Chapter 25 – Scroll of Sealing

Sango was a spectator, he was clad in a black outfit that hid his appearance and was hard to see at night, he hid himself and observed how Mizuki talked Naruto into stealing the Scroll of Sealing so that he could graduate since he failed the exam. Naruto fell easily for his words and managed to steal the Scroll of Sealing, but luck played the biggest role in his success together with some instructions from Mizuki, otherwise a kid wouldn’t be able to steal such an important object.

Sango observed the arrival of Iruka who found Naruto learning one of the jutsu written in the Scroll of Sealing, then the arrival of Mizuki and the fight between them. Everything was developing how he expected and that disappointed Sango, he hopped for something unexpected. Events developed as he remembered, in the end Naruto used the Multiple Shadow Clone Jutsu and defeated Mizuki, then he shared a bonding moment with Iruka.

“Now.” Seeing that the moment he waited for arrived, Sango sprinted into action. The reason he waited until now was because the Hokage was also watching the event through his crystal globe, he knew that from the anime, and Naruto had the Scroll of Sealing with him at all times making it hard to get access to it unseen, but now the scroll was forgotten a distance away while Naruto hugged Iruka like the child he was and they didn’t pay any attention to the scroll, the Hokage was also no longer watching the scene at this point if the events occurred as he remembered from the anime.

Like a shadow, Sango arrived beside the scroll making sure not to be in Iruka’s or Naruto’s field of view, he touched the scroll with one hand and made some hand seals with the other, in just a few seconds the jutsu was completed and a similar scroll to the Scroll of Sealing appeared in his hand with a *puff* of smoke, but it was much smaller to the original, small enough to be put into his pocket. The technique was developed by him for situations like this, it was fast, silent and effective, all the information would be copied to perfection inside a much smaller scroll, then another technique could be used later to bring it to the original size, only a touch was needed for the technique.

Now he had to find a secluded place to read it, then disperse himself, since he was just a clone, then all the information would be sent to the main body without the risk of being caught by someone.

The scroll was very important to Sango, with it he could finally advance from standard jutsu to more complicated ones and drastically improve his strength and knowledge, not to mention the breakthrough in the development of many things that where progress stalled thanks to the lack of knowledge.

Sango was using the clones for information gathering and in tasks such as this, he acted as the brain of the body, the multitude of clones being his hands, feet, eyes and ears, he rarely had to act himself, but that had a price and that price was having only 1/4 of chakra disponible as the rest was distributed to his clones, yet Sango didn’t consider it a bad thing, even his 1/4 was much more than the amount of chakra his classmates had, excluding Naruto. Thanks to that, Sango didn’t grow dependent on his huge chakra reserves and focused on optimizing the usage of chakra to minimize the amount he needed to perform jutsu.

At Sango’s apartment.

Sango’s room had paper and books thrown all over the place, the word chaos could describe the scene well, but not from Sango’s point of view, for him all the papers and books were positioned in a certain order that created a diagram in his head, the diagram made it easy to connect all papers in certain ways, helping him in making logical connections between them. There was a computer on his desk, something he happily discovered existed in this world, thanks to it he was working on a software that would bring many advantages once completed, but that was still in the future. The books and papers were all written by him, with his memory he didn’t need to keep a book around for reference, once he read it once that was it, he had it memorized. The books were written in English so no one could read them other than him, English didn’t exist in this world after all. The books and papers were mostly about theories and research he created, many of which he couldn’t prove or test as the consequences could be very dangerous or there was not enough knowledge for their development. One of his main research topics was his body, he needed to understand all its secrets, but with no success. Trying to open his eyes forcefully brought unimaginable pain not unlike long needles being inserted into his brain through his eyes, he stopped such attempts, since it hurt so bad then he shouldn’t force it yet, but he worried that nothing changed even after so much time passed. Even his own body’s strength stagnated, and he wasn’t able to improve anymore, even doing physical exercises didn’t improve his strength, something that didn’t make sense, his body was as if frozen in time, his strength was stuck at the level of a Jonin, something he couldn’t accept. On the other hand, Kurenai was much more impressed by his growth in strength than Sango himself, a 12 years old Jonin wasn’t something you saw every day, but Sango wasn’t happy, Kakashi himself became a Jonin at the age of 10 so he didn’t think of it as anything to be happy about.

His relationship with Kurenai became a bit strange with time, they were mostly living together, she still didn’t sleep at his apartment but that was obvious, there wasn’t an additional room for her to sleep in and there was only one bed in the apartment. They had never talked about the subject, there was still a barrier separating them, that was without doubt the age difference, that wasn’t something easy to overcome, not when he was 12 years old. In truth, he was much older than that if he counted the time in the other world, even older than Kurenai herself, but he couldn’t say it. He hopped that a chance to break the stalemate would come in the future, after all, he was aware that Kurenai would become the Jonin-leader of his team, that would bring many opportunities to break the ice.

At the moment Sango was drawing the plans for a new house, the income from the book he publicized more than three years ago accumulated over time, he had more than enough to build a house, he could even be considered well off. He planned to begin the construction by the end of the month and move in as soon as possible, maybe then Kurenai would move in for real, even if they didn’t speak about the oddness of their relationship.

“Haa.” Thinking many strange things, he sighed, he didn’t think that the relationship with Kurenai would be so hard to understand, he was confident in the beginning, but now he stormed his brain thinking on how to take their relationship to that of lovers, even then, what will he do about Hinata, Sakura and Ino? There was someone else in his mind too, he was having another headache thinking about that subject again. He may be a genius in many things, but love was out of his understanding.

At that moment, new knowledge surged into his mind, the clone he sent to steal the information in the Scroll of Sealing succeeded, and he sat there for a long time absorbing the new information.

A long time passed until he moved his body again, the new information was as he believed, it opened many more possibilities.

“I have to rework my techniques.” He murmured. Sango now saw the many improvements he could bring to his techniques.

“No...” Not just improvements, their entire foundations should be remade. The information was still not understood completely, he still had much more work to do before such radical changes could be made. Even with his brain’s abilities, understanding techniques such as Impure World Reincarnation in an hour wasn’t possible.

His thoughts were growing in disarray, so Sango decided to sleep.

The next day would be the team formation day, but he already knew who his teammates would be, he had sweet talked the old man into accepting his request, the Hokage didn’t hesitate once Sango hinted at a new, more advanced volume in fighting techniques including chakra usage, he just had to say that having those two as teammates would surely bring him much inspiration and thus accelerating the release date. Having two girls as teammates was almost unheard of nowadays, and since there were less girls than boys graduating, someone will have a boy only team. That wasn’t Sango’s problem, the teams were almost never broken so he had to have good company.

Since Kurenai was out on a quest again, he had worry in his heart, his mind understood that she would be all right, but his heart still worried. That happened many times along the years, he had no choice but to hope that nothing would change the course of history for now, and Kurenai wouldn’t be hurt. Shortly he won’t have to worry, not because they would undertake quests together but because one of the main subject of his research was an object that would enable him to protect her even over long distances, he hadn’t had much success in creating the technique needed but that changed with the Scroll of Sealing and the Flying Thunder God Technique within. Thinking a myriad of things, he slept.

As he drifted off into the world of darkness, he smiled.