After coming back to the village with Gaara, Ren was looking forward to spending some quality time with Temari. Unfortunately for him, any plans instantly went through because pretty much everyone in Suna was busy with preparations for the upcoming war. Temari more than others, as she had to attend every single strategy meeting or council meeting in her capacity as the Kazekage successor.
Two weeks quickly passed, and Ren had seen her only when he deliberately went to the Kazekage tower to have lunch with her. And even then, sometimes he did not succeed because she had a meeting or was busy with work.
Every time he had seen her, though, she looked more and more harried. It tugged at Ren's heart, yet there was nothing he could do to help her. As somebody who wasn't officially from Suna, he wasn't invited to these meetings. Ebizo apologetically explained that it wouldn't look good... or something.
On one hand, these meetings would reveal Suna's military secrets by default, so it was understandable that many of those attending would have a problem with a Konoha ninja being there, getting these for free.
This was one situation where Ren's outward allegiance screwed him up. He had won a lot of trust with his actions, but it seemed that revealing certain things to somebody who still wore a Konoha forehead protector was a step too much.
In fact, during one of the earlier successful lunches with Temari, she had informed him with a troubled expression that she was forbidden from revealing certain things to him.
Considering the ANBU sloppily hiding outside the room, trying to eavesdrop, Ren just rolled his eyes at her and said he did not care while ruffling the flustered girls' hair and getting an adorable glare with no bite behind it in return.
It was just the nature of their job.
That definitely was not one of Ebizo's schemes. Ren knew the old man enough to know he would never be this sloppy. Somebody most likely wanted Temari to blab so they could protest her competency for the position as the Kazekage successor.
It wasn't very inspired, but Ren had to give this mystery schemer credit where it was due. It could have easily worked. Privately, Ren just chuckled in his mind and shook his head at the fact that even this close to war, internal political maneuvering and scheming were still going strong.
To be fair, he did not try to fight it much. Admittedly, Ren did not pay a lot of attention to their reasons for keeping him out because he really, but really did not want to actually be a part of these meetings in the first place.
When it came to strategy and planning how to fight and win a war, he was not your guy. He didn't have good strategic thinking. He knew that much already in his previous life. Even if he were there, he would not have been of more use to them than an exceptionally handsome room decoration.
It suited him just fine to be excluded!
On the other hand, only now did he realize he had sort of left Temari in it alone. Alas, it was one of these experiences she had to go through. It would help her in the future once she got the fancy hat. Leadership positions gave a lot of authority, but they came with a lot of responsibility, and this would just give a glimpse to Temari of how heavy the burden of the hat was going to be in the future if problems arose.
Thinking deeply about that, Ren realized he honestly wouldn't have minded if Temari decided she no longer wanted to be the Kazekage. It would frankly suit him just fine. They could simply all retreat to their Little Garden, spending their time happily there. Just him, the girls, tinkering with seals, and fuck the world around them.
Didn't that sound like the dream?
Ren wistfully sighed as he returned to reality from his daydreaming and looked down at the project in front of him. He had a generic Sunagakure war fan on a table in front of him, slightly blackened in a few places due to chakra burns, as several seal lines covered it, pulsing with chakra.
These two weeks, Ren had nothing else to do other than occasionally visit the Little Garden to spend time with Hinata and Ino. But they, too, were busy as Konoha was in a state of war preparation as well. Even if Ino was fully willing to play hooky from her work for him, as her teacher, how could he allow that?
He gave her a tap to the forehead and sent her back to work the first time she appeared in front of him in the Little Garden, wearing only skimpy underwear. She was all grumpy and pouty, glaring at the air in front of her, but later on, they shared a laugh about it over a mug of hot chocolate.
Ren chuckled as his hands started to tinker with the seals on the fan. He appreciated Ino's... initiative to seduce him. But it was not worth the two hours of complaining he would have to suffer through if her dad found out she wasn't at her workplace during work hours.
He would bitch and moan at Ino for it, and then, showing that she was his daughter, Ino would bitch and moan about it to Ren because Hinata would just give her a blank, 'Are you an idiot?' look, unwilling to entertain her antics.
One time was enough of that. And if it cost him a bit of hanky-panky, that was a price he was nobly willing to pay!
Hah! Sometimes, he was just as righteous as this Tang San dude he remembered from a story in his previous life.
The damned bastard.
"Oooh." Ren owlishly blinked at the war fan in front of him, "I got it." He exclaimed in surprise as he felt the chakra in the seal stably pulse, properly contained, which signified that his efforts were finally successful.
Attempt number one hundred twenty-seven was it. Even Ren had a hard time believing it.
He had a lot of free time during the past two weeks, so he decided to buckle up and go build Temari the seals for her war fan that would make it easier for her to change the temperature of her winds. She put in a lot of effort into that in her recent training, but she was still not that good with it.
According to Ino, that was only natural. She needed tens of thousands of mental hours of work to get a good result with it. Ino was actually surprised at how quickly Temari was advancing with the technique.
Sadly, it was nowhere around combat-ready. And Ren's new seal was supposed to solve that. Well, it was supposed to do that, but his attempts to put something together were failing one after another for this or that reason.
Creating a weapon on the level of the Kirigakure's special swords was turning out to be pretty tough.
But Ren wasn't discouraged. He was actually pretty happy. He was learning a lot with each attempt. He even relegated ten shadow clones to solely help him with this project, doing the busy work like creating smaller, simpler seal components of the greater whole to speed up the process.
In his last attempt, he had gotten the idea of incorporating a small sub-seal that would take a little bit of the user's chakra and automatically convert it into a crude fire chakra before mixing it into the technique.
It was inferior to a proper fire chakra molded by an experienced ninja. Maybe on the level of somebody who had only fiddled with the fire nature transformation a teensy bit. But it turned out to be enough.
The new seal matrix should allow Temari to easily heat up her wind techniques during use. How much, well, that would depend on her grasp of wind temperature control, but Ren had high hopes for her.
Unfortunately, the current seal could not solve the problem with the other spectrum of that technique. Ino could just as easily make her winds freezing as she could make them boiling hot.
... Now that he thought about it, Ren really did not understand why the girl was not using that in combat.
He disgruntledly snorted under his nose. 'Yamanka and her obsession with mental techniques.' He inwardly grumbled. She could flash-boil people alive in a split second over a large area, but no! She would rather drive them mad with genjutsu and her custom-made trademark Yamanaka mind-whammy-wham.
Not for the first time did Ren wonder where he had gone wrong with that girl.
Ren's mind started going through the seal, trying to find any inconsistency or issue, while he also distractedly pondered how to incorporate the whole 'freezing' part into the current seal. He didn't want to create a whole new seal and somehow put them together. Preferably, he wanted one seal to do both.
The more he thought about it, the bigger the frown on his face became. But he felt like he was onto something. Using his chakra to inscribe his recently created fire chakra transformation seal on a paper, he powered it up, creating a small flame that instantly started burning the paper.
Letting out a long hum, Ren's eyebrows furrowed. He took a pencil and started deconstructing the seal, altering a small part before he put it together. Staring at the final result, Ren awkwardly chuckled.
"There is no way this works, right?" He muttered, feeling both anticipation and trepidation as he powered the seal up.
Instantly, a flame appeared, this time a blue one, and the paper... froze solid as Ren hissed in pain, letting go of it while shaking his hand and wincing due to the chilled tips of his fingers.
The blue flame disappeared the second Ren stopped supplying chakra, and as the paper dropped to the floor, it shattered into countless icy shards under Ren's bewildered stare. He was so startled, he almost forgot about the pain in his hand after seeing it.
"Holy shit, I just innovated the entire field on a fluke, didn't I?" Ren joyfully whispered with a silly grin.
Reading all those xianxia novels wasn't in vain! Flames could be cold, too!
For a moment, he wondered why nobody had tried this, but then he felt a twinge of pain in his fingers and realized that somebody probably did try, only to die because he or she made his internal organs into a popsicle.
Fire release was usually started by internally molding the chakra in the lungs... Ren subconsciously shuddered at the thought of how badly that kind of experimentation could go. There would not be a second try.
He remembered the usually disregarded warnings in the academy to not try jutsu on their own because, for example, the fire techniques tended to burn the lungs or throat if done wrongly. There were probably a lot of people dying of burnt lungs before somebody finally figured out how to do fire release safely and spread the knowledge.
'That, or Indra used his cheaty powers to figure it out and taught it to his descendants, and the knowledge spread around throughout the years.' Ren inwardly hummed while using his chakra to soothe his chilled fingers.
Suddenly, a seal alerted him that somebody had entered the house, and he quickly checked the surveillance seal near the door, only to see tired Temari in the hall, sitting down on a chair with a groan before she started to take off her sandals.
Perking up, all thoughts of subsequent experiments were gone from his mind nearly instantly. Science could wait. His girl was finally home!
Ren quickly walked out of his impromptu workshop in the basement with a skip in his step.