The Hokage Building, mid-morning.
Sarutobi Hiruzen signed the last line of a war expenditure report, set down his pen, and exhaled. The document was one of a stack, and the stack was one of several on his desk, and the pattern had been like this for months — the fighting on the front lines had slowed to occasional skirmishes and minor engagements, but the cost of maintaining a wartime posture didn't slow with it. Garrisons in the field, supply lines to small buffer countries that Konoha had been using as barriers, the implied obligation to provide some material consolation to the civilian populations that had absorbed the damage of this war on Konoha's behalf. None of it came cheap, and none of it produced returns.
The Third Shinobi World War had been defensive from Konoha's perspective — reactive, not expansionary. You didn't take territory in a defensive war. You didn't extract tribute. You spent money to stop things from getting worse, and when you were done, you had spent the money and things were not worse, and that was the outcome. The other side's strategy, he had concluded some time ago, was simply to outlast everyone else's willingness to keep spending. They had not openly admitted defeat because admitting defeat was the one thing none of the major villages could afford politically.
So it continued. At low intensity. Draining everyone slightly, continuously.
He picked up the pipe he had purchased recently — a decent piece, carved wood with silver fittings, which had cost him three months of the Hokage's salary because his wife Biwako controlled the household finances with an iron discipline that extended even to him. He lit it and exhaled the first pull of smoke with the satisfaction of a man allowing himself one small thing at the end of a difficult task.
It was not as fine as Finn's. He had been thinking about this with mild annoyance since the chess game. Ivory and jade inlay. He was the Third Hokage of Konoha.
He turned in his chair to look at the village — the rooftops, the training grounds, the green beyond, the cliff face of the Hokage Rock with its carved portraits looking outward over everything. He did this whenever the weight of the desk pressed too heavily. There was something about seeing it from above, whole, that reminded him why the desk existed.
He looked at the Rock. He found his own portrait, as he sometimes did, between the First and Second. He allowed himself the small, private satisfaction of it — a Sarutobi beside the Senju, inscribed in stone, which was not something he had imagined when he was young.
Then he stopped.
He raised his hand, removed his hat, and rubbed his eyes carefully. He replaced the hat. He looked again at the cliff.
Someone was sitting on his head. Or rather, on the top of his carved stone portrait — cross-legged, settled, completely at ease on the highest point of his own sculpted likeness, looking out over Konoha as if this were a perfectly ordinary place to be.
Even from this distance, the silver-white haori was identifiable.
Hiruzen stared at this for a long moment. His jaw had a specific set that happened when he was choosing not to say something.
The office door opened. Jiraiya walked in with the particular energy of someone who has made a decision and is here to announce it rather than discuss it.
"Old man, I'm leaving Konoha again. Just wanted to say so." He paused, registering the direction of Hiruzen's gaze. "Oh. He does that. He said the elevation is good for it."
"For what, exactly?" Hiruzen said.
"He's working on Sage Mode. Said he needed a quiet spot to practice sensing natural energy. Hokage Rock is high up, not much foot traffic, good air." Jiraiya shrugged. "It is actually a reasonable location for that sort of practice, technically."
"I'm aware that it's technically reasonable," Hiruzen said, with a controlled evenness that communicated something rather different from acceptance.
He turned back to face his desk. Rodriguez Finn — S-rank wanted criminal, the single most significant unknown variable Konoha had encountered in recent memory, a man who had been playing shogi in this office four days ago — was currently sitting cross-legged on top of the Third Hokage's stone portrait, practicing sage arts, apparently without any sense that this was an unusual thing to do.
And Orochimaru was involved somehow, which added another layer of things Hiruzen was processing without enough information.
"Orochimaru," he said. "He mentioned they were working on this together."
"He did say that," Jiraiya said, scratching his head. "Though I don't know the details. When we met in the Land of Earth, Finn expressed real interest in Myoboku Mountain. He wanted to go there to study properly. I didn't give him the location." A pause. "I guess this is his alternative approach."
"Is it possible?" Hiruzen asked. "Sage Mode, without the Three Holy Lands? Orochimaru doesn't know it himself."
Jiraiya thought about this with the genuine seriousness of someone who had actually studied the subject. "Theoretically, in the broadest sense — yes. The sacred places aren't what creates Sage Mode. They're institutions that developed methods for teaching it. The underlying principle is just natural energy integration. If you could find a different path to that integration..." He trailed off, then shook his head. "But Orochimaru doesn't know it himself, and neither does Finn. There's no established technique here. I wouldn't expect anything to come of it quickly, if at all. The Three Holy Lands have maintained their monopoly on this knowledge for thousands of years, through countless talented practitioners who tried and failed to develop it independently."
Hiruzen listened to this and found it convincing. Jiraiya's reasoning was sound. The history was sound. He himself had heard Jiraiya describe the specific difficulty of the practice — how long it had taken even with the toads' direct instruction, how many students had attempted it and never arrived at the state.
At the same time, he found himself also thinking that neither Jiraiya nor he was the sort of mind that produced the kind of research Orochimaru produced. Orochimaru's particular habit was making possible things that everyone around him had agreed were impossible. It was annoying and impressive and, at this moment, concerning.
"If he does learn it," Hiruzen said, "and he's already at the level Jiraiya described — the strongest you've encountered, above Hanzo by your assessment —"
"He won't," Jiraiya said, with reasonable confidence. "Not quickly. And probably not from this approach. Let him enjoy the scenery."
Hiruzen looked at the Hokage Rock one more time. The silver-white figure on the stone head had not moved.
"Let's go," he said, to no one. "Let's go, let's go." He waved a hand at Jiraiya. "You're leaving anyway. Go."
"Glad to see me off with such warmth," Jiraiya said.
"I see you too often for warmth to be appropriate," Hiruzen said.
Jiraiya grinned. He said his farewells to the people he needed to say them to — Minato and Kushina, whose living situation in his former house was, he felt, somewhat constrained by the presence of a teacher with sharp ears and unpredictable schedules. He said something brief to Finn on the Rock — Finn opened one eye, waved, closed it again — and then left Konoha with the easy purposefulness of someone who had somewhere to be and was not anxious about getting there. The child of destiny was out there. His novels needed material. The world was large and Konoha was not the whole of it.
The additional bite had not happened.
Finn had asked — had, in fact, extended his arm before Orochimaru had finished explaining why it wasn't going to work. Orochimaru's answer had been patient and methodical in the way of someone who understood that the question would come and had prepared the response.
The cursed seal was a key, not a supply. It had opened the door. The door was now open. Adding more keys to an open door accomplished nothing. What had been established — the body's capacity to accept natural energy, the mechanism of integration that his vitality had forced through sheer biological stubbornness — was already present. The seal had served its purpose. Whether the magatama marks remained or faded was beside the point. The channel existed.
What came next was not a technique anyone could give him. It was practice. Attention. Sitting in a quiet place, genuinely quiet, and learning to perceive what was already around him — natural energy, present in the air and the stone and the living world at all times, the ambient medium through which everything that lived moved without noticing it. Sensing it. Then, eventually, guiding it.
This was the orthodox method. The slow method. The method that the Three Holy Lands had refined over centuries precisely because it was the only reliable way to complete what the initial opening made possible.
So Finn sat on the top of Hokage Rock, cross-legged on the stone crown of the Third Hokage's carved likeness, and did exactly that.
The air up here was clean and still. No foot traffic, no market noise, nothing coming up from the village below except the distant, continuous sound of a place being inhabited. He let his attention expand outward — not with chakra, not with Observation Haki, but with something quieter, something he was still learning the shape of. Reaching for a sensation he had briefly touched and lost, and finding the edges of it again, and beginning, very carefully, to feel his way toward what lay beyond.