Konoha's Third Training Ground.
Sunlight pierced through the canopy above, scattering mottled shadows across the earth. Etsu Kazama stood in the shade, green stubble showing along his jaw, his worn face flushed red with frustration.
Watching Naruto in the forest, where his clones looked denser than the trees themselves, Etsu gripped his right wrist with his left hand. A spiraling wind drill spun above his fist, yet loose chakra kept leaking from it uncontrollably. The more he watched, the more he felt his blood rush straight to his head.
Thunderbreak Drill required extremely fine chakra control. Its shape transformation and nature transformation were both advanced, far more complex than ordinary elemental ninjutsu.
Unfortunately, the one thing Naruto was worst at was precise chakra control.
When he used Wind Release, his style was always as direct and brutal as possible. After all, he never ran out of chakra, so his whole philosophy was simple: hit hard enough and brute force solves everything.
In other words, the technique and the student were a terrible match.
It was like asking a hopelessly careless Naruto to study medical ninjutsu. Anyone tasked with teaching that would go insane.
If only Konome Taketori were willing to inherit my jutsu.
Etsu could not bear to keep watching Naruto's miserable training progress. He tipped his head back and stared at the sky, thinking wistfully of his former genius disciple.
Her speed in learning ninjutsu had practically been cheating. Even with all his shadow clones, Naruto could not begin to compare.
Using shadow clones to cheat did make Naruto a kind of genius, but with Konome Taketori there as the standard, Etsu could not help feeling Naruto was still lacking.
Once you had known luxury, it was hard to go back to frugality.
Back then, he had even complained that teaching Konome Taketori was too easy and gave him no sense of accomplishment.
Now, he realized that at least it had protected his blood pressure.
"Multiple Shadow Clone Jutsu!"
Naruto had no idea what was going through Etsu's mind. Exhausted, he split into several hundred shadow clones again and gritted his teeth, trying to force the wind drill on his arm to spin faster.
Because of the Nine-Tails' chakra interfering with him, his chakra control was abysmal.
He had spent six whole years unable to grasp even the most basic Clone Jutsu.
Compared to that, Break Thunder Drill, an S-rank technique, was vastly more difficult.
After more than half a month of training, he still had not even truly started learning Break Thunder Drill.
What he was working on now was not Break Thunder Drill at all, but the A-rank technique Etsu Kazama had developed over the past five years: Whirlwind Drill.
Because Etsu had lost both arms, he could no longer form hand seals and had found it difficult to continue refining Break Thunder Drill. So he had taken a different route, lowering both the shape transformation and the nature transformation by one level and turning it into the comparatively more stable Whirlwind Drill.
In Etsu's training plan, learning Whirlwind Drill was the entry point. After that came the half-finished Break Thunder Drill, and only then would they gradually refine it into a true S-rank ninjutsu.
Everything was connected, one step after another.
And Naruto was still stuck on the first one.
"Naruto!"
A crisp voice called from above.
The exhausted Naruto froze, then quickly looked up.
Half-hidden in the dense canopy above sat a slim white figure perched on a branch. Her face and body were obscured by layers of green leaves, impossible to make out clearly. Only her pale feet in ninja sandals dangled below, swaying lightly, her slender white ankles shining in the sun with a dazzling brightness.
Gulp.
For some reason, Naruto suddenly thought of snow on a winter rooftop the year before. He swallowed reflexively, only then realizing how dry his throat was.
His tongue felt like a newspaper left out for ten years.
"Konome Taketori! When did you get here?"
Even though he could not see her clearly, Naruto still recognized her at once. He jumped up excitedly, and the gloom from over half a month of failed training, along with the mental fatigue caused by his shadow clones, seemed to vanish in an instant.
"Just now. Kakashi-sensei asked me to tell you all that the written exam starts the morning after tomorrow at eight, in Room 301 at the Academy."
Konome Taketori looked down at Naruto, who was still laboring over Wind Release, and could not help reflecting that he was finally about to move beyond his old style of simply throwing chakra at everything with brute force.
"A written exam?"
Naruto went blank.
He had trained desperately for over a month and had never known the Chunin Exams even included a written test. Since graduating, he had already returned everything the Academy taught him straight back to Iruka-sensei.
"Because this exam is so massive, with nearly three hundred participants, I heard the difficulty of the questions will be the highest in history. If you fail the written test, you'll be eliminated immediately. Your teammates will be eliminated along with you too.
"So if you dare drag me down and make me fail the exam, I'll kill you."
Seeing Naruto under the tree go from bright orange to stone-gray, Konome Taketori forced back a laugh and kept a straight face as she scared him mercilessly.
She had definitely noticed the way he had been looking at her just now. He still dared to harbor those kinds of thoughts about her. He needed to be taught a lesson.
"Slacking off again, are you. Wait, it's Konome Taketori!"
While the two of them talked, Etsu also noticed something was wrong. At first, he thought Naruto was being lazy and had quietly come over intending to give him a hard kick. Instead, he found the disciple he had been thinking about standing there.
"Kazama-sensei, how have you been feeling lately?"
Konome Taketori greeted him, but her gaze fell on his empty sleeves.
Those arms had been lost because of her.
"Hah, same as always. Not dead yet."
Etsu's green eyes dimmed slightly. He shrugged and tried to sound casual, but the sleeves on either side swayed emptily in the breeze, carrying a trace of bleakness.
His luck had never been particularly good.
Once a genius shinobi, he had been crippled in taijutsu after his limbs were broken. Now he had lost his arms and could not even use ninjutsu.
Of course it hurt.
But reality was what it was. All he could do was slowly accept it.
Fortunately, he had trained Konoha's greatest genius, and the ninjutsu he developed had not vanished with him. He had even met a good wife who did not despise him.
"Naruto, catch."
Etsu was still wallowing in his melancholy when two dark shapes suddenly dropped from above.
Naruto reacted fast and caught them in both hands. When he opened his palms, he found two strange pills.
They were pale pink overall, their surfaces crisscrossed by crimson patterns. Their texture looked like some kind of gemstone, yet they were soft and springy, almost as if fish paste or beef paste had been mixed together with powdered jade.
There was also a faintly strange fragrance coming from them.
What are these?
Naruto and Etsu both stared at the two unusual pills in confusion.
The two wounds in Konome Taketori's arm twisted shut. Flesh rapidly grew and sealed the holes.
While waiting for the injuries to finish healing, she said expressionlessly, "These are the latest healing pills I developed. They can bring the dead back to life and regrow flesh from bone. Regenerating severed limbs is no problem."
Hashirama cells could restore half of Uchiha Obito's body. Naturally, Konome Taketori's cells, after her Sage Body evolved to its third stage, could do the same.
And because all her cells were completely controlled by Takamagahara, even their genes could be edited and rewritten freely, meaning there was no need to worry about compatibility, rejection, or anything of the sort.
She had not done full human testing yet, but in theory the danger level was basically zero.
"Regrow severed limbs?"
The moment he heard those words, Etsu's eyes lit up.
His face, worn and stubbled, turned completely electric with emotion.
Naruto's eyes widened too. He carefully held the miracle medicine in his hands and examined it from every angle, but after staring for a long while, he still could not figure it out.
"So how do you use them? Just eat them?"
"You can take them internally or apply them externally."
Konome Taketori answered casually. Beneath the cloth over her eyes, her left eye was already shining gray.
If she had not been worried about frightening the two of them, she could have made the flesh pills grow limbs and crawl onto the wound by themselves.
Sometimes she really felt like she was becoming some kind of eldritch horror.
Watching the two pills in Naruto's hands, Etsu swallowed hard.
Ever since losing his arms, he had felt like his life had gone dim.
His wife had often comforted him, saying that maybe one day a jutsu capable of regenerating limbs would be developed. But he knew it was just a distant dream. His life was already over.
And now, not only was the dream not ending, it seemed like it might actually become real?
A trace of suspicion flashed through his mind, but he quickly crushed it.
Why would Konoha's greatest genius bother lying to a cripple like him?
What could she possibly want from him?
His lack of hygiene? His meager compensation money?
She had even refused his S-rank ninjutsu when he tried to give it to her for free.
Once he had thought all that through, Etsu suddenly strode forward. Before Naruto could even feed him the medicine, he bit down and swallowed both pills himself. Before he could even taste them, they instantly softened into mush and slid down his throat like worms.
"Ugh... cough cough cough..."
Etsu's green eyes went wide. He opened his mouth and retched violently.
He could feel that soft, muddy thing wriggling through his esophagus.
This medicine is alive.
Buzz.
Konome Taketori's left eye shone with gray light, piercing through Etsu's body. The Konome cells, like two venomous snakes, tore through his digestive tract and finally flowed to his shoulders.
The wounds hidden beneath his sleeves suddenly erupted with new flesh. Pale white bone burst through the tumor-like skin. Blood vessels and nerves crawled over them.
Mental and physical energy collided. Two chakra cores were born at once, like purple crystals shattering into existence. The Konome cells, strengthened by chakra, began to transform and proliferate, even adjusting their internal gene sequences to match Etsu Kazama's.
The human genetic code was too complex to completely dissect and modify within a short time, so instead of analyzing it in full and then fine-tuning it, she had simply copied his genetic chain one-to-one before guiding the cells to differentiate.
Etsu, still coughing violently, suddenly jerked.
Naruto had just started to step forward to support him when, with a wet tearing sound, two slick arms burst from Etsu's shoulders right before his horrified eyes.
"Ah. Th-that..."
Naruto instantly stumbled back, pointing at Etsu's new arms in terror.
Konome Taketori's left eye narrowed as Takamagahara continued to function.
The chakra cores that had formed in the arms shattered immediately, and the chakra and soul fragments they contained were drawn back into her.
The cells and genes now belonged completely to Etsu. From this point onward, those arms had nothing to do with her anymore.
Otherwise, if he got bored and started doing certain things with them alone in his room, that would be... uncomfortable to think about.
Etsu flexed his fingers again and again, looking down at his familiar yet unfamiliar hands. His expression shifted from shock to disbelief, then finally to uncontrollable ecstasy.
He moved them, opened and closed his fists. There was not the slightest sense of discomfort. Bone structure, muscle alignment, even skin tone, everything was exactly the same as before he lost them.
Konome Taketori had not lied.
Seeing Etsu nearly losing his mind, Konome Taketori smiled and asked, "Kazama-sensei, how does your body feel?"
"Uh... uh, good. No, amazing. Anyway, thank you, Konome Taketori."
Usually calm and steady, Etsu now looked at her and found himself stammering. He had no idea how to properly express the gratitude filling his heart. In the end, all he could do was force out a sincere thanks.
"No need to say all that. I'm heading out. That idiot Sasuke probably still doesn't know the exam schedule yet."
Konome Taketori waved it off casually.
Telling Naruto the exam time had only been an errand on the way. The real reason she came here was to restore Etsu's arms.
Her shape transformation and Wind Release nature transformation had both been taught by him.
True, that knowledge was not some extraordinary secret in Konoha. But without his help, she never would have defeated Yeyue Xiong, let alone gone on to be accepted as Hiruzen's disciple.
Restoring his arms was her way of giving something back.
Even though those new arms no longer contained her chakra, their cellular activity still originated from the same line as her Sage Body.
Once implanted, Etsu's physical strength and chakra reserves would increase tremendously. The arms would come with their own regenerative function and a very high resistance to Lightning Release. As long as he could fill in the flaws in Break Thunder Drill, he would once again become an elite jōnin of Konoha.
Then she greeted Naruto as well, who was staring at Etsu's arms with shining eyes, and closed her own eyes for a moment.
Whoosh.
The two of them felt their vision blur.
The lovely figure on the branch was gone.
"So fast."
Naruto muttered to himself, his eyes full of frustration.
He had thought he had already become strong, but he had not even been able to see Konome Taketori move.
The more he chased after her, the more clearly he understood just how wide the gap between them really was.
"That's my disciple."
Etsu bared his teeth proudly. The real sensation in his restored hands was so overwhelming he nearly cried.
"Kazama-sensei, I'm definitely going to master Whirlwind Drill today."
Naruto's competitive streak flared up again. Fired up from being stimulated, he clenched his fists, and his blue eyes burned with steam-engine intensity.
Etsu slanted a look at him, his expression full of disgust.
"There's no need to rush Whirlwind Drill. You'd better hurry home and prepare for the written exam. Don't you dare drag Konome Taketori down and make her fail her promotion to chunin."
Naruto, who had just rolled up his sleeves and prepared for a glorious struggle, turned to stone on the spot.
Because Naruto and Sasuke had both been training hard to prepare, they had no time to wander the streets, so naturally they never ran into Team Sand.
But whether because of fate or simple narrative inevitability, Konohamaru, Moegi Kazamatsuri, and the others still ended up running into Kankuro while playing by the roadside.
This time, Kankuro had already been educated at Konoha's gates and had become much more restrained.
The moment he thought of that figure standing in the sky, his calves started trembling.
After apologizing to Konohamaru, he turned around and ran without looking back.
Are shinobi from Sunagakure all this polite?
Konohamaru and Moegi Kazamatsuri were both baffled, but they quickly went back to playing.
Because there were so many participants in the Chunin Exam, all three Academy classrooms had been turned into test halls. Even the teachers had to serve as proctors. The students had therefore received a delightful three-day break.
What none of them knew was that the three days' worth of classes would all be made up next week and the week after.
The suggestion had come from the chief proctor herself, who in her previous life had suffered endlessly under the tyranny of "make-up holidays."
She had gotten soaked in the rain once, so naturally she now had to tear up everyone else's umbrellas.
Time passed quickly, and in the blink of an eye, two days were gone.
Morning.
The sunlight pierced through the thin mist and fell across Konoha's streets. It was bright, but not harsh. The roadside shops had already removed their shutters and were full of people inside.
The exam schedule had long since spread through every alley and street in Konoha.
This road happened to lead directly to the Academy, making it the path every examinee would have to take.
This Five Nations Joint Exam had escalated into a true all-nations Chunin Exam, and such a massive event was unprecedented. The Konoha villagers who loved a good spectacle had deliberately gotten up early just to see the shinobi from the other villages.
Before long, dark clusters of figures began appearing at the far end of the street.