konoha could probably put about five hundred jonin or special jonin, a thousand chunin, and twenty-five hundred genin into an assault without seriously stripping the home guard or neglecting their feudal obligations to the Fire Daimyo. Konoha’s troops would be of slightly lower quality overall, and significantly worse equipment for each quality category.

At the time, Konoha was the largest military force, so you can see why Uzushio couldn't be invaded by any single village. Especially so since challenging a sealer on their own turf was rightly considered somewhat foolish. Enemy villages rarely worked together, so Uzushio could be forgiven for becoming complacent, not that being forgiven would have saved us.

A big problem with the invasion I feared was coming was that Uzushio didn't practice as aggressive population increasing measures as other villages. Ninja villages had high attrition rates and demands for fresh blood. As a result, they tended to evolve cultures that were effective at filling this need. Lightning’s Kumogakure was rumored to engage in significant levels of what I, as a modern person, would consider slavery to provide enough women to fill their ranks; to be fair, in a more historical middle-ages context it wasn’t quite that bad, but even other nations thought that Kumo’s actions were a bit distasteful. Konoha (an example I was more familiar with) had this idea that patriotism, especially for females, was to breed with the strongest male they can, then send the kids to the war-machine.

Jonin there actually got incentives to have harems. While Uzushio allowed polygamy, consorts and concubines, our long lives and relatively low death rate didn't necessitate such an aggressive breeding philosophy. But that was for relative peacetime. What that meant during wartime was that our casualties would not replace themselves. And since our troops tended to require more knowledge and skills, we needed a longer time to train them. A series of even relatively minor wars could draw down our population and reduce our institutional knowledge, whittling away at our strength until we failed.

Uzushio had not been seriously attacked in centuries. If we were attacked, we needed to crush the invaders so completely that they never even thought of it again. I wanted attacking Uzushio to become the Elemental Countries' version of a land-war in Russia during the winter; an obvious military trap.

So, there I was, just turned four years old, and I needed a way to at least double, preferably quadruple, our combat potential. Alternatively, I needed to be able to match the combat potential of five hundred jonin on my own. And, to make it even more complicated, I needed to do so without introducing a technology that could be turned against us in the future. For example, guns. Guns were simple enough compared to the local technology level that if an enemy village developed them, their genin might have over-run us. I sure as hell was not introducing anything that could be used against us so easily.

So that was my challenge. Become a monster, or create a monster of Uzushio, and all within two years. And, as I could hardly prove I was a reincarnation with potential knowledge of the future, I had to do so without being able to get massive resources or support from my village.

At my then rate of growth, that was impossible. Even assuming I unlocked the chains, and projecting my speed forward, I still needed at least two years of progress to go against a low-strength jonin without special bloodline tricks. Assuming I somehow learned or re-created the shadow-clone jutsu, which, from Tou-san's explanation on clones, was not known in Uzushio; I might have matched a hundred jonin, though would still have lacked the ability to go after any of the S-ranked titans of the battlefield. This approach was still far from sufficient.

I decided that if my rate of growth at the time was insufficient, then I needed to improve it. Sort of like investing in infrastructure and research in the beginning of a strategy game. The experience-sharing shadow-clone jutsu, my first choice, was not known to Uzushio then, or if it was, it was at a level far higher than those I had access to (no matter how nice Kazuo-sama was). While I'd need to reinvent the shadow-clone later anyways (or steal it, or somehow purchase it, I wasn't picky), it was beyond my theoretical understanding. But if I couldn’t think more, I could certainly think better; the avenue I picked was thus thought-acceleration and mental reinforcement.

I've already discussed how internal chakra acceleration makes you faster and stronger. It turns out, that while it could use regular old chakra, using energies weighted towards ki, or yang, yielded better results. As in, a one-to-two parts mixture of mental and physical energies was almost twice as effective at physical reinforcement as a one-to-one chakra mixture. Getting too imbalanced wasn't good either though, since it took time to change and would make casting jutsu impossible while too imbalanced.

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Reinforcement of tissues using chakra was similar, though bone, muscle, tendons, everything had its own optimal mixture. Tou-san was a wealth of information. I wasn't perfect, or even very good at the time, but I was putting in the effort to improve and perfect myself; all of this knowledge was important for training.

A similar technique could be done in the mind, but using a predominance of chi (ie yin or mental) energies. The thing was, over-loading anything could cause damage: tears, burns, and chakra induced morbidity were just a few of the possible effects from overload.

I'd just recovered from losing my brain to disease; I had little desire to experiment with burning it out. That said, my soul was the seat of my mind. I should have been more resilient to this damage than others, and Uzumaki’s, especially those with chakra densities as high as mine, were stupidly regenerative.

And, if I did die, at least I would have tried.

By that point, my personal chakra-building, control, and sensing exercises and meditations were somewhat automatic. While they were more efficient when I specifically spent hours every day on them, I could continue to improve by using them in the background. Instead, my main focus became experimentation with neural and mental reinforcement.

In the days leading up to Haruto, my new tutor's arrival, I had a bit of time free which was normally used for meditation or extra studying. Since Cousin Kiyoshi was on a long-distance patrol for the month there were no other distractions so I experimented.

First, I wanted to find the maximum load on a neuron. I reinforced a nerve a bit above the hip, then poked it. I reinforced it a bit more, and continued to do so until I felt a slight burning pinch there, after which the nerve seemed dead. Having found the limit, I set my own personal limit as half that, and began testing this level of reinforcement in other areas where I could afford to lose feeling. I burned out a few more nerves, halved the limit again, then continued testing until I was relatively sure I had found a safe amount. Then I repeated the process using yin-dominant chakra acceleration, which turned out to be basically inherently safe much the same as how the yang-dominant chakra acceleration was for my physical enhancement.

The moment of truth came as I began to apply these principles to my brain. The first day, I only applied yin-acceleration. It seemed to make me a bit sharper, more aware and focused, increased my reaction speed a fraction. I thought my memory was stronger too, and processing speed faster. All excellent advantages, probably worth another standard deviation, or about fifteen IQ points, but not the gains that I needed. It did however give me the idea to develop yin-reinforcement techniques for my signaling nerves to improve speed in combat.

The second day, I began to apply the reinforcement to the brain. And holy fuck was it a trip. Turns out, that if you reinforced areas of the brain you reinforced everything that area controlled. Sensations, pain, pleasure, colors, desire to sleep mixed with manic energy, emotions, all of them, at once, mixed with leaps of intuition and moments of clear logic.

If I didn't have the memory of being a baby, I think it might have driven me mad; if I didn't have much of my mind in my soul, I'd have lost control of my chakra and possibly killed myself with a runaway overload. I managed to dial it back though, and began systematic testing of what regions should be reinforced, and how. I was basically getting all of the symptoms from those lists drug companies are obligated to read out in television adds. When not learning from Kaa-san or training with Tou-san, I suffered temporary twitches, random pains, burning feelings, sudden bouts of emotion, hyper-awareness, blindness, irritability, hysteria, even the hiccups, and this just in the days before Haruto arrived.

Meanwhile, Kaa-san had me started on a whole new set of seals. It turned out that as an apprentice sealer, I was expected to know more – a lot more. I already knew the eighty four symbols of the basic, introductory level. Next, I had to learn every interaction they had, not just as pairs but as groups. Seals interacted somewhat similarly to atoms; anyone that studied atomic theory in solids knows you have to worry not just about the nearest neighbor atoms, but those out several further steps too.

Although seals had a lot stranger qualities than atoms. Celestial and elemental alignment, dimensional polarization, and chakra orientation were all potential qualities to be worried about. Higher level sealers with a good intuition would often talk about the beauty, hesitancy, and other artistic qualities that could have their own sub-interactions too, though I didn't have to worry about that much at my level. Apparently, the goal for my level, and what separated out those who can become true masters from those who couldn’t, was the ability to develop an intuition about the interaction of seal symbols. Otherwise, to learn literally millions of combinations – and that only for the most basic symbols – was not really an option.

Tou-san, not to be outdone in the “fun new stuff now you're four,” had started me on elemental jutsu. As a Water-type, he didn't know the elemental manipulation training for air, but my water affinity was still strong, being above average even for a clan-member. He was happy to start me off on several exercises to train that. I spent hours focusing on extending my senses into the water, manipulating water from one glass to another, catching rain, and desiccating leaves.

It went really well. While I may not have trained my elemental affinity before, my chakra itself was highly trained and responsive, as I'd been consciously controlling it from a young age. Further, my concentration was high. I found within days that while focusing I could complete the basic exercises. Tou-san gave me a set of small water balloons and tells me to try and work on keeping one in orbit while I work on other things; this became a new type of meditation for me. Being orbited by small, bright water-balloons was great, filling my inner child’s desire to be like some comic-book character.

With the first level of manipulation done, he taught me my first water jutsu, the Canteen. The canteen was a jutsu that collected about a liter of water, typically out of the air, but could also be used on existing water sources like a pool or river. It would collect only water; at low levels, it would filter out particulate but not salts, while at higher levels, the water would be completely pure. It was excellent as a way of avoiding being poisoned, and by purposefully adding and then trying to remove salt, served as an excellent training method and way of testing my control of water.

Not the flashiest jutsu, and my inner-child was a bit disappointed, but as an E-D rank jutsu it was a great choice, since I'd be using for the rest of my life. Literally starting that day; Tou-san banned me from drinking any water that I hadn't used the canteen jutsu on. He’d even do things like add capsaicin to the water at the dinner table as a trap. At the time I didn't realize it, but looking back he must have been worried about assassination considering my status as an “amazing prodigy”.

Suffice to say, I was kept so busy by both myself and my parents that I had almost forgotten about Haruto by the time he arrived.

And what an arrival he made.

It happened while I was out in a training field, putting in my three hours a day of martial arts practice and physical conditioning. I had already finished my kata and impact-conditioning, and had moved onto workout circuits of running, pushups, pullups, leaps, situps, sprints with rapid direction changes and rolls for dodging, leglifts, burpees. I’d then repeat that circuit ten times until I was properly exhausted. The first seven were without reinforcement; the last three circuits were with, but at an even more brutal pace. And yes, that did suck just as much as it sounds. On the other hand, between that and my chakra reinforcement training, Tou-san said around then that I was as fast as most genin, and stronger per pound.

I was on my sixth circuit. So there I was, covered in and dripping with sweat, steaming slightly in the cool air. I could barely even see I was focusing so hard, ears buzzing with the sound of blood, pushing my body to the limit and just far enough beyond. And then, while exhausted and distracted, I heard a fwip sound of an incoming projectile and suddenly sensed someone who had been suppressing their chakra.

I tried to dodge but tripped, luckily falling beneath the object. I rolled, coming to my feet facing the attacker. He moved towards me, fast. It was only my over-reinforcement and hard-gained speed that allowed me to block the first strike, a punishing kick that knocked me over despite my defense.

He was on me in a moment, flipping me over, capturing an arm behind my back in a half-nelson and placing his other arm around my neck, a knife held in a reverse grip touching both his forearm and my jugular. I froze, filled with panic.

I thought, in that moment, 'no, No, NO! I can't die like this, I haven't done what I needed to, I haven't lived this life to the utmost, not to this bastard, this child-murdering piece of shit, please, fuck, I NEED TO KILL HIM FIRST!'

And something heard those prayers. It wasn't Tou-san or Kaa-san or a passing Kami.

It wasn't Haruto either, if you thought that’s where this was going.

No, I heard that prayer. Or rather, my subconscious and chakra did, and they answered.

Chakra poured out of me, and in truly obscene amounts too. Enough that it scalded the majority of my skin just from the concentrations of energy. And my chakra, my chains, pierced the enemy and coiled about me, lashing the air protectively. A moment later, the enemy collapsed in a burst of water, and somewhat distantly I heard someone yelling, telling me that everything was alright, that I could withdraw the chains, to just focus on my chakra coming back to me.

I did, and Tou-san and Kaa-san ran over and hugged me. While I was still a bit shock-y, they told me how proud they were, and how brave I had been, and Tou-san even said he was impressed with my speed and strength and that we'd be starting some more advanced forms the next day.

Then they motioned, and over came a new man. He looked like he was in his late thirty's, so was probably at least sixty, maybe more like eighty years old. Kaa-san was glaring at him a bit, and Tou-san looked a bit sheepish.

“Daichi, this is Haruto-sensei. The attack you just experienced was only simulated danger to get you to activate your chains. Haruto-sensei will be taking over your training in the Adamantine Chains bloodline, and will be providing some advanced training in other arts too,” Tou-san explained.

“Holy shi-” I started to reply, still obviously in shock.

“Language!” Oops, I thought. Kaa-san would definitely have me in the doghouse for that later.

“Sorry, sorry. It's not every day you get attacked, think you're going to die, kill the attacker with your previously inactive bloodline, then find out it was all some sort of sadistic test!”

So, yeah, at the time I was a bit pissed. I mean, sneak attack? While I can sympathize, they had to at least allow me to be angry after. I thought I was going to die, that the whole village would fall. And, to my shame, I started to cry. I blamed my tiny body's child hormones.

Freaking child body and child emotions.

And that was how I came to meet Sensei Haruto.