Naruto: Tango with Death

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"The night will soon fall, and the only town in the surroundings is Toruake. We'll stop there for the night, and go back on our way at dawn tomorrow."

Following Amai-Sensei's plan, we quickly arrived at a quaint little town. I was excited as it was actually my first time outside of Konoha, so I was curious about the town.

However, I had a mission, so I followed Mr Tokikake to the town's only inn, where we booked three rooms, one for Mr Tokikake, one for Amai-Sensei and Laiko, and a last one for Izumi and me.

Although I wanted to explore the town, I had to protect Mr Tokikake at all times, if he was attacked while I was away then it would be a major stain on my resume.

Upon arriving in my room, I looked at Izumi and said, "What do you usually do in these situations?"

Izumi shrugged and replied, "I never left the village for more than a day."

I nodded and asked, "Then what do you intend to do now?"

Izumi said, "I don't know, watch out for danger, and talk I guess?"

I sat down on my futon, and said, "Well, sorry, but I'll be reading. You're free to talk to yourself. If you do so in your head."

Izumi rolled her eyes as I grinned, and took out the only book I had taken with me.

It was a book on medical jutsu, and Yang Chakra in general. For some years now I had been studying Healing, having taken the additional class in the Academy, but no matter how much of a genius I could be, less than a year in the academy was far from enough.

Until now, I had learned about the human anatomy, it was one of the first things we learnt, alongside the Healing Jutsu which was used to heal small injuries.

Honestly, although having graduated early would allow me to get more experience, I have to admit I was lacking in several areas. Medical Ninjutsu and Seals were the two subjects I had to work on the most, and I chose Medical Ninjutsu for now.

Since I already learned about the anatomy of the human body, including its weak points and tenketsu, I now had to learn more about how Yang Chakra affected the body, be it my own or others.

The hours passed as I learned more about Medical Jutsu, while keeping some focus on the room next to mine, where Mr Tokikake resided.

As the night fell, I decided to take the first round for the night, letting Izumi sleep first as I remained focused on my book. To not bother her, and watch the surroundings better, I moved outside the window, sticking my body to the wall.

I also didn't bring any light with me, as I decided to switch from theory to practice.

In the dark of the night, I meditated stuck to the ground, circulating my chakra around my body and turning parts of it into Yang Chakra.

An interesting thing about the human body I discovered was that flowing Chakra through two different tenketsu points would have different outcomes. While performing handsigns, one's chakra would travel through a certain pattern of tenketsu points, creating an 'effect'.

Then, a Chakra was made of several 'effects', or handsigns. On average, a handsign would have chakra go through 5 or 6 tenketsu.

To this day, 12 Handsigns have been found, while there are 361 Tenketsu Points in the body. In theory, there should be at least 361^361 possible effects. This made for such a great number that it was easier to consider it infinite, but for fun, it is a number with thousands of zeroes, at least.

In other words, even if I were to become immortal, it would be impossible for me, or anyone else, to explore every possible effects.

Thankfully, those numbers were valid if one was to search randomly. Effects actually followed a logic, which drastically lowered the number of possible effects.

Now, this is all quite cryptic, and something that has never really been researched before, as far as I know at least, even the handsigns were found rather randomly. However, I happened to like to speedrun in my past life, and one of the most important steps in speedrunning is… theorycraft.

Many people think speedrunning is simply repeating a set course over and over, getting faster over time, but there was much more to it. One has to find the most optimal path to follow, items to gather, and the order in which everything should be done.

All of those elements have to be taken into account to form the optimal, most efficient path, and that's what theorycraft was. That was actually my favourite part of speedrunning.

Now, creating one's own jutsu was complicated, and relied more on guts than anything for others, as well as luck.

My idea now is to consider the human body as a maze, with every tenketsu being a crossroad. It was also a 3d maze, because it wasn't hard enough.

Now, the hard thing is that I can't even see the labyrinth, I first have to explore every crossroad to find which other crossroads they could connect to, and gradually form the giant labyrinth known as the human body.

I know, I know, this sound cryptic and senseless, and honestly, it kind of is. This is a lifetime project, it will take me years to explore everything, if I ever manage to do so, but the end result is more than worth it.

To put things in perspective, completing this project of mine would mean mastering the human body, and thus becoming capable of creating any jutsu possible. One that only involved chakra in the body, that is.

I even suspect that mastering the Kekkei Genkai, or at least replicating them, would be possible, because as far as I know, the Kekkei Genkai isn't granted by an additional organ or set of tenketsu, but simply an 'effect' we hadn't discovered.

Anyway, I do feel I have strayed a little from Medical Ninjutsu, but I was impatient to start.

And to do so, I first had to research each of my Tenketsu, and that's exactly what I did.

The first part was rather simple, I controlled my Chakra to send small streams of chakra into each of my tenketsu points, before mentally noting down the effect.

At first, I thought of writing what I found down, to make sure I wouldn't forget anything, but I quickly realized it wouldn't be possible. Not only would I waste a lot of time on writing down everything I felt, but some things could also be hardly put into words.

And even if I managed to circumvent the first two problems, the amount of paper and ink I would need would not only ruin me, I'm not even sure there is enough paper in Konoha to write everything I need to write.

So for now, I decided to stick with my memory, the increase in my spiritual energy had increased my ability to memorize anyway.

Others would quickly abandon faced with the difficulty, and the very repeating nature of my project, but I guess I am a researcher in soul, for I only felt excited as I tried to move chakra through each of my tenketsu, mentally noting down the effects before moving to another.

I was able to experiment with one Tenketsu per minute, approximately, and so around 6 hours passed quickly. I could feel my mind tiring, and I should have already awakened Izumi a couple of hours ago to take my shift, but I just couldn't stop. But now, as I reached the last Tenketsu, and was about to finish the first round of my research, I was forced to open my eyes.

I always kept a part of my attention on my surroundings, and finally something had come to disturb my research.