"Why is Ino tied up?" Hinata asked as she entered the chamber Naruto was working in.
He looked over at Ino and shrugged. "At first because she was doing a horrible job of staying out of the way, but the suppression seals I included to keep her from using chakra or shapeshifting to escape the ropes fell off an hour ago."
"And what annoyed you enough to have tied her up at all? Because if she was merely 'in the way' you'd have probably just forced her out of the chamber."
Naruto sighed. "Politics."
"Clan politics?"
He understood why she'd jump to that, being one of the few kinds of politics he normally had to directly deal with, but shook his head. "No, international politics. Shisui spoke with the Daimyo in person about Uzushio and got back to Yoko with annoying details this morning."
Proving that she'd been able to release herself for a while, Ino slipped out of the ropes and freed her mouth. "What kind of annoying details?"
"The ones that interact to make me, on paper, a Minor Daimyo."
"...what?"
"Is this because of Uzushio?" Hinata asked.
Naruto nodded. "In part. The island is still recognized as a protectorate nation by the Land of Fire and Konoha refuses to acknowledge that Uzushiogakure itself is 'gone' so long as loyal Uzumaki exist. Coupled with a...problem that came up on the island after Konoha was founded and laws passed to solve them, well..."
Hinata waited a moment for him to continue, before sighing. "Well what?"
"...being declared the legal head of the Uzumaki clan by Konoha technically makes me the leader of the island by Uzushio's own laws. The clan never saw the position as being one of a Daimyo, but that's what it's on record as being in the Land of Fire's treaties."
"Oh."
"At the same time, being a 'protectorate' nation allows the Land of Fire and Konoha to officially 'assist with administration until such a time as the proper leaders return'. Meaning that I'm being encouraged to accept refugees as citizens...including some from other nations that can trace their families back to the island in the first place and have been reaching out to Konoha asking questions now that things have been rebuilt. Konoha would then 'officially' assist with things until such a time as I decide to shift from Konoha to Uzushio to run the place, allowing me to pretend that there's some more secret location that the leadership is running out of due to concerns over the security of the island."
Ino looked confused. "So...the Hokage and our Daimyo want you to pretend to be a Daimyo afraid to return because of what happened years ago?"
"...essentially."
"That sounds like a lot of trouble for little to no gain."
"It provides a number of wonderful excuses for things, such as officially hiring Uzushio to do things that Konoha can't do directly, and creates fun and potentially exploitable situations with various other groups. Like the Land of Hot Water, that may be convinced to 'return' the coastal facility and surrounding area, and The Land of Water that had taken what used to be a neutral island for themselves. And, of course, it means that all the reasoning for not holding chunin exams there would be void while simultaneously giving me a truly unblockable veto on the idea."
"Are you going to use the veto?" Hinata asked.
"...don't know yet. There are good and bad reasons to 'show off' the rebuilt village."
"You've discussed that a bit." She then tilted her head as she looked at the lines of the seal script he was working on. "But you haven't indicated what, exactly, your plan is for the giant seal arrays you seem to be making."
He blinked, and thought back to things. Surely he'd said something? But considering things, it was probably only to Miho. "Huh. Having figured out how the Forest of Death's seal array works, after duplicating it without noticing everything it was actually doing, it wasn't hard to tweak it a lot more. My goal is to have a core of 'extremely dangerous', surrounded by a ring that's probably a little over thirty percent more dangerous as the Forest of Death is, and a final ring surrounding that at around half the danger of the Forest of Death. Walls between the layers, training grounds in the outer ring, towers spread in the middle ring, and a larger primary tower and small mini-village in the center. Integrating a form of barrier trick that I've also added to Uzushio's training ground should keep the plants and animals from spreading beyond their danger levels."
"...you're making the entire island a training area?"
"Basically. I've already marked it on Uzushio's maps as 'Training Island'. The center of things is also positioned so that there are some training areas in the caves on the cliff-covered side of the island."
Ino groaned. "If this is just a 'training island' more dangerous on average than the Forest of Death, then what are you going to call the training ground outside of Uzushio itself?"
He shrugged. "The Forest of Inconvenience."
Both girls groaned at that, but there was an effort to portray Uzushio's forces as being a cut above everyone else. Selling that properly, or ensuring that it was reality later on, required more advanced training methods and more dangerous training areas.
Hanabi fidgeted while being examined by Yoko, still not sure why there'd been a weird itch for a couple of days before a very sudden hour of excruciating pain this morning.
"Congratulations," Yoko finally said. "You're the first person to ignore the signs of over-use of shapeshifting, by virtue of probably being the first one to run into them."
"Over-use of shapeshifting?" Hanabi asked.
"Let me guess," her father said. "I have a son now?"
"Indeed," Yoko replied. "The shapeshifting seal is disengaged and temporarily unresponsive, likely to stay that way for at least a week based on the chakra flows, but he is otherwise healthy. I suspect that the itching was the 'shapeshifted too long' warning sign and the pain was a combination of transitioning to no longer being shapeshifting and the cat features reestablishing themselves properly for the new base form. Based on this, it wouldn't work to permanently remove or change the species of animal features, but it might work to change their appearance within tolerances."
"I'm a boy?" Hanabi asked, looking down. "But..."
"We noticed that you were spending more and more time shapeshifted into a male version of yourself for well over a year," her mother said. "I just didn't realize that you'd stopped changing back when going to sleep. Of course, you've also never really changed your wardrobe, or how you refer to yourself, so we've been assuming that you still think of yourself as a girl."
Hanabi flinched a little at that, because running around as a boy was supposed to be a disguise. Wasn't it?
Naruto checked the current flow on the electricity-generating seals to ensure that they were generating the correct amount of electricity, then moved to the central power board to start doing pre-checks on it. He'd made the mistake of not checking this stuff once in Uzushio and wasn't in the mood to redo a pile of work by blowing out all the equipment.
After an hour of checking things, he turned on the central tower computer systems.
"None of these computers work," Hinata said once they'd failed to boot up.
"They're brand-new creations," Naruto replied. "I have to download the software into them."
"You should've done that back in Uzushio then, because we're definitely out of range of the radios."
"...why would the radios matter? They work great for talking to people nearby, and for controlling the automatic puppets..."
Hinata gave him a 'are you an idiot' look. "Because there's no way you're going to run a hardline all the way here like you did to connect Uzushio with the Land of Hot Water outpost?"
"What hardline?"
"The one in the tunnel to the outpost that you used to download the software for Uzushio's computers?"
"...I put that tunnel in after downloading the software, and there's no wire running down it."
That seemed to bring Hinata up short. "But...okay, I suppose you were likely in range to get a radio download."
He scratched his head. "Still don't know what you're talking about."
Unfortunately, he was subjected to another hour-long lecture on how radios worked, their inherent range limitations, some ways to mitigate that with altitude and power, and absolutely no additional understanding as to what the hell she was talking about because he didn't understand ninety percent of it. How she, and to a lesser degree Hanabi, could understand all of this baffled him when they couldn't seem to get more than a basic grasp on sealing.
Then again, he also got the impression that they were equally baffled as to how he couldn't understand what they did while being able to do everything he could with seals.
"I didn't understand most of that," Naruto said when Hinata was done. "And I still have no clue why it would be important. The manuals state that the software transfer can only happen at the physical port array on the central mainframe unit. I just need to do the final checks on the connection from this end, then pop back to Uzushio to start the transfer. Well, I could also do it from the Land of Hot Water facility, but I wasn't planning on connecting directly to it."
Hinata pinched the bridge of her nose while taking a couple of deep breaths. "Naruto, we're too far away to connect the two computers."
"I already checked that the seals I made to connect things work over much longer distances. The biggest problem is that you have to make them as a single seal, activate them, and then physically bring them to the other end of the connection. Summoning and the Hiraishin make the travel time a non-issue though."
"...you...made seals to connect the computers?"
He nodded and popped a stack of small strips of metal from a seal, each measuring two by eight centimeters. "Yeah. These are them when they're not activated yet, though the prototypes were a lot larger. Once you activate them you break them on the scored line, then solder them to the terminal wires at each end. One seal pair per wire." Another seal was accessed to pull out little tube-like bits of metal that were the same length as the strips but not as wide. Of course, being tubes they were round instead of flat. "Or I can use one of these instead of each of the wires that use light instead of electricity. The only downside is needing another seal array to ensure that there's enough chakra in these ones, but you only need to worry about it at one end as the seal is still a 'single seal' even when you split it into two pieces."
The look on her face told him that he'd done something that 'broke everything' again, though what the scope of 'everything' was hadn't yet been determined. Matatabi and Miho had both suffered similar breakdowns at finding out what he'd done though, so he was assuming it was 'one of those Uzumaki things' as they liked to put it.
He ended up showing Hinata the connections in the computer, and then the ones in Uzushio that had a chakra-gathering seal array nearby. Once she'd seen all of that he'd started the transfer, and then when it was obviously working she spent two hours simultaneously redesigning several things on paper and lecturing him on how this negated all kinds of downsides of networked computers and changed the entire security model at the same time because of how easy it would be to slip them into the computers themselves to allow remote access.
...he held off mentioning that he'd at least thought of the latter and had both detection and disconnection seals available. Or that sets were installed around each mainframe now and any unexpected connections triggered the disconnection seals.
Eventually he was able to leave Hinata to her thing and go check on Ino's ideas for the Uzushio technique library. Turning the rebuilt village into a functioning hidden village required setting a bunch of things up he'd not bothered with yet, and he was hoping that the clones he'd tasked with figuring out a solution to all the paperwork needed came up with a good way of handling that. Making paper and ink was time consuming and relying on Konoha's supplies wasn't going to cut it long-term.
"I think we're done here," Naruto said as his clones did the last few things for Training Island to be left unattended for a bit. They'd monitor things from Uzushio going forward.
"Seems a shame to have done all the work and then not use it at all for a bit," Ino commented.
"The forest needs time to become properly dangerous anyway."
"...a tree tried to tear my arm off this morning."
Hinata chuckled. "I don't think it has the strength yet. Training ground forty-four has much more impressive trees, the Forest of Inconvenience is now slightly worse, and if Naruto did things correctly then this is going to be an in-demand training area for high jounin in the future."
Ino flinched in a way that made Naruto think that she didn't think she was going to qualify for that, even though she was well on her way.
"At least you have the ability to get that far," Odoroki said, pouting. "We'll never have the chakra needed."
"An unfortunate limitation of the guardian system," an unknown voice said from behind them.
Naruto spun around, as did Hinata and Ino, and he found that the byakugan couldn't see the two transparent figures unless looking directly at them. Hinata likely found the same thing, and the fact that they...only just started feeling like they were there from a chakra-sensing point of view was concerning. Both of the figures were old men wearing white robes and had horn-like protrusions on their foreheads. The one on the left looked like he might have circular patterns in his eyes and had what looked like a red eye marking on his forehead while the man on the right looked to have the byakugan.
Notably, Futo, Miho, and Odoroki seemed unable to see or hear the two figures, based on their reactions.
Very concerned about these two suddenly appearing, coupled with his clones noting that all of Hinata's clones elsewhere had just dispelled, Naruto attempted to get everyone out of there with the Hiraishin. It was immediately obvious that he couldn't reach out to his anchors, leading to attempting to get his clones and Yoko to summon them out. That also didn't work and had him considering alternate escape routes. Getting far enough away to be out of range of the blocking, perhaps?
"Sorry about the interruption," the man on the left said, his voice indicating that the man on the right had been the one to speak first. "But we've discovered a problem and need to deal with it while we still can."
"Luckily you have a suitable vessel available," the man on the right added, as suddenly the world went slightly blue. Futo, Miho, and Odoroki had seemingly stopped moving, and if Naruto had to describe things he'd say it was like being in the middle of a Hiraishin jump in regards to his connection to Yoko and his clones.
"Good reflexes," the man on the left said, looking at Naruto. "Didn't consider that you might start sounding the alarm through your other self, or that her existence would keep your clones active."
"More like we forgot about his connection to her entirely."
"True. But we've skipped some introductions." The man half-bowed. "I am Hagoromo Ōtsutsuki, known to many as the Sage of Six Paths, and this is my brother Hamura. The Uzumaki, Senju, and Uchiha clans are my direct descendants."
"While the Hyuga clan are my direct descendants," Hamura said, nodding to Hinata.
"We hadn't paid enough attention until recently, but all three of you descend from both of us. Naruto is an Uzumaki, which frequently intermarried with the Senju, and has multiple ancestors from branches of the Hyuga and Uchiha clans where the fathers were likely unaware of their children. It's not commonly known that lack of contact early on in the pregnancies can prevent dojutsu from developing in that situation. Hinata is a Hyuga, but also has Senju ancestors. Lastly, Ino also has distant ancestors that can be traced back to my line before the Senju and Uzumaki clans formed properly, but also three different connections to the Hyuga clan where likely-unknown children never properly manifested the byakugan."
"It's been long enough since our time that large swaths of the continent descend from either or both of us. The important detail is that we can only show ourselves to our descendants, which is why we can't communicate with the three connected to the guardian system."
"Why are you here?" Naruto asked, not actually certain that he believed their story.
Hagoromo sighed. "To pass on gifts that you likely won't want so that we can remove a threat to all life from play. At that point we will finally be forced to move on for ourselves, finally unable to sustain our existence, having to hope that we've done enough to save countless lives."
"I'll leave more details for you to review later," Hamura said. "But the short version is that God Trees are a bad thing, you accidentally stumbled upon a way to kill them that doesn't require starving them in a very difficult and time-consuming process, and it turns out that there's a seed of another one that needs to be killed before failsafes cause it to make its way to Earth to take root."
"And your method requires putting a crucial component of the tree inside of a living vessel."
"...what are you going to do to me?" Ino asked.
"Make you stronger as a side effect of the process."
Hamura nodded. "Indeed. But first there are other items." He was suddenly in front of Ino, and touched a finger to her forehead. Chakra flowed into her before he nodded. "Your eyes are closer to a byakugan than you likely realized, the lack of pupil being a sign of having it in your ancestry. This should be enough to awaken it." As Ino was reeling from that, he suddenly shifted to Naruto, finger already in place. "You've already obtained my eyes, but despite that have not properly awakened their full potential. Luckily, only a small amount of my chakra is needed for that." As Naruto's eyes burned, Hamura shifted to Hinata, hand on her shoulder instead. "And your connection to me is quite strong. Your sister-turned-brother's connection might be stronger, but you are here and he is still too young. Upon you I shall bestow the bulk of my chakra that needs to be passed on. You will likely not see any significant improvement from it until you complete your training with the snakes though."
Hagoromo then moved forward, though more gently, and placed his hands on the shoulders of Hinata and Ino. "From me, I bestow upon you two what I can of the gifts the Senju and Uzumaki inherited that gives them enhanced vitality in their chakra, even if it seems like you don't or won't need it." Chakra flowed into both of them before the man released them and moved back. "Unfortunately, now I find myself needing to intentionally make a mistake I had long since realized should not have been made and pass the bulk of my power to a single person instead of distributing it more equally. Sadly, the need is far too great."
The apparent Sage moved to Naruto and the world went white.
"I think I believe that Naruto has met the Sage of Six Paths," Kakashi said as he did some basic checks on Yoko.
"What gave it away?" Cat asked, head tilting to show curiosity that his Anbu mask would otherwise hide.
"You arrived three seconds too late to see her eyes flash through multiple levels of sharingan."
"...multiple levels?"
"One, two, three tomoe, and what I believe to be the start of a forming mangekyo before she finished slamming her eyes shut in pain. The only oddity was that there was no red, but she's also not an Uchiha. It could be that the red is tied to their eye color and not the dojutsu itself."
"Huh."
"Would you mind warning Tsunade? Team Yurei senior are probably all going to need an examination after this, based on what was being said."
"Can do."
"Ugh," Naruto said, groaning. "What happened?"
"The Sage borrowed your body," Hinata answered, and he realized that his head was sitting on her lap. "You might want to focus on Yoko's memories? He said something about explaining things to her before he left you."
Blinking, Naruto did so...and got memories of what amounted to an out-of-body experience. The Sage had done something to his eyes, which had echoed to Yoko, and then possessed him. Hamura had then possessed the Tome, before they'd then taken Ino to a giant beast. Said beast had wanted to eat Ino, but had been willing to obey Hagoromo-in-Naruto. Sealing script was then deployed by him and the Tome, holding the beast down and draining energy from it before the Tome was used to tear the beast apart and bind part of it to Ino.
While the Tome was doing that, Hagoromo both kept the beast from fighting back and dumped 'how to use the sharingan and rinnegan' lessons into Naruto's connection to Yoko. Plus a bunch of new seals knowledge, some chakra usage tips, and an ability to pass chakra on to others...that might be temporary instead of the intended permanent, coupled with some of the Sage's chakra moving over the connection to Yoko making it problematic to hand half of it over to an Uchiha?
Oh, and there was an apology for needing to give Naruto and thus Yoko the sharingan and rinnegan, but the safest way to keep the ten tails that was the seed of a God Tree from fighting back was to use a rinnegan and the 'only current holder of one' hadn't been present.
After the process of binding things to Ino was completed, including an impromptu lesson on using the Creation of All Things technique to make shapeshifting abilities and bind them to people, they'd returned to Training Island. Hagoromo and Hamura had apologized for the trouble and vanished, the bulk of their remaining chakra settling into Naruto and Hinata.
Naruto frowned after processing that. "I was used as a way to keep a ten-tailed beast from fighting back as it was killed?"
"And for your connection to the Tome," Hinata added. "They needed it to bind the seed's element that I assume moved from you into Yoko, and Ino was the only one available for the binding. I ended up needing to help keep her alive during the process though."
"...and now I have eyes that are connected to external power sources that I'm going to slowly absorb and integrate into myself in some fashion."
"...that didn't come up in the discussions I had."
"That was described to Yoko. We were bound to the 'power nodes' more deeply than should normally be done to trigger it as a way of removing the nodes, once it was realized that the chakra originally hoped to be passed on to an Uchiha had instead split off to bind to Yoko. There's a good chance that eventually the Uchiha won't have sharingan eyes because there won't be anything left to power them? In...a couple hundred years, anyway."
"But...if they're also connected to those nodes, what's that going to do to them?"
"My understanding is that the sharingan connects each time you activate it instead of remaining connected at all times because the people those nodes were set up for moved around and would be in range of different nodes at different times. Yoko and I can't move around to that degree until the nodes are absorbed because of how we were connected and part of the reason we were told was as a warning. But once they're absorbed we'll be free to move around a lot more."
Hinata nodded, then stiffened. "Wait, that implies that you're going to live long enough for that to happen, and you just said it could take centuries."
"Yeah...Hagoromo also said that it's likely that being bound to the pieces of a God Tree has a life-extending effect."
"So you, Yoko, me...and now Ino are going to live a lot longer?"
"And those who still had tailed beasts sealed in them and had the pieces bond to them as a result of the deaths of the tailed beasts themselves."
"How long are we going to live?"
"He didn't say, but there was an...implication of there not being a natural death in our future. The God Trees themselves apparently can't be killed so long as they have a collection node and there's sufficient life left on the planet for them to absorb and concentrate, but we don't have the 'concentrate' side of things and just...filter the energy instead? So we aren't a blight on all existence while the trees that the nodes were pulled from are."
It was a little obvious that Hinata was having trouble processing that. Admittedly, he was only doing as well as he was with the information because Yoko had already worked her way through most of it...
"The headaches are because your brains aren't used to having sharingan eyes," Kakashi explained while Tsunade was examining Naruto. "Luckily, you don't have to suffer through three weeks of constant pain like I did."
"Activate some level of things every day until the pain builds up," Tsunade explained. "It'll likely take months to adapt that way, but it'll be safer. Oh, and that's each of you, because I can tell that you're at different levels of adaptation already. Presumably because Naruto wasn't adapting while he wasn't under control of himself and Yoko was forced to keep her eyes active for the duration."
"Kind of surprised you aren't spending more time examining Ino," Naruto said. He knew Hinata's examination had been quick, as she had no real physical changes to examine, but Ino also had a pounding headache and changed eyes.
"She's the least likely to explode with chakra due to containing part of a tailed beast."
"...fairly certain that having the core of a ten-tailed beast bound to her means that you're wrong. In fact, being newly bound seems like it would make it more likely in her case?"
There was a moment of silence as that was processed, and a few heartbeats later Tsunade rushed from the room.
"So," Kakashi said. "Fun fact. The village considers non-implanted sharingan eyes as justification to confer automatic membership in the Uchiha clan."
"And non-implanted byakugan eyes to confer automatic membership in the Hyuga clan," Yoko added. "We were in a gray area on the latter, though officially recognized as part of the main branch of the family due to Hiashi either way even before he knew about Naruto having a lesser form of the byakugan. We probably qualify more now. Ino is going to be the fun one to explain."
"Being adopted into the clans by the Sage of Six Paths and his brother is likely to smooth things over significantly. Aside from that, did you happen to notice that your mangekyo patterns are different from each other?"
Naruto blinked. "They are?"
"Neither of you looked at the other's eyes, did you?"
"No."
"You've both got a six-bladed shuriken kind of look. Naruto's has a black dot in the center of a blue straight-edged shuriken while Yoko's has a blue dot in the center of a black 'swirling' shuriken. The two of you are reflections of one another, but not quite."
"Huh."
Hiashi sipped his drink. "This is an interesting development."
"You could call it that," Inoichi replied. "Shikaku has referred to it as 'troublesome', which I'm inclined to agree with."
"Finding out that one of your clan's notable physical traits is a sign of a distant connection to my clan is merely an excuse to foster better relations between the two clans."
"That portion of things is indeed merely interesting. Unfortunately, I have to consider the effects of things on my heiress."
"Ah. I had admittedly expected to eventually be adding her to the clan rolls in a similar manner to which I had previously added Naruto and Yoko, once someone got around to asking for permission to grant her our eyes. Having the progenitor of our clan grant her the eyes instead was...unexpected, as was him changing the way Naruto and Yoko are registered."
"Itachi wasn't expecting to need to add to the Uchiha rolls either, admittedly, but this creates...problems for my clan. Hokage-sama has done what he can to 'flatten' the hierarchy of clans, but it will take generations to eliminate it."
That was admittedly not something that Hiashi had considered. He knew that Hinata's likely marriage to Naruto would make her ineligible to become head of the Hyuga clan for years, but not for hierarchy reasons. Hanabi had further insisted that Neji be placed before her for potential leadership of the Hyuga clan, now that they'd been able to abolish the branch family system. But the Uzumaki clan had always theoretically sat above the Hyuga as well, with the Daimyo's meddling to ensure that Naruto was recognized as Uzushiogakure's leader on paper reinforcing that.
An Uzumaki being on the Hyuga clan rolls would be prevented from leading the Hyuga clan due to the Uzuamaki clan's better standing, but Naruto wasn't in line to lead the Hyuga clan anyway. This was compared to being on the Senju clan rolls, which Tsunade likely hadn't told Naruto he was due to being able to manage living plants with wood release, as the Uzumaki clan was equal to the Senju clan and had intermarried quite a bit. But putting a Yamanaka on the Hyuga clan rolls was elevating them...and negated the ability to take over as the leader of the lesser clan, lest the Hyuga clan be seen as interfering in the matters of the lesser clan.
Hiashi eventually nodded. "So you're annoyed at needing to deal with the headache of choosing a new heir now, instead of being able to put it off?"
Inoichi nodded. "Yes. Pointing out that she was less likely to end up chosen over Hinata, and that the power disparity would make things...difficult on her, had been enough to shut up the more pushy members of my clan. Not that she'd have cared about the power disparity, and I carefully never pointed out that it's been obvious to those paying attention that she's already decided that Naruto and Hinata are 'family'."
"Tsume finds it hilarious that people haven't noticed that tendency in those that got dog features from the beast-man formula."
"Most people are easily confused with the similar but distinct wolf features. Those with dog features are more likely to attach to individuals while it seems that those with wolf features only show the bonding trait when they enter a proper relationship."
"...I have to admit that I'd not considered that distinction, but I also acknowledge that my own cat features have made it slightly harder to understand canines in general. Tsume has been quite understanding there as I've worked with her to understand a few of my clan who ended up with canine features of their own."
