N:RTK. 4: Nine Months in Hell – His Masterpiece.

Disclaimer: This fanfiction is a creative work inspired by the Naruto universe created by Masashi Kishimoto. It is not intended for profit or to infringe upon any copyrights associated with the original series. All recognizable characters and settings belong to their respective creators.

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Opening Author's Note: Man this chapter was a pain to write, not because I didn't know what to write but because I had so many ideas and also because unlike my Hollywood novel which is going to be a long haul this one will end much sooner.

It's still gonna be over 100 chapters easily and even though I already know where and when I want to end this story. I have no clue how many chapters that's gonna be, also I would like to take this opportunity to thank all 30 of my patrons on this app/site.

It hasn't even been a month since I started this patr. eon thing. Thank you guys, to celebrate this, I will be posting a special exclusive that I have been working on for the past month. It is the special exclusive that I talked with Rycork about before.

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Summary of the previous chapter –

The MC heads to the library to get more information about the timeline he has found himself in, thankfully his memories of this world are coming back and they help him navigate his way through to the Ninja academy.

There he learns about chakra theory, history, Ninja 101 basics. He also finds a book on fuin-jutsu and reads through it to find a nasty surprise inside. Thankfully his vigilance and instincts are able to help him avoid trouble.

After getting out of the library he has a snack and travels around the village, on his trip he finds the solution to the problem that will decide his future.

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Last time on Naruto: Road To Kage. Chapter 3: Lay of the Land –

After reading up on the history of this world, he knew what his immediate problem was going to be. Thankfully, on his trip around the village, he also found the answer to his problem.

Though it was going to be a hard one to pull off, for now he was going to have to train on his own and bide his time.

Now Continuing –

And bid his time he did; to not attract any unwanted attention to himself, he didn't try to do any better than he was doing before. Thankfully, before his full awakening, he was always smack-dab in the middle of the pack in class, which was perfect for him.

The teachers never paid attention to the middling students because they weren't doing badly enough to warrant extra help or attention. But they also weren't doing well enough to make the teacher want to focus their efforts on making them the best.

He was happy to be passed on for the "genius" Uchihas and the Hyugas in his class. After all, an early graduation probably meant only one thing for him - an early death. Even though he tried not to garner attention for himself, he still had a lot of people wanting to befriend him.

Though it was only because of his looks, he had forgotten to check how he looked in favor of getting a lay of the land. He had only done so when he went into the bathroom to brush his teeth the next morning.

He saw the shocked eyes of a young Satoru Gojo staring back at him, and no matter how much he whined about the unwanted attention, looking like one of his favorite anime characters was a dream come true.

Especially Gojo, who was officially crowned as the character with the most beautiful eyes in all of Anime. Although he received some disdainful glances from the Uchihas, the Hyugas didn't deem him worthy of their attention, which he appreciated.

Gradually, over the following weeks, he established a daily routine. He would wake up at 4:30 AM, stretch his body with yoga poses, and limber up. Building up flexibility and training his body to move more freely was his goal.

He would then make a bento for himself, which for the first month used to be filled with fruits and vegetables that he would pick up while foraging, as those were free, and he was still a poor academy trainee.

After packing his breakfast, he would run circles around the village wall. In the months that he had been doing it, he had greatly improved his stamina. At first, he would barely be able to finish two laps, but now he could even do nine if he pushed himself.

While he was jogging, he would also practice the leaf-sticking chakra control exercise as a way of improving his chakra control and also to slowly grow his chakra pool and strengthen his tenketsu points.

Staying true to his promise, he revisited the library the very next day to study basic medical knowledge for ninjas, stumbling upon a book co-authored by Hashirama and Tobirama.

Maybe it was because Hashirama wasn't able to put his genius into words, and Tobirama had to translate, but he could only infer. The information he found there was a treasure trove, and he didn't know why it wasn't covered in the classes.

It stressed the importance of stamina and flexibility, how to correctly expend chakra as a child to help grow your chakra pool, how to meditate, how the tenketsu's work and how to strengthen them without mistakenly harming one's chakra pathways, and so much more.

It made him realize just what Madara meant when he said that Hashirama was the greatest medical ninjutsu user to ever be born. Tsunade might have revolutionized iryo-ninjutsu, but on a personal level Hashirama was just built different.

He would finish his runs at the Hokage Rock Face, and there he would have his breakfast while looking down at the entire village from that place and also watching the sun rise up on the horizon.

It was a beautiful sight, and it filled him with energy to face his day. In the classes, he also learned how to make traps, even though they were mostly used to catch ninjas off-guard. They could also be easily modified to catch animals that live in the surrounding forests.

It was at the end of his second month in this world that his trap caught some fish, and from that day onwards, he had a steady supplement of meat/protein in his diet.

In the Bukijutsu classes, he opted for learning Kyūjutsu, or the Art of Archery, on top of the traditional shuriken and kunai. It wasn't a popular course, but one he was personally very interested in. Why? Well, he was a fan of Hawkeye, and he couldn't wait to create trick arrows with the help of fuinjutsu.

Also, in the short term, it would allow him to actively hunt for animals from afar and practice and improve upon his aim. But most important of all, it would allow him to avoid CQC in actual combat until he found a way to enhance his taijutsu capabilities.

He even got to save money on buying a bow and arrow due to him being the best out of the very few who even opted for the course. The instructor knew about his financial condition, so the kind man allowed him to "borrow" the academy equipment permanently.

Makima-sensei was even kind enough to teach him advanced survival skills like - tracking, skinning, butchering, foraging, etc. so he could eat meat more often.

From then on, he maintained a healthy diet of meat, fish, fruits and wild vegetables he foraged, and as for the eggs and milk, those he got by trading the skins/pelts of the animals he hunted.

After his academy classes, he would head to a training ground for academy students that was deserted due to its lack of plain fields. It was because it was just a huge rock face with a cliff to one side that overlooked a river. It had a few shallow caves on the cliff face overlooking the river.

But for him, it was an ideal place for him to practice his fuinjutsu and do his hidden training. Hidden training being his deceptive style of fighting, i.e., using fake hand seals, calling out fake elemental ninjutsu names, etc.

Due to him being thrifty, saving all the money he could from his monthly stipend, and even earning more by selling extra meat he hadn't yet learned how to preserve, he could buy supplies for training in fuinjutsu.

When he started learning and practicing fuinjutsu he finally realized what having Kage-level talent truly meant. In just a few tries, he intuitively understood information on the subject, like it was second nature to him.

It took him just 3 days to figure out that the requirement of having perfect calligraphy or handwriting was BS. He could even infer that it was only made so because others had just directly copied the design of seals from the uzumaki's rather than learning the language of seals or how they even function.

It was like writing an article on a certain topic and memorizing all the words and shapes of the alphabets, rather than learning the meaning of the words. Maybe it was because the Uzumakis never shared the knowledge behind the language of the seals with other villages.

Even in the book detailing the basics of sealing arts the language was incomplete, while it might have stumped others. It only took him a few dozen tries to brute his way through trial and errors to create his own seals.

Why did he invent his own seals? As they say, necessity is the mother of all inventions. And even despite his ability to perfectly draw a storage or explosion seal,

It still meant jack shit if he couldn't "prime" it.

"Priming a seal" was the act of filling a seal with one's chakra so it's active and ready to use. From his understanding of the subject, this was also the reason why Uzumakis were so feared; he found out that to prime even the lowest-tier explosion seal.

It would take the entire chakra pool of a low chunin rank ninja, and it had to be done in one sitting. He didn't even want to find out about the result of failure because of how harshly the book warned against trying to create one's own seal unless they were a jonin.

In just 3 months, since he had secretly started learning fuinjutsu, through his experimentation, he was able to create two auxiliary seals that he placed on top of any seal, and it would prime that seal for him.

The fake security seal that he had discovered at the end of the Fuinjutsu manual, with the hidden transmission seal placed on top of it, had inspired him. After learning how to create a counter seal, he broke the security and read through the information hidden inside.

Said hidden information was actually just basic-level information about what the yin seal was and how it worked in theory. But even just that much proved to be invaluable in the creation of two of his auxiliary seals, which helped him overcome two of his biggest problems.

The first helped him in overcoming his problem of having a small chakra when he was performing fuinjutsu and the other he was 90% certain who help him grow in strength and chakra pool beyond the natural limits of his body that the talent test had shown.

But how effective the seal would be in practice was yet to seen as its results had to be observed over long period of time to test for its effectiveness and feasibility. Even if it just helped fix his strength limit, he would still satisfied as he could always formulate a new seal to help his small chakra pool.

These two auxiliary seals that he had created were —

1. [Perfect Chakra Storage Seal] It didn't just store the user's chakra but also stabilized the chakra stored inside by constantly keeping it in a state of flow. The seal also allowed him to add commands on how to use said chakra without any further input from him. It looked like the uzumaki clan symbol inside two concentric circles.

And the second, which he considered his Magnum Opus, had come to him in a moment of Eureka. At first, it had just started out as a cheap knockoff of the [Cursed Seal Of Heaven]. Yes, he had figured out how to draw in chakra from his surroundings.

Even if quite inefficiently. He had done so by window shopping for a chakra-draining seal from the Shinobi shop. The shopkeeper had been annoyed, but no one would think that he would be able to decipher the seal just by observing it for a few days.

Though it wasn't perfect and needed more trial and error to perfect. The explosions caused by the seals destabilizing when he was creating the perfect chakra storage seal were somewhat under control and didn't draw much attention.

The moment he would feel the seal was destabilizing, he had at best 2 seconds to clear the area before the seal would explode, easily covering an area of 3 meters. He used to tie a rope around his waist while creating the seals, and at the first sign of instability, he would jump off the cliff.

There was a time when he hesitated; he still had burn scars from the explosion on his back. It was a grim reminder that, in this line of work, hesitation would cost him his life. After jumping off the cliff, he would climb back up using the tree-climbing technique.

But the nature chakra absorption seal was a completely different beast, and while making it for the first time, he had forgotten to take two very important things into perspective. The first, nature chakra, enhances ninjutsu to a level never seen before.

[Sage Mode] had allowed Naruto, who was a jonin at best in shippuden, to wipe the floor with Pain, who was a kage level ninja and had the Rinnegan. This should have been enough of an example of how careful one must be if they want to use the stuff.

And to be honest, he had been careful, but he had forgotten the second most important thing: Nature Chakra by itself is very reactive and unstable. He had forgotten to add in an extra function to his sealing matrix that would slowly mix his chakra with the nature chakra to create equilibrium.

One of the reasons why he had even survived that explosion was because he had mastered the [Substitution Jutsu] to the level where he could use it with just 2 hand seals from its usual 5, and he had kept a log ready at the bottom of the cliff.

The moment he sensed the seal start to unravel, he felt it react to the nature chakra in the air, causing goosebumps on his skin. He immediately yeeted himself off the cliff. In his free fall, he heard a deafening, earth-shaking explosion, and his instincts screamed at him to get out.

But he knew he was still too far from the log to substitute with it, as his testing had found that his range was 20 meters at best, and he was still 30 meters in the air. At that moment of desperation, he felt his mind go blank, and he entered a zone-like state.

One moment he was about to be engulfed by the explosion that was catching up to him, and the next he was on the ground. As he looked up, he saw the cliff face exploding, and rocks were raining everywhere. He knew he couldn't stay there; he couldn't afford to be linked to this incident.

It didn't even take him 2 seconds to come to that realization; he used substitution jutsu in quick succession to get out there and immediately get home.

Upon witnessing the explosion, he came to the realization that his initial strategy was the correct one, and that it was simply not possible for him to acquire knowledge of the art of sealing by himself. Even the R.O.B who reincarnated him stressed the importance of having a teacher before he sent him over.

After suffering from the worst kind of headache and body ache for a week after the incident, he realized that the real reason he survived that explosion wasn't exactly because of his mastery of the Substitution Jutsu like he had thought so before, but rather him unlocking the first gate of the [Eight Inner Gates] in a moment of life and death.

It had been just a fluke; that happened because of him being in a life-and-death situation. But he knew if he could stimulate his mind, maybe he could do it again, though it was something that would need a lot of testing.

And it was something that he vowed he would only try after his body strength and durability were at the chunin level. Just using the first gate for a few seconds nearly put him in the hospital and weakened him for a week.

Despite him diligently training for over 5 months when the incident happened, he couldn't even take a few seconds of the first gate. And the pain that came after it didn't feel worth it at all; maybe if his life was at stake and he had no other options, only then would he use it.

After recovering from unlocking the first gate, he felt his mind was even clearer than before. His speed of perception had increased as well, and he could formulate and design seals faster in his mind. The whole week, his body felt so weak that he couldn't even physically train.

He spent all his time just brainstorming and redesigning the knockoff cursed heaven seal. As he was doing that, he was reminded of Hashirama and Tsunade, who both had a seal on their foreheads whenever they used their ultimate jutsu.

For the first hokage, it was his sage mode, and for the fifth, it was her yin seal, which enhanced her stats and allowed her to heal from anything. He decided to combine the two because he needed the functions of both.

Tsunade's yin seal worked by gathering the chakra of the user and storing it for a rainy day. Whereas Hashirama's just appeared whenever he used sage mode, his assumption was that it assisted him in stabilizing his sage mode chakra and allowed him to use it and enter sage mode instantaneously.

After a lot of trial and error, he created a seal he was proud to call his own. It truly felt like a work of art, for it did something he had never seen before in Naruto or Shippuden.

It had only taken him a few weeks to figure out a nature chakra seal that would absorb it from the surroundings and feed it into any seal he was creating in the perfect amount to match his own chakra that was already in the seal and reach equilibrium.

No, he had spent the last 3 more months on experimenting—enduring through a total of 9 months of hell, just so he could create his Magnum Opus, his Masterpiece — [The Fake Sage Seal]. It looked like a diamond inside two concentric circles, he had applied it on his belly as it was central point of his Chakra Pathway System ajd right on top of his Chakra Pool.

He called it "fake," only because instead of absorbing chakra from nature and pumping it into his body into one powerful burst and making him enter Sage Mode. It instead it pulled chakra from his chakra pool and mixed the nature into the perfect ratio and then released that sage chakra in his body in very small amounts, constantly throughout the day.

He took inspiration from the fourth hokage's eight trigrams seal that leaked the kyuubi's chakra into Naruto's coil.

It had caused Naruto to grow used to the caustic-tailed beast chakra, which made his chakra pool bigger and his chakra coils stronger. He hoped that the sage chakra would serve a similar purpose, even though most part of it would dissipate back into the surroundings.

Even the little bit he could absorb was already enough for him. In the few weeks of using it, his stamina and endurance had rapidly shown improvement. The number of laps he could do around the village perimeter wall went up from 8 or 9 to 13 in just a few weeks; if that wasn't proof, he didn't know what was.

He hoped that this Fake Sage Seal of his, would allow his body to grow beyond his natural limit of high chunin and get to the level of a jonin. But to determine that he would need more data and testing, for now he could only work towards his plan.

In the last three months that he hadn't just been working on the Fake Sage Seal alone but also on some other side projects. It was done with the intention of breaking the monotony of just working on a single type of seal and also to test his creativity.

He had developed a few more seals, like the Cloud-Stepping Seal that would erase the sound of his footsteps or any actions he took. Another was the scent concealment seal (name pending) that made him completely lose his natural body odour.

He had also reverse engineered the chakra paralysis seal, chakra draining seal and body paralysis seal. His own creations included the flash bang seal, the shadowless seal and more.

And he also brainstormed a few variants of Sage Seal that allowed him to use sage chakra in some very limited yet creative ways. But sadly, almost none of them would work with his current level of knowledge and understanding of the Shinobi body.

To make it work, he needed a more advanced level of knowledge in Iryo-ninjutsu, but he was only an academy trainee. It would take years before he would be qualified enough to attain Jonin-level information. This lack of vital information to his continued progress was one of the reasons why he was enacting his plan.

He had laid low enough; it was time to make contact, and as he was thinking about these thoughts in his head. A voice called out to him; it was a kind yet tempered one, like the calm before the storm with a hint of mischief hidden underneath.

"So you're the kid who broke the seal, causing Tobi-chan so many sleepless nights."

He opened his eyes to see four people standing in front of him; two of them weren't in his best-case scenario plan. But plan no survives first contact, so it was time for plan C. And maybe it would be better this way; after all, one of the two was known to be more easy-going and kind.

"If I said yes, would I be in trouble?" He asked with a smile tugging at the corners of his lips, as he glanced at woman who had addressed him and the two men behind her.

Even though they were garbed in their civilian clothing he couldn't help but imagine them in their iconic red and blue samurai style war armour. Along with them was a cute little blond girl who was giggling at the woman's words.

— To be continued…

In the next episode of X̶-̶M̶e̶n̶ '9̶7̶

Cough* *Cough*

I meant in the next chapter of Naruto: Road to Kage.

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Word Count: 3,317 words (without the author's notes and disclaimer.)

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{Closing Author's Note: Thanks for reading, this is part of my exclusive works that's only available here on pat. reon.

I am happy to announce that 3 new patrons have joined us as well. Thank you all for all the support.

Anyways, I hope everyone is happy and healthy, this is bye for now but I will be back in 12 hours with H:HHS chapter till then. I hope you have a beautiful day 😁👍}