Sakura finds a half-buried necklace. She would have ignored it as a mere curiosity if it didn’t have a pendant, a shiny pink stone that caught the light unlike any piece of jewelry she’d ever seen.
Investigating closer, she saw it was old.
Her slippers slid a little on the rock. She didn’t want to get too close. Sakura and her family were on a vacation, Sakura herself given a small break between years of study at the Konoha shinobi academy.
Only the really rich went on far-off journeys, what with bandits and ninja and everything, so they were still in Fire country. In fact, they’d barely left Konoha. They had only traveled a day with their genin-team escort and found themselves at a very pretty lakeside village.
They were staying for a whole week until the team– and their jonin sensei!– would depart again, escorting Sakura’s family back alongside some other merchants.
Sakura’s family were civilians and had a small shop. (Merchant options- not farmers or dye makers or silk weavers. A secondary, skilled talent using pre-made items. Bookbinding, leather-working, glass-blowing (could be very fun), jewelry-making, or seamstresses. Oh, maybe if they didn’t work from home, something like owning a paper-making operation, a silk-farming operation, a dye-farming operation– but they’d have to be in charge of it with many employees. Wine making could be very profitable.)
(Apiaries/honey for beemaking, or wax, or any other number of things. That could be deeply fun. Would the Aburame be pissed? Or just glad to have them? Haruno being allied with Aburame would be cute as fuck. Haruno to Aburame: do not steel my bees.)
(Ink makers? That could be fun. Ink-maker combined with brush-makers could be really neat. Scroll makers, even. They dont have a lot of scroll experts among shinobi so Sakura could really get an ‘in’ there.)
Most of the business was above Sakura’s head. She knew her parents sent out ink and brushes and other goods out to many villages, even the capital, and occassionally went in person to talk to the people. Sakura didn’t really understand, but any time she asked who was selling the things if their shop was in Konoha, her parents said they had ‘people’ for that.
They also had people to do the ‘looking in’ or managing the other people, so really it was a big cycle where her parents mostly stayed at home in the evenings and didn’t go on trips.
For all that they didnt need to do much direct ‘lookin in on’, they certainly took the opportunity to talk about business with their people in this village, leaving Sakura on her own devices during the mornings.
It was okay, though, because the lake and walking paths through the small mountains were interesting. Really they were hills, but when the hills are mostly rock instead of earth and grass, doesn’t that make them small mountains?
She’d already found a lot of cool rocks, many rubbed smooth by lake water, and had followed the shore to a small stream going up one of the rocky ravines.
It was still well within shouting distance of the village, probably. Okay, maybe slightly out of range. But they had a real jonin with the team on this mission, so surely everything would be okay. She was only five or ten minutes’ walk away, practically nothing.
Despite Sakura not being present for the boring, stuffy business meetings, she was still dressed like she was. Just for a greeting! Right after that she’d been shooed out the door, so why couldn’t she wear her normal things? This was an unusually nice dress with slippers instead of her usual sandals, and she could already hear her dad despairing of the state of them from the mud she tried but mostly failed to avoid.
The necklace was half-buried in the rock. That’s how Sakura could tell how old it was. The chain actually disappeared into the rock. She had only seen it by pure chance, because the whole thing was at water level, and grimy enough that it blended in almost perfectly. If the sun hadnt hit the stone pendant just right, she’d never have seen it. It was probably how nobody had seen it until now!
Or, Sakura realized, as she gave up on keeping her shoes dry entirely and trodded closer to the banks of the stream, maybe the local kids found this anew every summer but couldn’t do anything about it.
The necklace was embedded into the rock. She couldn’t even imagine how old it was for the rock to have formed around it.
It wasn’t rusty, which was good because they were taught not to handle rusty kunai and other metal equipment– not that good shinobi metal should rust, it being high-quality steel and such. It did seem kind of… fragile.
Which made sense. Old things kinda fell apart with time, right?
Sakura touched the necklace. The stone was like a pink diamond, as large as a big broach, and it shimmered under her fingers. Uh. No, that wasn’t the sun, it was glowing—
Sakura woke up hot. The afternoon sun was blaring down on her, painting her face and arms vivid pink. Water trickling was the first sound she heard, her head mere feet from the stream, and the gross feeling of damp not-quite-mud under her dress– oh no, dad was going to be insufferable— and then the birds and insects of summer in the trees.
She blinked wearily at the sky, a clear blue with only one or two clouds in sight. Oh, no! It was so late!
Sakura splashed water on her face, tried her best to clean the dress and shoes– better damp than dirty– and ran back to the village as fast as she could. She made her apologies, did the touristy evening plans her parents had on the agenda once the day’s heat had mostly broken, ate dinner, and then collapsed on her futon at the inn.
Despite her nap earlier, she was oddly tired.
Her hand touched the necklace at her nape and she froze. The inn wasn’t rich enough to have a mirror, so Sakura felt the pendant by touch alone, exploring with her fingers. A two-inch gem on a silverish chain, none of the imperfections shed observed earlier present.
It was like it was brand new.
Sakura’s brain felt foggy, still cooked from the sun. She was exhausted, too sleep for mysteries. She fell asleep.
Sakura was five years old and in her dreams, she met another version of herself, outline shaky, who didn’t yet speak.
–
(Sakura’s device puts out a passive ‘You do not FUCKING see me’ field.)
–
Her parents didn’t notice the necklace. Most of the time, Sakura forgot she was wearing it. By the time the week was up, she’d even stopped trying to take it off.
It didn’t, by the way. Come off, that is. She tried for ten minutes to remove the necklace before their final day at the onsen, but it had no clasping mechanism Sakura could find and the chain wasn’t long enough to pull over her head.
Although she waited nervously for her parents to comment, neither did, and Sakura slowly got used to the idea that the necklace was weird.
She even thought about asking the Jonin sensei for the team escorting their caravan of small merchants back to Konoha, but ultimately decided against it–mostly because the woman was busy with her assignment and her team, and adults rarely spoke to Sakura when her parents were around. Of the half a dozen people the Jonin talked to during the day’s journey, Sakura wasn’t one of them.
The genin talked to the two teenagers accompanying their parents. Sakura, however, was too little to garner their attention, and she decided they weren’t likely to know anything anyway.
She kept to herself, riding in the cart, and half-dozed, half-puzzled through the math she’d started to dream about, beautiful and satisfying strings of numbers, balanced equations that took principles they learned at the Academy– basic sums, angles, and geometry– and slowly expanded them, like a breath of fresh air rose in your chest, a flower unfurling.
There was an elegance to them. She nudged her mother and quietly asked for a sheet of division work. Approving of the pass time, her mother complied, pulling over a notebook that could be Sakura’s from now on, and quickly penning out two columns of basic division.
By the time they reached Konoha’s gates, her mom had ‘graded’ four pages, taught Sakura how to use multiplication to check her own conclusions, and graduated to three-digit numbers.
It was satisfying. Looking at a sheet of math with the answers filled out felt like– a puzzle solved, maybe. It made her feel incredibly smart to have a trail of completed problems all along the pages, like she was a scientist or math teacher, the kind who filled out big blackboards of chalk equations.
Sakura had seen that in a movie, once, that didn’t really make sense to her, but her father had talked about the university at the capital, and a few of the things taught there, what the classrooms were like and how they differed from the shinobi Academy.
If Sakura wasn’t going to be the best shinobi ever, she’d have been taught basic reading and math by her parents, and then gone to one of the temple schools for her education. It was unlikely she’d go to the capital’s university, even if her parents could probably afford it. Further education for most people was done at one of the big temples, where serious scholars attended lessons and copied manuscripts by hand.
Her dreams continued to be full of math.
There was another her, in her mindscape– as Ino called it– who started to speak in slow, stilted sentences. The other Sakura was her inverse; done in grays and blacks, eyes deep purple pools, hair a white-gray just dusted with pink when the sun hit it.
Sakura’s mindscape was a meadow. She bugged Ino for meditation lessons and though the other girl sighed dramatically, at first, she got to teach and lead the meditation, which worked to Sakura’s favor; Ino loved to boss people around and show off how much she knew, especially about her clan techniques.
She probably told Sakura more than she should, but that didn’t occur to Sakura until the first Yamanaka cookout she attended right before the school year began, when Inoichi-oji gave her a funny look for something she’d said. Oh, right. Clan secrets.
They were very little. Ino liked to know things she shouldn’t, and also tended to blow raspberries at adults who told her what to do. Inoichi-oji sighed heavily, but Sakura wasn’t in trouble.
Soon, her mindscape bloomed with flowers.
Inner Sakura was always there, inspecting each new addition. A steam was added after a week of constant effort, bubbling in a little brook maybe six inches deep. It reminded Sakura of where she found the necklace.
She still couldn’t get it off.
–
Sakura felt tired a lot these days. Meditation helped. Sunlight helped. Sleep helped. Food really helped. Her parents were convinced she was going to grow three feet overnight, with how much she was eating for her next growth spurt.
Four weeks after she found the necklace, on the second day of Academy classes resuming, Sakura was meditating with Ino at lunch. The Yamanaka had weedled advanced meditative techniques from her father, who had given in on the grounds that a) it’s Ino and her big blue eyes and b) he’d rather his heir use said techniques of her own volition, even if she was giving them to an outsider as well. Sakura had to promise not to share anything she learned with anyone, and even then she suspected they were getting generic shinobi techniques and not Yamanaka secret clan techniques, because that would be crazy.
They’d learned how to access their chakra in the very first year of the Academy, of course. The younger you were when you started manipulating it, the more control you would have, and the larger your reserves could grow, which was part of why clan shinobi had an advantage over their civilian-born counterparts.
It was something Sakura’s parents and the academy teachers had been very blunt about, though she hadn’t understood all of it at the time: ninety percent of the civilian-born academy students would wash out by their final year.
The first year was required for all children in the village; after that, no Academy attendance was mandatory, even if you had could touch your chakra. Most people could at least feel it by the end of their first year, if not really do much of anything with it.
Sakura’s year class was going to start the leaf exercise soon. They were practicing feeling their chakra and trying to channel it into their hands. Ino guided Sakura through a meditation where they would focus on individual tenketsu instead, mentally following chakra along each one of three-hundred-sixty-one tenketsu, or points where the smaller chakra veins met.
Supposedly chakra can be released at any of those points, but the biggest and easiest are at the hands, which is part of why shinobi use jutsu with hand seals.
It takes ages before Sakura can even feel a tenketsu. Mostly she has this awareness of her chakra as a sort of nebulous cloud in almost-her-shape. It’s a pink mist that gets fainter the further out from her torso it is.
She has to really focus to feel the edges of that mist. It takes a few days before she can even start to feel that the mist is moving, that there’s a flow to it. Once she gets that down, she can meditate on the flow, following the path of chakra through her body.
This quickly becomes her favorite method of meditation. She does it in almost every waking moment, mesmerized by the feeling. Any time she can sit still and close her eyes for a spell, she starts concentrating on the flow, feeling the chakra– her chakra!– moving through her. The mental picture of it becomes clearer, until the edges aren’t mist but clearly defined.
Her chakra network is, to no surprise, the same size as her body. She knows its not a completely clear picture, their textbooks assure them that the “outline” around the network is just their skin, and the pathways themselves are more like veins with even tinier capillaries connecting the rivers of chakra that flow between tenketsu to the skin and organs.
That overall, mostly-muddy sense gives a picture of your chakra ‘body’; once it narrows down into a chakra ‘skeleton’ in which you can differentiate between the big picture of ‘chakra’ to chakratic veins, you have a better idea of how and where chakra is moving, and can intentionally direct it.
If you’ve still got the image of yourself as a uniform chakra-filled container, a human-shaped vessel, Ino tells Sakura very seriously in a tone that means she’s quoting Inoichi-oji and pretending it’s her own conclusions, then trying to move chakra anywhere is disastrous.
You’d actually end up yanking chakra out of those capillaries instead of moving just the concentration in the veins or pathways, which is how people get tingly numbness or even chakra burns.
Except, of course, the tenketsu at the wrists, which are large and almost instinctual to use and pull from.