Morning sunlight filtered through the inn's paper screens, casting geometric patterns across the wooden floor that shifted slowly as the sun climbed higher in the sky. The room was quiet except for the rhythmic sound of breathing—not the deep, steady breathing of peaceful sleep, but something more comical that would have made anyone watching struggle not to laugh.
Naruto lay sprawled at the corner of his futon in a position that looked profoundly uncomfortable despite his apparent deep sleep. One leg dangled completely off the bedding, his foot twitching occasionally as if he was running in his dreams. His head was tilted back at an angle that would probably give him neck pain when he woke, mouth open in a way that suggested complete unconsciousness.
And with every breath—every single inhalation and exhalation—a bubble formed from his nose. It would expand gradually as he breathed out, growing larger and larger like a balloon being inflated, becoming almost comically oversized before deflating with the next breath in. The cycle repeated endlessly: inflate, deflate, inflate, deflate, accompanied by soft snoring sounds that suggested Naruto was thoroughly enjoying whatever dream he was having.
Jiraiya sat at the small table across the room, already dressed and clearly awake for some time based on the empty tea cup beside him and the completed scroll he was carefully rolling up. His expression carried the focused concentration of someone finishing important work, his hands moving with practiced precision as he secured the scroll with a ribbon and tucked it carefully into his travel pack.
The scroll's contents—whatever he'd spent the early morning hours writing—were sealed away with the kind of deliberate care that suggested importance beyond his usual research notes. His face, briefly visible before he composed it back into his normal cheerful mask, had carried something heavier. Concern, perhaps. Or determination born from knowing difficult truths that couldn't yet be shared.
But that expression vanished as he turned his attention to his still-sleeping student. Jiraiya stood, stretched with theatrical groaning that suggested his joints weren't as young as they used to be, and moved across the room to stand over Naruto's sprawled form.
"Wake up, kid." His voice was conversational rather than shouting, but carried enough volume to penetrate deep sleep. No response except the continued bubble inflation cycle.
"How much longer are you going to sleep?" Jiraiya's tone gained a slight edge. "We've got to move. Places to be. The morning's half gone already."
Naruto mumbled something completely incomprehensible, his face scrunching up briefly before relaxing back into that same slack-jawed expression. The bubble continued its cycle without interruption.
"I'm resting," Naruto finally managed, his words slurred with sleep and muffled by the futon he was half-buried in. "You said rest is important too. Recovery time. Essential for muscle development and chakra pathway healing. I listened to your lecture."
Jiraiya's expression shifted to something between annoyed and amused. "It is important, kid. After training, not like you're some sleeping beauty waiting for true love's kiss to wake you up. You've been asleep for nine hours. That's sufficient recovery for someone your age."
"Five more minutes," Naruto mumbled, already starting to drift back into deeper sleep.
"What's the hurry anyway?" Naruto added, his words becoming even less coherent. "Did you find another spot to do your 'research'? Because I'm not helping with that again. My face still hurts from the last bucket that hit me."
Jiraiya's eye twitched slightly at the reminder of their previous bathhouse misadventure. He moved closer to Naruto's sleeping form, his shadow falling across the boy's face. "If you're not going to wake up voluntarily, I'll make Gamaken sit on you. And then I'll have him swallow you and spit you back out, just like how that snake freak emerged from all those nested serpents. See how you like experiencing that firsthand."
The threat finally penetrated Naruto's sleep-fogged consciousness. His eyes cracked open slightly, blue visible through narrow slits. "That's... that's mean. You wouldn't actually do that."
"Try me. I've done worse to lazy students who refused to wake up for training."
Naruto groaned but finally began the process of actually sitting up, moving with the reluctant slowness of someone whose body desperately wanted to return to unconsciousness. He rubbed his eyes with his fists, yawned widely enough to show all his teeth, and looked at Jiraiya with the betrayed expression of someone forced awake before they were ready.
"Where are we going now anyway?" Naruto asked, his voice still rough with sleep. "And why does it have to be this early? The sun barely looks awake itself."
"Mount Myōboku." Jiraiya's voice carried a note of something that might have been anticipation or might have been nostalgia. "The land of toads, kid. The place where I learned to become a sage, where the greatest toad summoners in history have trained, where you're going to begin the next phase of your training."
The effect on Naruto was immediate and dramatic. His eyes went from sleepy slits to wide-awake circles in an instant. He sat up completely, all traces of drowsiness vanishing as if they'd never existed. "The toad place?! The actual toad summoning homeland?! With the giant toads and the sage training and everything?!"
His enthusiasm was infectious and completely genuine—the kind of pure excitement that only children could really achieve, untainted by cynicism or the knowledge of how difficult training would actually be. "When do we leave? Now? Right now? Should I pack? I should pack! Where's my—"
"Your pack is already ready because I organized it while you were sleeping like the dead." Jiraiya's tone was dry but he couldn't quite suppress the smile tugging at his lips. "Get dressed. We're leaving in ten minutes whether you're ready or not."
Naruto moved with speed that suggested his earlier sleepiness had been completely fabricated, throwing on his clothes with the kind of haste that resulted in his shirt being inside-out initially and having to be corrected. Within five minutes he was dressed, packed, and bouncing on the balls of his feet with barely contained energy.
"I'm ready! Let's go! Mount Myōboku awaits!"
They left the inn after Jiraiya settled their bill with the proprietor, stepping out into morning air that still carried the coolness of night despite the rising sun. The street was quiet, most of the town still waking up, which was exactly what Jiraiya had wanted—fewer witnesses for what they were about to do.
He led Naruto to the inn's front yard, a small space that was mostly packed dirt with a few decorative stones arranged in aesthetic patterns. It was private enough for their purposes, hidden from the street by the building itself and a wooden fence that enclosed the property.
From his pack, Jiraiya withdrew a scroll that was unlike any Naruto had seen before. The paper was aged but well-maintained, and the edges were trimmed in what looked like gold leaf that caught the morning sunlight. Green ink covered much of its visible surface in complex seal work that made Naruto's eyes water slightly when he tried to follow the patterns.
"What is that?" Naruto asked, leaning closer to examine the intricate designs.
"This," Jiraiya said with obvious pride, "is a reverse summoning scroll, specially made for me. It's only given to outstanding sages who've proven themselves worthy of unrestricted access to Mount Myōboku. Haha! Not just anyone gets one of these!"
He paused, then muttered under his breath in a tone that suggested he was talking to himself rather than Naruto: "Of course, that old toad did make me do all sorts of ridiculous tasks to earn it. Fetch quests, combat trials, philosophical debates that lasted for days... nothing comes easy with the sages."
"What does it do?" Naruto was practically vibrating with curiosity now, his earlier sleepiness completely forgotten.
"It allows instant transportation to Mount Myōboku from anywhere in the world," Jiraiya explained, laying the scroll flat on the ground and smoothing it out carefully. "Normal summoning brings creatures from their home to you. Reverse summoning takes you to their home. It's incredibly useful for emergency situations or when you need to consult with the toad elders about something important."
He pulled out a kunai and made a quick cut across his thumb, blood welling up immediately. "To use it, you have to use your blood as a catalyst. Since you don't have any summoning contracts established yet—we're going to fix that while we're there, by the way—you have to go through the basic blood ritual first. "
Jiraiya pressed his bloody thumb against specific points on the scroll, activating seal work that began to glow with a faint blue light. "Kid, come here and do the same. Make a small cut—just enough for blood, you're not trying to lose a finger—and press it where I point."
Naruto approached with uncharacteristic caution, the reality of what they were doing suddenly making him nervous.Making a small cut on his thumb with his own kunai, he watched the blood well up with fascination and slight queasiness.
"Right there," Jiraiya indicated a specific seal on the scroll. "Press firmly and hold for three seconds."
Naruto did as instructed, feeling a strange tingling sensation as his blood made contact with the seal. The glowing intensified, spreading from both their blood markers to encompass the entire scroll in luminous blue-white light.
"Now stand next to me," Jiraiya commanded, placing both hands flat on the scroll's center. "And try not to throw up when we arrive. The spatial displacement can be... disorienting for first-timers."
"Wait, what do you mean throw up? What's going to—"
"Reverse Summoning Jutsu!"
The world lurched.
That was the only way Naruto could describe it later—the sensation of reality itself suddenly moving in a direction that shouldn't exist, of space folding and twisting and pulling him through dimensions that human perception wasn't designed to process. His stomach seemed to relocate somewhere near his throat, his inner ear screamed that he was simultaneously falling and flying, and for a brief moment that felt eternal he was convinced he was going to die from the sheer wrongness of what was happening to his body.
Then, between one heartbeat and the next, they were somewhere else entirely.
Mount Myōboku materialized around them like a painting becoming real. Massive stone statues of toads—some sitting in meditation poses, others seeming to leap toward the sky—rose from landscape that looked like it belonged in a completely different world than the one they'd just left. Waterfalls cascaded down cliff faces that seemed impossibly tall, their mist creating rainbows in the morning light. Trees larger than any Naruto had seen in Fire Country stretched toward a sky that was somehow bluer, clearer, more vibrant than normal skies.
Everything was scaled wrong—not quite big enough to make humans feel like insects, but definitely sized for creatures much larger than people. The paths were too wide, the doorways in distant buildings too tall, the lily pads floating on nearby ponds large enough to support full-grown humans standing upright.
Naruto registered all of this in the half-second before his body's rebellion against the spatial displacement caught up with him. He collapsed forward onto his hands and knees, dry heaving, his stomach trying desperately to expel contents that fortunately hadn't had time to settle from breakfast.
"Ahhhhh," he groaned, the sound mixing distress and nausea in equal measure. "Warning! You could have given me a warning!"
Jiraiya, standing perfectly fine beside him without any apparent ill effects, laughed with genuine amusement. "Just like him! Hahaha! Your father had exactly the same reaction the first time I brought him here. Spent a good five minutes convinced he was dying before he recovered enough to be embarrassed about it."
"You pervy sage," Naruto gasped between heaves, "you could have given me a heads-up! Told me what it would feel like! Prepared me mentally for whatever that... that horrible sensation was!"
"Haha, kid, what would you have done if I did?" Jiraiya was clearly enjoying this far too much, his grin wide and unrepentant. "There's no way to prepare for your first spatial displacement. Knowing it's coming doesn't make it any less disorienting. Better to just experience it and get the acclimation over with."
"I would have mentally prepared," Naruto insisted, though his argument was significantly undermined by another wave of nausea that made him groan. "I would have... I don't know, breathed differently or centered my chakra or something!"
Jiraiya moved forward, walking past Naruto's collapsed form with the casual ease of someone who'd made this journey hundreds of times. Then, with the same motion someone might use to pick up a misbehaving cat, he grabbed Naruto by the back of his collar and hauled him upright with one hand.
"Beat it, kid. It's not that bad. You're already recovering—see? Your color's coming back and you're complaining coherently instead of just making those pathetic groaning sounds. That's progress!" He started walking, still holding Naruto by the collar, essentially dragging him forward like luggage. "Now come on. We've got people to meet, contracts to sign, and training to begin. Welcome to Mount Myōboku, Naruto. Try not to embarrass me too much in front of the Elder Toads."
Naruto, still slightly green but recovering with the resilience of youth, found his feet and started walking properly instead of being dragged. His eyes were adjusting to his surroundings now, really seeing Mount Myōboku for the first time, and despite the lingering nausea, wonder was beginning to replace discomfort.
This place—with its impossible architecture and vibrant nature and the sense of being somewhere fundamentally different from the normal world—was where he'd learn to summon toads. Where he'd begin training that might eventually make him as strong as his father had been, as strong as Jiraiya was now.
"Pervy Sage?" Naruto asked as they walked deeper into Mount Myōboku, the landscape growing more surreal with each step.
"What now, kid?"
"Thank you. For bringing me here. For teaching me. For... for everything, really."
Jiraiya's hand moved to ruffle Naruto's hair with rough affection. "Don't get sentimental on me yet. Save that for after you've actually completed the training. Mount Myōboku doesn't coddle students, and the toads are going to work you harder than you've ever been worked before. You might be cursing my name by the end of the week."
"I can handle it," Naruto said with the confidence of someone who had no idea what they were committing to. "Whatever they throw at me, I'll handle it. That's a promise."
"We'll see, kid. We'll see."
They continued walking until they reached what appeared to be a central plaza of sorts—a massive open space surrounded by those oversized stone structures, with a pond so large it looked more like a lake occupying most of the center. The water was crystal clear, showing depths that suggested it was much deeper than any normal pond had right to be.
Then the water erupted.
A toad emerged from the depths—but calling it a toad was like calling a mountain a hill. The creature was easily the size of a large building, orange-skinned with dark markings that looked almost like tattoos, wearing what appeared to be a blue happi coat and carrying a massive kiseru pipe that was larger than Naruto's entire body. Its eyes were sharp and intelligent, tracking their approach with the kind of assessment that suggested this was no mere animal but a being with intelligence and personality as developed as any human's.
"Oh, Jiraiya-boy!" The Boss Toad's voice was deep and resonant, carrying across the plaza with ease despite not being particularly loud. "You've returned! And brought a guest, I see. Who's this youngster you've dragged to our mountain?"
Jiraiya bowed respectfully—not deeply, but with genuine deference that Naruto had never seen him show anyone before. "Gamabunta, it's good to see you again. This is someone special. This is Minato's son. My student now. I'm taking him to meet the Elder Sage."
Gamabunta's eyes widened slightly, his pipe lowering as he studied Naruto with new intensity. "Minato's boy? Well, well. I can see the resemblance now that you mention it." The massive toad's voice became warmer. "Your father was a good man, kid. One of the best summoners I ever worked with. You've got big shoes to fill."
"I'll do my best, " Naruto called up, craning his neck to look at Gamabunta's face so far above.
"Hah! Polite too. Unlike someone who calls himself sage." looing at Jiraiya. Gamabunta took a long pull from his pipe. "My wife's making something special for lunch. You boys should stop by after you're done with the Elder. Can't have Minato's son visiting without proper hospitality."
With that, the massive toad launched himself backward into the pond with a leap that sent water cascading in all directions, soaking Naruto and Jiraiya both despite them being dozens of feet from the water's edge.
"He seems nice," Naruto said, wringing water from his shirt.
"He's the Boss Summon. Most powerful toad in Mount Myōboku aside from the Elder Sages. If you can earn his respect and partnership, you'll have access to combat capabilities that most shinobi can only dream about." Jiraiya was also soaked but didn't seem bothered. "Now come on. The Elder Sages don't like to be kept waiting."
They walked to a structure that looked ancient even by Mount Myōboku's standards—a temple carved directly into the mountain face, its entrance flanked by statues so weathered that their original features were barely distinguishable. Inside, the temperature dropped noticeably, and the air carried a weight that suggested powerful chakra had saturated this place for centuries.
A small toad—only about two feet tall, wearing what looked like a traditional sage's robe and carrying a staff nearly as tall as he was—hopped into view. His face was wrinkled with age, and he moved with the careful deliberation of someone whose body no longer moved as easily as it once had.
"Jiraiya-boy," the small toad's voice was surprisingly strong despite his apparent age. "You're late. I expected you three days ago based on your last message. What kept you?"
"Fukasaku-sama," Jiraiya bowed more deeply this time, genuine respect clear in his posture. "We had some complications—"
"Complications?!" Fukasaku's staff struck the ground with enough force to crack the stone.
"Well, something important came up, so I had to take a little detour," Jiraiya interrupted quickly, rubbing the back of his neck. "I apologize for the tardiness."
"More like peeking into the ladies' baths is the important work," Naruto muttered under his breath, hands tucked behind his head as he stood beside him.
In an instant, Jiraiya spun around, whacking Naruto square in the face with the heavy scroll strapped to his back.
"Ow—! What was that for?!" Naruto yelped, tumbling to the ground.
Jiraiya leaned over him, voice loud at first: "Kid, you should watch where you're standing!"Then, lowering his tone so only Naruto could hear, he added through gritted teeth,"Why are you bringing that up, huh? You want to train all day without lunch?"
Fukasaku harrumphed but seemed mollified. Then his eyes—sharp despite his age—fixed on Naruto. "So this is Minato's boy. Doesn't look like much. Scrawny. Probably weak chakra control based on that disheveled appearance. And he's already soaking wet. Can't even avoid a splash from Gamabunta? This is what you brought me to train?"
"He's got potential," Jiraiya said firmly. "More than his father had at this age, if I'm being honest. The Nine-Tails' chakra gives him reserves that most shinobi never develop, and once his control improves, he'll be formidable."
"The Nine-Tails, eh?" Fukasaku hopped closer, circling Naruto with assessment that made the boy feel like he was being examined by a particularly demanding teacher. "That's a double-edged sword if ever there was one. Could make him powerful. Could also make him unstable, uncontrollable, dangerous to everyone around him. We'll see. Lets take him to the Great Sage. ."
They followed Fukasaku deeper into the temple, the passages growing narrower and more ancient with each turn. Finally, they emerged into a chamber so large it seemed impossible to fit inside the mountain, its ceiling lost in shadows high above. In the center, on a throne carved from a single massive piece of stone, sat the oldest toad Naruto had ever seen.
The Great Toad Sage Gamamaru looked like he might crumble to dust at any moment. His skin was wrinkled beyond description, his eyes closed, a sleeping cap perched on his head at a jaunty angle that suggested he'd fallen asleep wearing it and never bothered to adjust it. He appeared to be... sleeping? Possibly dead? It was genuinely hard to tell.
"Great Sage," Fukasaku called out loudly. "Jiraiya-boy has brought Minato's son. The one you prophesied about!"
One of Gamamaru's eyes cracked open, revealing cloudy depths that somehow still seemed to see everything with perfect clarity. "Eh? What's that? Speak up, Fukasaku! My hearing isn't what it used to be!"
"THE BOY!" Fukasaku shouted. "MINATO'S SON! THE PROPHECY!"
"Oh, yes, yes, the prophecy..." Gamamaru's other eye opened, and both focused on Naruto with sudden intensity that made the boy feel pinned in place. "Come closer, child. Let me see you properly."
Naruto approached hesitantly, very aware that he was standing before a being that had probably lived for centuries, that had seen the rise and fall of nations, that knew secrets about the world that most people couldn't imagine.
Gamamaru stared at him for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Then he spoke, and his voice—when it came—carried weight that made the very air seem heavier.
"The child of prophecy. The one who will face a choice that shapes the world's future. But which path will you choose, young one? Light or darkness? Salvation or destruction? Even I cannot see clearly past the moment of decision."
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