“What’s that?” Tsunade asked skeptically.
“One of the nice things about being a kunoichi is that you don’t have to always stay in control,” I said gently. “There is nothing more liberating that being able to let down your defenses completely with a lover you can trust, and know that after a night or a weekend or a long vacation of bliss you’ll return to yourself just as you were before.”
I caught the haunted look in her eye before she managed to hide it again, and knew I’d struck a nerve. But she wasn’t going to be convinced so easily.
“Some of us actually have responsibilities,” she insisted. “I’ve seen what happens to ninja who let their guard down with the wrong person. There’s no way you can ever be that sure of anyone.”
“Actually, there are two solutions to that problem,” I replied. “Although I’ll admit I hadn’t realized it myself until recently. My own solution is to have so many layers of tricky mental defenses that even an expert couldn’t keep me turned for long. But that’s only feasible because I’ve got an odd bloodline that lets me split myself and treat my own mind like a physical place.”
The Sannin exchanged a speculative glance. “Kami blood?” Jiraiya guessed.
I nodded. “You two are good. Yeah, I can split my mind into aspects, and I know my true name, and my mindscape is a fortress anyway. So while it’s always possible I’ll run into someone even better than I am, the odds are low enough that I’m not too worried about it these days. But obviously that approach is only viable for someone with a special advantage in mental defense.”
“The other solution is the one that my dearest friend adopted. She was a Hyuuga, and I think she must have been a natural sub as well, so she went a bit overboard. But the fundamental concept is sound. If you truly, deeply love someone, your first loyalty is always going to be to them instead of your clan or country. So accept that. Pick a man who has the same ideals you do, who respects your opinion and who you trust to make good decisions, and let yourself go. He doesn’t need to control you if you’re already willing to follow him anywhere, and if you listen to each other the rest will work itself out.”
“You make it sound so easy,” Tsunade said bitterly. “But I notice you’re out here alone.”
“Things happen,” I said heavily. “There aren’t a lot of sane S-rank ninja to choose from, and anyone below that level wouldn’t survive being near me for long. But hey, you guys were practically my heroes when I was an impressionable kid. Maybe things are looking up for me!”
“Oh, ho!” Jiraiya chuckled with a playful leer. “Sounds like a challenge to me!”
Tsunade growled warningly at him.
“Hey, who says it’s him I have my eye on?” I teased her. “My first crush was a girl, you know.”
Tsunade gave me a shocked look, and I laughed. Oh, I probably couldn’t really get them together like this, but some day…
“Oh, I get it!” I exclaimed. “The blood signature pulse from the technique gets picked up by the blood binding seal here, then you run it through the splitter and amplifier stages and compare it to all the signatures on the scroll in parallel. That’s neat! I never realized you could re-shuffle the individual meta-seals like that.”
“How could you miss that?” Jiraiya asked in exasperation. “That’s one of the first things you learn once you get into serious seal engineering. Who was your teacher, anyway?”
“Like I said before, I didn’t really have one,” I explained. “I didn’t get interested in anything beyond basic explosive tags and storage scrolls until after I left Konoha, and I’ve just been picking up bits and pieces as I could.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t make any sense,” he protested. “You shouldn’t even be able to read that array without years of training that you obviously don’t have. You certainly shouldn’t be able to just glance at it and see how the seals combine. Even with talent it takes years to reach that point with a decent selection of seal arrays, and you didn’t even know what half these were until a few days ago.”
“Really?” I cocked my head and considered the issue. “I don’t see why. It’s just like reading, isn’t it? The seals are words, their relationships are syntax and grammar, and.. oh, that’s why you can mix-and-match them! I see, it’s just like forming sentences. Hey, does that mean that designing a new seal array is just a matter of writing out what you want it do? Um, why are you staring at me like that?”
“Sakura,” he said slowly. “In theory that’s true, but no one understands the meanings of the seals or their grammar anywhere near well enough to work with seal arrays like that. Is this one of those things that just came naturally for you? Because if it is I’m going to have to hunt down your old jounin sensei and kill him for wasting such potential.”
I blushed a little. “Um, thanks. But no, I don’t think it’s a bloodline thing, or at least not entirely. I used to struggle with seals before I learned the celestial tongue, but after that it was suddenly easy. Seals are just the written form of the same language, after all.”
His eyebrows looked like they were about to take flight, so I stopped there.
“You speak the celestial tongue?” He asked urgently. “How? That knowledge was lost when the Sage of Six Paths died! Did you find a surviving scroll? Can you teach it?”
“I have no idea if I could teach it,” I answered honestly. “It would be a big project, but I’d be happy to give it a shot if we ever have a few years to spare. As to how I learned it? I wouldn’t recommend trying my method. I was experimenting with some exotic techniques, and I… well, I guess you could say that I saw beyond the Veil of Maya. I’m pretty sure my soul would have just dissolved into the cosmos if it weren’t for my bloodline.”
He winced. “Definitely not something I want to try. Well then, I’ll just have to show you how to use some of that lost knowledge you’ve got locked in your head, and once we’ve won this war you can return the favor.”
“Deal,” I smiled. “So, about that return circuit?”
Tsunade absently wiped the sweat from her forehead as she scowled at the mirror, which stubbornly continued to show a seventyish Slug Sannin instead of a younger one. “How do you juggle so many details at once?” She complained.
“Practice, of course,” I answered. “It’s just like training to do taijutsu while water-walking with a couple of clones out. Well, to be honest I originally came at it from the direction of making a funky special-purpose transformation technique more flexible, but I figured this way would make more sense for you. I’m not sure why this is so hard. You’re just trying to change your age and nothing else, right?”
She nodded. “Believe me, that alone is enough. Trying to juggle muscle tone and bone density and skin condition and all the biochemistry and… gah! Even with my genes as a reference, it’s too much!”
“Oh, no wonder!” I exclaimed. “No, you’re right, doing it like that is much too difficult. I can barely do anything that way, and I’ve been training for years. No, what you need to do is reverse your focus on that second boar seal, so the chakra flows through the genetic template instead of just referencing it. That way nature does almost all of the work for you…”
“That looks suspiciously like my strength boost technique,” Tsunade said as she wiped the sweat from her brow. She’d been gradually getting the hang of my medical transformation techniques, and her biological age was back in the mid-thirties now, but she was still miles behind me in physical conditioning. We’d been sparring for less than an hour, and she was already getting tired.