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Chapter 233 The Mind... The Weed!
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"I am guessing Jiraiya did something." Naruto said as they arrived at the base of the Hokage Tower.
"Yes." Kakashi answered, hands in his pockets as they climbed. "Jiraiya-sama informed Lord Third and I about Danzo's recent red letter before he left. We were asked to handle things in his absence."
"Define handle things."
"You'll see."
The Hokage's office felt different the moment they stepped inside. Hiruzen took one look at them and snapped his fingers without a word. The ANBU standing guard rushed out in complete silence. Two remained posted outside the door as a chakra barrier sealed the room into an isolated place.
A minute passed as two new faces arrived.
The first man had two scars running down the right side of his face. Dark hair pulled up into a spiky ponytail. A neat goatee, pierced ears, and the kind of dark eyes that had looked at too many war tables to be surprised by anything sitting across from them. He wore a deer skin coat over his flak jacket. He moved like a man who had long since decided that unnecessary effort was somebody else's problem.
That's definitely Shikamaru's dad. Naruto thought as the man looked like an older, more serious shikamaru.
The second man was someone Naruto knew. Ash blond hair worn spiky at the crown and falling into a long ponytail that reached his back. Light green eyes and a jaw that looked like it had been drawn with a straight edge.
"Old man, I thought it was just going to be you and Kakashi." Naruto said.
Oscar lifted one small claw in a wave.
Shikaku and Inoichi both looked at the crystal lizard in surprise. They had never seen anything like him. Inoichi reached into his coat and producing some candy. Oscar accepted it with great dignity and then ate it with the wrapper.
"You have grown considerably since I last saw you." Inoichi said.
"Stuff happened." Naruto said, rubbing the back of his head.
"I imagine it did." Inoichi's gaze settled on the red hair with something warm and a little careful in it. "It suits you. Kushina would have said the same thing, though probably louder."
"Thank you." Naruto said politely.
Kakashi and Hiruzen exchanged a brief look over his head. Why was Naruto minding his manners infront of Inoichi? What did this mean?
Shikaku cleared his throat. "Troublesome as it is to interrupt this reunion, we have a more pressing matter."
The warmth left the room.
They arranged themselves around the Hokage's desk. Oscar settled on Naruto's knee and listened carefully.
"To make sure we are all working from the same information." Hiruzen began. "Outside of this office, Shimura Danzo is a registered missing-nin. There is an ANBU division whose sole mandate is his capture. That is the official position of this village." He let that sit for a moment. "What we discuss in this room does not leave it."
Nods around the table.
"Danzo has taken a significant personal interest in Naruto. Most critically, he appears to be withholding assets belonging to the Uzumaki clan. Minato and Kushina's personal effects. Clan jutsu. Their written works." Hiruzen said.
Naruto's jaw tightened despite knowing about it.
"This meeting exists to determine how we deal with Danzo." Hiruzen said.
"The first question is how much direct contact Danzo has been able to make with Naruto." Shikaku said, leaning forward. "That determines everything else. Danzo doesn't move without leverage. If he is personally invested in Naruto, he has already started building it."
"Personally, I would prefer Naruto have no further contact with the man at all." Hiruzen said.
Kakashi remained quiet.
"Unfortunately, Naruto is currently our only thread back to Danzo and Root." Shikaku said. "Outside of whatever they want from the boy, they have gone completely silent."
"Naruto." Inoichi said, drawing every eye in the room. "What do you want?"
Naruto's fingers curled around the lizard's side.
"I want my inheritance back." He said. "The books, the jutsu, everything Danzo took or is sitting on. All of it. If getting it back means he dies in the process, that is fine with me."
The adults in the room went quiet in the way people do when a child says something that sounds exactly like something an adult would say.
"Fine or not, you should want him dead regardless." Shikaku said. "Danzo is the kind of shinobi who doesn't stop. If you walk away with your inheritance and leave him alive, what stops him from moving against the people around you instead?"
Naruto subconciously released his killer intent at that thought of his friends getting hurt.
"Naruto." Hiruzen said gently.
The pressure receded yet the cracks around the office stayed.
"Sorry." Naruto said.
Shikaku looked at his sweaty palm. It had been a long time since someone's killing intent shook the jonin commander. Maybe he had underestimated the boy.
"Walk us through every interaction you have had with Danzo. As much detail as you can. Where, when, what he said, what he wanted, and what he offered. Start from the beginning."
Naruto went through every detail without skipping anything. The first red letter to the dream meeting. All of it laid out in the order it happened.
The room was quiet when he finished.
"That is a classic Isolation Play." Inoichi said.
"A what?"
"A manipulation tactic." Kakashi said. "You present yourself as a uniquely trustworthy source of information and engineer a bias in the target toward you. Then you begin cutting off every other avenue they might use to get answers until you are the only one left."
Naruto was quiet for a moment. "I thought he was just testing me."
"He was doing both." Inoichi said. "Look at how he approached you. His first move was to isolate you from Lord Third, ensuring that any answers you sought would have to come through him. Then he offered you a month. That grace period was a test. Depending on what you did with that month, he would have adjusted his approach entirely."
"I can see it now." Naruto said slowly. "He gave me Tobirama's journal on the Uzumaki clan. I want to be Hokage. He probably figured I would subconsciously give more weight to a Hokage's words aka his words."
"Precisely." Inoichi said, his expression looked like genuine surprise that Naruto had picked up the situation so quickly.
"And even now Danzo is positioning himself as someone you need." Shikaku added, leaning back. "He holds the Uzumaki clan legacy. He gave you a powerful wind jutsu. He is making sure that every time you think about what you are missing, the answer to getting it points back to him."
"I still don't understand why." Naruto said. "What does he actually want from me?"
"That is the difficult part." Hiruzen said. "What Danzo wanted when he first approached you and what he wants now may be two entirely different things."
"Why?"
"Because he has been branded a traitor." Kakashi answered. "His position has changed. His options have narrowed. His goals may have shifted with them."
"So we wait until he shows his hand?"
"We wait and we prepare." Hiruzen said. "So that when he does move, he cannot simply take what he wants from you."
"You mean my memories."
"The Baku are an unusual summon." Hiruzen said, setting his pipe down. "They feed on dreams and nightmares. When Danzo commanded the ANBU division, we have reason to believe he used them on ANBU operatives suffering from ptsd. As a way of removing the problem quietly and pushing them back onto the field."
"But dreams and memories are different things?" Naruto questioned.
"Less different than you might think." Inoichi added. "The brain during sleep is actively sorting and consolidating the experiences of the day, deciding what to keep and where to store it. Most of what appears in dreams is memory, replayed, rearranged and mosttimes distorted but drawn from the same source. Which means something that feeds on dreams might be able to feed on memories."
The room sat with that for a moment.
"We suspect Danzo may have used his knowledge of Yamanaka clan techniques from his yamanaka root member to develop something closer to a direct memory extraction."
"Why not just use a Yamanaka clan jutsu on me directly?" Naruto asked.
"The Nine-Tails." Inoichi said simply. "Entering your mind through conventional means would mean going through the Kyuubi first. That is not a risk any sane shinobi would take voluntarily. The Baku operating through dreams may have seemed like a much cleaner approach. Something that could feed without ever needing to knock on the front door."
Oscar made a low sound against Naruto's arm.
"What is Danzo going to do with my memories?" Naruto asked.
"We don't know for certain." Kakashi said. "At minimum, they give him a complete picture of you. How you think, what you want, and what you are afraid of."
"Great, I have the world's least attractive stalker. J feel robbed. The least the universe could do was make him someone my age." Naruto joked. Nobody in the room laughed.
"Which is precisely why we are here." Hiruzen said. "We want to protect your memories from Danzo. But more than that, we want to use this against him. If he goes looking and finds something we put there ourselves, we control what he thinks he knows."
"False memories?"
"Yes." Inoichi said. "Something that sits in the path of anything trying to reach your real memories. We would plant fabricated ones for Danzo."
"That's possible?"
Inoichi explained that there were ways to protect the mind from outside invasion.
Since the formation of the Five Great Shinobi Nations, an active arms race had existed between foreign villages and the Yamanaka. At the start of the post-Warring States Era the Yamanaka had been arguably the biggest problem in the shinobi world. They were walking into people's minds and walking back out with whatever they wanted. The Hidden Leaf had used that advantage to assert dominance over every other village for a generation.
It had gotten bad enough that keeping foreign intelligence operatives in complete darkness had become standard practice across every major village. Being captured by Leaf meant a meeting with a Yamanaka.
Even the Hidden Leaf itself kept careful watch over the mind walkers living inside its own walls.
The villages began searching for a counter. Fuinjutsu was identified early as the most promising avenue, pursued with a desperation that produced some genuinely remarkable results.
The seal Inoichi had in mind was something that the Yamanaka made when trying to break seals from foreign villages. A highly specialised sealing array applied directly to the mindscape, constructing internal walls that a foreign presence couldn't pass through or see beyond. The seal simply made certain parts of the mind structurally inaccessible. A secondary seal would gave away false memories to anyone the snoops in.
Oscar chirped out a question.
"The little guy wants to know how you make a false memory convincing enough that it doesn't read as fake next to the real thing."
Shikaku looked at the lizard for a moment with an expression that was difficult to read. "That is a good question."
Oscar smirked at the praise.
"The short answer is that I would need to see your real memories first."
"Yeah, that is not happening." Naruto said flatly. Oscar hissed once as a warning.
"Naruto, I understand this feels like an invasion of privacy, but the alternative is leaving you exposed to—"
"Teach me the jutsu." Naruto said.
"Sorry?"
"Inoichi-san is going to use a seal to construct false memories." Naruto replied, "So teach it to me. I will do it myself."
"That would be..." Hiruzen searched for the word.
"Difficult."
"I pick up jutsu fast." Naruto said. "Ask Kakashi."
Kakashi gave a nod.
Inoichi was quiet for a moment, choosing the next words carefully.
"Techniques are currency, Naruto. In the shinobi world, a clan's techniques are the single most valuable thing it owns. They are the reason a village recruits you, the reason an enemy wants to capture you, the reason your children have a future worth inheriting. The Yamanaka mind arts are the reason the Hidden Leaf has tolerated a clan of people who can walk into anyone's head and read whatever they find there."
Naruto nodded.
"The moment a secret art leaves the family without control, everything built around it begins to erode. You cannot un-teach something. You cannot take back a technique once it exists in someone else's hands."
"Other villages have entire divisions dedicated to stealing clan techniques."
Naruto thought about Lordran, where technique was simply a thing you purchased or found or were taught by someone who had already decided to share it. But Lordran was also a place where everyone was already dead and the world was ending. Maybe scarcity looked different when you had nothing left to lose.
"I understand." Naruto said. "I would rather die than leak something someone trusted me with. That is not something I say to sound good."
Inoichi stayed quiet.
"Wait. What about Danzo? He has already developed something new using the yamanaka clan's knowledge. Wouldn't he leave clan secrets to weaken konoha as revenge or something?"
"Danzo will not leak it."
"He is a traitor."
"Yes." Hiruzen said simply. "He is. And he has done things I can't forgive and will not excuse. But Danzo Shimura has spent his entire life in service to one idea. Konoha's supremacy. He would burn half the village to the ground if he believed what rose from the ashes would be stronger. But he would never hand a weapon to an enemy. That is the one line he has never crossed and the one line I am certain he never will."
The room was quiet.
"We are back to square one." Kakashi said. He had been quiet long enough that the room had half forgotten he was there. "What if we put a seal on Naruto's memory of learning the technique itself? The knowledge stays usable but he can't leak it. And the fact that he even has it at all stays between the five of us."
"That works." Inoichi said.
"I was going to suggest it myself." Naruto said.
Oscar smacked him with his tail.
"Yeah I know I wasn't." Naruto said. "So. What do we do now?"
"Two steps." Inoichi said. "First, I go into your mindscape and construct the seal. Once the seal is in place, I teach you the jutsu that interacts with it."
"And then we wait for Danzo to come sniffing." Shikaku said.
"Sounds good." Naruto said. "Let's get started."
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Kakashi and Shikaku cleared the office furniture to the walls. Hiruzen began drawing the sealing matrix onto the floor.
"Lie down and relax." Inoichi said, already moving through a hundred handsigns. "Try not to think about anything in particular."
Naruto handed Oscar to Kakashi before lowering himself onto the floor.
The yamanaka finished his sequence and placed both palms flat against the floor on either side of Naruto's head. Blue chakra gathered at his hands, as he pushed.
Nothing happened.
"Naruto." Hiruzen said carefully. "Stop resisting."
"I'm not."
A soft chime sounded somewhere that only Naruto could hear.
[ MIND INVADER: 10% ]
The bar was barely moving. Inoichi pressed harder. The percentage climbed one point and stopped. Climbed another and stopped again. It seemed like leveling up resistance stat made it harder for certain jutsus to effect him.
Hiruzen moved without a word. He settled behind Inoichi and placed both hands on the man's shoulders, channeling his own chakra through him like a second current joining the first. The combined output hit the threshold and broke through it. Blue light filled the room from the floor up, washing the walls white, and Inoichi fell inward.
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The human mind was not a place. That was the first thing every Yamanaka learned and the thing most of them eventually forgot, because the mind insisted on presenting itself as one anyway. It built corridors, rooms and landscapes from whatever it had available. It could not help itself.
Naruto's mind had built a sewer.
Inoichi found himself standing neck deep in water that was cold, black and moved with a slow current that came from nowhere and went nowhere. Pipes ran overhead in rusted tangles that dripped into the water around him with sounds that echoed longer than they should have.
He knew about it.
Fifteen years ago a team of yamanaka were sent into naruto's mindscape to check if the kyuubi was negatively effect naruto's young mind. That had ended with two Yamanaka in comas and a third in the hospital for a month. The Hokage's confirmation that the Nine-Tails was gone had been the only reason Inoichi had agreed to attempt this today.
Yet the sewer was different from the reports.
The open corridor was now fractured. The stone split and heaved outward like something had grown through it from the inside. Dark roots, or something that looked like roots, pushed through every crack and ran along the ceiling and disappeared into the water beneath his feet. They were stone-grey with a stone like texture.
The cage was ahead.
The bars were bent outward at the base in ways that had nothing to do with the fox. The seal paper was gone. The roots had come through the floor of the cage itself and climbed the bars. The archtrees reaching toward the center of the space to form a door.
It was simply a door made of stone. There was a ring of fire burned within the centre. That ring contain a darkness that looked like it went on forever. Inoichi looked at it for a moment longer than he meant to. Something in the darkness seemed to look back at him. He took a step forward.
"Don't approach that door."
Inoichi stopped.
His hand had gone to a kunai he wasn't carrying. Old instinct. He turned slowly, to show that he wasn't a threat.
There shouldn't have been a voice here.
Standing at the edge where the sewer corridor opened into the cage space was a child.
Naruto.
But his hair was short and blond. With red irises and a black scalera.
Is he a shadow? Inoichi thought.
The theory of analytical psychology was something the Yamanaka had created. The shadow was a component of the human psyche. The part of a person that held everything the conscious mind had decided it could not afford to be. Repressed desire. Rejected capability. The grief that had no acceptable form. The anger that had nowhere safe to go.
A shadow was supposed to be a pressure. A weight beneath the surface. Not something that stood in front of you and told you where not to walk.
"Yami Naruto." The child said, by way of introduction. Then, with slightly too much seriousness, "I don't say dattebayo."
A beat.
"That's so stupid." He started laughing.
Inoichi stared at him.
"Right. Do you know why I am here?"
"Yes." Yami Naruto said. He was completely relaxed. "You need to place the seal. So do that." He glanced toward the door. "But don't open it."
"What happens if I open it?"
Yami Naruto looked at him with the flat red eyes and said, "Curiosity killed the cat."
"I won't touch the door." Inoichi said, and meant it with a conviction he didn't usually need to locate for professional decisions.
"Moving on." Inoichi said, more to himself than to the shadow. "I need to reach the central hub. In my experience it presents as something approximating a brain."
Yami Naruto just turned and walked, gesturing once over his shoulder for Inoichi to follow.
The sewer tunnels changed.
Inoichi followed the shadow through corridors that shifted as he moved through them.
The sewer turned into the northern undead asyulum.
One step was sewer water and the next step landed on grey stone. Collapsed archways that had never been built in any order that would have made structural sense. Walls that ended before they became ceilings. A staircase descending into water that reflected a sky Inoichi could not see when he looked up.
Then a forest. Then a valley. Then a church. Then something that might have been a fortress wall or might have been a cliff face and Inoichi could not determine which because neither category fully fit and the thing seemed unbothered by that.
None of the spaces ended. That was the detail that accumulated into something difficult to process. Each one simply became the next one.
He was walking through the memory of places rather than the places themselves.
The difference was in the details. Everything had them and none of them were quite right. The torchlight fell from the wrong angle. The water in the ruins reflected things that were not there. The trees in the forest had bark that looked correct from a distance and resolved into something with no grain when he came close.
Lordran, Inoichi understood, was not a place Naruto had visited.
It was a place that had happened to him. And this was what happened to a place that had happened to a person. As the emotional truth of spaces that the conscious mind could no longer access with any precision.
Inoichi noticed the lines that ran along the walls of every section.
"These are the lines of birth and death." He muttered to him. "They form when someone is dying or being born. The consciousness produces them at those two moments, when it is arriving or when it is leaving."
There were hundred of these lines like the rings of a tree. The mosaic covered every surface he could see. Life and death and life again. Inoichi saw Black ichor, burned at the edges in between these lines. That was the darksigns's mark onto Naruto's psyche.
Inoichi felt genuinely lost for the first time in a long career.
"Just what are you?"
"He is a shinobi of Konoha." Yami Naruto said from ahead.
Inoichi breathed out slowly. "You're right."
He followed.
The central hub opened ahead of them without warning. The central hub looked like the firelink shrine. That told inoichi that Naruto found most peace at this place.
"Do what you came to do and go." Yami Naruto said.
Inoichi moved through his hand signs and knelt. Meanwhile in the Hokage's office, the sealing matrix began to glow. The light traveled downward through the chakra connection and began assembling itself around the central hub in interlocking layers. Barrier over barrier. Each one anchored to the next.
Yami Naruto watched without expression.
"Is this actually going to stop Danzo from taking his memories?"
"Hopefully." Inoichi said, finishing the last anchor point and sitting back. "And if it doesn't, I suppose we have you as the secondary defense."
Yami Naruto stayed quiet.
"Should I tell Naruto about you?"
"I don't care either way." The shadow said. "We will meet properly once he needs to shed his mortal form."
Inoichi didn't know what to make of that. Then he felt the pull of chakra drag him back toward the surface.
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Inoichi came back to his body breathing hard. Shikaku and Kakashi were already beside him.
"How did it go?"
"The seal is in place." Inoichi said.
Across the room Naruto groaned and sat up slowly. Oscar was circling him from every angle, checking each side with the focused energy of someone running a full diagnostic.
"How do you feel?" Hiruzen asked.
"There is a strange sensation in my head." Naruto said, pressing two fingers to his temple. "Like a pressure that isn't quite a headache. That is going to take some getting used to." He looked at Inoichi. "Did anything interesting happen in there?"
Inoichi considered how to begin. "Naruto, your mindscape is an incomprehensible mess." He explained what he had seen.
Kakashi stared at Naruto wondering when the insane reveal was gonna happen.
"Stop looking at me like I know what that shadow was."
"But you have an idea." Shikaku noted
"Sort of." Naruto said. "Sakura has a shadow. She calls it Inner Sakura. The humanity I gave her made it conscious enough to have a personality. I am guessing something similar happened with me, probably with a lot more death involved." He shrugged. "I'll figure it out eventually."
"You're not concerned about it taking over?" Kakashi asked.
"I'll deal with it when it becomes a problem." Naruto said. "Right now I want to focus on learning the false memory jutsu."
Inoichi raised one hand. "This evening." He said before taking a gulp of water. "That technique takes a significant amount out of a person to cast. I need to rest before I teach anything."
Naruto nodded as he hugged oscar before lying down.
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The evening had settled over the village by the time they returned to the Hokage Tower. Hiruzen looked up from his desk the moment the door opened, reading the hour against the expectation, and his eyebrows came together slightly.
"Is something wrong?"
"No." Naruto said. "We came back to tell you that I learned the false memory jutsu."
Hiruzen looked at Inoichi.
Inoichi raised both hands in a gesture that confirmed it and also communicated that he was still processing it himself.
"In an hour..."
"It was actually half, then we went to get ice cream. Thank the Shadow clones, baby." Naruto said.
Inoichi pulled out the chair across from the Hokage's desk and sat down with the energy of a man who had spent an afternoon being continuously surprised and needed a moment to stop. "You know, if every genin in the upcoming Chunin Exams could use the Shadow Clone Jutsu, I would sleep considerably better at night."
"Wait. The other genin teams are participating in the Chunin Exams?"
"Yes."
"All of them." Naruto said flatly. "You are putting all of the genin teams into the Chunin Exams."
"That is generally how the Chunin Exams function."
"Some of those kids got their headbands last month." Naruto said. "You want to put them in a room with shinobi from every major village coming to kill me and hope for the best?"
"We can't keep protecting this generation forever." Inoichi said quietly. It didn't sound like an argument. It sounded like something he had already lost sleep over and arrived at anyway. "They are going to lead this village. That process has to start somewhere."
"So the plan is to throw them into the fire and see who doesn't burn?"
"The plan," Hiruzen said, "is to prepare them as thoroughly as we can in the time we have and trust in what they have already built. We got alot of money from the Daimyos for this exam. What better way then to invest in the childs that will lead this village? That is the will of fire."
The redhead took a slow breath and let it out.
"I might be able to help with that."
Hiruzen folded his hands on the desk. "Oh? How?
"Alot of... Weed."
"..."
Silence of the office was broken by Inoichi saying, "Excuse me, what the fuck?"
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[ Personal Note: First off, thanks a ton to all of you for sticking with this story. Seriously, you guys are awesome. Now, if you're interested in supporting me on P@treon, let me just say that over there, I post these massive 15k-word chapters. But heads up, if you're jumping to P@treon, you'll need to start from Chapter 102, since that's where this chapter lines up with the content there.
To everyone here just reading along, please don't forget to leave a comment! Honestly, your comments make my day, and they let me know you're as invested in this story as I am. So yeah, thanks again, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day!