Six Years After (book 2)

Chapter 6

Third person pov

Do you know how hard it is to read?

Naruto has no idea how people do it! And for fun, no less. The concept of willingly doing this for any other reason than absolute necessity is positively mind boggling. There's just no way people wake up and decide this is what they're going to do with their time.

Naruto's never been all that good at focusing on any one thing for any period of time. He can be dedicated, can work towards a goal and not give up on it, but his attention is erratic at best. He jumps from thing to thing like a lively frog jumps from lily pad to lily pad, only stopping briefly to bask in the sun before he's moving again.

There's no real narrative in seals. Maybe they tell a story all on their own-- maybe they can make a story when put together-- but the separated parts are little more than chunks of information he needs to memorize. Hours spent squinting at blocks of text, trying to parse out what it's saying and what it means.

Kurama is the biggest help he has in the moments he spends curled up in his bedroom in the evenings, hunched over his dad's annotated texts and making a futile attempt to absorb it all. Kurama can glance it over through Naruto's eyes and re-explain it in a way that he understands. Naruto's pretty sure that fact alone is the only reason he makes any progress at all.

It's, in so many words, total ass trying to figure out what the hell is even happening. The vague foundation in sealing his parents had given Naruto definitely gives him a leg up, but that hardly matters in the face of his overall struggling. Everything he's picked up through osmosis feels obsolete. 

"Okay." Naruto massaged his temples. He felt like he was hardly sleeping these days between training, studying, and dodging all the wary elders trying to prod him more about Kurama's seal. "Let me get this straight. The centerpiece of Neji's seal isn't an X form seal, it's actually a linear bolt construct crossed over with a modified confinement strait that's been literally branded onto his fucking forehead?" 

Naruto... has no real idea what he just said. God, what is he turning into? Had those words all just come out of his mouth?

"Yes." Kurama responded drily, sounding about as unamused as Naruto felt. "That's exactly what that is. Keyed through the blood and chakra of the main house, and involving a spiritual facet on confinement and a physical facet on the bolt."

Naruto stared down at the notes he'd been taking, utterly unimpressed. Cursed seals were controllable-- they'd known that. But to have one this complicated and layered... where the hell had they even gotten work like this? 

The invisible eight-pronged ring seal securing its permanency was so deeply entangled with the waterfall-style, dormant five element seal that would blow Neji's eyes up upon his death that Naruto had no idea if taking it off without blinding him in the process was even possible. The entire thing was heinous, meant to enslave and control in all the worst ways.

Without being to see the invisible layers of the seal, there was simply no way for him to find out more. It was driving him insane. Agitating it with chakra to show itself could kill Neji if he wasn't careful, but simple observation wasn't going to cut it. Cursed seals were the kind that twisted their way in and poisoned. And if he didn't know exactly what kind of poison, there'd be no combatting it.

"Cool. Cool, cool, cool." Naruto muttered to himself breathlessly, despite the fact that this was as far from cool as they could possibly fucking get. "And do we have any idea how to get either of those two things off?" 

"Separately, perhaps, though the processes for each are tedious and riddled with risks." Kurama's tails swished lazily. He wasn't near as invested in this as Naruto was, that's for sure. "Crossed over? I doubt such a thing has ever been done."