Chapter 06
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Time skip five years
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Well, after five years of learning under him, I can definitely know the reason behind his smile when we agreed to follow him a few years ago. He is a slave driver, beating us until we could not move and leave before he did the same in the next day.
But I cannot deny that learning under him makes us strong, even stronger than a kage-level ninja. We know of our level because our last test before we could leave the land of dragons is to defeat all of the Kage from the big villages in the past. Iroh asked the Shinigami permission for us to enter the soul world and fight against the Kage.
But back to what we learned for five years, the first thing Iroh did after we arrived at the land of the dragon is to teach us how to do a Kuchiyose no Jutsu and let us do the reverse summoning and lived with them for one year to learn everything from the summons.
He said that summoning animals are the best teacher in hand-to-hand combat and if we are lucky, we will have a chance to learn senjutsu, the art of fighting with natural energy. As for what if we didn't pass the test by the boss summon, Iroh easily told us that if we died then we died. We didn't deserve to learn anything from him if we could not pass the test from our boss summon. We gritted our teeth and performed the hand signs of Kuchiyose no Jutsu.
To my surprise, the reverse summoning send me to the land of salamander, and I met the legendary salamander summoning of Hanzo, Ibuse. He is a very old summon but still holds power in the community as he still holds the title of the strongest salamander.
I was tested directly by Ibuse who injected his strongest poison right into my body and let me tell you something, it is not a pleasant experience. I could feel the blood inside my veins boil, my muscles stiffened, I could not think for a second without feeling extremely dizzy, I could not eat anything without vomiting it a minute later, and I could not sleep for a second without having a nightmare.
It happened for three days, and I can say that it was definitely torture. I only survived and passed the test by awakening my conqueror haki, making all of the salamanders except Ibuse and the combat specialist passed out.
After passing the test, Ibuse lead me toward the sacred swamp of the salamander clan to cleanse all of the poisons inside my body. Let's just say that after getting tortured for three days nonstop, having my body cleansed was the best thing that has ever happened in my life.
My body feels lighter after that, almost like my whole body is enchanted. But it is nothing compared to my haki. Now I can feel almost two kilometers around me when I activated my observation haki, and the combination of my improved armament haki with rokushiki is stronger than Tsunade's enchanted punch.
I spent the entire year learning from the salamander, from how to fight to how to heal with poison. Ibuse told me that the poisons he injected into me for the test will remain inside my body and after I learned from the salamander, I can control the poisons to do anything I want. I also learned how to fight with salamander and I have to say it is really interesting. My opponents will never know if they were injected with my poisons until they lose their consciousness.
Unfortunately, I could not learn the senjutsu art from salamander as I am not that talented in the art. But at least I can use the senjutsu to enchant my healing ability, so it was definitely not a wasting time.
After a year finished, I came back to the land of dragons and saw Aoki with a chameleon. Later, we told each other about what we learned. It seems Aoki learned a lot about assassination and spying techniques from the chameleon clan, and Akio, one of the best chameleons, took a liking to Aoki very much because of their similar name and decided to go with Aoki as a partner.
A day later, Iroh came to us with a paper to test our affinity. I have a water affinity, and Aoki has the fire one. Iroh taught Aoki personally as he was more suitable with fire. As for me, he bought one of his friends that I know very much from my first life, Katara, to teach me how to control water.
I was very excited as before she died, Katara was the best water bender in the avatar world, and she didn't have trouble learning how to do the same with chakra. We spend another two years with perfecting our affinity and sparring with each other. Iroh proved himself to be a very good fighter as he could beat us together without any difficulties.
He also managed to launch sneak attacks on us from time to time, avoiding our observation haki. Later he told us that as haki is a soul detection, he can control his soul to match with our soul detection so that our haki didn't notice his presence.
We were flabbergasted when he told us that several people could do that with their souls. One of them was Dan Kato, Tsunade's fiancée. Fortunately for us, he is already dead so we don't need to face him in the future. But we know that the future is unpredictable, so we also learned how to fight enemies that slipped from our detection.
As for our affinity training, Aoki turned into a beast with several mass destruction techniques that it makes me afraid sometimes. As for me, I learned a lot about how to control the flow of the water and turned it into my weapon. I learned how to create an ice-which is actually not that difficult and definitely not a bloodline-, how to heal with water, and how to draw water from the atmosphere.
Water is the most balanced affinity, not the best in offensive and not the best in defensive. But I found myself comfortable with this affinity, especially when I combined it with the taijutsu style of salamander. I also learned how to draw the poison inside my body and insert it into my water so that I can kill my enemies instantly.
The rest of our learning time was spent with us having a fight with the soul that Iroh bought so that we have the necessary experience on the battlefield. Iroh created a lot of situations for us to fight, and I have to say that he is very creative.
We fought one-on-one against enemies from each affinity, one-on-two, one-on-three, and so on until we can fight an entire battalion by ourselves and win. Then we learned about battle strategy and how to be a commander. One day, he bought us to a land with almost ten thousand souls ready for a battle and he just said that we have to take command of each different team. It was a very good learning method for us to learn about leadership.
When we asked about how he bought that many souls, he just smiles mysteriously and said that he was a very good friend of the Shinigami. Just the mention of the death god still could make us shiver in fear, so we decided to leave the topic untouched.
Although we learned a lot about fighting, we still decided to maintain our hit-and-run fight to finish our enemies as quickly as we can. I mean, we are in a ninja world, so we don't have to spam a jutsu to win the battle. Just poisoning the logistics is enough to kill an entire army. We don't need to be an ordinary main character from the novel who was very brave and faced their opponents head-on.
And finally, for our last test, we have to fight against the souls of all the Kage in the past and win. It was just the soul without their memories or consciousness, so I guess it was like the Edo Tensei that Orochimaru performed during the Chunin test. But even without their consciousness, they still proved their worth as a former Kage.
Unsurprisingly, our worst opponent was Hashirama Senju, the first Hokage. With the combination of his senjutsu and wood style, he beat us black and blue for almost a year. We managed to beat him when Hashirama's senjutsu is down by combining our best water style and fire style jutsu, creating steam thick enough that I could combine with my poison to restrain his body.
And the most surprising enemy for us was the first Mizukage. His water affinity was very strong, far stronger than mine and the second Hokage as he could create a tsunami just by drawing water from the atmosphere. It was a three days battle nonstop that I finally managed to break after deceiving him with water style and quickly rushed toward him to attack with shigan, one of the rokushiki attack, wrapped with deadly poison.
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Time skip end
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We sat down under the trees while holding a piece of meat, resting after we defeated the last Kage as our last test, the yondaime Hokage. A very tricky opponent with his teleportation technique, but we managed to trick him to land at the place we prepare and when he did, Aoki who hides from the beginning killed him silently without the Hokage noticing his presence.
"Well, it has been five years. Are you ready to go back?" Iroh suddenly appeared with his smile.
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Author note:
You can also read:
- Transmigrated Into Anime World as Kiyoko Shimizu's Older Brother up to chapter 40
- Naruto: Ashigaru up to chapter 11
You can read all of it at my Patreon account, pat_reon.com/zwolf1 (Without '_') Thank you for your support! :)