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.