2,391Chapter 44
Time passed, as it always does.
Rei announced his cousin "Kanade" would be staying, and the villagers welcomed her with open arms. The innkeeper had no issues letting her use one of the rooms as a temporary residence at a discount until a new one could be built, with the excuse that Sute wanted to be closer to town than her cousin's house allowed. Of course, the truth was that Rei didn't trust her enough to house her. Fortunately there was no shortage of volunteers to help construct a house for her. Though that admittedly wasn't her main priority.
No, her greenhouse took that spot.
It didn't take too long to find suitable workers for the construction. Sute had secured a copy of its blueprints long before leaving Kiri, so it was easy for the local carpenters to erect the framework despite having never even heard of one before. They had to find glass artisans in a neighboring town to make the windows, but even with that delay they finished in record time. Within a month and a half, the greenhouse was complete.
The most time-consuming part for Sute personally was simply preparing to unseal her plants. The special storage scrolls she'd made pulled the soil along with the plants, so she had to dig appropriately sized holes to contain said dirt. That meant she had to plot exactly where to put each one so everything would fit, consulting a notebook she'd used to record the dimensions stored in each scroll. Then she also had to figure out the best arrangements for different humidities and soil types, make some tweaks to the original layout since this time she could plan it in advance, and prepare the right humidity-control seals for each area...
All in all, a long and tedious process.
It was worth it though, and after four days of digging and refilling and digging some more, followed by setting up seals to adjust the interior's climate, Sute finally got to unseal all her beloved plants. "Hello my sweet babies," she crooned, all but nuzzling one large fern's fronds. "I missed you so much."
"Can, can you hear them?" Rei whispered as he watched her from the side. "Does mokuton let you talk to plants?" Sute ignored him, pulling away from the fern to unfurl another scroll over another hole. A puff of smoke produced several plants and soil that fell into the hole, landing a bit crooked but overall landing in the correct places. She bounced over to begin patting down the soil around.
"You look so healthy," she cooed, cupping her hands around one of the blossoms of a flowering bush. It felt delicate and soft to the touch, the petals silky smooth against her calloused fingers. "I'm so glad the stasis worked alright, you look just like the day I put you in there. I know you were in there for a long time, but the dark times are over now. You'll get plenty of sunlight here!"
"I think I'll just let you get settled," Rei murmured, leaving her alone to continue welcoming her plants.
And also open her box to let her mamushis finally roam freely, as they were always meant to do. Mushi Mushi, Mushishi and Mama-chi were all ecstatic to be freed from their boxy confines, and watching them disappear into the greenery had Sute beaming with joy and pride. She had no doubt they would enjoy the new home just as much as their old one.
Shortly after her greenhouse was completed, work on her actual house also finished. Sute was more than ready to leave behind the inn and move somewhere with actual privacy again. It was a simple structure and a bit larger than most of the other homes, with the back two rooms serving as her living space. The front of the house, meanwhile, would be used as a clinic.
As soon as she moved in, Sute opened her doors to the village. She didn't reveal all her skills, but did portray herself as reasonably well-educated and trained in medicine, so the villagers were eager to accept her services. Rei had been the closest thing they had to a doctor, but his skills were mostly limited to basic knowledge and herbal remedies. At the hospital she'd have placed him at trainee level, a fact they intended to remedy.
As promised, she took the time to teach Rei about medicine and medical ninjutsu while having him help in her new clinic as an assistant. Their interactions remained politely distant for the most part, each still highly guarded and wary of the other, but the prospect of knowledge made working together smooth enough. Teaching him had been part of the deal after all.
That was also why Rei allowed her to visit his home for dinner to teach him about the chakra-disrupting seal away from the villagers.
Surprisingly, the latter turned out to be the more difficult task.
"I thought you said you had the basics down," she deadpanned.
"I said some of the basics," he reminded her wryly. "And I haven't had to use fuinjutsu for years now, so I'm a bit rusty."
"You made an explosive storage scroll. I'd be impressed if that was intentional, but it's clear that it wasn't."
"To be fair, don't most failed seals explode?"
"Yes, but that's usually not because you mix in elements from explosive tags so that it only explodes when you retrieve something." She gestured at the smoldering remains of the kokeshi doll used to test the scroll, the wooden figurine surprisingly not a pile of ash. The remaining lumps were slowly burning away though, as were the wood chips which had been sent flying all around the clearing. "How did you even do that?"
"I think it's obvious I have no idea."
"Your aunt would be ashamed."
"Actually, she'd probably laugh."
Needless to say, Sute had to give Rei a refresher course on fuinjutsu before they could move onto disrupting chakra coils. Though his failure did give her ideas for some new experiments of her own. Explosive storage scrolls could make for great booby traps, and that got her wondering about other potential combinations. Ideas to tinker with in her downtime, which would be plentiful once things settled down.
While Sute had plenty of things to teach Rei, he also had things to teach her in return though. His knowledge of local herbs exceeded her own, and he turned out to be better at mixing medicines than Sute herself. Surprising, since she had plenty of experience mixing poisons and antidotes. He had a good instinct for what to combine to get the desired effects, even with herbs from her greenhouse he had never encountered in person.
"I couldn't learn proper medical ninjutsu without a teacher, but there are plenty of botany books out there," he explained with a shrug. "I read whatever I could get my hands on. And a lot of merchants pass through from other countries, so they brought some from pretty far away."
Sute stared at him for a moment, and then asked, "Do you still have them?"
He did, retrieving a few boxes full of books from his bedroom, and Sute promptly borrowed about half his library to read up. While her knowledge was vast, Kiri's isolated nature ultimately limited her access to foreign botany books. His collection had far more variety than her own. Most of her knowledge had come from trial and error, and these books would have saved her so much time. Yes she was jealous, she wasn't above admitting that.
However, the real area where he outshined her came with treating more natural ailments and conditions.
"This should help with the cough," Rei said, placing a bottle of freshly mixed medicine on the table as Sute watched from behind. He smiled at old man Noburo, so soft and friendly compared to how he usually spoke to her. "Just be sure to take it easy for now, your lungs aren't as strong as they used to be. I'd recommend at least a week of rest after that fit yesterday."
"I'll rest after the planting is done," Noburo grunted as he reached for the bottle. "Can't trust anyone else to do it right."
Rei's hand slapped on top of the bottle before Noburo could grab it. His friendly demeanor had vanished, smile replaced with the chilly look Sute was more familiar with. "No, rest now," he said sternly. "You may have pushed through spring fine in the past, but your lungs have permanent scarring from that bout of pneumonia last winter. You just had a severe attack yesterday, severe enough Kanade had to use medical ninjutsu. Get your brother's grandkids to do the planting for once."
Noburo's face twisted in irritation at the suggestion. "Are ya kiddin' me, Rei? They end up wasting half the seeds every time! Brats can barely plant a single straight row!"
"Then teach them how to do it properly," Rei replied bluntly. "Better to do it now while you can still move and supervise them. You won't live forever, someone has to take it over anyway."
Noburo glared at him but Rei didn't move, just met his gaze with a stony glare of his own. Finally the old man folded, groaning as he ducked his head. "Fine. Just give me the cough medicine, and I'll go talk to Saburo about lendin' me one or two of the brats."
Rei's expression eased as he nodded, removing his hand from the bottle. "That's all I ask." Noburo took the medicine and headed out, grumbling all the while even as Rei called, "And I will be checking!"
Once the door closed, his body sagged with a sigh. "Stubborn old man," he muttered under his breath. "You'd think that after a whole lifetime with that seasonal cough he'd understand how it worked by now..." He shook his head with another frustrated sigh, and then the corner of his eyes slid towards Sute, voice dry as he asked, "What, no commentary this time?"
"You seem to have it handled fine," she replied with a shrug. "And I don't know much about... whatever he had."
"Really?" He frowned as he turned to face her fully. "Didn't you say you were basically in line to be the head of the hospital?"
"Yes, the hospital in the Bloody Mist," she responded wryly. "We mainly prioritize treating shinobi, maybe some civilians if they came from high-ranking families. People with chronic conditions like that cough usually don't become shinobi or just die in the academy, so that sort of thing wasn't high on the priority list when studying. I don't even know what to call whatever he has."
Asthma, some part of her mind suggested, but she was far from certain even after using the Mystic Healing Palm on Noburo yesterday. All her knowledge of asthma came from her first life, having never encountered it in Kiri, and it hadn't been a focal point of her studies back then so her knowledge was even fuzzier. She didn't even know the Japanese word for it to float it as a possibility, or know if the diagnosis existed here.
Whether he had asthma or something else, it had left its mark on Noburo. She had felt it in his lungs yesterday, seen the scarring in her mind's eye while her chakra circulated through him with the Mystic Healing Palm. While some of it came from the pneumonia Rei had mentioned, much of it also felt older. Whether he had asthma or something else, it had been slowly ravaging his lungs for an entire lifetime.
That sort of built-up scarring couldn't be healed, except perhaps by Tsunade. For all medical ninjutsu seemed magical in the show, it had limits. In Kiri, she would have forcibly retired someone with that level of scarring. The only saving grace was that Noburo's condition, based on what she just heard, mainly reared its head in spring. So a seasonal thing probably exacerbated by spring allergies, which was a hassle for a farmer, but if he paced himself carefully it may not be too prohibitive—
Sute cut off her mental analysis there, aware it could go on for a while, and shrugged. "I can make some assumptions for possible treatments based on my basic anatomical and medical knowledge, but I'm more knowledgeable in treating injuries and illnesses rather than conditions present from birth. I don't know any specifics."
Rei took in her explanation silently, his expression cool and hard to read as usual. "Do you know anything about pregnancy?" he finally asked, and Sute... Was admittedly taken aback by the question.
"Only the basics needed for delivery." Kiri did have a maternity ward in the hospital, and all staff were given basic education on deliveries to assist in an emergency, but she had never been called in. Her specialties lay in treating shinobi, and birth and pregnancy had never interested her enough to study it independently. Most of her knowledge came from a required course on the subject in her past life, and just like with asthma, the specifics from those memories had also blurred with time.
"Then now is as good a time to learn as any." He stalked over to the shelf where they kept supplies, quickly loading up a bag with some basic tools. "Come on, let's go visit Kimiko for a house call."
"Sure," she agreed mildly, faintly bemused by his authoritative tone, and followed him outside.
Along with all of the fuinjutsu and medical lessons, Sute also finally started training her mokuton.
The Land of Bamboo was sparsely populated with large distances between most of the villages and cities, with few people traveling between them besides merchants. Which meant there were plenty of places to secretly train near their nameless village without worrying about witnesses.
When she posed the topic to Rei, he instantly had a list of suitable locations from his own training. Thirty minutes of walking at a leisurely pace found them in a sizable clearing where bamboo and trees grew in equal measure. Reaching it required scaling down a cliffside with the aid of chakra, guaranteeing none of the villagers would randomly stumble upon them, but it was still conveniently close.
"This is a nice place," Sute commented as she looked around the clearing, brushing her palm against an age-old cut on a nearby tree trunk. A deep slash from a blade, the edges long since healed but still splitting the bark in a jagged scar. Other trunks and stalks bore similar marks, all of them worn down by time to no longer be sharp and crisp but dull around the edges. "Looks like you spent a lot of time here."
"I don't use this one too often anymore," Rei said. "It's a bit of a hassle to reach compared to others, and I don't do much heavy training these days. But it should work for you." He lingered towards the edge of the clearing, watching her with a keen glint in his eye. She'd noticed that glint before, a specific spark that only surfaced when her mokuton came into play. "So, what are you going to do?"
Usually, Sute wouldn't bother answering and would try to send him away. She didn't want to give away her secrets, especially not to someone she still barely trusted. Years of hiding her mokuton made the presence of an audience feel wrong, some voice nagging in the back of her head that it was dangerous. But for today at least, she needed another person present. "I'm going to test my limits," she said, walking to the center of the clearing and kneeling.
This marked her first time actually training the mokuton on such a large scale. She'd done smaller scale stuff before, practicing in her greenhouse by altering the growth of plants or practicing her sensory trick using the roots. Had even done some slightly more advanced techniques when alone on ANBU missions, like growing wood from her body or warping trees and roots. It was how she learned to make constructs like the boat she used to carry Amano back in Hot Water, and figured out how to make wood clones, misshapen as they could be.
But training of this scale, letting herself actually try to use it to its full extent, was new.
When she slammed her palms on the ground and let her power flow freely, buried bamboo shoots all but exploded into full-grown stalks. Saplings previously dwarfed by already-grown bamboo grew to their full height and maturity, roots so thick and large they broke through the ground and became tangled in each other. Already matured trees, meanwhile, grew even larger, branches splitting as they extended with new leaves and blossoms sprouting that hid the sky above.
The speed and extent of the transformation caught Sute by surprise even as she continued to steadily pump chakra into the soil. While not an instant process, the growth rate still exceeded her expectations given the range her chakra covered. In the span of a few minutes, the formerly empty clearing had radically transformed to become almost overgrown with greenery. The space became dimmer as the newfound canopy blocked the sunlight, casting everything in shadow.
Rei exclaimed in shock and awe as he watched the transformation. "This is amazing," he breathed, reaching up to brush the leaves on a freshly grown bamboo stalk that now towered above him. "I remember that dandelion seed grew fast, but to see entire trees..." He trailed off as Sute finally stopped pouring chakra into the soil and then slumped to the ground, turning to her in alarm. "Sute!?"
"I think I found my limit," she groaned. Pouring chakra into the ground and actively trying to speed plant growth, and across a large area at that, had drained her reserves surprisingly fast. Not enough to leave her with chakra exhaustion, but they were far lower than she was used to.
Rei huffed as he watched her stagger to her feet, her legs a bit wobbly. "I see you're not used to using up your chakra," he observed wryly.
"That obvious?" she grumbled.
"My aunt's husband was an Uzumaki." Sute started to respond but then paused, blinking in surprise.
"Uzumaki?" Sunny yellow hair and blue eyes popped into her head, along with a childish voice shouting "Believe it!" Sute blinked and banished the image. "Right. That was the main clan in Uzushio, right?" She'd seen the name the few times she came across mentions of Uzushio while studying fuinjutsu, mostly in reference to masters of the craft. Though like the village itself, she hadn't looked into it much.
(The fact Naruto shared the name had given her pause the first time she saw it, of course. Was that clan ever revealed or mentioned in canon? Or was it another detail that never got brought up, just like all the other fallen and failed villages and clans that littered this world's history?)
(Just another thought she filed away, for dwelling on a question she could never answer would do no good.)
"You really don't know much about Uzushio, do you," Rei sighed, though he didn't seem too upset about it. "Come on, we should get back before the effects really set in. My house is closer, so you can rest there."
"Thanks," she said, swaying only briefly as she followed him. She paused at the edge of the clearing, casting one last glance at the overgrowth they were leaving behind.
"Don't worry about cleaning up," Rei called from ahead of her. "No one comes out this way and we don't get many shinobi passing through either. It's fine to leave it."
"You're going to jinx it if you say that," Sute muttered wryly, but turned to follow nonetheless. Rei waited for her to catch up before resuming his walk, keeping his pace slow so she wouldn't have to strain herself to keep up.
They might still be only a step removed from strangers, connected only by blood, but it still felt nice to have someone looking out for her.
Hey guys! So much for my plans to stick to a regular schedule, huh? I can't guarantee when the next chapter will be, but I felt like this was needed today. Today is just... scary, so I won't talk about it.
Instead, I have a request and an offer:
Share your absolute favorite Naruto fics in the comments and reviews.
The ones you consider the best of the best, the absolute masterpieces and obscure hidden gems that you think deserve more recognition. Bonus points if they're already complete, or have been updated fairly recently and aren't likely to be abandoned. Nothing sucks more than getting into a fic and realizing the last update was a cliffhanger from 5 years ago.
I also encourage you to share your favorite fics from OTHER fandoms!
What fics would you recommend for someone JUST discovering that fandom? The top-of-the-line fics, the ones that are legendary or are hidden gems. The ones that would be great for someone with barely any knowledge of the fandom, the ones you WISH more of your friends would read.
Because right now, a lot of people NEED the aid of escapism more than ever.
If I've learned anything writing fan fiction and interacting with the community, it's that escapism can be vital for our mental health. We need to be able to take a break from reality, and deep dive into something so we forget the rest of the world exists and stop stressing over everything. This chapter is so small in the greater scheme of things, but this little break from reality is the best I can offer.
So please, share fic recommendations. To readers, please check out the comments or reviews, and find some wonderful rabbit hole to go down and stay away from the news and social media for the next few days.