Training Day

It is a normal winter day in Konoha, although it never snows, these are the days when the sun can hide. White clouds go across the sky, blocking the normally shining sun, many a cloud watcher lie on their back, for when the summer comes the clouds will go.

A pink haired red and white girl sprints in a training ground. Then she stops, turns left, and throws three shuriken from each hand after only an moment of seeing her targets. The six shuriken sink into the targets she aimed for, one in each of the two targets on the three trees, each set at different eye levels, the height of a tall man, a short man, and herself. Right after her throws, she rolls to her right, turns behind her and throws her kunai at a heart height target behind her, then she hops backwards into her tijutsu stance ready for any attack.

After a moments pause, she then goes over to collect her weapons wedged into the trees.

When taking out one of her shurikens she notices a notch of damage to one edge. She tisks in annoyance at that.

'Darn, it was hard enough saving up enough money to buy these.'

Her parents never give her any money for ninja things, she had to save up by skimming from her snack money, and there just wasn't much there in the first place.

She carefully puts the damaged shuriken in her ninja pouch with the others, luckily she bought a sharpener as well, hopefully it can be sharpened out.

This is not the first time she has done this exercise perfectly, even when she changed the targets around this type of exercise has become mundane to her.

She wants to move on to a harder exercise, but this is the last shurikenjutsu exercise that Sasuke ever showed off at school.

He does not show off everything anymore as he used to. The second he learned a new taijutsu, shurikenjutsu, or even a new trapping skill, he used to immediately show it off at school. However, that all changed one day.

He stopped showing up for a while after the other members of the Uchiha clan mysteriously died, although Sakura is sure that the ninja know what really happened, it is classified from civilians.

From then on he only shows enough to get a 100% grade and then immediately leaves after school ends. Now, he only shows an intense focus on becoming a ninja, completely different from all the other boys.

Ino and the other girls thinks that he is even more handsome now and try to get close to him even more. And while him becoming even more handsome due to no longer showing off and focusing on becoming a ninja is most definitely true, to Sakura this was a heavy blow. Before he stopped showing off, she never knew that she was remembering what he was doing and then later training with those skills as a goal.

Now she feels directionless, she has no idea what she must do to become stronger. No idea of even the true level a ninja needs to be at, what she needs to achieve. She can't even go watch one of the Chunin Exams held once every six month in Konoha, because she doesn't have any money to do so. Those tickets are not cheap. The event is designed for rich people who are potential customers to watch.

Now, she has just been training the same things everyday. She cannot even look up what she needs to do next because it's classified; she has to wait. She can no longer learn anything ahead of schedule.

She has no idea what to do now.

Even her transformation jutsu that Iruka-sensei recently taught is as perfect as she can make it. Only one look and sound is enough to copy someone that she has never seen before, their look, their voice, even their walk, all the same.

There are likely ways to make her amazing basic skills even better, but she does not know how and is not allowed to look up how. From now on, she must figure out how to improve these skills all by herself. However, due to this her progress has slowed to a crawl.

This frustrates her greatly.

So much so that she's going to do something crazy.

She reaches into her ninja pouch and pulls out a notebook.

However, this is not just any notebook, but that one she wrote after that weird dream she had almost a year ago now.

She knows that this is a crazy and extremely dangerous, since last winter she has looked up everything she could about fuinjutsu that a second and then a third year student is allowed to know. It's just the most basic of the basics and even then just descriptions of those basic and not how to actually do them.

Fuinjutsu is extremely dangerous to learn. Just one error in even the width of a single line is very likely to cause an explosion. It seems to match her dream skill in this way.

While it's normal to use paper and ink due to the necessity of accuracy, anything can actually be used to make the marks: dirt, thread, chalk, even chakra. As long as you make something to run your chakra through in a correct way, it does not matter what medium it runs through. This actually makes Sakura even more worried, because it's not limited to just ink, trying to make her dream fuinjutsu work is extremely dangerous.

Not only this, she read of explosive notes, storage note, and barrier jutsus, but she has never heard of anything like the alchemy from her dream, taking something and changing it into something else.

While every fuinjutsu she heard of also uses circular techniques in it, none of them actually draws an actual circle, let alone two as her dream technique had.

The only reason she is even considering trying this dream fuinjutsu is two fold. One, she is very frustrated by her lack of progress recently and two, her dream technique does not require her to run chakra through it; it's supposed to gain the energy it needs from like the planet's rotation, or from the moon's gravity, or something like that.

She carefully draws the full transmutation circle, all the weird characters who's meaning she does not know and has never even heard of. She takes two pots that she brought one full and the other empty and puts them in their proper place. She then looks over the equations written in her book that she at least understands now, memorizing them again.

However, just before she puts her hands onto the circle, she realizes that what she's doing is incredibly stupid. She is totally alone out here, what if the seal explodes even if she doesn't put chakra in it, what if her dream is even actually correct, but she got one of the weird characters wrong and the circle explodes due to the error. This whole thing seems like something only a really dumb person would do.

If it really explodes in her face, she could die.

She stands there in the training area looking at the seal on the ground in thought.

After a while, she packs every up and goes home.