By the time I hit four, I'd basically turned the temple into my private classroom. My brain was soaking up Sealing Techniques like a high-speed fiber optic line. Runes and formulas that were supposedly "obscure" or "holy" just looked like logic gates and circuit diagrams to me.
One afternoon, I was using a twig to sketch out a complex composite seal in the dirt floor, trying to figure out why the energy nodes were bottlenecking. Bunpuku sat nearby, giving me occasional pointers.
"See here? The energy reflux is moving way too fast," Bunpuku said, tapping the dirt with his finger. "It's going to fry the main structure. You need to add a buffering 'Vortex' rune to slow the flow."
I nodded, already visualizing the fix. Okay, it's a standard capacitor issue. Add the vortex to handle the surge.
"Psh, a Vortex rune? That's some low-efficiency garbage right there," Shukaku's raspy voice cut in from the shadows. "Why do you humans love making things so complicated? Just use a reverse 'Repulsion' field to shove the energy back where it came from. Simple, brutal, and effective."
I stopped my twig. "A Repulsion field? I haven't seen that in any of the textbooks."
"That's because your 'textbooks' are basically kindergartner doodles!" Shukaku snorted. "Most of the real tech was lost centuries ago. You guys are just playing with the scraps."
"Lost tech?" I asked. My interest was piqued. As an engineer, I knew that humanity usually builds on what came before but sometimes, civilizations fall and take their best ideas with them. "What was it like back then? Was the world different?"
Bunpuku opened his eyes, but he stayed quiet. He looked like he wanted to say something, but then he just sighed. He was letting the "eyewitness" take the floor.
"Back then?" Shukaku's voice suddenly got weirdly distant. It sounded less like a monster and more like a bitter old man. "Kid, this world wasn't always a giant, miserable sandbox. Especially not this place."
He seemed to "point" toward the desert outside with a ripple of sandy chakra.
"The Land of Wind?" I looked out the door. "It's... well, it's just sand and more sand."
"Sand?! Bah!" Shukaku sounded genuinely offended. "Before I was even a spark in the Old Man's eye, this place was habitable. There were trees. There was actual running water. It wasn't the Garden of Eden, but it wasn't this hellhole."
I was stunned. The Land of Wind... used to have forests? "Then what happened? Climate change? Total war?"
"It was that woman," Shukaku growled, and for the first time, I heard a trace of real, primal fear in his voice. "The one from beyond the stars. Kaguya."
Otsutsuki Kaguya.
The name hit my brain like a lightning bolt. I remembered fragments of the story from my old life the "final boss," the mother of all chakra.
"That woman," Shukaku continued, "she planted a damn tree in this dirt. And that tree... it didn't just grow. It was a parasite. It sucked the life force out of the entire planet like a giant straw. The rivers dried up because the tree needed the water. The soil turned to dust because the tree wanted the nutrients. And this land? This land was the first one to get stripped bare."
I felt a chill run down my spine. This wasn't just "magic." This was a planet-scale environmental strip-mining operation.
"What happened to the tree?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
"She ate the fruit. She got the power," Shukaku snorted. "And then her two sons - Hagoromo and Hamura had to clean up the mess. They fought their mother until the literal foundations of the world cracked. That was a real war, kid. Mountains turned into pebbles."
"The Sage of Six Paths..." I muttered.
"Oh, so you've heard of the Old Man?" Shukaku sounded surprised. "Yeah, that was him. He and his brother fought Kaguya until the topography of the continents was unrecognizable. This area, already sucked dry by the tree, got pulverized by the crossfire. Water sources were cut off. The ecosystem collapsed. All that was left was this endless yellow grit."
Silence fell over the temple.
I looked down at the half-drawn seal in the dirt. Suddenly, it looked so small.
I was an engineer. I understood the concept of energy conservation. If you pull energy out of a system without putting anything back, the system collapses. That's what the "Divine Tree" had done. It had treated the planet like a disposable battery, and Sunagakure was just the empty casing left behind.
This explained why Suna was so poor. Why the people were so desperate. The "Land of Wind" wasn't a natural desert; it was a crime scene. A scar left over from a war between gods.
Bunpuku finally spoke up, his voice heavy. "Ashes to ashes, Sayo. The mistakes of the past are what we're living in now. What Shukaku says is true this desert is what happens when power is used without any thought for the cost."
I lowered my head, staring at the ground. Chakra was the most incredible energy source I'd ever seen, but it was also the most dangerous. It could build a Gundam, sure. But it could also turn a continent into a graveyard.
But as I sat there, a crazy, arrogant thought started to take root in my head.
If the desert was caused by the reckless plunder of energy... could it be fixed by the precise application of it? If you could map the energy flows well enough, could you bring the water back? Could you "reboot" the ecosystem?
It was a project so big it was practically insane. But looking at the sand outside, I realized I didn't want to just build a cool robot. I wanted to fix the world that robot would stand on.
Shukaku went quiet, probably tired of his own history lesson. But I couldn't stop thinking.
The door to Sealing was open. Now, I just had to see how far it went.