Ch.10: Payback

I carefully finished the line till the very end, lifted the brush and admired the result. It was very difficult to draw the mon of the Yamanaka clan: it looked like a square inscribed in a rhombus, nothing special. Yet, the sides of both the square and the rhombus were white, and all the internal parts besides them were a square in the centre and triangles in four the edges are red, and I only had black ink. (Even for those I paid a lot to get, but that is a whole different story). Therefore, the white parts had to be outlined thinly along the edges, thinking in advance how to do it — my draft on the sand was all the time in front of my eyes, and I checked it every second, and I will do the red parts with hatching, let me just rest a bit before it.

I was discharged from the hospital rather quickly after recovery — whenever weakness returned, they simply told me to use the secret clan technique in order to literally gain strength. Further progress was on me.

I was spending my days as usual, running around the neighbourhood, climbing trees, swimming and fishing, but all those activities were increasingly more often interrupted by increasingly deeper thoughts about the future and my plans for it. In order to occupy myself with something not only tedious and exciting, but also useful and at least somewhat strategic, I began to draw a map of Utaki — the sacred mountain on which I apparently lived, and every corner of which I've explored. In any case, that is how it seemed to me before, but now I have had to seriously doubt it several times. As it turned out, drawing a map is a great opportunity to force yourself to be really attentive to the area, and several times already I have found a fork in the road where I ran before every day and was ready to bet substantially that there was nothing special there. There must have been some special ninja magic involved, but luckily for me, no mighty barrier-breaking techniques like the one at the town entrance, were required.

First of all, I found a writing shop in the town centre and asked the owner to be his assistant. He was an elderly man of a painfully lean appearance, who wore pinching spectacles without earpieces, while still constantly squinting. He took my proposal with great scepticism, but in the end he was able to easily work me to the bone for several weeks every day from morning to evening: hang the paper to dry, wrap the bar of dry ink, or even bring the bundle with the order to the address — this was the most difficult, because that the addresses here were by clans and districts next to the clans, and you had to know where someone lives in order to at least guess which way to go.

When the moment to get paid came, I asked for a couple of scrolls and ink instead of money. Then he lost his patience and gave me a moralising lecture in return, going on and on about how scrolls are not toys for kids, and how I need to study for at least twenty more years in order to somehow start using ink. By and large, he was right, but actually not: I knew how to write even before being drafted into this ninja world, and the fact that they did it with hieroglyphics, of course, made things difficult, but it did not become an insurmountable obstacle either. However, he emphatically stated that he would neither give me nor sell anything of value until he heard what I was going to do with it.

I told him about my map-drawing plans. For the first time in my memory, the poor owner of the store took off his spectacles, put them on the table and, closing his eyes with all his strength, as if trying to drive away the haze, furiously rubbed the bridge of his nose for a whole minute or two. The second lecture promptly followed, this time about the fact that cartography is an important science, the basics of which also take years to comprehend, and that without the help of teachers qualified in calligraphy and cartography, I can only spoil a valuable thing possibly useful by smarter people, and instead smear it with blots and ridiculous scribbles.

In response, I delivered a prepared fiery speech — since it worked with Hisao-ojisan, I decided to rely more on the possibility of persuasion altogether — after all, in the series that I watched, Naruto did this with enviable regularity. My speech this time was that the path to the heights of art can be long and winding, but I am ready to take up the challenge, and that all my relatives taught me as best they could, and that the scrolls are almost sacred to me, and I will never give up until the most perfect plan that I can possibly come up with, has been put on paper.

We agreed that he gives me four scrolls, a brush and some ink, and I draw four copies of the same map: one for myself, one for him, one for Akira-san and one for Kinako. Despite the perceived logic of what was happening, a feeling was not leaving me that I remained indebted to both Akira and Kinako. This feeling was not the best to have, so I decided to fix it and repay them with actions — and gifts.

The ninja town hidden in the leaves was quite vast, or seemed so to a preschooler. It included many districts that differed from one another: poorer, richer, built up with spacious estates or huts, leaning one on the other and dangerously hanging over the river, and in some places the rivers themselves looked more like half-dried dirty ditches, and in some places they were real majestic rivers, now and then crossed by beautiful high arches of bridges painted in a constant bright red colour, from which one could look at clear water with eternally hungry fat faced carps, with waves crashing against the bridge supports and with cargo boats and rafts passing under. At the centre of it all stood a massive, round, high-rise building made of red stone — Ninjagakko, the Academy where I still had hopes to study. Right behind him loomed the sacred mountain, the slopes of which carried little to no vegetation, and it bristled unfriendly with its rocky sides. In the middle of it, in the most inaccessible part of the slopes, they carved out huge faces of town leaders, known to me as the first four hokage. Along the edges, diligently bypassing not only the hokages, but in general all the well-visible areas, several staircases were winding, carved into the rock so as not to be noticeable from afar. They looped, crossed, moved from crack to crack, or simply hid behind rows of trees or densely grown shrubs, and somehow reached the top. At the end of each staircase stood a festive-looking arch, decorated with colourful ribbons and bells during holidays, and behind the arch the road began to branch and merge into the network of streets that I just decided to draw.

Not wanting to disappoint my incredulous employer, I was first taking notes mentally or, like today, coming to a quiet place by the stream, where I could draw on the sand with a branch, only to be disappointed with the result and to trample over it angrily and try again on the next day. At the university, Perspective Geometry was an easy subject for me, and I loved it for the crystal clarity of the training manual and for its meditative application: there was no need to think, all steps were strictly determined by one of these rules, and one could spend many hours on one drawing without noticing how he missed lunch, and dinner, and even sunset. I did almost all the tasks in such binges, sitting down to complete them at the last moment and doing in a day what I had to spend a month on — and almost always I was not just given the highest mark, but also praised publicly and set as an example to others. It took me no more than a week to decide on such a projection, so that the whole mountain with its entries lay on it.

All this time, as well as a few more weeks after that, I played the role of a curious child — it was easy for me, because, honestly, I am one: ready and happy to explore the world, I strive to ask questions without any second thoughts or cunning plans. Neighbourhood kids, Hisao-ojisan, Ichiraku cooks and just random passers-by were showered with questions, and I learned the names of all ten great Utaki clans. I knew most of them, some I remembered with difficulty — like Hagane — and some I did not remember at all — like Abeno. I was surprised to learn that Yakushi was also a great clan — I thought that it was just Yakushi Kabuto, the solitary future traitor of the village, operating alone, and here there is a whole clan, and even a great one. Perhaps this somehow explains the abundance of Kabuto's techniques and his sudden rise power at the level of Orochimaru and Madara…

One of the bystanders turned out to be Umino Iruka, whom I was so glad to see that I even slightly alerted him and set him against me with enthusiastic shouts of greeting. Still, this is the only person in the whole city at the moment who believes in Naruto, supports him and is not afraid to do all this openly. I always had an unpleasant aftertaste from all the other fellow villagers who shunned the “monster child” who saved them and repaid him for all the achievements of his father with nothing besides a childhood trauma that cannot be solved so easily by recognition in adulthood. Iruka confirmed my already formed assertion that there are ten great Utaki clans, and praised me when I quoted the entire list, but that was not even the main point. He also involuntarily led me to the Uzumaki residence: I had to pass by what seemed to me before like a small wayside sanctuary, and turn towards something that I thought to be just overgrowing forest. After this revelation, I walked along the mountain for a long time and looked behind each statue, trying to find secret passages — and thus found two more clans: Uchiha and Abeno, from whom, however, I eventually ran away without bringing my research to any it was the end, since it was very uncomfortable to even be close to their walls.

Having finished drawing the last mon, I began to check the result of my work: it was the first completely finished map, intended for Akira-san. Just using it, I found a place that was impossible to pass by on the way from one of the stairs to the Uzumaki house, no matter how hard one tries, and settled there today. Everything was in its place, I also finished with the shading, and, having doubted properly, I decided to put my signature in the corner of the map. Just as I had completely rolled up the scroll and tied it up, Akira-san appeared on the road. I called out and ran towards him, clutching the gift in my fist.

- Hello, Niko! — Smiling, he waved at me, and immediately stopped short, noticing the scroll in my hand. — No, Nico, I will not agree to teach kinjutsu to you. Not today, not ever. I explained that the exchange of clan techniques is a very serious matter and requires the consent of the clan heads…

I waved my hands, in every possible way denying the direction in which his thoughts went. Just before my discharge from the hospital, he dropped by on the way home (the fact that I only learned to appreciate later, remembering the details). There, out of the blue, we ended up having a heated argument. After telling him the story about what happened to me, I unrolled the clan scroll and tried to show it to Akira just as a part of my story. After all, it would seem that I have already shared so much information with him: my summoning, my clan, Hisao-ojisan… — practically everything that I knew, I laid out to him straight. However, this was the first time he resolutely refused to listen and look, and even got offended at my attempt. According to his logic, it turned out that him becoming acquainted with a technique of my clan somehow obliges him to reveal to me in response one of the techniques of his clan, and that he cannot possibly do without permission from his great-grandfather, who would rather die than agree to that.

I don't think it is worth saying that I never intended to claim anything of the kind, and definitely planned no attempts to learn Uzumaki clan techniques. I was just trying to continue to be as open as possible, with one of the few inhabitants of the Leaf who treated me like a human being and offered real help in difficult situations. I cannot swear that his explanation left me completely indifferent — later that night I dreamed that Akira was teaching me the rasengan. Waking up, I laughed myself at the hopelessness of such a development of events, but the dream, nevertheless, came out from my mind.

— I have a present for you, Akira-sensei! No secret techniques, I did everything myself from start to finish! Here! Thank you for saving me and bringing me back to Konohagakure! — With these words, I handed him my map, holding it out of courtesy with both hands.