Part 7 – Wood Release

I haven’t felt like this in a long while …

Uzu laid in her warm bed, carefully tucked under her blanket and enjoying the afterglow of an unusually long sleep.

Stretching and shifting around beneath her covers for a while longer, she decided to get up.

After taking a shower and getting dressed, she walked towards the kitchen, expecting her Mom to be there. When her chakra waves entered the kitchen, however, she realized that her Mom had already left.

Instead, there was a small note on the table.

Picking it up, Uzu let her eyes roam over the paper: “Come to the office when you are ready.”

Sighing, she put on her shoes and traveled through the hidden parts of the Hokage tower, making sure that she didn’t have to meet anyone.

Stepping through the door connecting the hidden archive and the Hokage’s office, her waves picked up several presences in the office.

Well, of course his chakra would seem familiar. He is partly made of Hashirama cells, just like me.

She laid her eyes on Yamato, carefully inspecting his face.

She received a smile in return.

Averting her eyes, she looked at her Mom who was observing their interaction.

Silently, she waited for her Mom to talk, though she could already guess the reason she was called here.

“Right on time. Uzu, meet Yamato, he is the one I told you about. He’ll teach you how to use the Wood Release, and the jutsu that the first Hokage has left for us.” Tsunade said.

“Nice to meet you, Senju Uzu-sama.” Yamato said, bowing.

People bow to me now. Though it does make sense, seeing that I’m Mom’s daughter now.

Uzu nodded, accepting his greeting.

Tsunade smiled: “Go on then, let’s have dinner together later, I’ll try to finish early today.”

“Mhm, I’ll see you later Mom.” Uzu said softly, smiling at her Mom.

 

…

 

This place is nice. I’ve always felt calm in nature ever since coming to this world.

Raising her eyes from the surrounding flowers, she looked up at Yamato.

“Alright … have you previously tried creating wood release chakra?” Yamato asked.

Uzu shook her head.

“Hmm, because of your Senju bloodline, you have an affinity for water and earth, and to awaken the wood release, you need to combine them. That should come natural to you, just like it did to me.”

Closing her eyes, she created a mental image of her body’s chakra pathways.

Raising her hands, one coated in chakra that seemed firm and steady and the other coated in chakra that seemed soft and gentle, she brought them together.

The two chakra types automatically merged, as if they shouldn’t have been separated in the first place.

As the new chakra rushed through her pathways, she felt her senses strengthen.

Even without her chakra waves, she was able to properly locate the birds chirping in the trees.

Opening her eyes and taking in the scent of the flowers around her, she was able to feel the life flowing through them.

So, this is what it means when it’s said that everything contains chakra, or rather, natural energy.

She looked up at Yamato and saw a gentle smile on his face: “You’ve done it. Can you already feel the connection to nature?”

Uzu nodded. Merely being in the forest had always calmed her down, but now she felt at home in here. She could feel herself being a part of the forest, her feet connecting her to the earth.

“Alright, watch carefully, these are the hand signs for the Wood Release: Wood Clone jutsu.” Yamato said.

Committing the hand signs to memory, she watched as perfect copies of Yamato grew from the trees surrounding him. At first, they seemed wooden, having a brownish color, but then they took on Yamato’s form.

Sending out her chakra waves, she couldn’t sense any difference between the clones. If she didn’t know where the real Yamato stood before, she wouldn’t know whether the real Yamato was even among them.

One Yamato spoke: “These clones are perfect copies, yet they take very little chakra to create. They also have the interesting function of being capable of independent action. Upon destruction, they transfer the memories they gained to the creator.”

Oh? Isn’t that just like the Shadow Clone jutsu?

“Try it?” A Yamato asked encouragingly.

Nodding, she slowly copied the hand signs, coaxing a bit of wood natured chakra to travel through her pathways.

“Wood Release: Wood Clone.” She whispered.

Soon enough a perfect clone grew from the tree next to her.

She had decided to only create one for now, just wanting to test the chakra drain it had.

Apparently, being surrounded by trees from which the clones could be created from, drained a lot less chakra than they would if she needed to create them from chakra alone.

She asked her clone to count and smell the different flowers surrounding her, intending to test the memory transfer feature of the technique.

A few minutes later, the clone dispelled itself and she felt as if she was watching another’s life through their eyes, moving across the grass and bending down to smell each of the flowers.

She smiled when the experience ended, feeling pleased with the nature of the wood clones. Though, she would need to become used to the rapid assault of senses that she got when the clone dispelled.

…

Across the days, Yamato taught her many different Wood Style jutsu and if Uzu was honest … then she could only say that it was too easy. And she loved that it was that easy.

Emptying her chakra reserves by training the Wood Release jutsu’s Yamato taught her, having several wood clones practice Fuuinjutsu and having some of them read medical texts, she rapidly increased her knowledge and Fuuinjutsu mastery.

Not wanting to be caught off-guard, she sent a few clones to practice with the different weapons that her body should instinctively know to use. She let them fight against each other and dispel when they suffered enough injuries.

The memories she received made her shake at first, not being used to so much pain. Over time, she got used to the pain the several different weapons caused her and learned to endure it. She might need to create a seal that dulled the pain she could feel.

Why didn’t I even think of asking for the shadow clone technique before …

At the current rate of my improvement in Fuuinjutsu, I should be able to start working on level 2 seals soon …

Level 1 Fuuinjutsu was drawing on paper and using a brush, most seals could only be used once.

Level 2 Fuuinjutsu, an art that was almost completely lost, included creating seals on bodies. Whether that be animals or humans. It required extensive knowledge on chakra pathways, especially with them being slightly different in every living being containing a certain amount of chakra. Every seal was essentially tailor made and none could be copied onto another person.

It was a very private and intimate matter to create such a seal. Knowing of another person’s complete chakra pathway system was a sign of trust and intimacy normally only found in family.

The symbols needed to be drawn while taking the chakra pathways into account. Channeling chakra into the seal would activate it.

Honestly, Uzu liked comparing those seals to tattoos.

While there was a third level of Fuuinjutsu, Uzu was still years away from even being able to think of trying it.

Uzu was content with working on her normal seals for now … and she was already excited to finally start working on personal tattoos. The idea itself making her feel giddy inside.

The storage scrolls filled with all kinds of seals started bothering her, so she gifted most of them to either Tsunade, Shizune or Naruto.

Tsunade had also suggested just selling them to the Anbu that would know to make use of enhanced seals, though Uzu decided against that as she didn’t want to talk to strangers. She knew that it would benefit the village though, so maybe she’d ask Shizune to help her? Though that’d be unfair towards Shizune as she already had such a huge workload.

She already had some ideas for Level 2 seals, or rather, tattoos.

A nightmare repellant seal that would enable Naruto to sleep well at night without worrying about nightmares. Though if she even wanted to start on creating it, she would first need to know his chakra pathway system … though she wasn’t sure if he would allow that. They just weren’t that close …

She also wanted to create tattoos that automatically converted the user’s chakra into medical chakra that would automatically move to areas that needed healing. It would never work on bigger injuries, as she couldn’t create seals for every single specific operation that someone might need. Creating a tailor-made seal was a lot of work after all …

She did create normal seals that jump-started the healing process. They can only be used once though and they needed to be applied on the place that the wound was at. What she was really interested in was a permanent basic healing seal though. That was something that needed to be drawn on the body.

For her mother, she wanted to create an anti-aging tattoo. She noticed that her mother was older than she looked … and she feared the day that her Mom would die. She didn’t want to lose anyone in this life.

Sure, her mom was healthy, and she had Senju and Uzumaki blood, so she would live for many more decades, but she couldn’t help but fear her inevitable demise.

She would be all alone again, especially with the way that her own body was somehow frozen in time. Her body was the same every day, nothing grew, nothing aged as long as she had chakra flowing through her body.

No amount of medical knowledge they had could figure out what caused this. By now, she had settled on believing it to be a mutation based on her perfect merge of Uzumaki and Senju bloodline. The way that her vessel was given life was also a mystery she just couldn’t solve. Something like that shouldn’t be possible.

Tsunade, Shizune and Uzu were the only ones that knew that she wouldn’t age. Well, Danzo probably knew too.

Honestly, she hadn’t asked her Mom if she even wanted to live forever, she was just being selfish … but she had completely scanned her Mom’s chakra system anyway …

Her Mom had also taught her how to form the Byakugo seal. Her Mom had personally helped in adjusting it to her pathways. She stored a bit of her chakra in it every day, a faint outline of the diamond shaped seal already formed on her forehead. Honestly, she had only asked her mother about it because she liked the appearance of the diamond on her forehead and she wanted to feel more connected to her Mom by having the same diamond shaped seal on her body. She didn’t really need the stored chakra reserves that weren’t exactly hers, but she wouldn’t reject more chakra.

Another project of hers would be to create storage seals on the body. If she succeeded, she wouldn’t need normal storage scrolls anymore. All the pouches and scrolls were starting to annoy her.

Honestly, she had so many ideas, she didn’t even know where to start.