Well shit. It wasn't a gag, it was a slip of paper, and since I couldn't feel my chakra I deduced that not only it kept my mouth shut, but was also a chakra inhibitor.
It wasn't that it stopped the flow of chakra, it simply made me unaware of it, and thusly unable to manipulate it.
...
Jutsus had two components, the chakra, the control, which was a mesh between your understanding of what you were trying to accomplish and how finely you could 'tune' the movement of your chakra.
Hand seals worked a bit in the middle of the two. The more you had of one, the less you needed the other, but hand seals stabilized greatly the more lengthy processes that manipulated chakra.
My chakra control was sublime, if not on par with Tsunade perfect one. I had enough chakra to perform the Kage Bunshin, and I trained extensively with it.
Only, I had never done it without handseals before, and based on my experience, I would need several weeks of work to learn how to do it. I had an easier time with suiton, but there were no tricks with kinjutsu.
So, preparing myself to take a beating passively? Or whichever torture kids were capable of. Then I thought about Itachi. Better not play it with 'I can endure it.'
I forced myself to realize that kids in this world were closer to mindless soldiers than anything else. At least some veterans had seen enough shit to start questioning themselves.
I had roughly another thirty seconds to come up with something. And not being able to access my chakra was quickly sending me towards mindless fear.
In all the shit I've been put through, I always had with me the comforting presence of my chakra. It came with the knowledge that, if needed, I could try something. I bit my tongue in frustration, feeling the spike of pain and the metallic taste of blood.
In my haste, I bit too deep and now there was a lot of blood in my mouth. Disgusting.
But it managed to calm me down. Somewhat. I slowed down my breathing, hoping that I would be able to spit out the blood soon. I didn't want to swallow it, it would make me puke. And with the seal on my mouth I would have to swallow it...
STOP THINKING ABOUT IT! I mentally screamed at myself. I forcibly changed the direction of my thoughts.
They can't kill me if they want to pass. But they could cripple me. Bloody fucking hell I would cripple an enemy.
Then I paused, running through the stuff I was able to do. Well there are always the gates. Thay simply change the amount of chakra that can flow through my body, the third is probably enough to shred the seal.
With that backup plan, I finally managed to relax. I had a way out.
Mind games first, then. I decided when a kunoichi and a shinobi entered the room.
Kiri kunoichi. 13. 160 cm. 48kg. No distinctive signs. Pale blond, dark brown eyes. Likely support role.
Kiri shinobi. 15. 175cm. 70kg. A scar across the nose. Slight discoloration of the left iris, possible trauma. Brown hair, brown eyes. No taijutsu or kenjutsu user. Ninjutsu or Genjutsu.
They slammed the door behind themselves. Seriously? This should be intimidating?
Then I remembered that to become genin in Kiri they had to kill a classmate and my hopes to bullshit my way through the situation I was in dimmed.
Then he punched me on the cheek. My head slammed on the side, and my vision went out of focus. "When they explained the task I couldn't believe our luck."
He started conversationally the girl, who with an uncaring twitch of the wrist unleashed a kunai that slashed open my other cheek.
"You see, my father is in the Torture and Interrogation department." She went on.
"So I shared what I knew, but Hano, here, is a natural. And while we both enjoy this kind of game, we really need to be quick. So, we are going to ask only once, and you are going to tell us."
'The or else torture will start for real' went unsaid.
The shinobi, Hano, my mind provided, grabbed the edge of the seal and ripped it off.
Immediately, I felt again my chakra running through my coils and started molding it in my mouth. I looked at them, managing to plaster a bored expression on my face.
The talking won't work. I decided.
"So." The girl asked. "What's the secret?"
The shinobi walked forward cracking his knuckles, with a creepy grin on his face. He really would have preferred if I refused to tell them. At least for a while, I could tell from the way his pupils were widening at the prospect of beating down a tied up prisoner.
I raised an eyebrow and kept discretely molding my chakra. It was something done with so little waste that even a sensor would have needed to check twice to be sure I was doing something.
I tensed my muscles, but even then the punch that landed on my stomach made me wheeze through my nose. I couldn't open my mouth until I was ready.
Two minutes had passed, I wanted to keep the Gates a secret, but I was going to reach the end of my rope pretty soon.
Hano hit me again, and four minutes after they had entered I still had to open my mouth once.
Only, they thought it was because I choose the 'indestructible' approach. I was ready.
I slowly nodded and grumbled something in my throat.
"Did you broke his jaw?" the girl asked her companion, who shrugged unapologetically. I distractedly wondered if he was some kind of idiot with a sadist streak a mile wide.
And there was no way around it, I wanted him dead. I inhaled deeply through the nose and acted. I'll feel sad later.
The Suiton: Teppodama at its simplest, allows the user to spit a ball of water of different dimensions, based on the quantity of chakra you poured in it, at high speed. The whole point of it was that said ball of water hit like a ton of bricks. That was not what I did. When I saw an opening I spat a thin, high-pressure jet of... bloodied water since I was manipulating the water in my blood.
The thin, reddish line sawed through Hano, following the direction in which I was moving my head.
The kunoichi reacted fast enough to be merely clipped by it, but she did something with her chakra that turned the cutting edge of my attack into a blunt force. She was thrown against the wall, hit her head, and slumped forward, unconscious.
In the same way, I could feel the drops of water I had laced with my chakra a month before, I felt my jet of bloodied water shredding through cloth, chainmail, skin, muscle and bone, digging into the rock of the room, before slamming against the kunoichi.
I blinked. "Well that was... kind of underwhelming." I murmured, before directing medical chakra through the tenketsu on my palate, carefully healing my tongue.
I let my mind take a step back from the gore in front of me and closed my eyes, choosing to focus on something else.
I had tried to separate the water from the rest of the blood. But controlling such manipulation with the limited number of tenketsus in my mouth was another kettle of fish.
The real question was why the blood in my mouth didn't start clotting when I fed it chakra. The only different thing was from my other experiments with blood had been performing them in my hands.
So maybe the presence of air induced in the blood a different way to react when fed chakra. I am an idiot. I didn't need to separate the water from the blood.
I couldn't infuse chakra into my blood before turning it into water natured one since the blood would immediately try to clot (since it was outside of my veins).
That was how I manipulated water without hand seals. But blood already was laced with my chakra, I simply needed to change it into water natured one. And that had been what I did in my haste.
I should thank Hano in the next life. I grimaced. He was a sadistic bastard, but it was around my age, and was truly his fault?
Can I fault him for adapting to the only kind of life this world teaches? I asked myself.
The answer was no. And even if I could argue that removing sadists in the position of letting loose with their instinct was more or less like removing cancer, it didn't change the fact that I killed another kid.
I gathered my chakra very carefully at the tips of my right hand, calling forth a chakra scalpel. As slowly as I could, I closed my hand, bringing the scalpel over the ninja wire.
It was something that I had chosen not to do before because cutting too deep could have meant wounding my self. More specifically cutting my veins and tendons.
Which was something that required hours to heal. And hurts like a bitch, thank you very much.
After having freed my right hand, the rest was easy.
I rose from my seat rolling my shoulders and doing my best to ignore both the view (I could see his spine) and the smell of the shinobi that I had butchered (blood and shit, death smells like blood and shit).
I left the room not caring a bit about the strange looks I got from the chunin who was patrolling that section of the corridor.
In front of my door there was another, still with the number seven on it. I walked forward and was about to knock when it opened, Shin walking out with a furrowed brow, Hana biting her lower lip nervously.
Both their expression turned into one of surprise, before flicking in the most coordinated manner I'd ever witnessed through worry (probably for me), shame (for having taken so much time that I had to free myself?), and relief.
I was willing to bet that while Hana felt honestly relieved after seeing me safe and sound, Shin was only happy that he had less work to do.
I couldn't resist. I looked at them and in the most patronizing tone I was capable of I asked.
"What took you so long?"
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