Uchiha’s grimoire guide to winning Chapter 15: Cleansing

The water hit my skin, and for a moment, that was all there was.

Not thought, no memory, just sensation. The temperature hovered somewhere between warm and hot, the kind of heat that made muscles unclench.

 It fell in a steady stream, not pounding, not aggressive, just consistent. 

The sound filled the small bathroom of the inn, a white noise that drowned out everything else, the creak of old wood, the distant murmur of voices from other rooms, the phantom echoes of screaming that still lived somewhere in the back of my skull.

I stood under the flow and let it work.

The water touched my scalp first, soaking through hair that had been matted with sweat and worse. It ran down in rivulets, tracing paths along my forehead, my temples, the curve of my jaw.

I tilted my head back, let the water hit my face directly. It pooled in the hollows of my closed eyes, overflowed, streamed down my cheeks like something gentler than what I deserved. My mouth opened slightly, tasting the faint mineral edge of well water, clean and neutral, and I swallowed without thinking. The heat sank into my skin, into the tension that had locked itself between my shoulder blades, into the tightness in my hand where I had gripped a weapon too hard for too long.

The water turned pink at my feet.

I watched it spiral toward the drain, slow at first, then faster as more came. Pink, then red, then pink again, diluted and diluted until it was just water pretending it had never been anything else. 

The blood had been everywhere. On my hands, my arms, splattered across my chest in patterns. It had dried in some places, tacky and dark, and in others it had stayed wet, soaking into fabric, into the creases of my palms, under my nails where I could feel it even when I could not see it.

I reached for the soap. It was plain, unscented, the kind that would just do its job without being luxurious. I worked it into a lather between my hands, watching the bubbles form, and then I began to scrub.

My arms first. Long strokes, methodical, from shoulder to wrist, then back again. The soap foamed, turned gray, then red tinged, and I rinsed it away, watched it join the water at my feet. 

I maybe scrubbed harder than necessary with the way my skin turned pink.

I moved to my chest, my ribs, the flat of my stomach. 

The water kept falling.

I scrubbed my neck, my jaw, behind my ears. I worked the soap into my hair, felt it catch on tangles, felt it loosen them. My scalp tingled, blood flow returning to places that had been locked tight with adrenaline. I dug my fingers in, massaged in slow circles, and felt something in my skull release like  a tension that had been living there rent free.

The drain swallowed it all. The blood, the soap, the evidence. It disappeared into darkness, into pipes and I stood there under the water and let myself believe, just for a moment, that it could be that easy. That I could wash it away. That I could stand here long enough and step out clean, not just on the surface, but underneath, in the places that mattered.

My hands moved without conscious direction now, following patterns, routines. I scrubbed my legs, my feet, the spaces between my toes where dirt had gathered. I rinsed and rinsed again, and the water stayed clear now, no more pink, no more red, just water being water.

The heat surrounded me. It rose as steam, filled the small space, turned the air thick and soft. I breathed it in, felt it coat my lungs, felt it carry something out with each exhale. My heartbeat had slowed. The frantic rhythm that had defined the last few hours, the spike and crash of combat adrenaline, had finally settled into something steady. Something almost calm.

I leaned forward, pressed my forehead against the tile wall. It was cool against my skin, a contrast to the water’s warmth, and the difference helped.

Time stopped meaning anything.

I did not count seconds, did not measure how long I stood there. 

Eventually, I reached for the water control, turned it off.

 I stepped out, grabbed the towel that hung on the hook, rough fabric that smelled like clean linen and nothing else. I dried myself with the same methodical care I had used to wash, patting down my arms, my chest, my legs, until I was no longer dripping.

The mirror was fogged. I did not wipe it clear.

I dressed slowly. Clean clothes, the kind the inn provided for travelers, simple and functional. A loose shirt, dark pants, nothing that marked me as Uchiha, nothing that marked me as anything. They felt strange against my skin, too soft, too clean, but I pulled them on anyway.

I finally felt human again.

I walked to the bed and let myself fall onto it.

The mattress was thin but not uncomfortable, the kind that had been slept on by a hundred travelers before me and would be slept on by a hundred more. It smelled faintly of lavender, probably from whatever the inn used to wash their linens, and underneath that was the scent of old wood and dust and time.

I lay there, staring at the ceiling, and let my thoughts catch up to the rest of me.

The inn was in a little village, not far from the spot where we had originally stopped, where Fumiko and I had separated from the Uzumaki convoy.

 My aunt had wanted me to clear the bandit camp nearby.

Clear it.

Kill all of them.

Slaughter them as if they were cattle.

And she had wanted me to do it while my Sharingan was activated, so that I may never forget. So that the memory would be etched into my eyes with perfect clarity, every detail, every moment, every face as it realized it was dying. So that my Yin, my spiritual energy, would be strengthened through exposure to death, through the act of taking life, through the kind of trauma that Uchiha were supposed to thrive on.

I knew my aunt had done so because she thought it necessary. Because she only wanted the best for me, because she believed that strength in this world came through suffering, through pushing past limits, through confronting the worst parts of reality until they no longer broke you.

But still.

Right now, at this moment, lying on this bed in this inn with the smell of lavender and the ghost of blood still clinging to the inside of my nose, I did not think I could be in her presence.

Because right now, the part of me that loved her, the part that remembered her smiles and her teasing and her genuine care, was being gnawed on by the new part that hated her.

Hated her for making me do this.

Hated her for being right that I could.

Hated her for the fact that I would probably thank her later, once the rawness wore off, once I had distance and perspective and could look back and say yes, that made me stronger.

But right now, I hated her.

And I hated that I hated her, because it made me feel weak, made me feel like a child throwing a tantrum over something that was, in this world’s logic, completely reasonable.

Cursing the world and thus cursing yourself. Perverting it, twisting it, changing yourself through pain, misery, and hate. Strength begotten by such.

That was the Uchiha way, was it not? That was what our eyes demanded, what our bloodline fed on. We grew strong through loss, through rage, through the kind of suffering that would break normal people. We turned our trauma into power, our grief into weapons, our hatred into evolution.

I had realized, not long after the killing, that I had gained new abilities. And while I knew that this was because of the infinity behind my eyes, my soul not native to this world, the otherness that had given me advantages I did not necessarily deserve, it would probably appear to my aunt, to anyone from my clan who was in the know about some of my abilities, that it would have been because of what my aunt did.

That what she had done was right. Justified. Effective.

And just for that, I felt spiteful enough at the thought to not even use those abilities.

To let them sit there, dormant, unused, as a fuck you to the methodology that would have had seemingly birthed them.

But then I realized that would be dumb and childish, and in the end, the one I would be hurting would be me more than anyone else.

This was a world where power shaped everything. Where the strong dictated terms and the weak died in ditches. Where politics and alliances only mattered insofar as they were backed by the ability to destroy anyone who disagreed.

Refusing power was akin to accepting to be beholden to those I knew I was better than.

And I refused to be beholden to anyone.

I closed my eyes, let the exhaustion pull at me, and turned my attention inward, toward the new things I could feel sitting in my mind like gifts I had not asked for.

From what I could instinctively understand, the first ability I had gained was one that would allow me to summon a shield if I wished. A shield called the Mirror Shield, and that would be great and all if light magic existed in this world.

It did not.

The closest thing, the closest equivalent in the Naruto universe, could be argued to be Yang release, and that was more about strengthening its user’s physical might, Guy style, making them faster and stronger and more durable, than it was about making them create lasers to reflect or beams to redirect.

Something told me I would truly regret it if I tried fighting a taijutsu specialist with the idea in mind that my shield would give me an edge. They would just punch through it, or around it, or use it as leverage to break my arm.

Still, a shield was a shield. Maybe there were uses I had not thought of yet. Maybe it would be more useful than I expected. Or maybe it would sit in my arsenal and never touched.

Time would tell.

The second ability was one that made me more durable. Stronger. It strengthened my vitality in a way that felt deep, complete, like my body had been rebuilt with better materials, like the fragile human shell I had been wearing had been upgraded to something that could take more punishment.

If a blade through the heart would have been enough to kill the Ren of before, something told me right now that few things other than beheading in one clean blow would be enough to do the job.

I could survive injuries that should be fatal. I could keep moving through damage that should drop me. I was not invincible, I could still be killed, but the threshold had moved. Significantly.

That one, at least, was immediately useful. That one I could appreciate without reservations.

The next two abilities were related to time, the second a continuation of the first.

The first allowed me to sense the flow of time as if I had a clock in the back of my head, always ticking, always accurate, never needing to be wound. I could tell you the exact second of any moment, could measure durations with precision, could feel time passing in a way that normal people could not.

And I could give this ability to someone else through a ritual.

Why I would want to do that, I had no idea. Maybe there were strategic uses. Maybe it would matter later. For now, it felt like a novelty, like something that was neat but not immediately practical.

The second time ability, though, was the one that made my breath catch.

It allowed me to perform a ritual that would make me immortal. Unaging.

Literally immortal.

I could lock my age, stop the clock, exist in perpetuity at whatever physical state I chose. I could be ten years old forever, or I could wait until I was twenty five and freeze there, or I could let myself grow old and then reverse it.

It was the kind of power that everyone dreamed of. The kind of power that started wars.

And it was mine.

Which, while really great, still was not that great when I was living in mystical ninja land where the favorite pastime was killing each other the same way British people liked their tea.

Immortality did not mean invincibility. It just meant I would not die of old age. I could still be murdered. Beheaded. Incinerated. Sealed away for eternity in some hellish prison dimension.

Still, it was a hell of an insurance policy.

The last ability I had gained, the one that was serving me the most in the immediate, the one that made me not spiral further into self loathing and rage and the kind of despair that turned people into wrecks, was one that made my mind impregnable. My sense of self inviolable.

In other words, things like despair and depression and the likes were no longer in the cards for me.

Yay.

More than that, anyone stupid enough to try to use a Genjutsu on me, a Yin mental technique on me, an Uchiha, which by the way was the stupidest thing one could do, yes, I am talking about you, future Kurenai, would find their abilities either blocked or, worse, find themselves being the ones trapped in my mind.

It meant that in case the Infinite Tsukuyomi happened, because in whichever way Black Zetsu and Madara succeeded in their insane moon plan, I would not be affected.

It meant that Itachi, or someone else with a Mangekyō, trying to use the Tsukuyomi or the Kotoamatsukami or even the Izanami against me, would fail.

It meant my mind was mine, and no one, no one, could take that from me.

That ability alone was worth the price of what I had done today.

If I was lucky, if things continued at this rate, it would not be long before I was strong enough to do whatever the fuck I wanted.

And I had not even eaten the Queen Slime yet.

The slime that would allow me, if nothing went wrong, to reach Indra’s levels of strength. Ōtsutsuki levels of strength.

The reason I had not yet done so was because the clan had still wanted to test the slime with two more people before allowing me to use it. They wanted to be sure. Wanted to understand the side effects, the risks, the exact mechanisms.

The Queen Slime made you a queen version of whatever species you were, and I guessed that in the case of the Uchiha, that meant becoming something like Indra, something with that quarter Ōtsutsuki blood that made you transcendent.

But there was still the part where we were not sure if the slime, if used on a man, would not have more consequences than just becoming stronger.

Like becoming a queen literally.

In other words, being genderbent.

I did not want this life to be summarized as, “I was isekai’d into another world and I ate a slime to get stronger, only to get stronger and turn into a girl.”

Nah. I was cool as regular me. I could wait until they could be sure.

There was also the fact that the seals to be applied, so that I could hide my true strength until the right moment, were like, really, really expensive.

From what I understood, the seals that hid the true strength of my aunt, the ones that made her appear as an average Jonin, were the kind of seals that cost low S rank mission pay. A.K.A. the equivalent of an amount around a million dollars in my past life.

Per seal.

And I would need multiple.

It could be argued that it would be stupid to try to hide, that it would be better to act at the first moment, that Fumiko, others, and I should have eaten the slime and directly coup’d Tobirama if we wished.

And while I liked the idea of it, a lot, a lot of factors would make what should be a satisfying result into a bitter one if they were not handled beforehand.

Like the fact that while Tobirama was not as strong as Madara, as Hashirama, he was still dangerous. A fucking necromancer and teleporter and water bender and sensor and seal master and inventor of half the jutsu that made Konoha’s military viable.

More than that, he was clever. Ruthlessly, terrifyingly clever.

And Tobirama had been born in the Warring States era. Been born in battle. Lived through it longer than most adults in Konoha had been alive.

You did not underestimate someone like that.

That was without mentioning the allies of the Senju clan, the political networks, the favors owed, the relationships built over decades.

And the fact that doing it without being ready, without taking the necessary precautions, would be akin to inviting the other ninja villages to try to fuck us.

Sure, in a scenario where the slime was eaten by me and others, where we had multiple Indra level combatants, it would result in our victory.

But the collateral would be higher than needed.

Better to be patient. Better to prepare. Better to,

My hand closed around a senbon flying toward my neck.

I opened my eyes.

I looked at the wall to my right, the one the senbon had come from, and said flatly, “A senbon, really? It could have killed me, you know. Or hurt me. It could have also made me angry, and you really do not want a ninja angry at you when you are a civilian. Especially when they are supposed to protect you.”

The perpetrator walked through the wall with a shameless smile on his face.

Shusei Uzumaki.

He moved like the laws of physics were suggestions, like solid matter was negotiable, and his grin was the kind that made you want to punch him and laugh at the same time.

Then he threw himself, shamelessly, onto the bed.

Onto my bed.

The disrespect.

“If you look closely,” Shusei said, sprawling out like he owned the place, “you will see little seals on the senbon that would have made it as dangerous as cardboard the moment it came closer to human flesh. More than that, I was sure you would stop it. And here you are, proving me right.”

I threw the senbon back at him.

He caught it between two fingers, right in front of his eye, still smiling that cheeky, infuriating smile.

“You are not the average Uzumaki civilian, are you?” I said, voice flat.

His grin widened. “The same way you are not the average Uchiha genin. How did you know?”

“Good instincts,” I guess I told him. It’s not as if I would tell him that it was because I had seen it coming through the senses of the bugs and flies and worms in the inn. If you could copycat your way to the finish line, why not copycat others like a certain queen of escalation?

Then he started talking about how comfortable my bed was, rolling in it like a child, like he had never experienced a mattress before and needed to test every square inch.

Enough was enough.

My eyes narrowed. My voice dropped low. “Get the fuck out of my room.”

Shusei grinned at me, unrepentant. “Come on, don’t be like that. I didn’t come empty handed.”

With a puff of white smoke, a bottle appeared in his hand.

I stared at him. Then at the bottle. Then back at him.

“Why the fuck,” I said slowly, “did you bring a bottle of sake into my room?”

Two small ceramic cups, the kind with no handles, smooth and simple, and a low table appeared in white smoke too, summoned with the casual ease of someone who did this often.

Shusei sat up, placing everything on the table with exaggerated care. “So that we can get plastered, of course.”

I stared at him.

“There are so many things wrong with what you just said that I do not know where to begin.” I held up a finger. “Firstly, I am supposed to be your bodyguard, which means I should not drink so I would be ready to defend you in case anything wrong happens.” Another finger. “Secondly, I am paid to protect you, not be your friend. We did not meet before today.” A third finger. “And thirdly, I am not older than ten.”

Shusei lifted one finger, matching my energy. “It could be said that you defend me from loneliness by drinking with me. Who knows what could happen to me, what I could choose to do, choose to go if I am too bored? Maybe I will make this mission harder. Wander off. Get kidnapped. Cause an international incident.”

He lifted a second finger. “Secondly, why the fuck should us meeting each other today for the first time stop us from being friends? Friends are not necessarily those you take a long time to know before, or at least that’s how I see it. Sometimes people just click. Gravitate toward each other without one reason or another. A friendship made in one day can be stronger than a friendship of decades if the sentiment, the bond behind it, is strong enough. So yes, we are friends whether you like it or not, and I refuse all your possible refusals.”

A third finger. “Thirdly, seriously, worrying about age? You can kill. Be sent on escort missions. Seduction missions, even, due to the fact that you Uchiha all look as if you were made to be pleasure slaves or something. I mean, have you looked at your aunt? At yourself? Wear a dress, become the femboy I know you can be. Be like your great ancestor Madara! This is your calling! To be a bottom, to lay on your ba,”

I slapped him.

He fell off the bed, hit the floor with a thud, and moaned in pain while rubbing his cheek.

“Never,” I said, voice deadly, “say something like that again, you degenerate.”

Shusei looked up at me, expression wounded. “Why? What did I do? I am just saying stuff based on Madara’s autobiography.”

I sighed. Put my head in my hands. Whispered, “It is that fucking romance novel, is it not?”

Shusei sat up, rubbing his cheek. “I was made to read it so that I would have a little bit more context on the Uchiha clan when I originally was going to leave Uzushio and come to Konoha.” He paused. “My aunt and a lot of her friends, even an elder of my clan, were the ones to give the book to me and tell me it is an autobiography of Madara Uchiha. They said it is okay that you are all yanderes, only desiring deep down to be held, loved, and lewded. That it is your nature, and I should accept you for that.”

He tilted his head, genuinely confused. “Why are you making that face? You are making the same face a lot of Uchiha did when I spoke to them in Konoha.”

Truly, fuck Tobirama. Fuck him. This book was going to haunt me forever isn’t it?

As if the torment could not end, Shusei continued talking.

“Anyways, like I said before, there is nothing to be ashamed of in being a clan where you either go mad due to battle or develop yandere tendencies, and who do best in selection processes where old men and women will probably violate boundaries and that you would have to endure to succeed, bu,”

“Shut up.” My voice was flat. Final. “You know what? Let’s drink. So that I may forget this conversation. Hopefully forever.”

The Uzumaki boy smiled like a fox. “Hehehe.”

He poured sake into a cup, handed it to me, then poured himself one.

He tapped the rim of his cup against mine. Then drank.

I looked at the sake in my cup. Sighed. And drank it.

The taste was clean, slightly sweet, with a rice grain smoothness that coated the tongue. There was a faint burn at the back of the throat, warmth that spread down into the chest, but it was gentle. Not harsh. Not aggressive. Just present.

I looked at the bottle.

It was something that might have been able to leave a little buzz, if not for the fact that my increased vitality and the fact that my willpower, my mind, had been jacked up meant that being drunk would probably be something I would find really difficult in this life.

I guessed it was a good enough price when you were, on the other hand, hard as fuck to kill.

Shusei’s voice brought me out of my thoughts. “It is not strong enough to give you a buzz either, huh? I guess I should not have expected anything from something not made by Uzumaki.”

With Uzumaki having stronger bodies, stronger constitutions, longer lifespans, I could see why they would choose to make drinks that would cater to them, or people like them. Alcohol that could actually affect someone who could survive injuries that would kill normal humans.

“Yeah,” I said, pouring Shusei another drink, then myself. “But you already brought the bottle. So even if it is disappointing, why not finish it?”

Shusei raised his cup. “You are right.”

He took the shot.

I watched him for a moment. Then said, voice casual, “Hey. There was something I wanted to ask.”

He looked at me, eyes bright, curious.

“Did I really look that pathetic when you were spying on me slaughtering the bandits, that you came to offer me alcohol? Or did you come because you thought the alcohol and the massacre would be enough to go further in whatever game you are playing?