Nine months had passed since Kusuri had enrolled, the three requirements had come and gone, and their year was now about a third of its original size.
Although the Uchiha massacre hadn't exactly helped with that number.
He... tried not to think about it.
Anyway, over that time, he had mastered basic enhancement, bringing his strength to that of someone nearly twice his age, and had moved on to more complex topics.
It was a slow, agonizing process.
A sentiment he could also express concerning their upcoming final exams.
The one thing that kept him sane was, funnily enough, his more mundane classes.
Learning about the wider history of both Konoha and the world as a whole was quite interesting, especially compared to relearning basic math.
Something that surprised him even more, however, was his newly formed friend group.
At first, Kusuri had been trying to avoid the pair, but, over time, he grew to value their companionship, although he considered them a bit more like little siblings if anything.
After a few weeks, they had even asked him to help them train, a request he obliged. They met up at his house not long after their school had ended, and they spent a few hours training interspersed with pointers from Kusuri since he was still a good bit ahead of them.
The odd thing was that, from their overall talent, they seemed more than capable of making it to the final year, or even becoming genin.
Which was odd, because, if that was true, then they should've shown up in the original story.
It made Kusuri curious.
His existence here was already an abnormality: he was from a clan that, as far as he knew, didn't exist, was part of a political nightmare that, as far as he knew, didn't happen, and, to top it all off, if Kusuri Saiyō had existed at all without him in the driver's seat, there was a high likelihood he would've shown up in the original story.
But despite all that, here he was.
What had caused such differences?
Or were they differences at all?
Were they just unmentioned?
Or were they the result of some strange butterfly effect?
And if it was the latter...
What else had changed?
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[Date of the Massacre - Outskirts of the Uchiha Compound]
Airi couldn't believe she was alive.
She didn't know how it was even possible.
Random chance?
A miracle?
Luck?
No, not luck.
Luck couldn't describe what she had just gone through.
She had seen death in the face, and lucky was no way to describe it.
She wanted to collapse, to give up, to cry.
But she couldn't.
She had seen the Anbu tattoo on the monster's arm.
She knew who had sent them.
She wasn't going to let them win.
She had to keep running.
She had to keep going.
She had to survive.
She didn't know if she'd ever return.
But she did know that whoever sent the monster would live to regret it.
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"Eh," Kusuri thought, "Probably nothing. Maybe some small things, but it's not like massive stuff will just come out of nowhere, striking me by surprise and kicking my ass. The odds of that are like, slim to none at worst."
Moving his mind away from that topic, he began to think about the upcoming exams.
Taga and Nori would likely want to do some extra studying, and, while he didn't need to, he liked to have company while he worked on a training jutsu.
It was one of the first jutsu they were allowed to use; none of them, however, had been proper ones, only being able to produce simple, useless effects.
This one was an E-rank ninjutsu just called shape molding.
Intending to improve chakra control for more complex jutsu, it literally just molded the user's chakra into a variety of 3d shapes, with more complex shapes requiring a greater level of mastery and more hand seals.
To move on to his next major assignment, he had to be able to form it into a decently proportioned cube.
Due to his previous training by attempting to stick things to his hands, his chakra control was miles beyond what was necessary to do that, and so he was really just messing around to see how complex of a shape he could make.
After hitting a dodecahedron, he got bored.
He would wait a while to make it a bit less suspicious, but he wanted to move on to a jutsu that he could properly sink his teeth into.
Although, if it were truly up to him, he would be using his time on the scrolls instead.
His studying of them had been at something of an impasse ever since school started.
He had been making some small progress, sure, but using the trickle of knowledge he was getting from his academics to do so was like trying to fill a canyon with a creek.
He was starting to think he wasn't going to be able to comprehend all of the scrolls until he graduated, and that was while taking every theory-based class he could and spending ample time perusing the library.
It was sad to him that the library was probably the most useful of those sources, but he supposed some things had to be constants among school systems, even if one of them was training ninjas.
Either way, of the 16 scrolls lodged in his brain, he had only managed to fully decipher four of them, and they were the ones that had been focusing on medical concepts that he already understood from his previous life. He was slowly deciphering the rest, emphasis on slowly, but had actually gained some fascinating, if currently useless, knowledge on the functioning of hand seals.
Not only that, he had gotten even further insight into what the scrolls were covering.
He realized that their content could be separated into about five major groups: medical theory, medical ninjutsu, fuinjutsu, the functioning of his kekkei genkai, and jutsu development.
His findings only reinforced his previous assumptions, specifically that there isn't a single technique documented in even one of the scrolls.
If anything though, that just made Kusuri even more excited, as that meant if he really wanted to act on this knowledge, he would need to make his own.
The idea of diving into research to make the ultimate technique gave him shivers every time it crossed his mind. That kinda made him feel like he was slipping into Orochimaru territory, so he tried to restrain his fantasies a bit.
No matter what the future held for him, at least exams weren't much of a worry
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Time passed, exams were completed, Kusuri's first school year ended, and summer break had begun.
He had gained two friends, and plenty of knowledge that he hadn't had before.
The former of those two things was actually something he wanted to focus on.
While Taga and Nori weren't bad at their assignments, Kusuri decided that he would do his best to make sure they graduated alongside him.
That was the reason for the development of his Ultimate Training Plan™.
He was going to ask his uncle Iori to help the three of them get a headstart for the next semester when he could and would fill the rest of the time with a training regiment of his own creation formed through his encyclopedic knowledge of the setting.
He thought the main problem would be getting the other two in on it, but that had actually been surprisingly easy, as they agreed the moment he started explaining it. They clearly had a lot of faith in his capabilities, which was gratifying to see. It drove him to make sure the regimen gave him, and most importantly them, the best shot at improvement.
The training would be rather brutal, focusing on three universal, fundamental areas, those being chakra control, chakra reserves, and physical ability.
He doubted he would succeed, but he wanted to hopefully drill tree and water walking into them and himself before they all graduated, but even if they failed, that would be knocking out several of those areas at once.
There would also be plenty of standard physical training, plus they would be working their chakra reservoirs like hell.
Kusuri's only hope was that it would be enough to keep them up to par.
And, to his relief, it sure as hell did.
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AN: I know Japanese schools don't have a summer break, but Naruto isn't set in actual Japan so sue me