His entire front burnt black with his back remaining completely untouched, leaving a hilarious outline of him in the soot on the wall behind him, the blonde blinked several times to bring himself back into consciousness. His owlish expression could clearly be seen through his cracked goggles.
The startled Naruto coughed out a plume of smoke.
"Something tells me that that was the wrong ingredient…"
XXX
Two months later…
Early morning…
And Naruto was still in the midst of a mid-life crisis. His quest to find, learn and master the perfect jutsu other than that retched Bunshin no Jutsu that just continued to fail him was becoming a real Fellowship experience. Normally by this time he would have found tasks like this tiresome, seeing as that he was more of the free-spirited kind of guy that preferred learning this material by hand. In order to put things into practice though, you still needed a significant amount of knowledge and experience backing you up. Hence, he'd started properly attending his classes, which made his teachers happy but made him downright miserable.
There was all that crap Iruka talked about like chakra, control, chakra elements, bloodline nonsense, and stuff that had Naruto drawing blanks on even after reading about it for hours. The amount of stuff taught at school even at his current year level was mind numbing.
All the basics of shinobi techniques were taught at a really young age, with theory basically coming out as dedicated by the seasons, or so it went. Naruto pretty much tossed all that traditional stuff out the window and tried to focus on the bigger picture. All he wanted to do was learn the material he needed to become an amazing shinobi in the future. That was all he had to worry about. It was a thought that stuck with him even in sleep and as he woke up bright and early for another day of training.
Letting out a yawn as he stretched to the morning sun peaking in through the window, Naruto drowsily grabbed his clock, reset it, and then staggered over to his bathroom for his morning grooming. He quickly found himself groaning through a mouthful of suds, at the same time scratching his head over his ongoing problem.
Forget the social issues and failings in the written examinations; he just wanted to learn a jutsu! It wasn't like one was going to come conveniently flying in through the window and land in his lap…
"How did everyone figure out how to make their own jutsu anyway?" Naruto frowned, thinking about the number of techniques that already existed in the village. "They use chakra to make them, right? To spit fire, create clones, switch places and all that stuff. Ninja control chakra with hand seals, so… if I made some random hand seals and stopped… I could come up with some sort of jutsu for myself… right?" It sounded simple enough, and in his mind it actually made a lot of sense.
"How hard could it be?"
Who cares what formula he came up with? What mattered right now was the end result!
Deciding to test his theory out he formed the basic hand seal in front of his chest, keeping his toothbrush in his mouth as he concentrated on working his energy. Like with every exercise he'd done in the past he focused on getting a feel for his chakra and chakra flow. This he could accomplish without even thinking about it, which allowed him to steadily slide into the next step.
"Okay, so if I just focus, I… hey, what the hell is that?" Naruto blinked before squinting at the mirror intently.
Thinking he was seeing things he wiped his hand over the glass, just to make sure it wasn't water condensing on the screen and messing up his reflection. When he was certain it wasn't steam that was the problem, his eyes widened and he looked down at his stomach.
"Huh… never noticed that before."
Since when did he have an awesome tattoo on his stomach? Wait, scratch that. Looking at it again, it was more like some sort of seal array, similar to the ones Iruka had shown in classes a couple of weeks ago where he was able to conjure stuff out of scrolls. Though they weren't learning how to use summoning seals just yet there had been plenty of beginner's lessons and demonstrations, so Naruto had become at least a little bit familiar with the strange scribbles.
The answer was right there in front of him, or so he thought…
"A summoning seal…?"
All he knew was that it was some sort of fuinjutsu, keeping something he didn't know locked up or stored away inside of him. Yeah. That had to be it. What else could it be? If he genuinely had something sealed away inside of him like a sword or something, then it was definitely possible to unlock and bring out whatever it was, just like how Iruka did.
The jinchuriki spared a smirk after running his fingers over the intricate, spider web design across his belly. As complicated as it was to read, he couldn't help but wonder what it was actually for. Was it something special? Was it something awesome?
Oh, now this was just too tempting a mystery to let go on unanswered.
"Let's see what this weird thing is all about," Naruto exclaimed before slapping his hands together to form a hand seal. "Alright… so how did Iruka-sensei do that again?" Bird, ram and tiger? There had been… how many hand seals? Damn… he couldn't remember. It was all a blur.
.
.
.
.
✨Subscribe to my Patreon for advanced content✨
✨The novel is available in PDF with more than 400 chapters, visit us in our Patreon store✨
✨https://patreon.com/Konekochan222✨