The next morning, Training Ground Three. The squad sat in a loose circle on the grass.
Teju had even prepared a chart: a full week of missions, every slot accounted for, neat and organized.
"That's solid work, Teju. I'm sorry, though. My fault for not explaining properly yesterday. Things have been hectic." Yoshimaru studied the chart, then set it aside. "I don't have much time with you three. I've got my own duties piling up. What we need to do is maximize your combat ability in two weeks, and cram every scrap of battlefield survival knowledge into your heads while we can."
He looked apologetic. "So our daily mission is training. Nothing else. Once I ship out to the border in two weeks, you can take jobs on odd-numbered days. I've spoken to Nara Katsuto at the Mission Hall. He'll keep an eye on you, screen whatever missions you pick up."
"Why are you so busy, sensei?" Teju frowned. He'd seen other squads' instructors lounging around the village with time to spare.
"My captain, Namikaze Minato, has turned into an absolute mission fiend. I'm half-dead from the pace. But it's for Konoha, so what can you do?"
Sora understood. The ambitious Minato was positioning himself for what came next, seizing every opportunity to build his record, paving the road toward the Hokage's seat. Yoshimaru, as his subordinate, got dragged along for the ride. The full-scale war hadn't erupted yet, but Konoha was about to take devastating losses. The Third Hokage's grip on power would weaken with every casualty report. He'd held the position for nearly twenty years. Plenty of people were already waiting for the chance to reshuffle the deck.
Now that Yoshimaru had accepted these three as his students, he stopped holding back. His subordinates' mission bonuses meant he'd collect at least half a share, after all.
"What I'm about to teach you is difficult. Pay attention."
"First: you'll likely draw a lot of supply transport missions. Early in a war, genin can't do much else. Unless things deteriorate badly for Konoha, transport runs are relatively safe."
"Some of these missions will carry standing orders to destroy the supplies if you encounter hostiles. Critical medical supplies, for instance, can never fall into enemy hands. The best outcome in a fight isn't always killing the opponent. Sometimes it's inflicting injuries they can't recover from. Forcing the enemy to pour resources into their wounded drains their logistics dry. For you, this means learning how to unseal storage scrolls and destroy their contents."
"Most ninja don't learn storage seals until after they make Chunin. For now, you only need to learn how to release them."
He handed each of them a blank scroll, then produced a storage scroll of his own and unrolled it. "Take a look at this."
Sora stared at the seal array on the scroll, and recognition prickled through him.
The storage seal was inscribed with a pattern of concentric arrays. The outer ring bore a Four Symbols design. The inner ring was left empty, marked with a single character meaning "seal."
In his previous life, he'd been a junior architect grinding out drafting work, and he'd drawn more than his share of classical buildings. Traditional architecture lived and died by geomantic principles. To understand those old structures, he'd had to study the cosmological framework behind them: Yin and Yang, the Two Principles, the Three Powers, the Four Symbols, the Five Phases, the Six Harmonies, the Seven Stars, the Eight Trigrams, the Nine Halls.
The Four Symbols pattern on this scroll was unmistakable. For a disorienting second, he felt like he'd slipped back into his old life. He shook his head hard, confirming that no, he was not sitting in front of a monitor assembling a client presentation deck. This was too surreal.
The most basic elements of the Four Symbols were simple: a solid line for a yang stroke, a broken line for a yin stroke.
If the underlying principles carried across worlds, then the yin and yang strokes were the place to start. From the Void comes the Taiji. From the Taiji come the Two Principles. Yin and Yang represent opposing yet coexisting states of matter and energy. If he wanted to seal a kunai, then the kunai's existence and its absence were two faces of the same coin. That was the goal.
The Four Symbols represented the four combinations of yang and yin strokes: Greater Yang, Lesser Yang, Greater Yin, Lesser Yin. Together they formed a single cycle of waxing and waning. So the kunai's disappearance wasn't the endpoint. He needed to envision existence and absence as a continuous loop. His aim wasn't to make the kunai vanish. It was to make the kunai vanish and then reappear above the scroll.
Following that logic, Sora drew eight strokes on the blank scroll, fast and sure, tracing the Four Symbols array. He placed a kunai on the pattern, gathered his chakra, fed it into the scroll, and held in his mind a single image: the kunai cycling between presence and absence, disappearing and returning, over and over.
A puff of white smoke burst from the scroll's blank surface. When it cleared, the kunai was gone. In its place, the character for "seal" had appeared on the paper.
That's it?
This overwhelming, nowhere-to-hide, raw genius!
Yoshimaru and the other two had turned to stone. The Tokubetsu Jonin recovered first, disbelief plain in his voice. "Sora, have you studied storage seals before? A genin who can perform Fuinjutsu... that's exceptional."
"Sensei, this is the first time I've ever seen a storage scroll. I thought it was straightforward. You draw something that looks about right, push in some chakra, and it goes poof. What's complicated about that?"
I know you're making that up, Yoshimaru thought. But I can't prove it.
"Fine. You're the best-looking one here, so everything you say is correct. Your Fuinjutsu talent is impressive, though. I mean it. The rest of you, work hard."
Sora didn't think it was talent. It was the legacy of his old world's civilization. This ninja world was a fantasy spun from a culture that had itself been shaped by the traditions of a far older one. Everything these shinobi treated as arcane mysticism, his ancestors had mapped out centuries ago. So when Sora looked at a storage seal, the principles clicked into place immediately, and mastery followed.
A gift from the ancestors. Reaching across worlds, still sheltering their descendants.
Sora had no cheat code. No special bloodline, no tailed beast, no mysterious benefactor. The only edge he could count on was the way his old world had trained him to think, the education that had shaped his mind. Even starting from nothing, those memories and that knowledge could carry him on foreign soil.
The homesickness caught him off guard. Sharp and sudden, the same ache he'd felt a hundred times in his previous life, during long semesters away from home or late nights at distant job sites. That momentary, irrational pull toward a place that no longer existed for him.
Yoshimaru walked them through the unsealing process for storage scrolls, left behind a stack of practice scrolls, and hurried off to his own duties.
The three of them trained until well past dark.
Walking home through the narrow lanes, Sora turned to his friend. "Teju, let me teach you the storage seal. Keep it between us. It'll be our secret weapon. You won't need to lug that enormous pack full of trap gear anymore."
"Wait, so I'd just whip out a scroll and all my equipment appears?" Teju's eyes went wide. "Forget the technique, I need to practice the unrolling motion first. The rest doesn't matter. The pose has to look cool!"
Teju's father was standing in their doorway, waiting.
Under the streetlamp, half the man's face sat in shadow. His eyes were unfocused, evasive, unable to settle on either of the boys. Sora's stomach tightened. Something was wrong.
"Sora, come inside too."
This is bad. Whatever had happened, it wasn't small.