"I heard Tsuna was seen at the hospital this morning?" The shinobi asked after a short pause.
"She can't just hang out in casinos and drink sake in bars all the time, it's time for her to do something useful for the clan," the guest said with a slight squint, "and after her shift, she'll have to repair all the damage done to the park in the Senju district, without using any chakra. This will serve as a good lesson for Tsunade and an opportunity to rein in her temper, and then we'll see how it goes.
On the ship, I was given a separate tiny cabin, two by two, a large part of which was taken up by a bunk, a small table, and a chair, after which I was simply ignored, except for the unobtrusive observation of the guards. I wasn't eager to communicate myself, spending almost the entire voyage inside, meditating spiritually, since I had a lot of free time.
After two years of apprenticeship at the Great Water Temple, the kanpeki ningyo began his formal training, and this was the first thing he was taught. One can spend weeks in such a trance, without food or sleep, without causing any harm to the body, but that was not its peculiarity — after the first five months of practice, Ishikawa turned out to be the most developed in terms of developing a balanced chakra of all the perfect marionettes, practically ceasing to need my nourishment.
The senior monks claimed that this meditation served as the foundation of spiritual practices and strengthened the spirit of the student. It seemed that it not only strengthened the spirit, but also accelerated the formation of the soul in the captured body.
All these spiritual practices and their necessity caused me considerable skepticism, but such obvious results could not be denied.
What's more, the abbot and senior monks somehow determined at our first meeting that the soul of the kanpeki ningyo was weakened or damaged, and for this reason alone allowed me to join the temple as a novice, despite my past as a shinobi. They were also quite surprised by the absence of an aura of grave sins.
If I had previously considered temples to be just another group of shinobi, albeit ones who used only the yin component, such discoveries greatly shook my faith.
In the back of my mind, there was a vague memory of some kind of demon, but that was all I could scrape out of my almost vanished memories, even with the Yamanaka technique, and there was no mention of anything like that in the records.
In any case, the long days of idleness were begging for me to test the effects of meditation on myself, and fortunately, the clone's memories allowed me to find the right path much faster — I had a strong suspicion that it would benefit the use of Nara's hijutsu and improve my overall control over chakra.
And there, the rare transmissions of memories from the kanpeki ningyo might throw up something else interesting. The only downside to spiritual meditation was that you had to renounce all senses that allowed you to perceive the outside world, including your senses, so the piercing scream from outside didn't immediately reach my consciousness.
"Pirates!"
It took me almost a minute to come to my senses, and even then, I was left with a kind of detached calm as I removed the barrier from the cabin and stepped out onto the deck, turning my previously suppressed senses back on full power. I was not surprised to notice that the distance at which I could sense the sources of chakra had increased slightly.
"The sea rats are here," an elderly sailor puffed through his pipe not far from me. 'Nothing ever teaches them a lesson."
"Do you see them often?' I asked him.
Two sails were visible on the horizon, and they had not yet entered my range of perception, so I could only guess at the presence of ninja among the pirates.
"Yes, read it, every fifth voyage," the sailor shrugged.
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