Chapter 60.2- Gamer of the Desert

“Her condition is deteriorating rapidly, Kazekage-sama” The man that I grabbed by his coat to ask what the hell was going on said to me as he ran around to place a drip into her hand and begin refilling whatever the medication was. I stepped closer to her rasping form and noticed the way her eyes came into focus as she felt my chakra wrap itself around her.

“I told you no” She said, her voice stronger than it had been in months.

“You did” I agreed with her.

“I’m not healing you. Just surpassing the pain and giving you some extra vitality so you’re not so weak. Don’t worry, it’s all temporary” I told her with some consternation in my voice. I could not put words to the feeling that ran through me as I watched her, the woman who had been so much to me in this world. Her wrinkles were more pronounced than they’d ever been. Those scars that marked the passage of time over her face and drew lines across her visage that were once testaments to her fight against time now stood as monuments to her defeat.

“It’s not your fault” She said.

“I know. You’re the one refusing treatment here”

“Everyone I knew is dead, Gaara. My brother is gone. I am all the remains of my era, and I am so so tired.” She said. I nodded at the words even as I wanted to disagree. She was right. She had fought for longer than anyone else in the village. Asking her for any more would have been ridiculous, but still this felt like a betrayal.

“I am so incredibly proud of you. This village. This paradise on earth you’ve built is beautiful, and thank you for letting me watch it happen over the years as greenery overtook the brown that scared my eyes as a child” Her voice sounded so old in that moment. It sounded distant even as I heard it come from a woman seated next to me.

“Thank you for being the Kazekage the village needed. Thank you for leading her well. Thank you for choosing peace when war was all you had known. Thank you for being my Grandson…” The last one made my eyes snap up to hers even as she began to close them. I placed her hand in mine as I felt a sorrow that was beyond words come over me as I felt her life force begin to leave her. She was dying, and I could fix it but there was nothing I could do about it.

“She’s gone, Kazekage-sama” One of the doctors said like I could not feel it for myself. Like I did not feel the moment her body lost its battle with time and gave away to a dozen minor illnesses that I could have healed with a snap of my fingers and as much effort as it took me to blink myself awake.

I put her hand down as I dissapeared from the room into my office. The Second Hokage’s flying Raijin had been one of the last pieces of fuinjutsu to yield itself to my attentions as I grew from low 90s to the peak of Fuinjutsu mastery. I stared at the seal again and closed my eyes for a second as I realised that Chiyo would not be here to help with this next transplant. She’d marvelled at the Rinnegan just as much as I did when I first took Nagato’s head out of the inventory and freed the mythical eyes from them. Since then we’d both studied the physical and metaphysical properties of the eye until we understood every bit of how it worked- or every bit that yielded itself to direct observation of this form.

Neither of us had been comfortable enough to consider cutting the eyes open, but my Wet tinkeringskill had given me quite a bit to work with. That, combined with a total mastery of fuinjutsu had led to the creation of this seal. I called it the Zentai seal. It was to be everything. It would do everything that I’d previously needed multiple seals to do.

Everything would come together in one. One seal. Whole. Complete. All.

“Are you ready?” My clone asked. I just shrugged at his words as we began to walk down the hallway. I’d created a special training chamber for myself a year ago. Kamui gave me access to only the kamui dimension, but consistent practice with it gave me the building blocks I’d used in creating my own dimension. I wasn’t sure if I truly created it or just discovered it but the subspace played according to all he rules I’d set when drawing up the seals. We approached the door and pushed it open as one before dropping in. It was grassland. Just flat, plain grass stretching across to infinity. Not a true infinity, but a functional one for all intents and purposes. I’d had a clone fly in one direction as far as he could, and it took him hours to figure out that he was being looped back to where he came from upon reaching some arbitrary point. Still, it was a large pocket dimension, and more importantly a closed one.

If it wasn’t when first created it, then it was now. A seal matrix woven into the very earth prevented any space-time ninjutsu from accessing this place apart from the single portal that I’d created at first. This was my place.

“Do it now” I told my clone as I turned around and took a seat on the stone tablet that a different clone had left behind as a joke. For a joke, it was an unusually well made one. With the right combination of seals, he’d made the tablet chakra inert. Nothing. No chakra could affect it. He’d carved the whole thing with sand and then etched the seals into the surface. Even a tailed beast bomb did nothing to the stone as it stood there, completely unscathed and inert.

That made it the perfect reptacle for complex seals. My clone walked forward and placed a hand on my stomach. I gasped as I felt his grip on the seal that kept Shukaku within me. “Fuin: Kai”

A/N; Things and things and even more things