Naruto : Blazing Legend

Chapter 46: The Weight of Knowledge

Three days of searching through rubble and stone had yielded little comfort. Daki's wounds still wept blood through fresh bandages, a constant reminder of Kakuzu's escape into the wilderness. The bounty hunter remained a shadow beyond their reach, and each passing hour felt like borrowed time.

But the ruins held their own dark treasures.

Minato's discovery came wrapped in ancient parchment, buried beneath chunks of masonry that had once been someone's home. The Inner Four Symbols Sealing Technique—a name that carried the weight of desperate final moments. He'd heard of it in the anime, how Danzo had used it to obliterate half a bridge rather than let enemies claim victory.

Rei continued his grim archaeology, prying apart stones that might once have been foundations, graves, or altars. Each fragment told a story of destruction, but he pushed those thoughts aside. Survival demanded pragmatism, and sealing techniques were tools that could mean the difference between life and a shallow grave.

When his fingers found the tattered scroll, half-dissolved by time and weather, something cold settled in his stomach. The parchment was brittle, sections missing like torn flesh, but what remained spoke of forbidden knowledge. Sealing techniques weren't just tools—they were ways to bind life itself, to trap souls and chakra in prisons of ink and blood.

"Any luck with that?" Gaku asked, watching Rei handle the deteriorating document. His voice carried the exhaustion they all felt, the bone-deep weariness that came from too many battles and too little rest.

"Enough," Rei murmured, though his eyes remained fixed on descriptions of how to trap living beings in eternal darkness. The scroll detailed methods for using human bodies as vessels, for transforming people into walking prisons for entities that should never see daylight. He wondered how many had died learning these techniques, how many had become what they sought to contain.

Minato hadn't looked up from his own study in hours. The Reaper Death Seal consumed his attention like a fever, its promise of ultimate sacrifice gleaming from every line of text. Here was power that demanded everything—life, soul, future—in exchange for the certainty of mutual destruction.

"These techniques," Daki said quietly, his voice hoarse from pain and something deeper, "they're not meant for the living."

He was right. Every seal they studied spoke of endings: final desperate acts, suicide techniques, methods for ensuring that even in death, one's enemies would follow. The very air around them seemed colder as they delved deeper into arts that civilized shinobi had deemed too dangerous to teach.

The boat ride back to Fire Country passed in uncomfortable silence. Rei practiced his newfound knowledge on fish pulled from the waters, watching them writhe and then grow still as his seals took hold. Each success felt like a small death, a reminder that he was learning to cage living things in spaces smaller than coffins.

His shadow clones worked mechanically, five copies of himself perfecting the art of imprisonment while the original tried not to think about the implications. By the time they reached shore, he could trap a life in paper with the same casual ease he might fold a letter.

The walk home stretched endlessly before them. Daki's labored breathing marked each painful step, while Minato remained lost in contemplation of his new found techniques.

Rei found himself thinking of the Yin Seal, another method of storing and binding energy, though one that demanded years of patience and discipline. Everything came with a price.

Konoha's walls appeared unchanged, but Rei knew better. Beneath the surface, tensions were building like pressure in a sealed container. Border skirmishes were increasing, alliances shifting, and every village was quietly preparing for the wars that seemed inevitable.

The next morning brought an illusion of normalcy that Rei found disturbing. Walking through streets where children played and merchants hawked their wares, he couldn't shake the weight of forbidden knowledge pressing against his thoughts. The sealing techniques had given him power, but they'd also shown him how thin the line was between protection and destruction.

His feet carried him without conscious direction to the hot springs district, where the sound of running water and distant laughter created a mockery of peace. It was there that he heard the low chuckle.

Above, on the bathhouse roof, Jiraiya moved tiles with practiced ease, his eye pressed to gaps that afforded him views meant to be private. The sight filled Rei with a cold disgust that surprised him with its intensity. Here was one of the village's legendary protectors, reduced to crawling on rooftops to satisfy base urges.

The decision came without thought. Rei's shadow clone materialized behind the Sannin, and his foot connected with flesh in a kick powered by three days of accumulated frustration and moral exhaustion.

Jiraiya's descent through roof tiles sounded like breaking bones.

The screams that followed were shrill with terror and violated innocence. Women's voices, raised in panic and shame, while one remained ominously silent. Rei dispersed his clone and listened to the sounds of a man's world crashing down around him.

When Tsunade's roar split the air like breaking stone, Rei felt the ground shake beneath his feet. The impact that followed wasn't the cartoon violence of a comedic beating—it was the sound of a human body striking immovable force and losing catastrophically.

He found Jiraiya in a crater of his own making, surrounded by the pulverized remains of seven different buildings. Blood painted the rubble in abstract patterns, and the Sannin's chest rose and fell in shallow, rattling gasps. His arms bent at impossible angles, and pink foam bubbled from his lips with each labored breath.

"This is what power looks like," Rei thought, staring at the broken form of a legendary ninja. Not the flashy techniques or dramatic proclamations, but the simple, devastating reality of violence unleashed without restraint.

Tsunade appeared at the crater's edge, her face a mask of conflicted emotions. Her hands trembled—whether from rage or something else, Rei couldn't tell.

"Is he...?" she began, then stopped, as if afraid to voice the question.

"Dying," Rei finished for her, dropping into the crater. "But not dead. Not yet."

The ride to the hospital was a nightmare of jostling movement and wet, gasping sounds. Jiraiya's eyes rolled back to show only whites, and twice his breathing stopped entirely before resuming with desperate effort.

At the hospital, chaos erupted like a disturbed anthill. Doctors shouted medical terms that sounded like death sentences: "Massive internal hemorrhaging," "Bilateral compound fractures," "Possible cardiac tamponade." ANBU materialized from shadows, their masks reflecting the overhead lights like blank, judging eyes.

Through it all, Rei stood perfectly still, watching the consequences of his actions ripple outward like blood in still water. He'd wanted to teach a lesson, but instead he'd nearly orchestrated a murder.

In the end, the techniques he'd learned from those ancient scrolls weren't the only way to trap a life in darkness. Sometimes all it took was a single moment of poor judgment, and the cage built itself around you.