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Chapter 14 - Spirit with unfinished business
🕑 Added 2025-04-04 15:21:40 +0000 UTCOne of the things that had me most fascinated in this world — even before my reincarnation — was fūinjutsu.
I couldn’t really explain why. Maybe it was the influence of other fantasy works I’d consumed in my past life. Maybe it was just something about the idea — that ink on paper could defy physics.
Of course, fūinjutsu wasn’t magic. Or rather, it was as magical as science was.
That was why I’d tried to go into computer science in my last life.
Tried being the operative word.
College needed money and time.
I had neither.
My meals were mostly stale bread and tap water, my free time spent chasing odd jobs just to keep the landlord from throwing my shit into the street. College wasn’t an option.
But I’d scraped together what I could. Internet cafés when I could afford an hour, library computers when I couldn’t. The internet was full of free courses, cracked textbooks, forums where people argued over the cleanest way to structure a loop.
That was my hope back then — my one ray of sun in a rainy. Programming jobs paid well. Most companies didn’t care about a diploma, just about results. All I needed was proof—a portfolio, a project, something to show I could do the work.
That was the dream, anyway.
Then a car ran a red light.
And now I was here.
I used to joke that I was some spirit with unfinished business. That thought kept me going when I first started sticking my nose into dusty, unnecessarily complicated scrolls, trying to learn fūinjutsu.
It was boring.
These weren’t sleek tutorials with clear examples and step-by-step guides. No search bar to pull up exactly what I needed. No forums full of people troubleshooting the same problem I had. No neatly packaged "Learn Fūinjutsu in 30 Days!"
Just old paper. Dense, winding explanations. Deliberately obtuse scrolls written by drunk scribes who apparently got paid by the word and charged extra for clarity. Paragraphs of flowery nonsense about "the harmony of chakra pathways" before finally — finally — getting to the point. Draw this squiggle here, not there, unless it's a Tuesday.
Back in my old world, I could’ve typed a question and gotten a thousand answers in a second. Here? I had to sit for hours just to understand a single sentence, piecing together knowledge like a caveman trying to reinvent fire. Decipher handwriting that looked like a spider dipped in ink and thrown at a page.
And pray the asshole who wrote the scroll hadn't decided to "protect clan secrets" by leaving out one critical step just to fuck with me.
I blew up seven desks before I realized the Uzumaki storage seal diagrams always flipped the polarity markers in the third quadrant. Always. Was that in the instructions? Of course not. Why waste ink on something that could kill the unworthy?
But when that first seal worked…… it was better than any coding high — fixing bugs — I'd ever had.
But also so, so fucking disappointing.
Fūinjutsu — Sealing Jutsu — did exactly what it said on the tin. Seal. Nothing more.
No reality-warping, no bending the laws of physics to your will, no grand, universe-altering rune magic like I'd dreamed. Just... containment. Locking things away.
The coolest trick I found was sealing a jutsu into an object — basically a way to preload a technique and skip the hand seals. Turning a weapon into something almost like an enchanted blade.
Oh, and storage scrolls. Kinda like an inventory system. Useful, sure, but not exactly earth-shattering. Great for smuggling, if you were into that.
Some texts also told of sealing abstract things or concepts, but I had yet to see any proof of that.
Fūinjutsu didn’t get its renown for any of that. It got it because it could seal tailed beasts.
Figures.
They were the equivalent of nuclear warheads, and this was a world built for war. Of course sealing was mostly famous for containing things that could wipe out a country.
Back then, it was so discouraging. It was an amazing art to be sure but not….. what I hoped?
The sole saving grace was the markings of fūinjutsu — the jutsu shiki. The technique formulae.
That was where things changed.
Sealing scrolls, barrier arrays, summoning contracts — those were all just the surface. The real core of fūinjutsu was in the jutsu shiki, the makings behind the seals. My own Pandora’s box.
That was where I started seeing hope. Where things actually made sense.
And that was also why I had three gray strands in my hair not yet the age of twenty.
If learning fūinjutsu was a pain in the ass, learning jutsu shiki was a full-blown nightmare.
Fūinjutsu was already rare. The only people who really used it in Konoha were the Uzumaki remnants, Jiraiya, and the Hokage himself. And none of them were exactly in the business of handing out lessons. Hell, half the existing fūinjutsu techniques were kept under lock and key. Even as a Jōnin, I only had access to the basics unless I could prove I had the skill to go deeper.
But jutsu shiki wasn’t merely rare. It was esoteric.
There was no handbook. No structured lessons. Only scattered knowledge buried in cryptic scrolls, half-finished research, and the occasional experimental deathtrap left behind by people smarter—and deader—than me.
I had to reverse-engineer everything.
Why did one set of markings stabilize chakra flow while another made the whole damn seal collapse? Why did barrier formulas have strict geometric patterns while storage seals could be all over the place? Why did altering a single brushstroke in a contract summoning circle mean the difference between calling a summon and detonating the entire scroll in my face?
It wasn’t just memorizing symbols. It was understanding the mechanics behind them. The theory, the structure, the why.
And that took years.
By the time I finally started making progress, I swore I could feel my lifespan shortening.
Perhaps, I thought as I strolled through the village market—it was just past ten in the morning—if my first project hadn’t been so damn ambitious, I might’ve seen progress sooner.
But I always held some regret for not being reborn an Uchiha and the Susanoo in the end was just another jutsu.
It was a long tangent, but it led me somewhere useful.
I hadn’t cared about money before. I was a shinobi. I could die tomorrow. Comfort and stability weren’t things I ever thought to chase.
But last night fucked that up. I added a breeding kink to a list of many kinks.
I needed more than just a jōnin’s paycheck. I didn’t want my kids to go through what I had—in both lives. Uncaring parents. Destitution. Orphanhood.
So I called forth my capitalist mindset.
I could monetize my skills.
It wasn’t the first time I’d considered making money, but I’d always dismissed it. I had plenty of ideas. But now, I needed something easy, scalable, and something with an actual market.
First things first, who were my target clients?
Certainly not shinobi. They earned decent wages, but they weren’t exactly stable customers. A soldier’s income fluctuated. A soldier’s lifespan was unreliable. And there weren’t many of them to begin with.
Civilians, then.
The thought was almost amusing. Civilians didn’t have chakra. They couldn’t use standard fūinjutsu. But…. wasn’t that better?
I smiled as I eyed the bustling shops lining the street.
A merchant hauling silks from Fire Country to Wind. Normally, that’s wagons, bandits, rotten axles, and weeks of backaches. But with a sealing scroll?
A sealing scroll — something that could let a merchant carry ten times their normal inventory without a cart, or allow a farmer to store produce without it spoiling early — would be invaluable to them.
No more hiring guards. No more cargo delays. Just profit.
The problem was clear. A sealing scroll required chakra to both seal and unseal materials. A civilian couldn’t use it.
Unless…. what if I added a formulae to store some chakra as well?
The civilian might not have chakra to use the scroll, but a pre-seal chakra could come with it — a preloaded battery of chakra. That way, they’d only have to activate it…
How the fuck would they activate it without chakra, dumbass?
They’d still need chakra to trigger the sealed chakra. Back to square one.
What if I used something like a switch mechanism? Two lines, close but unconnected. When the user placed their finger on the gap, the chakra could bridge through their skin, completing the circuit.
That could work. I needed to test it.
"Stop him! Thief!"
My thoughts scattered at the sound of a commotion. Shouting. Another thief, it seemed.
I debated ignoring it. Theft had been on the rise lately. I couldn’t tell if it was due to the Uchiha being removed as the head of the police, the incompetence of the new chief, or if someone was playing behind the scenes.
Then I saw who the victim was. I pushed chakra into my legs just so —
I launched myself forward.
Shunshin was tricky. Hard to control. It sent you in a straight line, fast as hell, and adjusting mid-motion was an ankle-breaking nightmare.
Unless you calculated it.
I landed directly on the thief’s back.
The poor sod face-planted into the dirt so hard his sandals flew off. A dry thud, a muffled groan— then nothing. Out cold.
"Bad day for you," I muttered, shoving his face back into the dirt for good measure. He twitched but didn’t resist. Good. I didn’t have time to waste babysitting unconscious thieves. Either he'd keep sleeping here, or someone else would deal with him.
A sharp voice cut through the market noise. "Useless little rat."
The victim, a middle-aged woman stormed over, snatching her purse from the ground like it had been personally defiled. The way she handled it, you’d think he wiped his nose on it.
I raised an eyebrow, watching her sneer down at the limp body with all the sympathy of a tax collector. So this was Sakura’s mother.
Mebuki Haruno.
It wasn’t hard to see where the girl got her charming attitude. That sharp look, the practiced condescension — it ran in the blood. But where Sakura’s rudeness came from youthful confidence and impatience, her mother’s was different. Harsher. More like a woman who had spent years convincing herself she was better than those around her.
A superiority complex? Um, too soon to tell.
I smiled. "You're welcome."
That got her attention. She finally looked at me, really looked at me, her green eyes flicking up and down in a slow, measured scan. Judging. Evaluating. I let my gaze wander in return, taking her in without shame.
She wasn’t young, but she was trying damn hard to look like it. And in some ways, she pulled it off. The high-collared white dress clung to her in all the right places, sleeveless to emphasize her arms. Not a kunoichi but she clearly kept in shape. The partially unzipped front teased just enough to suggest she knew men were looking — and wanted them to. The slit in the dress gave a glimpse of those pink leggings hugging her long legs, a subtle but intentional touch. Practical, maybe, but still meant to draw the eye.
She had curves, ones that she carried with an air of entitlement, like they were proof of something — status, desirability, relevance. But her face told the real story. Time had started to press its weight on her, carving faint lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes. Not enough to ruin her, but enough that she fought against it. Hard.
Her lips pressed together as she met my gaze, catching the direction of my thoughts. For a second, I saw the flicker of annoyance? Amusement? maybe even intrigue — before it vanished behind a well-practiced look of quiet disdain.
"Took you long enough," she said.
What a pleasant person.
— — — — — — — —
A/N: Hey, just wanted to say thanks to everyone who commented on the last chapter. I was honestly expecting more side-eyes for the smut-heavy focus, but a lot of you were really cool about it. Appreciate it.
This chapter leans a bit more into backstory and worldbuilding. Still some chaos, but I did try to slide some actual narrative in there — baby steps, right?
Also, yeah… Sakura’s mom showed up. Not someone I planned on using this early, but she came in with a slit and attitude, and it just happened. We move.
Let me know what you thought — plot enjoyers, milf enjoyers, or both.
Anyway, thanks again for reading!
