I don't own Naruto
As I told one person that left a review I've had more than a chapter ready for awhile but I haven't gotten it edited until now as many things have been going on and derailing my attention. Relatives in and out of the hospital and nursing home for various thing along with a few others. I did however finish two chapters this time so that should make up for some of it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~jutsu theory~~~~~~~~~~~
Finding the scroll on chakra manipulation was interesting and the letter was more vague than anything but it did fit with some other clues that he had before. The third Hokage had said that both of his parents had died very soon after his birth and the letter was pointing toward them having died in the Kyuubi attack. He had always wondered just who his parents were, but before the letter he had very few clues to look through, now he had a few more clues to look into. If his parents died on the night of the Kyuubi attack like he suspected now then he could start by going through the names on the memorial stone that had been set up for remembering that night and start checking into the blond haired people that died that night. He might not be related to any of them but it gave him a very good place to look and it was a starting point to eliminating some of the possibilities.
The scroll had also fused together one of the ideas that he had earlier but had thought would be too much work for too little return but with some of the things that his clones had been studying when he had free time, it could be turned into a much more profitable business plan. He had once thought about buying a farm so that he had a legitimate area that he was getting his produce from but most of the farms that were for sale were the farms that were closer to where the Kyuubi attacked and he still would have to work out a way of ether purifying the yokai that had seeped into the soil or removing it entirely. The first part of his plan though could be done regardless of weather or not the yokai was removed from the soil. When he had gotten the sealing books, they had filled in a fair number of holes in his sealing theory and had slowed down the horrendous rate that his clones had died at while practicing the sealing arts. His plan for the farm that he was going to purchase was to use one of the seals on it as he constructed a more private training area.
Purchasing the farm under his Shin persona that owned his produce store, raised some suspicions in the village until he mentioned that one of his acquaintances that provided him with his sealing crates wanted to do some experiments on an area that was saturated in yokai settled all of the rumors down. Using seals and a earth moving jutsu that he had come up with Naruto started moving the earth out of a hole that he started digging in one of the more secluded areas of the farm that he had bought.
The seals used chakra to shift through the dirt and earth that was removed to pull out whatever they were attuned to and causing it to fall into the bins that had been arrayed below the attraction seals for just that purpose. After all of the materials that Naruto deemed useful were extracted from the earth it was placed into specialized boxes and another set of seals was used on it. One of the failures in his attempts to make a true gravity seal was inscribed onto the sides of the box and once the ten pounds of dirt and stone was deposited into the box the clone in charge would move it out of the way for another just like it to take it's place before carefully activating the seals on the box. There were several more pieces to the process but essentially all of the dirt and rocks would be hyper compressed into a fair sized stone brick that would be moved to wall that some clones were starting to build.
The attraction seals were set for every type of metal that he could get his hands on before he had started the project. The samples were from all over the place that he could get samples from and allowed the seals to draw even the tiny amounts in the soil into the containers along with repulsion seals for everything else other than what it was supposed to be picking up. It took him most of the morning to get a full bin of iron along with a four foot high and ten feet long wall being built from his setup but mostly that was to prove that it worked and because the way that the seals separated the metals from the rocks required that it was a slow process. Now that it was a proven process, it was time to build several more of the metal extraction stations to speed the process up along with assigning some clones to research and design the underground training facilities that he was going to build.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~jutsu theory~~~~~~~~~~~
The bar in the village was turning out to be a fairly big profit maker. His sale of his own alcoholic concoctions had sped up to the point that he had to purchase one of the buildings next to his bar to keep up his business of it and even now he was having to have clones work over time in the new brewery that he had installed in the basement and backrooms of his new building to keep producing his more popular creations. Because of the popularity of some of his drinks he had to stabilize the seal that aged the drinks so that he knew just how long the drinks had been aged for.
The secret of how he was able to keep selling so much stock and yet keep coming up with more had gotten out already as one of the accountants from the Hokage's office had already been investigating that very matter for tax purposes and somehow someone had gotten a hold of his less than classified report. In all honesty, Naruto hadn't expected for so many of the secrets that he had created to last so long anyway and in the report it just names the same fictional seal craftsmen that supplied him with his crates for the produce store that slow down the time that passes while the crates are sealed.
An upside to the fact that it came out that he had someone who was specialized in commercial sealing did get him a number of requests to pass on to the person that he had do his sealing for him. It also resulted in a flurry of new orders of bottles of his various alcoholic concoctions in various numbers of years aged as some of his more wealthy and influential clients started ordering their favorites in different years aged trying to find the best all over age for their favorite brew. Each batch of the different concoctions tasted similar but even with the recipe followed exactly the ingredients of each one were slightly different so that altered the flavor slightly and the correct number of years that it needed to ferment to taste its best.
Hiashi Hyūga and the Hyūga elders themselves passed along the idea to him to make a roughly eleven smaller bottles for testing once the rough best year was found make five years on ether side of the target year to find the best year for the batch. The fact that the Hyūgas were using this to purchase themselves a fair quantity of the concoctions of varying types showed that they enjoyed drinking away evenings when they weren't busy and had a pleasant brew on hand was almost blatantly obvious to Naruto as well as anyone that had access to his more detailed records from the transactions.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~jutsu theory~~~~~~~~~~~
Hiruzen looked at his half full desk and sighed as he continued to plod on through his paperwork. At least he had managed to catch up to the point that he was working on paperwork that was of the more routine varity rather than that monstrous mound of paperwork that had come after Naruto brought in his expense and revenue, and accidentally uncovered one of the leaks in the leaf village economy. There were others as well as some members of the village that were taking advantage of them but it was still a long process of sifting through the economy of the leaf village to find the missing funds as several leaks just dried up when they caught the merchants. At least one of the leaks that stopped was Danzo's root operation that Sarutobi still couldn't prove still existed.
On a lighter note, Hiruzen turned his thoughts back to all of the times that he had turned his crystal ball on Naruto recently to find out just what he was trying to do with the rather large farm that he had bought. He had spied on a group of clones that was in the process of making plans for an underground training complex as well as plans for tunnels to go much deeper to get access to more raw metal ore and possibly gemstones if he could find any. Seeing the beginnings of the underground complex as well as the slow conveyor belt that drew all of the dug up material through a series of attraction and repulsion seals was very shocking for Hiruzen especially as it seemed that Naruto was in the middle of making several more of the machines. He also had several metal bins that were labeled with various metal types that looked to be full from what he could see.
As the plans for the complex looked solid and the area that Naruto was building in didn't have any other known underground complexes, Hiruzen decided that if nothing else it should be amusing to see just what Naruto does from this point out.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~jutsu theory~~~~~~~~~~~
Hinata had been surveying her crush for several years now and as his senses had gotten sharper so had her stealth. Admittedly since she had started her project she had to cut back on the time that she could spy on Naruto but she wanted him to know that she wasn't trying to emulate his successes but rather was using him as inspiration for her work. Since she had started to play around with the gentle fist she had, had to research it extensively as many of the combinations didn't fit very well into the new version that she was trying to make. A side effect of all of the extra training and researching was that she knew quite a bit more about the way that the gentle fist was designed and worked than even the elders of the clan who were mostly coasting by on the top tier gentle fist moves that were restricted to the clan head, the elders, and their heirs.
Hinata had been able to build the very bottom tier of the new gentle fist style that she was inventing because of the fact that most of them were variations of the traditional gentle fist arts and really only changed the order that the same targets were hit in as well as some of the intermediary motions. She was still working on the rest of the basic katas. Fortunately one of Hinata's tutors that the elders assigned had discovered her private training and was quietly helping by volunteering to be something of a test dummy for the new style. She had been a friend of Hinata's mother and remembered the trouble that she had with the traditional gentle fist throughout her life because of the fact that her body type made it almost impossible to master. Hinata's new style would be just as difficult for the Hyūga who could master the traditional gentle fist, as the traditional gentle fist was for someone of Hinata's body type to master.
Hinata had inherited their mother's body type, while Hanabi had inherited their fathers which went a long way toward explaining just why it was that Hanabi was able to beat Hinata in their spars so easily even with Hinata severely limiting herself because she didn't want to hurt her sister. With the new style that Hinata was creating even in it's severely incomplete form she could defeat Hanabi with relative ease as she now knew all of the gentle fist moves and counters from her deconstruction of the style.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~jutsu theory~~~~~~~~~~~
Gai and Lee were once again training in their clean and upgraded dojo and while Lee wasn't doing anywhere near the number of exercises that Gai was they were both still somewhat awed and thankful to Naruto for the seals that he had applied to part of the dojo. With the building reinforced Gai had less to worry about destroying something in the building and he could finally use the building again as before it had been reinforced and the gravity seals added Gai had, had to stop using the dojo as every one of his training sessions damaged the dojo's building.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~jutsu theory~~~~~~~~~~~
As Naruto went to sleep for the night, the Kyuubi acted and used it's chakra to darken the area around it's cage to the point that not even the bars could be seen. Using a small bit of chakra the great beast drew Naruto's mind into the seal as he was trying to sleep for the night.
The moment that Naruto appeared in the room he was on his guard as the last thing that he remembered was laying down in his bed to sleep. Slipping two kunai from their hiding places in his sleeping hat Naruto yelled, "What's going on and where am I?"
The Kyuubi's deep booming voice answered him, "WE are within your mind child, and you are here because I brought you here as I have a little bit of information to pass along."
"Who are you and why should I believe you?" Naruto asked as his semi cautious nature from dealing with villagers who would sometimes lie to him came to the fore.
Deep chuckling proceeded the answer that the Kyuubi gave Naruto, "Who I am is irrelevant and you are wise to be cautious but for this time I speak to you at least I have no intention of lying to you and once you awake into the waking world once again you are perfectly free to check the information that I am about to give you but you may not find all of it or may be lied to about parts of it."
Naruto' slowly lowered his defensive stance some and replied, "That still explains very little about what is going on here."
The Kyuubi boomed out a short laugh before saying, " Very true but the information that I am about to tell you may just clear up a few things. You have been religiously practicing chakra control for several years and yet you control has only just recently reached the bottom tier of average, correct?"
Naruto started at the question and gave it some thought before replying, "Yes, but what has that got to do with anything?"
"One of the pieces to the answer to that question is that you are descended from the Uzumaki clan of the now destroyed whirlpool village." the Kyuubi said as it debated internally on just how to move on from that point as it didn't want to reveal itself to its jailer just yet or rather not until Naruto felt at least some slight debt to it. "There is another reason but your Uzumaki heritage would have caused similar problems to what you are facing currently anyway. That other reason just sped up the timeline by a couple years is all. You have a condition that is know as chakra dispersement, and the condition only shows up in high level ninja who have exceeded a certain amount of chakra in their bodies, normally. The condition is very low key because so few ninja have to deal with it."
"Why do only high level ninja have to deal with it?" Naruto asked with his stance relaxing just a bit more.
"The condition isn't limited to high level ninja alone but weaker ninja have a much easier fix to the condition." the Kyuubi said in a slightly lower voice as it looked at it's jailer from the darkness that its chakra had helped create. "Ninja with smaller chakra reserves tend to have periods where their chakra gets sluggish and becomes hard to channel when they don't exercise their chakra network regularly. Chakra dispersement is the same condition but with much larger reserves as well as much larger pathways if the chakra isn't exercised regularly than it hardens into a semi solid state disrupting the flow of the chakra in the body but never stopping it completely."
"Is that what's wrong with my control?" Naruto asked as he slid the kunai back into his hat as they didn't seem to be needed.
"To be blunt, yes." the Kyuubi answered. "If you will turn around, you will find several tunnels that lead to and from this place. In this place, within your mind those tunnels are a representation of the chakra pathways in your body and the sluggish water flow beneath your feet is a representation of your chakra. Along those paths you will find what seems to be warm ice that is the places that your chakra is solidified."
Turning back to the darkness from where the voice originated, Naruto asked, "None of that explains just who you are and why you are helping me?"
"You will know why I an here as well as who I am in due time and as to why I am helping you, you could say that in a way that it is the worlds biggest prank on someone else just by helping you a little bit." the Kyuubi said as it remembered the Uchiha that had ripped him from his former prison. "Now you have been told how a problem and have a partial solution so I expect you to remove several of the hardened sections of your chakra tonight and I will keep bringing you back to this place every night until your pathway are clear. To clear the hardened bits you just need to break them and that will be easier if you channel chakra as you break them. Now leave me as I tire of your presence and you have ice to deal with."
Naruto edged toward the tunnels entrances and almost jumped back away from the tunnel when torches set into the walls burst into blue flame as he stepped into the previously darkened tunnel.
The Kyuubi dampened the sound that could escape his cage and groaned as the subtle chakra that it had been expelling was finally violently rejected by the seal. It hadn't been until a week ago that it had even figured out the problem with Naruto's chakra and even then it had taken most of that time to set up an easy way for Naruto to deal with the problem and to work out how to manipulate the seal to bring Naruto to the room. The seal hadn't actively interfered with the slight changes that it had made to the physical projection of the seal most probably because he was attempting to help Naruto solve the problem on his own but there had still been several severe migraines from the chakra backlash.
Within the tunnels Naruto wasn't having very much luck with the ice and was using his kunai to chip away at it but even actively channeling his chakra into the kunai was only helping slightly and as each bit of ice fell away from the main mass and fell into the water it turned into water itself and the flow of water around his feet would visibly speed for a moment as each piece of ice fell into it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~jutsu theory~~~~~~~~~~~
He had worked at it for what seemed like hours before he was too exhausted to remove anymore and had retreated to the room that he had started in. A small red flash lit the room and he found himself sprawled out on his bed as if he had been sleeping. Looking at the alarm clock next to his bed, Naruto was surprised that it showed that less than an hour had passed.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~jutsu theory~~~~~~~~~~~
The next morning after making his clones for his usual daily training, Naruto went to the Hokage's office and at first hesitantly began telling his story that seemed dreamlike now.
After Naruto finished his tail, Hiruzen thought for a moment and then decided to have one of his more trusted medical ninjas check for the condition that Naruto had described and to have him do a complete physical workup while he was at it. Part of the process would also call for Naruto to be knocked out and that would allow him to check the seal. The chakra signature that Naruto was giving off was the same one that he gave off normally but it couldn't hurt to check the seal and it was getting close to its yearly check anyway.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~jutsu theory~~~~~~~~~~~
After the results, of the physical workup came in, Hiruzen slammed his head down on his desk hard enough to leave a dent. Pulling open his secret drawer and pulled out the files in it he slid Kushina's medical history from the pile and checked her earliest entries from when she was just being inducted into the academy. Sure enough within two weeks she had been treated for chakra dispersement and the worst part of the report was that he had been the one to sign off on the treatment being added to her official medical records.
The current report stated that the problem had been growing for quite a while and that it had to have started popping up shortly after his fourth birthday. The only bright side to the whole mess was that Naruto's seal was still ridiculously strong. As it was though Naruto was going to have to visit a medical ninja at least once a week until his coils had been fixed and oddly enough from the notation in the report the Kyuubi may be helping Naruto with his condition as a small section of Naruto's pathways near the seal were free of the condition and if Naruto had indeed learned the truth from Kyuubi it was going to keep putting him to work on it until it was solved. Hiruzen wasn't very comfortable with the idea of the Kyuubi speaking to Naruto yet but from the story the nine tails wasn't attempting anything just yet other than helping Naruto for some reason.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~jutsu theory~~~~~~~~~~~
Danzo sat back at his desk within his hidden complex and went over the information that his carefully placed spying seal had allowed him to overhear and pondered its implications. The Kyuubi had spoken to Naruto but had remained hidden and had only provided information and a little help to solve a problem with his chakra coils. This information didn't fit with the rest of the information that he had managed to acquire about the Kyuubi and if all of that information was wrong than it was a very good thing that all of his plans for Naruto had fallen through because if what he now suspected was true than his plans would have only lead to the leaf villages ruin.
Several times when in his presence Kushina and Mito had both stated that every time that they had tried to communicate with the Kyuubi that they had been unable to get anything coherent out of it and that all that they could sense was an overwhelming hatred and hear curses from the Kyuubi as if it was almost a wild animal bent almost entirely on destruction. Another possibility was the fact that aside from those times when Kushina and Mito had tried to communicate with the Kyuubi their seals slowed the time within itself so much so that for the Kyuubi only roughly a year had passed from the time that it had been forced to fight the first Hokage and the time that it escaped Kushina's seal.
To add to that information, Danzo realized suddenly, before Madara Uchiha had sought out the nine tails it had been content to rest happily in it's den in the land of iron only exiting its den when shinobi attacked it to attempt to subdue it for their ninja village. It had caused a fair amount of destruction in that period of time but it had always been humans that had instigated those situations in the quest for more power. Thinking it over for another moment Danzo started looking through his personal library again and thinking about the what kind of scrolls would be appropriate for when Naruto finished the academy.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~jutsu theory~~~~~~~~~~~
The treatment that he was given at the hospital every week was a rather unusual feeling to Naruto as the medic ninja's chakra felt like it was causing his chakra coils to vibrate slightly. Combine with him destroying as much of the ice in his mindscape every night and using quite a bit of chakra every day on his various projects, Naruto's control had increased to the point that it was above average for most chunin. In the end it only took them until the end of the current academy year to finish out the treatments that should have taken much longer to fix simply because of how long they had been allowed to build.
By this point Naruto was sending a shadow clone to the academy for everything that he couldn't get out of as he felt that he had more productive ways to spent his time. His academy grades were still just barely in the passing range from all of the answers that he had gotten wrong on purpose to keep the answers in line with his altered books and the lectures that his clones were actually allowed in. The only teacher that he even remotely liked was Iruka and that had happened more by accident than anything ease as they had run into one another at Ichiraku's ramen and Iruka had started asking some questions about his class work. The conversation had drifted off from there but by the end of it Iruka was firmly Naruto's friend. Since that day in his third year at the academy Naruto would meet Iruka at Ichiraku's ramen and they would share a few bowls and discuss the academy and his studies.
The businesses that Naruto had gotten over the years took up a fair bit of time even with the shadow clones taking up a lot of the slack. The produce shop was the least difficult as he had finally managed to build up enough stock that he only had to fill it up every other week. It had also had the side effect of improving some of his seals as he had to increase the quality of the seals that he used on the crates that slowed the passage of time while they were closed. The apartment buildings had had a few minor problems come up but most of those had been fixed by their tenants. The only major problem that had popped up at the apartments was that one of the apartments had caught fire and while the seals that he had layered around the building stopped the fire from spreading, the things inside the apartment were almost a complete loss. The apartment had to be stripped down to it's bare studs and the roof and floor ripped out and replaced, while luckily their was no real structural damage. His bar and selling alcohol on the side were both bringing in a tremendous amount of cash as he made most of his ingredients.
By the time the end of his fourth year in the academy finished up Naruto had figured out a way to drain away the Kyuubi's chakra that had lingered on the farm but it had taken a while to slowly drain away the energy so that the natural energy in the area could recover to where it should have been. His underground training area had been completed for the most part and there were some more areas that he felt that he should add to complete it but it was already being used for it's intended purpose. After the initial boom in the metals that he had been able to strip out of the earth that he had excavated, Naruto had began a second tunnel off of the one he already had and dug deeper and further out toward the forest that surrounded the village and while he still didn't get very much metal a day he had gotten at least a few pounds of the more common types of metal. His digging had also unearthed a few small gemstones of a semi-precious nature.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~jutsu theory~~~~~~~~~~~
Kyuubi sighed in relief, it had taken months and Naruto had to be helped to fix the problem but the chakra dispersement had been fixed. Normally Kyuubi wouldn't have bothered to help fix the problem in Naruto's coils but the blockages in Naruto's chakra flows were the reason that the seal was able to slam it's chakra back into it so painfully. In helping fix the problem, Kyuubi had also allowed itself more access to Naruto's chakra network. Why with the better access to Naruto's chakra network, Kyuubi had already built up a small stash of information that it might be able to trade to Naruto later for some benefits. If the five basic chakra elements that ninja used, Kyuubi could trade Naruto the information on just how compatible he was with each element naturally. Of course with training any deficit that he had in wielding the elements could be remedied somewhat. One piece of information that Kyuubi would most probably sit on in the future was the fact that Naruto was capable of forming the chakra chains that his mother had used to restrain Kyuubi. Of course if Kyuubi's memory was serving it correctly than Naruto's basic potential for the jutsu wasn't anywhere near what his mother had naturally possessed but if Naruto put in some training on it than he might be able to easily restrain up to the three tails. It would be somewhat painful for the Kyuubi but nothing that it couldn't handle in a pinch. That bit of information would be a last resort in bargaining with Naruto though because if it never came to light than Kyuubi would be much happier.
Slipping out another stealthy pulse of chakra the Kyuubi continued it's subtle exploration of Naruto's chakra network. It didn't know just what else may be there but once it finished mapping Naruto's chakra network then it would move on to mapping Naruto's actual body so that if he got hurt than Kyuubi could patch him us some from fatal wounds at least.