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.