A.N. Hello, this is kekkeigenkai95, with a small sketch I've been sitting on for quite some time. Based on the reception, I might continue this story soon. Hope you enjoy this.

Disclaimer : I do not own Naruto, and I own it even less after the last version of Harem Jutsu.

Chapter 1: The Scroll and the Stranger

Naruto was no stranger to pain. It had been his one companion throughout his life, from the blows he had suffered at the hands of the orphanage workers, to the constant abuse he suffered at Sakura-chan's hands. So why did it hurt so much when she ignored him for Sasuke once again, even though he had fought sannin and almost died to bring baa-chan to heal them?

Naruto was walking down the streets of Konoha, his hands lazily tucked inside his voluminous jacket and his eyes slitted against the glare of the sun. A random passerby would never notice anything was bothering him, though, Naruto thought bitterly, nobody would notice even if he was suddenly missing an arm.

Contrary to popular belief that Naruto was annoyingly cheerful, Naruto often sulked, if not outright brooded. What made him different from other career brooders was the simple fact that he never let anybody see him in the act. Today though, as he left the Konoha General Hospital, he found himself far too preoccupied to bother with what others saw of him.

Sakura would probably never know how much heartache and introspection she had caused by the simple and by now almost instinctual act of ignoring Naruto.

Trying to wrap his mind around the strange feelings of abandonment that had decided to plague him today, Naruto didn't pay any attention to his surroundings until he almost had a very intimate meeting with a tree.

Sufficiently brought out of funk, he took notice of his surroundings, only to let out a bitter giggle. Of course his feet would come here, when he was thinking about the possible folly he had committed in even entering the ninja academy. This was where his journey had truly begun after all, where he had taken down the traitor Mizuki. This was the place where he had accepted the duties of a ninja of Konoha, where he had officially become a ninja.

Now, almost eight months later, he found himself questioning his decision to become a shinobi of the Leaf. After all, the young him had wanted to become a ninja as a means of recognition, pining for the kind of acknowledgement that a ninja got in the Leaf Village.

Well, he had had that notion quickly corrected. A genin Naruto was even less welcome around Konoha than an academy student Naruto, and as a genin he was forced to interact with the very villagers who routinely sneered and belittled him.

The first days as a genin he had held on to some hope that his team would at least accept him; he had been proven wrong soon enough. Naruto had no illusions about Sasuke – As the boy had said in his introduction, he was a person who would never let himself get close enough to a person to be considered anyone's friend. And to be honest, Naruto thought, he really did not want to try. In addition to his 'holier than thou' approach towards him, his very existence was a constant reminder of what Naruto didn't have, and seeing him waste the goodwill of Konoha left a bad taste in his mouth.

Kakashi had once been his hero, when he had protected him from the shadows as an ANBU – Really, did he think that Naruto wouldn't identify his scent? - But ever since his appointment as sensei of Team 7 it had waned, along with the tolerance at his bad excuses. Naruto acknowledged that he may fundamentally be a good person, but he was a terrible teacher. But he would have let that go; after all, he wasn't the worst teacher he had - Mizuki came to mind – if not for the obvious favoritism to the resident broody Uchiha of the team. When he had pawned Naruto off to the awful poser called Ebisu he had cracked the final bit of gratitude that had kept Naruto from grouping him with the others who belittled him.

Naruto closed his eyes as he lay down on a horizontal branch that protruded from a nearby tree, and he sighed. By logical progression, the next person would be Sakura, but it hurt to think about her. Naruto still remembered the shy little girl that he had watched from a distance at the park, too afraid even then of rejection and ridicule to go and talk, but still longing to help her with the bullying she got from her classmates. Then he had not stepped in, afraid of the parent's reaction to seeing him with their children, but that guilt he had carried with him for a long time. That was what had led him to talk to her in the academy, and ask to be her friend in the only way he knew how, which was the way he had observed people become friends in the parks around Konoha. Of course, now he knew that what he had observed was a boy asking a girl to a date, but at the moment the only thing he had noticed was the way the girl's face lit up, and the hugs and affection the couple had shared. Being rather starved for attention, he had longed for that, so in a fit of recklessness he had charged in after the academy had finished, asking the pretty Sakura –chan to a date.

He clearly remembered the ridicule that little outburst brought upon him, when Sakura used her ridicule of him as a stepping stone to enter into the elite group at the academy. After that, it had become a matter of pride to him; after all, if he could get the popular Sakura to be his friend, surely he would get accepted?

Now, looking back at his reasons for chasing after her friendship, it felt so hollow, so baseless, so deceptive. But that was not a problem; in fact, it was almost a relief to finally be rid of that yoke tying him down. However, paradoxically, it was exactly this that bothered him the most. Haku's words in the forest kept reverberating in his mind.

"When a person… has someone important to protect… that's when they can become truly strong."

Now that the others in Team 7 were officially personae non grata to him, he found himself wondering what he had to tie himself down to Konoha. The Old Man was dead, and even before his death, Naruto had been unsure of his intentions, and rather leery of opening himself to him after the Kyuubi secret had been revealed. It hurt, wondering whether the only man who had been kind to him had done that with a ulterior motive in mind, but it was something he could not help pondering whenever he thought back to those early ramen runs. Surely the Hokage did not do that with all orphans?

Excluding them, the only people he had any connection to were the Ichiraku's, Iruka, and Konohamaru. All of them had ulterior motives for his acquaintance, with the Old man pushing Iruka into socializing with him; the Ichiraku's gaining a significant portion of their income via him, and Konohamaru's own pride. Still, they stuck with him, and for that he would be thankful.

Naruto sighed. Introspection was tiring work, he thought as he absentmindedly tapped the branch below him.

An ominous crack echoed through the clearing, making Naruto look up in alarm. The place he was tapping on the branch had given way, revealing a layer of older bark that was lit up by a strange seal, arcane characters lit up in ominous crimson.

A seal? What was a seal doing in an ordinary tree branch, and how in the world had it activated?

Naruto instinctively jumped off the branch, half expecting the tree to explode in a burst of flames. However, as soon as his hand left the branch, the glowing seals dimmed, the light softly pulsing as opposed to glaring.

Hastily searching for some explanation for the sudden unexplained activation, he suddenly noticed that the blood from when his fingernails had been driven into his palms was still coating his hands. Could the seal have been activated by his blood?

No. That was impossible, he told himself as he approached the gently pulsing seal, now certain that it wouldn't explode. Instead he carefully crept near the strange seal, carefully analyzing it.

Seals had always been a point of interest to Naruto; he seemed to have an instinctive understanding of the subject. In fact, he would probably have been at the top of the class in the Sealing Introductory class at the Academy, if it hadn't been for Hoshi-sensei, who had hated his guts. Later on, he had looked them up whenever he could, until the Old Man had heard of his interests (How he knew, Naruto would never know) and visited his apartment, making him promise to stop studying Fuinjutsu for reasons he wouldn't explain. Naruto had needed a whole week of all-you-can-eat ramen before he had agreed.

Still, Naruto still occasionally dabbled in the study of the esoteric art, and therefore he could tell just by looking at the seal that it was a work of art. The seal's base matrix was somewhat unusual, being a helical base that was covered up using a spiral design concealment cipher. The design itself looked old, but that particular arrangement was one Naruto had seen before, on the protective seals woven into the massive wooden walls surrounding the village.

However, that was not the most intriguing part of the puzzle as far as Naruto was concerned. That honor belonged to the activation sequence of the seal. There, at the very centre of the helical base, was an ink circle surrounding the kanji of 'self', 'family' and 'blood' linked by a combination rune. The ink circle was surrounded by rings and rings of arcane script that detailed restrictions on what the containment seal, for this obviously was one, would release. This was what had Naruto so puzzled, and in a small part of his mind, hopeful.

That this sealing structure was on the barrier meant that it has been around for some time… but it hadn't even been mentioned in passing in any of the beginner sealer scripts that he had stolen. That meant that it was probably a clan style, but with the activation sequence only allowing a blood relative of the sealer to activate the seal…

Naruto looked at the glowing seal with an increasing sense of wonder. All the evidence pointed to one conclusion. Whoever this clan was, he had found a familial connection!

With a growing excitement, Naruto continued to peruse the strangely complex seal. There was the relay, the storage seal, the inhibitor seal, an identification seal, a shock seal? Naruto shuddered in sympathy; those seals hurt! Furthermore, there was a plea to the guardian spirits, and… an emergency total unseal!

Naruto barely managed to stifle his yell of triumph. Even if the blood seal part had been unlocked, it had been an overall locking mechanism that concealed the very presence of the seal. Typically, unlocking it contents would have required an activation password that was obviously out of his reach. Sure, it was still possible to contain the sealed items by nullifying the seal itself, but that would require seal work far beyond his comprehension. Currently his strength was in analyzing seals, not creating them. He could barely make a successful exploding tag.

However, the emergency unseal provided an out. The emergency unseal worked on a simple principle; blood and password. However it differed from the others in that the password had to be specified in the seal structure itself in kanji, therefore any person with a relatively good knowledge of seals could open this seal, if they had managed to open the blood seal.

Grinning infectiously, Naruto bit his own finger, pressing on it until a drop of blood formed on the pad of his finger. Using this, he carefully wrote the kanji for 'Blood' on the centre of the designated empty runic circle.

An ethereal pulse of golden chakra spread throughout the forest, with Naruto barely managing to cling onto the branch due to his instinctual use of chakra.

Suddenly, the forest was unnaturally silent. Then the 'pop' of a storage seal unsealing echoed, along with the customary puff of chakra smoke.

As the smoke blew away, a large bejeweled scroll was visible to Naruto's hungry gaze. It was precariously balanced on the branch, along with another smaller, plain scroll.

Even as Naruto scrambled to catch the scroll before it hit the ground, he was puzzled by the appearance of the scroll. Why go to all that trouble just to seal a scroll? It was not as if the seal could have contained anything else, the emergency unseal essentially short circuited the dimension stability component in the storage, causing anything stored in the other dimension to manifest in the material world. He was abruptly interrupted as his hand closed on the smaller scroll, as when his skin touched the scroll, it caused a sudden suctioning effect on his chakra, causing him to stumble on his landing, landing on his tailbone with a lurch.

The suctioning was getting worse. Naruto was not the most chakra sensitive ninja in Konoha and his skill in internal chakra manipulation was just short of horrible, but even he could sense his chakra output surge out of his control, inexorably pulled towards the insatiable scroll stuck in his left hand. He could dimly feel the larger, more ornate scroll roll away from his thrashing body, but he couldn't muster enough strength to go after it. The surroundings were getting duller to the senses, the world was spinning, and his body was wracked with violent cramps. He faintly recalled Iruka-sensei describe these symptoms as those of severe chakra depletion, but at that time he had not really listened to it. Those days, he had considered himself far too awesome to succumb to something as plebian as chakra exhaustion, and later his tenant had made sure that he was never really short of it. For some reason though, this time the Kyuubi was not supplying chakra as he normally would.

Naruto whimpered as he curled himself into a ball, violent tremors overcoming his body as the scroll continued to resist his attempts to remove it. He could feel that he was close to unconsciousness, and he all but welcomed it. Suddenly, he was feeling even more disorientated as the chakra that had been siphoned away from the body began to flow back into the body from the scroll.

It was a strange feeling; part sudden relief, as if a muscle he had not realized was tensed had suddenly relaxed, and part uncomfortable pressure, as he often got when he gorged on ramen.

The scroll was still firmly stuck to his hand, and the flow of chakra was not showing signs of lessening. When he took a closer look at the small scroll, Naruto's eyes widened in disbelief at the sight.

The once plain red capped scroll was crawling in minute golden symbols, kanji and katakana mixed with several types of ancient hieroglyphs that Naruto had only seen in passing. And they were moving, replicating, morphing in a perpetually shifting pattern that baffled the eye.

That… was just not possible! Naruto may have not been the most dedicated scholar, but he took sealing seriously. And according to what he had learned, the very principles of the art dictated that it was simply impossible to form a self-updating array! Just what was this scroll? The worst part was, now that he could think again, he realized that it was inadvisable to remove the scroll until whatever it did was complete. Otherwise, seeing as it was directly connected to his chakra network, it might damage his chakra coils enough to render them incapable of molding chakra, and that was possibly the last thing he wanted to do.

His muscles protested his attempts to get up, and he rolled over onto his back in disgust, holding the hand stuck to the scroll in front of him. He could see the large scroll caught in the underbrush, and the setting sun through the canopy of the treetops.

Staring at the scroll got old pretty fast, Naruto noted, after staring blearily at the irritating object for close to quarter of an hour. His spewing of curses had finished a few minutes ago, when he had run out of expletives to use for the scroll. The golden script covering the scroll had begun to pulse, its glow ebbing and flowing with his pulse. There was a persistent itch on his lower back that was annoying the hell out of him, he was feeling supercharged from the excess chakra in his coils, and his muscles still felt like limp noodles attached to his limbs rendering any immediate plans of relocation moot.

The rhythmic movement of the glowing script was slowly increasing in speed, slowly building up to a crescendo. He could feel his chakra flowing through the coils mimic it, flowing agitated through his coils, building momentum. Whatever the scroll was going to do, it was going to happen soon.

In spite of himself, the anticipation was getting to him, along with a hitherto unknown emotion: fear. The flowing, morphing symbols were hypnotic, as was the feeling of the chakra flowing within his body. However the itch was getting ever more insistent…

The primal, tribal rhythm reached the apex, the golden script lighting up like a miniature sun. Naruto was wreathed in a bluish chakra aura as it crashed into the walls of his chakra coils in waves and waves of pressure. Naruto's blood was singing in his ears, his body seemed ready to itself apart…

The itch suddenly escalated, transforming into a blinding pain. Naruto's eyes widened as pain speared into his lower back, along with a sudden snapping sound that made him fear for his bones. A suddenly blank scroll fell from his nerveless fingers as he was propelled upwards by an unknown object pressing harshly into his lower back.

Coming to an abrupt stop suspended about 6 feet above ground, Naruto looked around in alarm to find that the surrounding was crisscrossed with thick, cable-like golden chains that seemed somehow insubstantial. They formed a bowl shaped grid around him, and it was obvious that it was what was holding him suspended.

"Well, this wasn't what I expected to see." A cultured female voice spoke from behind him, laced with a hint of amusement. Naruto turned instinctively, the chains holding him up subconsciously aiding him, only to come face-to-face with the woman who had spoken.

The woman looked to be in her early thirties, dressed head-to-toe in white. Her crimson hair was fashioned into twin buns at the sides of her head and held there with several senbon, while an intricate seal stood in the centre of her forehead. But that was not what was concerning Naruto right now.

Instead, all his concerns were centered on the fact that the woman in question was translucent. Naruto could make out the outlines of the tree trunks behind her through her torso, even as she tilted her head to look at him curiously.

"G-G-Ghost!"

With a terrified scream, Naruto instinctively thrust his hands forward, the chains following the motion as four large chains with sharpened hooks for ends speared into the form of the ethereal woman. As they passed harmlessly through the figure, Naruto could feel his chakra getting sapped again.

"W-What a-are y-you?" He managed to stutter, before his body gave up on him and he collapsed in a heap, out cold.