…I’d never heard of such a technique before, but suddenly I wanted out of Amegakure. I didn’t want to spend another minute inside the field of that horrible thing. Only, how far did it extend?
A sudden terrible suspicion led me to contact my other aspect in distant Snow Country, and after a moment of preparation we switched places. She’d been sitting atop the roof of one of the palace towers working the bugs out of a new seal array, so I had a clear view of sky and mountains and miles of broad snow-covered valley.
The same tenuous cloud of evil hung over the entire landscape. Only the symbols in the sky were different…
…for every crossroad of fate the best choices shall be hidden, while the flaws of those that lead subtly to ruin go unnoticed…
“My god,” I breathed. “It covers the whole world.”
For a moment I felt the same hopeless despair as when I’d first found out about the invasion. Astoria had told me. Hell, Kogura had told me, when I was a demon. But I’d been so focused on my own problems I hadn’t thought it was significant.
Suddenly, I couldn’t stand to be alone. I merged with my other aspect, leaving behind a lifeless corpse on that roof in Snow Country, and buried myself in Hinata’s arms.
“Sakura?” She said hesitantly. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s everywhere,” I said hollowly. “This is what Astoria meant, when she said this was a dark world. Our kami are dead. The higher powers have walled us off. There’s nothing left to stop the demon gods from doing whatever they want to us, as long as they don’t break any of their treaties. They’ve spun some monstrous fate-warping jutsu over the entire world, and from what I can see its whole purpose is to drown us in misery. I always wondered why the world’s problems seemed so impossible to solve. Why even the greatest men do so much evil, make so many stupid mistakes. Now I know it isn’t an accident. Though why they would do it this way…”
A passage from my demon self’s briefing came to mind, and I hung my head.
“Of course. They’ve made this a world where anyone who can be corrupted will be, and those who can’t either give up or die young. But if there is ever a day when there are no more righteous men to stand against them, they can claim the whole world and everyone in it forever,” I whispered.
“What? But… what about children?” Hinata protested. “Well, and the world is so big, how could there ever not be even one?”
“Innocent children don’t count,” I said. “Only mortals old enough to understand the difference between good and evil. Hinata, the treaty I’m quoting doesn’t say ‘nice’ or ‘well-meaning’ or ‘mostly ok’, it says righteous.” I sang the key word in Celestial, and confirmed that it meant what I thought it did.
“How many people do you know who always take a stand against evil, no matter what it costs them? That’s what it takes, and there can’t be many people like that left in this world. I’ve only ever known one.”
“Two,” Hinata insisted softly. “You shine as bright as he does in your own way, my treasure. But if Pein kills us, and his plan destroys half the world and leaves the rest a wasteland while someone hunts down any survivor who stands out…”
I nodded. “Yeah, it could happen. We need to tell… Naruto. The hero of the age. Astoria said… Hinata, this could be the reason they gave him that wish!”
“Then we’d better tell him quickly,” she observed. “There are walls in this place I can’t see through, and seals whose purpose I can’t fathom everywhere. Someone is probably listening to us.”
“Right.” I let my vision of the world’s true state fade, and turned to face her. “Come inside, then, and we’ll reset right now. Naruto isn’t due to call us for a few loops yet, but I think I’ve finally reached the point where I can get us to him without help.”
21. Understanding
Disclaimer: I don’t own Naruto.
AN: Responses to reviews can be found on my personal blog (see the home page link in my profile).
The written version of the celestial tongue is essentially a form of seal-crafting, and I’d discovered I knew enough of it to say things that can’t be expressed in the more limited vocabulary of conventional human seal masters. A normal summoning contract is built around a symbol provided by the leader of whatever group of spirit beings it’s tied to, and I’d wondered when Jiraiya explained this. Summoning seemed like the kind of thing that would require a true name, but how could a whole tribe of snakes or toads or whatever share one of those?
Only I’d realized on reflection that just because it looked like a single symbol after it was written didn’t mean it really was. My own name was just a stylized sakura petal at first glance, and I knew what hidden complexities lurked beneath the surface there. It was perfectly possible to write something like “the toads of the bloodline of Myoboku” the same way, as long as you knew enough about them.
So the symbol I’d built my summoning scroll around wasn’t “Sakura, the person who made this scroll”. No, in human speech it meant something closer to “the set of all persons who share the true name Sakura”. I wasn’t sure it would work the way I wanted it to, but I had high hopes.
I had to wait until we were done with the Forest of Death, because I needed something distinctive for my summoning to focus on if I wanted it to work right. But in some ways that was just as well, since it gave me time to pull myself together. Knowing I was stuck inside a world-spanning technique made of black chakra made my skin crawl, especially since I had no reason to think I was immune to its influence. But I’d probably been living in it my whole life and Astoria had still acted like I was an ok person, so it wasn’t irresistible. Logically I wasn’t any worse off that before I’d found out about it.
But that didn’t make it any easier to sleep at night.
I didn’t expect Naruto to have any answers, but I was still anxious to see him. He needed to know about this, and I wanted to see if his world had the same problem. It probably did, since his Konoha had the same tragic history as mine, and I was pretty sure that ensuring our history turned out tragic was exactly what the demons were trying to accomplish. But I needed to see for sure.
So after I kicked Ino’s ass and they sent us all back to town for our month of training I sent a shadow clone home to keep anyone from missing me, and made my way to one of the more remote hiding spots I’d found in the forest. Then I retreated into my mindscape to attempt a rather unconventional summoning. My focus was a girl not much different than I’d been the first time through the chuunin exam. One who’d survived the forest only because Naruto was watching out for her, and lost her match in the preliminary round. I’d been nauseatingly fixated on Sasuke back then, but the girl I imagined was started to see Naruto in a new light and wonder if she’d chosen wrong. Because the Naruto she’d been with during the exam was the looping version, and I knew he didn’t try all that hard to act like his old self anymore.
I did the summoning the slow way, with a full set of hand signs and a generous dash of my blood, and poured my chakra into the technique as it reached far, far across the gulf between worlds…
And a young Sakura in a nightgown appeared in the air before me, to fall in a tangle of limbs at my feet.
“Ack! What the heck!” She’d apparently been asleep, and she stumbled to her feet and looked around wildly while pawing for a kunai that wasn’t there.
“Calm down, Sakura. I’m not attacking you. I was just testing a summoning technique.”
She spun to face me, and did a double-take. “Who are you?”