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.