Naruko sat at the low table, her nose buried in a geography notebook. The sun blazed through the window so brightly the pages nearly gleamed white. Outside was the kind of day that made even the village itself feel like an invitation to adventure: birds chirped, clouds drifted lazily across the sky, and the distant chirr of cicadas carried through the air. All of it only deepened the gloom in her eyes.
She sighed—long, resigned, like a prisoner in a tower. For the fifth time in under a minute.
"Broooother…" Naruko drawled, dropping her chin into her palm and casting a forlorn glance at the window. "What if I switch with a clone? It can slog through this boring stuff, and I'll go train!"
Menma lifted his eyes from his own notebook, following her gaze. Outside, sixteen of their clones struggled to hold spinning balls of chakra in their hands. The results were… underwhelming. One clone detonated the sphere right in its palms, another dropped it, and a third winced pitifully as a rasengan splattered apart in the air.
"We've already discussed this," he said calmly, still working. His right hand filled line after line in the notebook, while his left kept a concentrated chakra orb spinning. "If you want your reserves to grow fast, you have to train both body and mind. Balance, sister."
"Let the clone study then!" Naruko shot back, folding her arms and pouting. "It'll pass the memories to me anyway."
"Memory transfer from clones strains the brain," Menma said in the lecturing tone of a teacher addressing a scatterbrained student. "Too much information and your head splits. And more importantly, it's nowhere near as effective for chakra growth as doing the work yourself."
"And how do you know that?" Naruko narrowed her eyes, a mischievous spark lighting them. "Maybe it's not your genius method at all, maybe we're just Uzumaki."
Menma snorted, tilting his head toward the window.
"Look closer. In the last eight months, our reserves grew enough for us to add one extra clone every two months. That's not just bloodline—that's the system."
[And this is only the beginning. I thought mastering Kagura Shingan would take a full year. We managed much faster—and all thanks to that 'balance.']
Naruko puffed her cheeks, refusing to give in.
"What if it's just coincidence?" she challenged. "Or you just got lucky."
"Of course, lineage helps," he nodded, letting her taste victory for a heartbeat. Then he flattened it with cold precision: "But the decisive factor is still balance. Think of Shino. Seen how much chakra he's got? He's way ahead of Kiba and Sakura put together. Why? Because he works hard—both in training and in class."
[Actually, Sakura is another good example. At the start of canon her reserves were tiny. But once she dug into medical scrolls and paired it with body training—bam, S-rank medic.]
"Hm…" Naruko pursed her lips, thoughtful, then scowled again. "Fine. But where'd you even hear about this 'balance'? They never mention it in the academy."
"From a book," Menma replied offhandedly, as if it were obvious. "The Path of Earth and Heavens. Earth is the physical work of a shinobi, Heavens the mental. Only by combining both can you become truly strong."
"Such a bookworm," Naruko muttered, sighing as she returned to scribbling in her notebook. She tried, like him, to keep a rasengan spinning in one hand while writing with the other. The result was messy, but determined. "Still amazes me how you even find this stuff in the library."
[She has no idea how much the old schemers hide from the younger generation. The Earth and Heavens method isn't forbidden—they even mention it offhand in the chunin exam. But in six years of academy classes, not once do teachers say math directly boosts chakra reserves. If they did, kids would be cramming logarithms so hard Iruka would keel over with envy.]
"Then it's decided!" Naruko suddenly perked up, stabbing a period in her notebook as if skewering an enemy. "I'll ace every test! Even the boring ones! If it makes me stronger, I'll cram till I drop!"
[I told you.]
"Good," Menma said with a faint smile, closing his workbook. "But homework isn't enough. You need more food for thought."
And it was true: since their physical training with Gai far outstripped anything the academy offered, their mental load had to be raised to match.
[Thank you, Uzumaki sensory skills. I can see how Yin and Yang interact in chakra, and tailor the training for balance.]
Menma stretched lazily, then pointed to the corner of the room where two chairs and a wide board waited.
"Shogi?" he suggested.
[Strategy, logic, planning ten steps ahead. A game for training the mind, not just the muscles.]
"Or we could do fuinjutsu," he said, nodding toward another table piled with brushes, ink, and neatly rolled scrolls.
[Drawing seals and crunching formulas is training too—just for the mind. And a lot more useful than mindlessly memorizing dates from a textbook.]
"Mmm," Naruko hummed, chewing the end of her pencil. "We already played shogi yesterday, and I'm bored of it. And I hate drawing… But fine, let's do fuinjutsu."
She pulled such a tragic face it looked like her brother had just sentenced her to hard labor.
"Quit whining," Menma walked over to her table and leaned over her notebook. "Look. Your handwriting's already neat and steady. Nothing smudged, no ink blots." He nodded like a master evaluating a student's work.
Naruko's shoulders instantly straightened, and her grin stretched from ear to ear.
"Time to move on to the next stage," Menma continued in the tone of an unshakable examiner. "Smaller script. That way you can fit three times as much info onto one scroll."
"Brooother," she groaned, rolling her eyes. "Why do we even need this?"
He shot her an annoyed look—and Naruko immediately sat up straight with a model-student smile plastered on her face.
"Fine, fine! I remember!" she blurted quickly. "You said fuinjutsu is an art and the heritage of our Uzumaki clan."
"And?" Menma crossed his arms and raised a brow. "Don't tell me you don't want to study our heritage. Didn't we agree to master all the clan's techniques together?"
"I never go back on my word!" Naruko declared with dramatic flair, poking a thumb at her chest. But she deflated almost instantly, like a popped balloon. "It's just… I like sensory skills. I like the rasengan. That's Dad's technique—even if he wasn't an Uzumaki, he made it for Mom. You could say he gifted it to the clan. Now that's cool! Techniques are flashy, exciting. But fuinjutsu…" She wrinkled her nose. "I asked Iruka-sensei, and he said fuinjutsu's only used to store weapons. That's boring! Why waste a whole day wrapping things up when a shop can do it for money? Tell me I'm wrong!"
Menma rolled his eyes.
"First of all," he began in a lecturing tone, "never ask Iruka about anything outside the academy curriculum. He doesn't know squat. If you're that desperate, ask me, Grandpa, or—worst case—Mizuki."
[Though that guy's an Orochimaru spy and future traitor. Shame—plenty of brains on the villain side.]
"And second," Menma went on, "Iruka gave you the bare minimum. Fuinjutsu isn't just iron and explosive tags. With seals you can bind anything, anywhere. Bijuu, spirits—even space and time. That's why our father became famous in the first place."
Naruko frowned, thought for a moment, then muttered:
"I mean, it makes sense… but it still sounds boring."
[Got it. She just hates any kind of work that involves sitting and writing.]
"Want me to show you?" Menma offered.
"You can already do it?!" Naruko's eyes went wide. "Of course I want to see!"
"It's not that hard." Menma sat at the work table, pulling out scrolls, brushes, and ink. "The key is knowing the formula. Luckily, the standard ones for weapons are already written down."
He pointed at a sheet pinned to the wall, covered in long lists of formulas.
"Say, a kunai," he said, pulling one from a drawer. "We take its parameters and weight. Usually they're standard, but better to check."
He produced a ruler and a small scale, jotting the measurements into his notebook with meticulous focus.
Naruko leaned so close over the desk her nose almost touched the scales.
"Whoa, you actually calculate everything?"
"Of course. Get it wrong, and the seal could misfire."
[Best case, the kunai just stays put. Worst case, half the room ends up in its own pocket dimension.]
"Now we plug in the numbers," he went on, guiding the brush across the scroll. "Normal paper won't work—you need chakra-conductive ink."
Naruko held her breath as her brother's brush glided swiftly and confidently, weaving precise, living lines of script.
"Done," he said, setting the kunai on the fresh seal. "All that's left is chakra."
He pressed his palm down, the ink glowing softly before the kunai vanished with a faint pop, as if dissolving into thin air.
"Wow!" Naruko gawked at the empty scroll like it was a portal to another world. "You did that in just five minutes!"
"Only because I haven't practiced enough," Menma admitted. "A real master does it in ten seconds."
"Coool!" Naruko breathed in awe. "Can you seal two kunai at once?"
"Or a hundred," he shrugged. "You just stack the parameters."
"A house?" she burst out, eyes sparkling.
"In theory, sure. But you'd have to record every plank, every stone, every item inside. You'd need a massive scroll—and handwriting smaller than a bank clerk's."
"Can you seal me?!" Naruko blurted out, her eyes blazing with excitement.
Menma let out a heavy sigh.
"No. Sealing living beings is master level."
"I believe in you, brother!" she declared, flashing a thumbs-up. "You can totally do it!"
[Yeah. And then I'll have to explain to the Hokage why my sister turned into a scroll.]
"By the way!" Naruko suddenly brightened. "Since you can already seal weapons, let's open our own fuinjutsu shop! We'll sell scrolls, yeah? It's a goldmine!"
She could already picture shinobi crowding their store, lining up for her "signature seals."
Menma only smirked faintly.
[Sure. Start with a shop… and end with the whole Hidden Leaf sealed in a scroll.]
"And what makes us different from the dozen shops already selling scrolls at the market?" Menma snorted, resting his cheek on his hand. "Sealing weapons doesn't take talent. Formula templates can be bought from any merchant, and even a complete idiot can use them. If we want a fuinjutsu shop, we need exclusives."
Naruko lit up as if someone had lit a fuse inside her.
"I want a fuinjutsu shop!" she proclaimed, fists clenched, eyes burning. "It'll be awesome! Ayame-chan has Ichiraku, and I'll have the Fuinjutsu Shop! I'll be famous!"
"And I suppose I'll be the one creating all those exclusives," Menma sighed.
"But I'll run the counter!" Naruko shot back cheerfully. "Smile, attract customers, haggle—you know, with charisma!"
Menma narrowed his eyes.
"No way. You're not getting off that easy. We'll both grind over the scrolls."
"Fine…" Naruko sighed, pretending to be magnanimous. "But what exactly are we making? What kind of scrolls?"
Menma gave her a steady look, as if checking whether she was ready for an unpleasant truth.
"You know why Uzushio was destroyed?"
"Uh…" Naruko stalled, eyes flicking toward the ceiling. "'Cause our ancestors kicked everyone's butts with fuinjutsu?"
"Exactly," he nodded.
His sister grinned, pleased she guessed right, but Menma went on in a serious tone:
"Look. To hold an object inside a seal, you need chakra. For normal items, ordinary chakra is enough. That's why most specialists never go beyond storing weapons and explosives. But we Uzumaki have special chakra. We can seal not just objects… but jutsu."
Naruko blinked.
"Wait. Actual… jutsu?"
"Exactly," Menma nodded.
[That little gem came from the old scrolls in the basement—teachings of Mito Uzumaki herself.]
"Just imagine," he continued, slow and deliberate. "A tiny scroll, no bigger than your pinky. Inside it—an A-rank technique. You could carry a hundred of them. One shinobi, without spending a drop of his own chakra, could wipe out an entire village."
Naruko exhaled sharply, eyes blazing with fanatical excitement.
"That's insane!" She clenched her fists and leapt to her feet. "So that's why those bastards wiped Uzushio off the map!"
Menma silently nodded.
"Then we've gotta revive the family business!" Naruko declared passionately, stabbing a finger at the ceiling like she was calling for a revolution. "We'll make them all pay!"
"Agreed," Menma said calmly.
[Our own fuinjutsu enterprise, built on exclusives, will give us an incredible edge. And a platform for experiments. The trick is planning it so we don't spook the powers that be. Otherwise history will repeat itself.]
Meanwhile, Naruko was already waving her arms, imagining the future:
"Picture it, brother! A big sign: 'Uzumaki Shop! We'll seal anything!' A line of shinobi all the way from Konoha's gates! I'll be at the front, gorgeous, handing out promo scrolls, and you'll be in the back room drawing super-awesome seals!"
Menma rolled his eyes but couldn't suppress a faint smirk.
[Yeah. With her charisma and my brains, it's actually doable. But we've got to start small—or the whole world will team up against us. And right now, we're not ready for that.]