Read advance chapters of all my works or want to support me.
https/www.p.a.t.r.e.on/Adamo_Amet
Join us on discord:
https://di..scord.gg/h3kDw7ma
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
Naruto couldn't describe what was happening to his body.
Pain was supposed to have a location. You stub your toe and it's your toe. You know where it hurts and doesn't.
This had no location. It came from everywhere at the same time.
There were no words for it... he was being stretched.
That was the best his brain could comprehend it. Some kind of force had grabbed him at both ends and was pulling. He was like dough being turned into ramen noodles. If the dough could feel it. If that dough had twelve years of memories, dreams and a stupid headband it had worked so hard to earn.
His fingers felt like they were somewhere a hundred meters below him. His legs felt like they belonged to a different person entirely.
The sphere pulsed.
His ribs bowed inward. The air in his lungs had nowhere to go. His spine bent into a spiral and something in his lower back gave with a sensation he felt rather than heard. A deep wrongness that traveled up through his teeth. His brain stopped trying to process it after that. There was simply too much of it. The pain spread until there was no Naruto separate from the pain. Just a boy-shaped thing being taken apart in the dark.
He stayed conscious through all of it. Whatever this place was, it had no mercy in it.
GET UP.
The Kyubi's voice cracked through his skull like a migraine.
GET UP YOU WORTHLESS RUNT. DO YOU THINK I WANT TO DIE IN HERE WITH YOU?
Red chakra ripped out of the seal and slammed into the walls of space around him and held them. Even the fox didn't want this. Even the Kyubi was scared of being unmade in this place.
That scared Naruto more than the stretching.
PUSH BACK. PUSH BACK AGAINST IT. USE THE CHAKRA OR I SWEAR ON EVERY TAIL I HAVE I WILL TEAR THE SEAL APART AND EAT WHATEVER IS LEFT OF YOU.
He tried.
His hands weren't where he'd left them. The signals his brain sent were taking too long to arrive. Something warm was running down his face and he couldn't tell if it was blood or tears.
His life started playing before his eyes.
Iruka-sensei's face when he put the headband on his head. The smell of Ichiraku's. Haku and Zabuza's last momoments. Inari and Tazuna waving at them on the Naruto Bridge in the wave country. Training with Jiraya. Convincing Tsunade to come back. His promise with Sakura. Kakashi-sensei reading his stupid book every morning like they weren't all standing there waiting for him. Sasuke scarificing his body to save him from Haku.
The sphere crushed inward and his thoughts shattered.
STOP THINKING ABOUT YOUR PATHETIC LITTLE LIFE AND SURVIVE. SURVIVE OR I WILL NEVER LET YOU REST. I WILL HAUNT EVERY REMAINING SCRAP OF YOU FOR THE REST OF ETERNITY.
The chakra redoubled, tearing through him and around him... lacing into every torn muscle and cracked bone. Kurama forced the boy's body back toward something resembling its correct shape.
It hurt.
The pain of being healed was almost as bad as the pain of being broken.
Naruto was still being stretched.
Why is it always me?
The boy hadn't meant to think it. It wasn't the kind of thought he let himself have. He was going to be Hokage. He didn't have time to say why life was so unfair to him? But something about dying or the Kyubi's chakra healing him had broken the lid off something he had spent a very long time keeping shut.
Why do I have to be the sacrifice?
Why does everyone else get a childhood and I get this?
Why do I have to keep every promise I make when nobody keeps theirs to me?
Why do I have to be everyone's hero?
Where is mine?
Why do they get to have families? And I don't?
The sphere closed tighter and Naruto couldn't hold it back anymore.
I cried.
He wanted to sit at Ichiraku's until old man Teuchi told him to go home. He wanted to prank Iruka sensei with Konohamaru. He wanted to be taught by Kakashi sensei. He wanted to go on missions with Sasuke and Sakura. He wanted to become Hokage and be loved by the village that always ignored him. He wanted someone to be proud of him.
I wanted someone to love me.
I wanted to live.
The sphere pressed inward.
"Somebody help me!"
His voice disappeared the moment it left his lips.
"Please! Somebody please help me! I don't want to die here!"
Nothing came back.
He pressed his palms against the wall of the sphere and pushed. He screamed as the sphere kept crushing.
Naruto deep down knew that there wasn't anyone who coming. Iruka-sensei would be sad. Kakashi-sensei would probably stand at his grave with his book. Maybe Sakura. Maybe some of the other genin. But no one would come save him.
No one would tear the world apart trying to find him.
A voiceless scream moved through the sphere. The crying of a lonely child swallowed by the spatial abyss.
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
Inside the seal, Kurama sighed.
His jailer was a wreck. Physically, the void was pulling him apart faster than his chakra could heal. Mentally, the boy had already come apart at the seams.
The kyuubi had lived for thousands of years. He had died before and reformed. But that assumed the world still existed to reform into. This place had no rules he recognized. He didn't know what dying here would mean for something like him.
Oh Great Sage, how am I going to survive this? The fox was still thinking through it when he heard the word.
Mom.
The word surfaced from somewhere beneath conscious thought and dissolved immediately into the void. Kurama had been inside this child since the night of his birth. He knew exactly what Naruto had and hadn't been given. That word carried no face. No voice. No memory of warmth or the specific smell that a child learns before speaking. Just a sound other children used, heard from a distance across thirteen years, never directed at anyone.
Dad.
It was the same emptiness. A borrowed word with nothing underneath it.
Kurama's attention shifted to the chakra moving through Naruto's deteriorating body.
Yang was gone. The physical component had been the first casualty of the void. It was stripped away as the space collapsed inward and took the body with it. What remained was overflowing and directionless yin.
Kurama braced for hallucinations. Yin governed the mental, the spiritual, and the illusory. A dying child conjuring parents he never knew.
But the names that came weren't Minato and Kushina.
Jiraiya-sensei.
The name of a man the boy had known for a few months. A perverted, irresponsible, intermittently present man who had taught him more than anyone.
The closest thing to a father Naruto's dying mind could locate.
Tsunade.
Kurama went still.
A woman who had spent years running from grief and had been dragged back into the world by a child who refused to stop believing. Who had pressed her hand to his chest and poured her own life force into keeping him breathing. Who had taken the Hokage seat because of him.
The only woman in his life that truly believed that he could make it.
The closest thing to a mother a child's dying mind could locate.
Why isn't anyone here?
Kurama sensed a new strange chakra begining to form. This chakra was strangely like his own.
I don't want to die alone.
Inside the seal, something stirred.
Please can someone... anyone just... help me?... just protect me?... just remember me.
A chill ran through Kurama that he had no framework for.
The words had weight. More weight than a dying child's grief should carry. More than delirium. The weight of an indescribable curse.
As if a response to those words, chains erupted from Naruto's body. They drove themselves into the walls of the sphere. A barrier formed around Naruto, protecting the boy. The spacetime void pressed against it from every direction but the barrier held.
Flying Thunder God: Guiding Thunder.
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
[ Japan - Tokyo ]
[ 2015 ]
Tokyo had a way of containing contradictions without acknowledging them. Bullet trains and ancient shrines. Glass towers beside paper-walled temples. Twenty million people living within arm's reach of each other and somehow maintaining the collective pretense of privacy. The city had been rebuilt so many times over its history that newness had become its own tradition.
In the outskirts, where the density thinned and the hills began to assert themselves against the skyline... the noise softened. Tucked into one of these quieter margins, stood the House of the Star Religious Group.
The church was dominated by sweeping concrete curves, wide geometric overhangs, and a tall sail-like fin that rose from its center. Thin vertical pillars rose from the roof at varying heights. On either side of the broad divided staircase that led up to the entrance. Spherical white ornaments sat mounted on posts, its small quiet flourishes against the otherwise uncompromising concrete.
A crowd had gathered on the plaza at the base of the stairs.
At the top of the stairs, Suguru Geto stood with his hands folded. His expression arranged into something that passed for serene from a distance.
The man was tall and lean. His long black hair was gathered into a bun at the back of his head. The rest of it draping down between his shoulder blades. His eyes were a thin, pale brown beneath dark brows. As bangs fell across the left side of his face at an angle that made his expression perpetually difficult to read. Gold-colored kāṣāya robes draped over black yukata. White tabi socks in Zōri sandals.
The man looked like a monk but was anything but...
"You should smile more, Suguru." Manami Suda appeared at his side without looking up from her tablet. "These monkeys need validation for their donations."
Manami was young woman with long dusty-pink hair that fell past her shoulders. She wore a sleeveless purple dress and long dark heels.
"Let's get this over with. I would rather not interact with monkeys more than I have to."
Geto reached for his microphone but never got the chance to begin.
In an instant, a wave of malice froze every sorcerer present at the same time. A wave of dense cursed energy pressed down on all of them like a pressure flattening out the space beneath them. Breathing became a conscious effort. Their own cursed energy pushed back against it instinctively. Yet it made no difference at all.
The non-sorcerers began screaming. The killing intent inside that wave made the civilians hallucinate their own deaths or pass out.
In the shadows at Geto's feet, the curse spirits he had spent years collecting and taming began to scream in fear. His own palms were slick with sweat. His throat had gone completely dry.
Cursed energy reserves weren't everything. Geto knew that. Technique and Refinement mattered. The gap between raw output and actual combat ability was wide enough to swallow lesser sorcerers whole.
But what he was feeling right now made Gojo's reserves look like comparing the ocean to a very large bathtub.
Suguru Geto had no illusions about where he stood in the hierarchy of the jujutsu world. Whereas Gojo was the ceiling. The thing every metric bent itself around. Yet this CE presence was stronger than Gojo's.
How is that even possible?
"Get everyone to safety," he said, turning to Manami. "I'll find the source of this CE."
"Suguru. Let the family come with you."
"No! Stay here. That's an order, Manami."
He didn't wait for her response.
A curse spirit manifested behind him. It was a huge white pelican-like curse with four feathery wings. Its gular pouch opened and Geto stepped into it. The creature launched itself skyward, banking hard toward the source of the pressure. Below, Manami wished her leader: "Good luck."
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
The closer Geto got to the source, the more uncertain he became about approaching it.
Did the King of Curses get reincarnated? The thought arrived while he channeled his CE into the pelican curse. He was forcing it to hold its course as every instinct the creature had screamed at it to turn around.
"Hyakume. Find the source."
The curse manifested beside them in the open air. A large flesh-like mass covered head to foot in blinking yellow eyes. Each one moving independently, scanning in every direction at once. Its CT allowing it to see across a hundred kilometer radius in every direction.
Jujutsu High would have felt this CE. Which meant Gojo would be deployed. Whatever was at the center of this, if it exceeded his ability to manage, at least there was a failsafe. He clenched his hand at the train of thought.
Even now, even after everything, that name was still the last line of defense he fell back on.
If only I had your power, Satoru. The thought was old and worn smooth from handling. How differently this world would look?
Hyakume's eyes began blinking in rapid sequence.
"Share your vision with me."
Iimages came through and Geto was quiet for a moment. He formed the hand sign.
"Emerge from the darkness, blacker than darkness. Purify that which is impure."
Dark liquid matter dripped down from the sky in a wide arc, forming a half-sphere barrier around the source and containing the cursed energy within it. The pressure outside the barrier eased marginally.
The pelican curse dissolved mid-descent. Geto caught hold of a Kasa-obake curse spirit as it manifested beside him. The old paper umbrella cursed tool had a single eye and a sandaled leg. The monk flew down like he was the japanese marry poppin. He dismissed it on landing and turned to face what Hyakume had shown him.
The look on his face was something closer to disgust.
A corpse.
That was the only word for it, but even that word was being generous. A thirteen year old child, or what remained of one. It had no skin, eyes or limbs. A bloody mess of a body that shouldn't have been alive by any measure. It was held together by nothing but the dense reddish energy.
Is this a human or a curse spirit?
Chains erupted from the ground.
A cluster of red centipede-like cursed spirits surged to intercept them and died instantly on impact. Geto threw a large blue daruma doll curse into the path of the chains to buy himself a half second. He spun toward the CE signature that had materialized behind him. His three-section staff was released by the inventory curse.
Playful Cloud passed through empty air as the entity had teleported away.
A ball of spinning chakra hit him squarely in the back. Geto was slammed into the ground creating a crater. He had just enough time to defend against that attack. Even so, his Ce reinforcement was almost broken while chains wrapped around him
The monk felt his cursed energy getting suppressed by the chains.
"I expected to encounter many things today," he said while injured. "Two special grade vengeful spirits was not among them."
They floated above the "body" of Naruto were the vengeful curse spirits of Kushina and Minato.
Kushina's curse form was a being made of red hair wrapped around a humanoid shape, bound with chains. A smooth white mask covered her face. The mask had hollow black eye sockets and doll-like features. But looked alot like Kushina's real face.
Minato in his curse form wore what appeared to be a Hokage's robes draped over a corpse. A gaping hole occupied the center of his torso. His face was hidden behind the mask of the Shinigami.
"Minato, what happened to us?"
"I don't know," Minato was already looking at the child below them. "But we need to help Naruto."
"My baby."
The hands at the ends of her chained arms reached toward the boy and stopped short.
"The fox has kept him alive for now."
"I don't trust the fox. He is still unconcious from holding collapsing space together. With the damage to the seal, he can get out whenever he wants."
"Nothing short of Tsunade Senju could heal my boy. I can't watch my baby die, Minato."
The man looked up at the barrier surrounding them. It was unlike anything from the elemental nations. A half-sphere constructed entirely from yin chakra, and filled with something he couldn't immediately identify.
"If healing your child is the problem," Geto said from the ground, "I can solve that."
Both of them turned to look at him.
"I don't know what happened to bring him to this state. But the only thing that will repair damage this extensive is reverse cursed technique output. I know exactly who to call."
Minato and Kushina looked at each other.
"I don't like this, dattebane."
"We don't know where we are. We can"t find Princess tsunade before the kyuubi tries to escape or kill naruto," Minato said quietly. "This is the best chance Naruto has."
Kushina turned back to Geto, "I will free you," she said. "You will help my son. If he dies, I will kill you. That is not a threat. That is simply what will happen."
Her killing intent made Geto shudder in fear.
"No need for that, ma'am. I'll agree to the binding vow willingly."
Kushina paused as she felt the shift through her chakra. The chains fell away.
"What did you just do?"
"I agreed to a mutual binding vow," Geto said, rising to his feet and brushing dust from his kāṣāya. The inventory curse manifested behind him, producing an ornate coffin surronded by talismans.
Minato and Kushina watched in silence. The jutsu of this strange monk operated on principles neither of them recognized.
"This is a special grade cursed tool," Geto said, running a hand along the coffin's surface. "Called the hōsōshi's coffin. During the early Heian era, a special grade sorcerer, led funeral processions and protected the dead from cursed spirits. A body placed inside this, provided it carries even a single drop of cursed energy, will be held in a state of limbo. His chances of survival improve significantly with him inside it."
Minato and Kushina bowed as a thankyou for helping their child.
Geto began the process of sealing him within the coffin, "What is his name?"
"Naruto Uzumaki."
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
Author's Note: Q&A Time
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
Q. How are Kushina and Minato Vengeful Spirits?
Both of them left behind pieces of their chakra inside Naruto's seal specifically to protect him if the Nine Tails ever came close to breaking free. When the power systems of the elemental nations and the jujutsu world collided for the first time, that chakra transformed into Vengeful Cursed Spirits. It is the first major consequence of these two systems making contact with each other.
I will go deeper into how exactly that transformation happened as the story progresses.
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
Q. Can you explain all the references packed into this chapter?
So let me break them down.
The Hōsōshi's Coffin:
The Hōsōshi is a yokai.
During the early Heian Period, the hōsōshi's duties included leading coffins during state funeral processions, officiating at burial ceremonies, and driving corpse-stealing yōkai away from burial mounds. By donning the mask and costume, the hōsōshi (priest) became the hōsōshi (god) and was able to scare away evil spirits. The hōsōshi's most famous duty was a purification ceremony called tsuina.
Tsuina was performed annually on Ōmisoka—the last day of the year—at shrines and government buildings (such as the imperial palace). In this ritual, the hōsōshi and his servant would run around the shrine courtyard (covering "the four directions"), chanting and warding the area against oni and other evil spirits. Meanwhile, a number of attending officials would shoot arrows around the hōsōshi from the shrine or palace buildings, symbolically defending the area against evil spirits. Other observers would play small hand drums with ritualistic cleansing significance.
The coffin in this chapter is built on that folklore.
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
Some other Yokai that Geto uses as cursed spirits.
Hyakume are yokai covered from head to foot with countless blinking, yellow eyes. Underneath those eyes are fleshy, roughly man-sized bodies. With their eyes closed, they resemble pink lumps of flesh, and are nearly indistinguishable from nuppeppō (which live in a similar habitat).
The kasa-obake is the famous paper umbrella yokai. They are depicted with a single large eye, one leg wearing a geta sandal, and a long protruding tongue.
Tamamo no Mae is one of the most famous kitsune in Japanese mythology. A nine-tailed magical fox, she is also one of the most powerful yōkai that has ever lived. Her magical abilities were matched only by her trickiness and lust for power. Tamamo no Mae lived during the Heian period, and though she may not have succeeded in her plan to kill the emperor and take his place, her actions destabilized the country and lead it towards one of the most important civil wars in Japanese history. For that reason, Tamamo no Mae is considered one of the Nihon San Dai Aku Yōkai—the Three Terrible Yōkai of Japan.
That covers the major references for this chapter. More of this in future chapters as I will take alot of inspiration from japanese folklore for my cursed spirits.
0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
That's It… For Now.
I want to thank you all for taking the time to read, comment, and follow along with this story. Your feedback means more than you know, and it helps push me to make each chapter bigger, sharper, and more true to the worlds of Naruto and Jujutsu Kaisen.
And if you can't wait for the next update, the next chapter drops on August 9th! You can read ahead to Chapter 16 on P@trEon or come join me on discord
Until next time,
With this treasure, I summon...
-Adam-