Then I chuckled. “Wait, does that mean the gods would consider him the rightful ruler of the world? That’s funny. He thinks he’s being ambitious by telling everyone he’s going to be Hokage someday, but he’s really supposed to be the next Emperor.”
Jiraiya cracked a smile, but I could see he was still troubled.
“That would be something,” he admitted. “But this could stir up an amazing amount of trouble. I need to talk to the Honored Geezer about this. Please, keep this quiet?”
“Sure, no problem,” I reassured him. “The last thing I want is to have half the noblewomen in the world trying to marry him before I do.”
My research took far longer than I’d expected, to the point where the staff at the Twin Falls Resort started joking about offering me a long-term lease. Jiraiya ran into Tsunade in the local casino a week after we arrived, which led to introductions and more bemused reactions. But the fact that I obviously knew a lot of secret techniques neither of them had taught anyone was counterbalanced by my casual willingness to share my own secrets, and eventually they both decided to at least act as if my story was for real. After that I’d get a visit from one or the other of them every few weeks, but they rarely stayed for more than a few days at a time.
Amusingly, at the end of Tsunade’s second visit Shizune begged off leaving with her in hopes of studying under me instead. I’d shown them both the basics of my medical transformations at that point, and apparently the long-suffering jounin had decided her time was better spent learning instead of following Tsunade through every bar and casino in Fire Country. It was a bit of a distraction, having her interrupt me every few hours with another question about one technique or another, but she was so determined I didn’t have the heart to tell her to figure it out for herself.
Three months after Orochimaru’s death I finally managed to pull an ordinary kunai into my mindscape.
Shizune looked up from where she’d been practicing at my cheer, and gave me a quizzical look.
“So, you made a kunai disappear?” She asked at my explanation. “How is this a big deal?”
“Hmpf,” I grumped. “This isn’t like storage seals. Let me see if I can make it work the other way.”
In my mindscape I crafted a long, straight blade of flawless diamond, inlaid with seals for strength and sharpness and a fiery chakra nature. Then I focused my will, grasped the hilt, and drew the blade from my mindscape into very solid reality.
My vision blurred as it came free, and I had to tap my storage seal a bit to avoid chakra depletion. But the blade I now held in my hand was as flawless as the one I’d imagined, and when I plunged the point into the floor there was only the barest hint of resistance. Not only was it solid, the seals I’d worked into it were functional.
“Oh, so it’s like Orochimaru’s sword technique,” Shizune observed, still clearly unimpressed. “I suppose that has its uses, if you can learn to do it without passing out.”
“Bah!” I scoffed. “Orochimaru’s version was a half-assed hack job. With this technique, I can make myself a gateway between the physical world and the realm of ideas! I can create anything in my mindscape, and now I can make anything in my mindscape real.”
“Can you make a drug that cures cancer that way?” Shizune asked dryly.
“Spoilsport,” I pouted. “No, I’d have to know of one to make it. Ok, fine, so it’s mostly just a cute trick for fabricating things I could have made anyway. But now I can take things with me when I loop!”
“If you say so, Sakura-sensei. So, how would you tweak your medical transformation to replace lost blood without doing anything else?”
“Oh, honestly, isn’t that obvious?” I grumped. “Here, let me make a subject and I’ll show you…”
I kept the loop going long enough to finish unraveling Orochimaru’s various cursed seal designs, which let me work out a less drastic removal process for next time I wanted to help out Anko. With the demonic invocations removed it was actually an interesting branch of seal tech, with the potential to tap just about any energy source in useful and interesting ways. But it was also a dangerously unstable sort of power, and I eventually set aside my plans for a version that could tap my storage seal as not worth the risk.
The rest of Orochimaru’s research tended to be more cruel than useful. His work on artificial mindscapes was interesting, but I was skeptical about its effectiveness against a mature Sharingan. His medical experiments were mostly useless, although they did provide an interesting basis for working with modified physiologies. I spent a few weeks playing around with having extra limbs, odd joint designs and even a tail before I decided that none of the changes were actually an improvement on the plain old human body. Most of them sacrificed flexibility or had serious side effects, and the few that didn’t were sufficiently obvious that the benefits weren’t worth getting stared at all the time.
Orochimaru’s library of information on rare drugs and poisons was also pretty impressive, and I had some fun working out water and wind techniques that came pre-loaded with various concoctions. Stashing real objects in my mindscape to pull out later was much less tiring than just creating them, and with practice it wasn’t too hard to summon them back as part of an elemental technique. Not having to re-create my poison stash every loop made it a lot more feasible to do interesting things with it, although I had no intention of becoming too reliant on the stuff.
But once that was done I had no more excuses to put off what I needed to do. I was getting lonely by then anyway, after nearly six months apart from my loves. So one morning I said goodbye to Shizune, and climbed to the top of the cliff overlooking the Twin Falls just as dawn peeked over the gorge.
“Well, let’s see if I can make this crazy idea work,” I said to myself, and switched my chakra nature to air. It was still a bit harder to adopt than the other elements I’d mastered, and my air techniques lacked the effortless fluidity of my water and fire shaping. But maybe I just needed a reason to practice more.
I called up the highest level of my transformation technique, becoming aware of every detail of the shape and operation of my own body in a way I never could have managed without so many years of practice. Then I sprouted wings.
Orochimaru had tried dozens of approaches to the problem of human flight, and none of them had worked for more than gliding. But I knew a lot more about what I was doing than he ever had. My wings were feathered, patterned after a harrier’s to allow stable hovering, but my wingspan was only eight feet. Far too small for actual flight according to Orochimaru’s calculations, but at the same time far too large to be powered by any set of muscles that would fit in a human torso.
Of course, none of his test subjects were me.
I threaded the flight muscles carefully around my ribs, noting the way this enhanced my bust with a touch of amusement. Then I conditioned them for extreme chakra enhancement, just like every other muscle in my body, and gave them an experimental flap. The movement wasn’t quite right, but that was easily fixed. Another flap, and I felt a significant lift. Excellent.
I called a wind to help carry my weight, and leaped off the cliff.
The next few minutes were an exhilarating confusion of rushing wind and spinning ground and my own shrieks of delight. I frantically juggled my wind control, trying to keep myself aloft while I learned to use my new appendages, and managed to bounce off the sides of the gorge three times in the process. But the damage from that was nothing I couldn’t heal with a thought, so I kept at it. Finally I hit on the idea of wrapping an air control field directly around my wings, effectively increasing their surface area to something that could actually support my weight. I did a lot less falling after that.