( 25 of April )
six years After the Kyubi attack
I was looking at the faint green glow which was coating my hands. My attention however, wasn't on what I could see, but on what I could feel.
I could get a taste, an instinct, an image, from feeling the chakra of others, but I couldn't read myself. However I could see the difference from the chakra I used to climb, and it felt quieter than the nature aligned one.
It wasn't exactly like the chakra sensing Karin was capable of in the manga, I could do it only when people were standing right next to me, and if the shinobi erased his presence (simply slowing down the chakra flow) he would disappear from my sixth sense.
The bare bones of medical jutsu were the different ways through which one could transfer chakra. Chakra was life force, after all, nothing more and nothing less. Shaped in yin and yang, respectively a more spiritual and a more physical aspect of it. They were opposites, but only in the sense that at the end of one began the other.
Changing one 'normal' chakra into the medical kind, meant bringing forward the yin aspect, and healing someone meant using your yin to properly assist the patient's yang.
The yang chakra took form into the production of blood cells, into the contracting of the muscles, into the infinitesimal spark of electricity that coursed among neural cells. The yin chakra took form into the manifestation of your soul, your thoughts, your beliefs, your feelings.
In that way, healing became pouring your yin, your will, in a way that was understandable by the yin of the patient (and that I suspected was the idea behind the compatibility of chakras), so that was in a language that the yang of the wounded could follow.
After turning your medical chakra into something compatible with the unique patient you wanted to heal, it came the difficult part. You needed to direct the blend of your chakras to heal. 'To heal' meant that if you needed to close a wound, you needed to enhance the clotting property of the blood, and then repairing the tissues.
If the oxygenation of the blood was too low, you needed to act on the lungs, and direct the organs to produce more blood, making it circulate faster so that the cells wouldn't die of hypoxia, but you had to take care to not make the heart run too fast, the pressure had to be just right so that the patient wouldn't burst blood vessels.
Those were the bare bones.
For example, to heal a bone, one had to have a lot of previous knowledge. Bones were considered organs because they contained various types of tissue, such as blood, connective tissue, nerves, and bone tissue. Osteocytes, the living cells of bone tissue, formed the mineral matrix of bones.
There were two types of bone tissue: compact and spongy. Compact bone (or cortical bone), forming the hard external layer of all bones, surrounded the medullary cavity (innermost part or bone marrow). It provided protection and strength to bones.
Compact bone tissue consisted of units called osteons or Haversian systems. Osteons were cylindrical structures that contained a mineral matrix and living osteocytes connected by canaliculi which transport blood.
They were aligned parallel to the long axis of the bone. Each osteon consisted of lamellae, layers of a compact matrix that surround a central canal (the Haversian or osteonic canal), which contains the bone's blood vessels and nerve fibers.
Osteons in compact bone tissue were aligned in the same direction along lines of stress, helping the bone resist bending or fracturing. Therefore, compact bone tissue was prominent in areas of bone at which stresses were applied in only a few directions. And that was only the beginning of the stuff you needed to understand to know how to act upon a fracture.
Isolating toxins could be done, even if it was way easier teaching to the body how to fight those on its own, and it had the nice bonus of building up a pseudo immunity to the said toxin.
Viruses were impossible to heal through medical chakra. Why? Because the little bastards duplicated using our cells, and as such couldn't be properly identified.
I turned my attention inward, looking for the slight 'wrongness' the poison in my veins was causing. Finding it, I thought it felt like oil swimming into the water, it simply didn't belong. So I isolated the part of me that was fighting the infinitesimal quantity of venom and enhanced it but kept it at bay.
I didn't want to destroy only that dose of toxin, I wanted that my body could generate enough anti-toxins that would then be ready to be produced in bulk whenever the need arose.
After a while, it was difficult telling the time while in a healing trance, I let my body's answer to the venom sweep through my body, and in less than ten breaths I was completely functional. With a satisfying deep breath I trailed my faintly glowing fingers on the cut on my forearm, closing it.
I was getting faster at it, I didn't have Hana's natural inclination for it, but I made mine the philosophy of 'being a genius of hard work', and it brought results, slowly but surely. I slowly opened my eyes, taking in my surroundings.
The forest was drowning under an incessant downpour, and the thunders were almost the only sounds that broke the monotony. Almost, because my trained and highly refined senses could pick up the creaking of the woods under the wind and the occasional branch snapping, even the rustling of the beasts moving in the undergrowth.
And the heavy, happy breathing of Alfa, my favorite among the Haimaru brothers.
The dogs had grown to about a third of their adult size, but more than their bodies, their minds had been the ones to truly blossom. Alpha was a special case, because while arguably the smarter of the triplets, he was also the more festive one, and he also loved when you talked to him in a silly voice.
"Another thing I don't understand is hand seals," I confessed to my canine companion.
Everyone just went with the flow, do these signs, and there you have a jutsu. But I knew that the Nidaime Hokage had used only one hand seal instead of the 44 necessaries for the Water Dragon, the infamous Suiryūdan no Jutsu. And I had witnessed Sasuke using the Chidori without hand seals.
And from personal experience I knew that I was on my way to learn a seal-less Kawarimi. I knew that hand seals shaped your chakra, which then had to be properly molded through sheer will. Chakra control was simply a blend of the awareness one could exercise on the energy spent on a task and where said energy was directed.
So the questions were two: why did specific hand seals consent one to work better with Katon, or Suiton? Why genjutsu seemed to follow its own rules? And the second, and arguably the most important question.
What did the absence of hand seals say about Rasengan and Hiraishin? The latter may be sidestepped the problem using actually written seals, but the first, and its elemental variants, were shape and nature manipulation. Just like any other elemental based jutsu.
And yet there were loads of things done with chakra that didn't require hand seals. From enhancing one's body to sticking to walls, to placing seals with a simple touch. Following my gut, I could tell that I was well on my way to be able to perform a seal-less Kawarimi and Bushin.
While with hand seals I had managed to tweak and blend Bunshin and Henge. Once I could perform my variation seal less, I would be able to sprout illusionary limbs in the middle of a taijutsu fight.
How did I blend the two techniques? It had been relatively easy. Each of them required three hand seals. Firstly I gathered the chakra necessary for the bushin and performed its hand seals, without letting my chakra execute the order.
Keeping my focus on the complete but not executed yet jutsu, and mindful of the tension it generated in my coils, I folded it and kind of stored it away, in what I believed was a tenketsu at the base of my spine, before going on with the henge, putting it away with the same method.
In the end I only had to carefully let go of the two while molding them together. But the last part was simply based on focus. I discovered the whole 'storing away techniques' while thinking about the infamous collaborative techniques of the Sandaime Hokage.
The whole gig required outstanding chakra control if I say so myself. And it also exhausted me. I could create around thirty bushins before feeling the strain, or henge fifty times in a row, but producing a henged bunshin, while roughly halving the chakra I had at my disposal, exhausted me mentally. It took me two months to make it work, and it also took three whole minutes to perform.
Why did I insist so long in practicing something I only had a hunch on? One, because of gut feeling, simple as that, and I had wondered if the Yondaime had started the Rasengan for the same reason.
Two of the possibilities, once I mastered the trick, were virtually endless. Bunshin and Henge together basically created the human shape of my choosing. It was an illusion and not a genjutsu. The difference was glaring, at least to me, a genjutsu worked with you entering your chakra into the coils of your opponent, and could be dispelled.
The result of my bastardized blended technique was something that dispelled on contact since it was still a construct made of chakra. It held potential. And that was without going in a possible Katon Futon combination. That was years down the line.