Hazō wasn't sure how he felt about the circumstances of his meeting with Keiko and Shikamaru. On the one hand, being seated across an oversized desk from them in Shikamaru's office made him feel eerily as if he was in Old Lizardbreath's office, trying to find a way to explain his latest "misdemeanour" to the caustic headmaster in a way that minimised his inevitable punishment (it had taken him a painfully long time to learn that "But Sensei was wrong!" was a guaranteed ticket to pedagogic violence). On the other hand, Keiko had made it clear that Hazō had two options: to arrange for an audience in a week's time, clan head to clan head, or to drop in to pester his brother-in-law with half a day's warning. In other words, this was Shikamaru's idea of intimacy.
"So," Hazō said, already tired of waiting, "how do you two feel about bringing back the dead?"
Keiko and Shikamaru exchanged glances.
"Four Shikamaru hours, if you please," Keiko said smugly.
"I should have pre-empted him," Shikamaru muttered. "Most people instinctively return phatic greetings even if they might not think to initiate one of their own accord."
"If I wanted a husband with highly-developed social skills, I would have married a... No, wait. I never wanted a husband. Mocking comment retracted. Hazō, what can we do for you today?"
"You can help me end death's dominion," Hazō said casually.
Shikamaru sighed pre-emptively. "Proceed."
"I'm confident," Hazō began, "that death is not an immutable fact of this world. You've read the briefings, so you know that Pain was able to bring back the entirety of Akatsuki with a single ninjutsu."
"Pain," Shikamaru objected, "is said to have possessed one of the most powerful Bloodline Limits known to man. As a general rule, such things cannot be replicated. Were it possible, I can assure you that every village under the sun would have developed a Byakugan ninjutsu by now, or perhaps a Byakugan seal."
"Still," Hazō said, "he proved that it could be done. He proved that there was no fundamental natural law preventing resurrection."
"Debatable," Keiko said. "We have no way of knowing whether his technique actually pulled souls back from the afterlife, or whether it merely reanimated their bodies while preserving their memories. The real Akatsuki may be even now languishing in the coldest, darkest layer of Naraka where they belong."
"Not an issue," Hazō said. "When I was at O'Uzu, there was a sealing failure that made a rift. A rift to the afterlife. I walked in and I pulled a dead man out. There's no question that it was the same Daizen. Not a replica. Granted, he was out at the time so I couldn't check him to see if he had his soul, but if that wasn't an act of resurrection, I don't know what would be."
Shikamaru nodded. "I read the report, of course. Everything to do with Akatsuki was and remains top priority. However, a version of the same question remains. How can you be sure that it was the afterlife? By all accounts, sealing failures can open rifts to
anywhere. All you witnessed was some kind of time loop, accompanied by environmental chakra drain. If anything, I am unaware of any legends of the afterlife that involve temporal distortion."
"I could be wrong," Hazō admitted. "And if I am, I am prepared to waste the time and effort to find out. Because if I'm right… Shikamaru, we all have people we really want to see again. If bringing them back is even a slightly realistic possibility, which it is, isn't that worth spending a few years of research on?
"I'm not saying it'll be easy. If I'm right, we need to figure out how to open a rift to a place that we were only able to access through a random sealing failure. If we're very lucky, we might be able to reopen the one I used, but that's still completely unknown territory for sealcrafting. Then we have to figure out what to do about the chakra drain, because there's no point going out to rescue the dead if being in there just means we join them. And then we have to navigate this whole other world in order to find the people we want. It's a massive project. But Keiko, Shikamaru, can you really tell me it wouldn't be worth it if it let us bring them all back?"
Silence. A long silence.
"Hazō…" Shikamaru said slowly. "There are exactly four people left whom I can call family. Ino. Chōji. Keiko. Uncle Chōza. Extended family like yourself aside, every other person is gone. I therefore believe that my opinion has weight when I tell you that this is a terrible idea.
"I could give you an entire speech on why what you are planning is a terrible idea—indeed, such things are all but traditional at this point—assuming it is possible at all. I could list countless disasters that can and are likely to ensue. Instead, allow me to ask a few simple questions. Do you have any means of ensuring that the first experimental rift you open does not lead to a source of existential danger beyond your ability to contain? The second? The third? When you open such rifts, will you know in advance that you can reliably close them again before anything unwanted can come through? As a sealmaster, you should know better than I that the contents of rifts are fundamentally unpredictable, and the dangers too varied to allow for realistic preparation.
"Suppose you succeed, and setting aside the fact that every good ninja will have become one with the Will of Fire, and thus either be beyond extraction or will have to be torn out of that state of eternal bliss and cast back down into the horrors of the mortal realm. Do you have a vision for how the world will function when people can be freely returned from beyond the grave? Will you restrict a second life to those of Leaf and turn away the rest, the only choice which can ensure any kind of stability, or expand your vision to all of humanity as is your custom, and bring back thousands upon thousands of shinobi with no more space or resources to support them, each with a grudge against their foreign killer?
"Hazō, you know by now that the Nara are not conservative thinkers. The problems our ancestors left us with cannot be solved with the tools that created them. Nor are we fools, to claim that because death is natural it must inherently be good. But in addition to the cataclysmic dangers of the course you propose… look out of the window, Hazō. Do you see a humanity capable of wielding responsibly the power it already possesses? A humanity that will not abuse the power of resurrection out of greed, or hatred, or most likely simple stupidity? A humanity capable of coping with the myriad global challenges that it must bring? Hazō, we cannot even go a generation without a world war."
"Is that it?" Hazō asked. "Are you saying we should accept defeat in advance because humanity isn't good enough?"
Shikamaru just looked at him wearily, but Keiko replied.
"I was under the impression," she said, "that it was your life's quest to make humanity better.
Our life's quest, perhaps. Have you considered that perhaps it should be that uplifted world that should have the power of resurrection, not this grim prison we have crafted for ourselves?
"Perhaps I am being selfish, or simply incapable of proper compassion. I have never lost anyone. There is a part of me that misses Jiraiya, yes, but fundamentally he allowed himself to be killed just as we were on the cusp of finally making a connection. I have no way of knowing what it is I have been robbed of.
"Regardless, it seems to me that your priorities are misplaced. You act out of concern for the dead while the living continue to languish in misery. Can you tell me that your necromantic project, should you seriously pursue its success, will not proportionately redirect energies that would otherwise be spent on Uplift? There are only so many hours in a day—though I suppose that problem may solve itself if you really do regain access to the time-loop world—and only so much energy with which to generate ideas and act upon them. If you must pull the dead away from their appointed path, can you not do it
after we have created a world worth coming back to?"
The thought flickered across Hazō's mind that if Ami died, Keiko would sign onto the project without a second thought, and either Shikamaru would throw the Nara's every resource behind her, or there would very shortly be a new Nara clan head. He suppressed it. The kind of person who thought that way was not someone who should be trusted with the keys to the afterlife.
"Kagome made it clear," Hazō said. "The hourglass is running. If we want to save the people
we want to save, then it has to be done before their souls move on, and we have no idea how long that takes. We can't afford to wait for a better future."
"Yes," Keiko said, "Kagome, that savant of all matters esoteric whose claims have been validated by actual evidence how often, exactly? Whose knowledge base stems, allegedly, from mysterious classified documents and sealmaster word of mouth we have never encountered and have no way of evaluating for ourselves, much less reason to believe that they possess superior knowledge of the subject to publicly known authorities. Summoning aside, there is exactly one individual most believe to have travelled to other worlds and returned—he has 'Six Paths' in his name for a reason—yet Kagome, world expert on that worthy, has never cited him in relation to the matter.
"Hazō, I am forced to agree with Shikamaru. The dangers are unknown and unknowable, but we can be confident that they will be great. The odds of success are minimal. The potential consequences, both metaphysical and social, are of apocalyptic magnitude, and if you must invoke them, you should do so after fulfilling your
existing dream, which will give humanity at least a chance of handling them without tearing itself apart—not to mention vastly superior conditions for research to begin with."
"So that's it, then?" Hazō asked resignedly. "Neither of you will help?"
Keiko gave a wry smile. "Tempting though it would be to say 'yes' and delude myself into believing that this will give you even a second's pause in pursuing your latest exciting project, I must be a realist. Left to your own devices, you will surely fail in some exceedingly colourful manner that will bring death and disaster to you, the rest of my family, and quite possibly the world at large. To
help you with your undertaking would be a violation both of common sense and of my duty as one responsible for keeping the world in one piece… but given that you will press on regardless, I can at least assist you with matters of safety. With such a cornucopia of lethal failure modes, I feel confident that there will be some I can assist you in preventing. Please keep me apprised of the project's progress, especially when you intend to rend the fabric of reality, or for that matter the social fabric of Leaf."
"I've explained my reasoning," Shikamaru said heavily. "It gives me no pleasure, but I must decline your invitation. Keiko, I permit you to assist them in your private capacity, but the Nara will not support the project."
"Hazō," Keiko said after a second, "would you mind allowing us a moment to confer in private?"
Hazō did, and they retreated to the filing room behind the office for a minute.
When Shikamaru returned, he looked twice as tired as before.
"On reflection," he said, "I wish to amend my stance. My opinion is unchanged—you wish to attempt something extremely dangerous, almost certainly doomed to failure, and likely catastrophic if it does succeed. However, while the Nara do not consider assassination to be a productive practice, and in our experience nothing less will keep a creative sealmaster from dangerous sealing research, we are masters of the art of contingency. Inform me if the point comes when your project has a genuine threat of succeeding, and I will assemble a team to begin drafting contingency plans for the many, many ways in which bringing the dead back to the world of the living is likely to go wrong, from turning Leaf into a second Whirlpool to a thousand varieties of demographic crisis."
It wasn't the result he'd hoped for, Hazō had to admit, but it was better than nothing. Their objections to the project were practical, not philosophical, and those could be overcome as soon as he could offer some evidence of success. Realistically speaking, the Nara probably received a bunch of proposals every day—Hazō recalled the Tsuchimikado Team—and he suspected that those put a lot more time into preparing their pitch than he had. For him, this was just the beginning of an idea, and he did not yet have answers for all of Shikamaru's questions, like where he'd draw the line. The idea of picking and choosing from among the victims of death to rescue just the ones he cared about felt wrong somehow, but Shikamaru was right in that Hazō had no idea what a world where all the ninja of the past came back would look like—and Shikamaru hadn't even thought of all the civilians.
That didn't mean Hazō would give up. It meant he'd do what he did with all his seemingly insurmountable problems (and also most things that weren't problems). He'd add it to a list, and go from there.
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Birdlord, those are your own chapters! And Ami only learned about it because of Snowflake:
