"Well?" said Sakura expectantly, planting her hands on her shapely hips. "Care to explain yourself, System?"
Sakura was back in her room.
She still had around half an hour to get her affairs in order— feeding her goldfish, watering the plants, restocking her weapon pouches and filling her backpack with essentials— before she had to join up with the others.
But rather than doing any of those things, Sakura was determined to get some answers from her System!
[Does the Host remember the Mōryō, the otherworldly demon?]
How could Sakura forget? The demon had torn out her heart… though you wouldn't know it just by looking at her.
"What's he got to do with anything?" asked Sakura suspiciously, glancing at the shelf above her bed. "He's right there— in one of those scrolls…"
Hang on, which one of them contained the froggified demon lord, again?
[As the Host is almost certainly aware, chakra is composed of equal parts physical and spiritual energies spun together— that is to say, moulded, or kneaded. These two types of energies are respectively extracted from the Host's cells and mind in the form of adenosine triphosphate and mentality— thus, the terms extracting or refining chakra are sometimes used interchangeably with moulding and kneading—]
"Get to the point," snapped Sakura. "I need to meet my teammates at the village gates, in like, five minutes."
Basically, there was much more to reality than could be seen at first glance.
The world Sakura inhabited and interacted with on a daily basis, composed of atoms and molecules, was the physical plane. Overlapping with the real world was the spiritual plane: a mysterious, barely understood world of pure imagination and souls, composed of all sentient beings' collective subconsciousness.
Normally, the physical and spiritual planes remained parallel to each other, never intersecting—the closest one could get to the spiritual plane was in one's dreams.
However, ever since the Sage of Six Paths had granted humanity the miracle known as chakra— which allowed shinobi to link their physical and mental energies like the Ōtsutsuki— the gap between truth and fiction had only continued narrowing, starting with the first use of the Infinite Tsukuyomi against the inhabitants of the Land of Ancestors a thousand years ago… and the subsequent creation of the Pure Land by the Sage of Six Paths to hold their souls when they became Zetsu.
[The spiritual plane is akin to a mirror held up to the physical plane, reflecting a distorted, half-forgotten image of reality. But just as a reflection must always mirror the original's gestures, and a shadow always follow the original's movements… so must reality follow what it sees staring back in the looking glass.]
Mind over matter!
"But…" said Sakura hesitantly.
[How do we Systems gain the power to alter reality itself? Why do we Systems have you reincarnators accomplish ridiculous tasks? It's not for the fun of it, but to cement your presence in the spiritual world. As the Hosts continue to gain either fame or infamy, the very concept of their existence and powers becomes ingrained in the population's subconscious, thus allowing us Systems to grant the Hosts ever more power.]
In other words, the more Sakura became known, the greater share of the world's administrator privileges the System could obtain. It was an infinite feedback loop: with these greater privileges, the System could give her more power, thus allowing her to become more famous… and so on and so forth.
Because people are easier to manipulate than the natural laws that bind them!
[Right before the Host's transmigration, a few thousand years or so ago, the System implanted the idea of a village of breast executioners in the minds of the humans living in the area that would one day become the Land of Fire. With the reflection in place, all that was left to do was await the person to be reflected— you, the Host.]
"So, sort of like Inception?" Sakura asked uncertainly. "But if Manyū Village is only supposed to exist in the spiritual plane, how come it's appeared in reality?"
[…]
"Hellooo?" Sakura ventured. "Are you still there? System? Status?"
The status panel appeared, but when Sakura attempted to scroll down, she found that the user interface had frozen, displaying a greater number of bugged-out characters than usual.
"System?" Sakura said hesitantly. "You're scaring me…"
Without warning, the System gave a loud beep and bluescreened, giving Sakura quite a start. She tried calling it nicely at first, then resorted to calling it names, but it was all for naught— the System was no longer responding.
Sakura glanced up at her wall clock.
She needed to be at the village gates in two minutes, so she quickly slipped on her fingerless gloves, strapped a shuriken pouch to her inner thigh, shoved Naruto's birthday gift in her pocket, and filled her backpack with spare clothes and ration pills before running out the door, grabbing her swords from the coat stand as she went.
…
"You're late," said Kakashi lazily as Sakura arrived, her breasts still bouncing a good five seconds after she'd come to a stop. "That's unlike you, Sakura."
It seemed Sakura was the last to arrive at the village gates.
Koharu had turned up her nose at Sakura in visible disapproval of her low-cut dress, while judging by Naruto's and Chiriku's constipated-looking expressions, they were clearly struggling not to cream their trousers on the spot.
Anyway, weren't monks supposed to renounce all worldly desires? Some enlightened soul Chiriku turned out to be… as expected of one of Asuma's friends.
"You're the last person I want to hear that from, Kakashi-sensei," Sakura replied, puffing up her cheeks in annoyance. "I…"
Sakura's voice trailed off, her eyes growing as round as saucers. Something had just shifted beyond the gates— something big and blue, with green eyes and slit-shaped pupils!
"Right, I forgot to explain," explained Kakashi. "This here's Aoda, Sasuke's summoned snake. He's the one who brought back the message you read earlier."
"Is the party all here?" Aoda inquired politely, smelling the air with his forked tongue. "If so, please gather at my side. Unless Sasuke-sama has run into some mishap, he should summon me back to his side within the next few minutes."
"Heh," Naruto scoffed, folding his arms and shaking his head smugly. "He's got nothing on the Boss Toad."
Just by looking at Aoda's head through the gateway, Sakura could tell the snake was just as big as Manda, Orochimaru's personal summons. But it wasn't as if the size of their summons was a competition… because it wouldn't be much of a contest if it was, considering Lady Katsuyu's true size!
"All right, that's quite enough," sighed Kakashi. "Everyone in position. Wouldn't want to miss our ride, would we?"
Everyone stepped closer to Aoda, each laying a hand on his smooth, cool scales.
…
Meanwhile, hundreds of kilometres away…
"Summoning Jutsu!"
Sasuke slammed his bloody palm on the ground, intricate jutsu formulas spiralling outwards from the epicentre. Space and time folded in on themselves, and white smoke erupted beneath his hand. In a flash, the raven-haired boy was elevated above the treeline, standing on Aoda's snout.
The smoke rapidly dispersed, and Sasuke watched as Sakura ran to the edge of the cliff where he had set up camp and peered down.
"Tanimagakure," Sakura said in wonder. "The Village Hidden in the Cleavage…"
Sitting neatly between two round hills lay a very small, two-storey-tall castle keep, surrounded by low walls that resembled those of the Hyūga clan's compound, with small towers at each corner. The castle town was ringed by a few pine trees and the sort of thatched huts peasants lived in, and further down the valley below, Sakura could even see the rice fields they cultivated, split cleanly in half by the river running along the valley floor…