Chapter 47.1- Gamer of the Desert

Itachi is one scary motherfucker, Gaara said to himself as his clone dispelled itself, ending his stream of information from the fight between the Akatsuki and the two jinchuriki. Watching that had taught him one key thing. As he stood now, Itachi and Kisame would run circles around him. It didn’t matter whether he was one of the strongest active kage or not. All that mattered was that the Akatsuki would kill him the m moment they decided to get serious about him. Both he and Han had struggled to contain Son Goku, and Kisame had done it all with one manoeuvre. Tailless tailed beast, indeed. Han was one of the deadliest taijutsu fighters, Gaara had had the chance of witnessing, and Itachi ran circles at him before catching him in genjutsu and ending the fight there.

It would have been impressive if it wasn’t so scary at the same time. He zoned out of the conversations between his strike team as they flew back to Suna. The truth was that he couldn’t bring himself to care about how their experiences in Suna had gone when his mind was consumed with one single thought; how do I get stronger. He knew that he wasn’t born with the same benefits as demigods like Naruto and Sasuke. But the reason he’d stayed away from selecting either of those bodies was because he didn’t want to have to deal with the destiny baggage that came with living either of those lives.

Hagoromo had clearly been watching the reincarnations of his sons for a while, and the last thing he’d want was Ninja- Jesus on his tail. Besides, Gaara knew the fact that his life would be less his own than it would belong to others was going to piss me off. Still, he had a plan.He’d said so for so long. And only held himself back from implementing it out of a desire to get to the upper limit of what he could achieve on his own. Sure, he wasn’t there yet. He had leaps and bounds left to grow by before he’d be knocking at the door of his full potential. But he no longer had the time to let the slow march of progress take its course.

For whatever reason, good or ill, the Akatsuki had made the decision to go after the tailed beasts earlier than they did in canon. If Gaara could be certain that Sasori would be the one sent after him, then he’d sleep easily, but the fact that Diedara was dead threw one hell of a wrench into things. The fact that he would not be certain who he was facing until they were face to face with him meant that he had to become strong enough to tell the lot of them to fuck off. Yes, that included Pain. And so Operation: Rebirth was born.

XXXXXXX- ONE MONTH LATER

“Are you sure about it?” She asked for the seventh time in the past hour. Gaara knew that she only did it out of concern for him but that still didn’t mean that he was blessed with the patience to deal with having his motivations and decisions questioned at every turn.

“If I wasn’t, we wouldn’t be here. Now get it over with” He replied tersely, patience long worn thin. In the month since he’d returned from Iwa, Gaara had spent every spare second studying a single thing. The Sharingan. Kakashi Hatake’s Sharingan, if we were being more specific. Well, more like Obito Uchiha’s, but there was no need to split hairs over such a minor matter. A month of study, and while I was nowhere near an expert on the Sharingan, I knew much more than I did at first. I was also pretty certain that the eye was not going to go blind by the time I began using its mangekyou ability. My theory regarding how Obito could use his ability nonstop was that Hashirama cells let him heal almost constantly from the Mangekyou’s desire to blind itself.

For myself, my plan was to let my new seal do the job for me. It wasn’t anywhere near the strength of a hundred seal that Tsunade had on her forehead but I’d been working on it for a while now, and it was something to be proud of. Near instant regeneration of the eye was the main function of the seal. The connection between the eye I’d be implanting and my chakra network would run through the seal first. The complex display of years of fuinjutsu training sat on my forehead as an unobtrusive black dot. The Blessed Seal of Theótita. It had four key functions. Firstly was that it was going to act as a bit of a dam for my chakra. It had the passive ability to leach on my chakra reserves, taking the unused excess for itself, but just like Tsunade’s strength of a hundred seal, I could funnel my chakra into it as necessary. Its second function was that it could heal the sharingan I was going to implant in my skull. How? Well, I had to rethink healing as a whole.

When a healer healed, they encouraged the body’s natural healing with chakra. That was why even after healing some wounds, scars would remain to show that the wound had once been there. A rare few, Tsunade and her apprentices among them, had the power to heal by promoting cell division to heal beyond the bodies natural limits. That was more regeneration than pure healing, so to speak. There was a third, lesser known and rarely implemented means of healing that I was implementing with the Blessed Seal. Where other forms of healing pushed the body forwards, this one dragged it back. The Seal of Theótita had two functions to aid this- one, it could scan the target completely, in this case, Kakashi’s eye- two, it could reject any damage or change done to the target, seemingly reversing the flow of time to return it to its original state. It wasn’t an easy thing. The more damage the eye took at a go, the more chakra the seal required to pull off what it was doing.

That was the key reason why the seal was still considered incomplete in its present state. Presently, it only fed on my reserves. My eventual goal was to acquire a cursed seal for study so I could figure out how the things managed to drag in nature chakra to power their functions. Once I had that, the Seal of Theótita would have a source of virtually unending chakra at its beck and call to ensure that nothing ever overcame its power and managed to damage the eye. Right now, according to my calculations, the seal could heal all the damage that consistent use of the mangekyou’s ability would cause, but would drain me to death if someone ever managed to slash the eye in half or whatever.

Now, the question I got from Chiyo when I gave her the rundown was why wasn’t I just using the seal for my entire body. The answer was obvious to anyone who looked at it for longer than a second. The seal returned things to status quo. If I used it on my body, then any gains from training would be turned to naught instantly.

The final two functions of the Blessed seal were that it could both power the Sharingan’s constant drain with its chakra so I left my reserves delightfully unmolested, and serve as a power source for ninjutsu if I ever needed it to.

“Are you ready?” Chiyo asked, and I settled for glaring at her. She took that as my reply and her hands glowed green as she reached down and plucked out my left eye. I felt none of the pain as the numbing effects of medical ninjutsu kicked in almost instantly.

She reached down again, and began the simple surgery to connect the sharingan to my optical nerve and get it up and running. What really needed to be studies was just how doujutsu worked in this world. For some reason, they were extremely easy to just plug and play. It was almost like they’d been engineered to be as easy to transplant as possible.

That proved to be true in this case as the moment the eye was installed and plugged in, so to speak, I could see right out of it. It was something to get used to. My right eye was leagues behind my left as the sharingan rendered everything in a startling high definition. I could pick out specks of dust as they flew behind the screen we’d sanitised for the surgery. I could pick out the most minute expressions on Chiyo’s face as thoughts ran through. It almost felt like I could just reach out and pluck the thoughts right out of her head. Thankfully, before I could succumb to the temptation to try, my vision was overtaken by a blue screen.

NOTICE: Foreign Intrusion Detected.

Player has implanted a sharingan in his left eye socket. Perception + 10; Wet Tinkering + 20; Intelligence + 5; Genjutsu + 60; Endurance -10.

I read through the notification and dismissed it immediately after, turning back to Chiyo. “I assume that everything has gone according to plan”. I said.

“See for yourself” She replied, tossing me a mirror.

Staring across from me was my face as it had always been, free from marking or scar. The only difference was that where my right eye was a calm teal, the left was a fiery red, glowing with the passion that the rest of the world had learned to associate with sharingan wielders.

“Perfect" I replied. Now, it was time to test this bitch out. Before that, though “What do you think of the formulas I submitted to you?” I asked her.

“The idea is ambitious, but I am not so sure about the side effects, and risk of crippling yourself permanently by going down that route.”

“It’s fine. While I was in the throes of your amnesia, I had an idea or two. I should be able to blunt most of the side effects with some further fine-tuning” I said to her. 20 extra points in wet tinkering was nothing to scoff at. I could already see dozens of ways that I could have been better, more precise, with transplanting the Dead bone pulse into Shira. I could see even more ways of harnessing the explosion release kekkei genkai I’d stolen from Iwa. Transplanting it to promising academy students would be just the tip of the iceberg.

It took all that I had to resist the urge to collapse into uncontrollable cackling. Chiyo might try to kill me again if I did.

XXXXXX- JIRAIYA OF THE SANNIN

He wasn’t expecting a parade or anything. Certainly not a festival or national holiday in their name, but he would have at least expected some more gratefulness on the part of the detestable Taki elders. They’d saved the village’s sole claim to fame and here they were being cantankerous old codgers- he had Tsunade to thank for that delightful bit of phrasing.

They’d left Orchimaru with Naruto and Shizune at the hotel room to avoid causing offence, and now the bastards left them waiting outside the meeting room. He could already tell that by the time the clock struck twelve, signifying that they’d spent an hour waiting, Tsunade was going to break the door open and barge in. The patience she was presently displaying was impressive but any idiot could tell it was wearing thin.

“Legendary Sannin?” A head poked out of the council chambers five minutes before the clock struck twelve.

As they were literally the only ones in the waiting room, neither of them bothered to reply. “Please come in. The Elders will see you now.” In an eye blink, Tsunade had covered half the distance between them and the door to the meeting room, dragging him along for the ride.

“Introducing, Jiraiya the Gallant, one and only Toad Sage, and Tsunade the Legendary Healer- Two of the Students of Hiruzen the Professor, Late Third Hokage of the Village Hidden in the Leaves” The secretary said as they walked in. He almost preened at the flattering introduction.

A/N; Let’s go?