.When he began, Tetsu didn't know he was doing anything wrong. Lying, insulated by several pounds of branches and leaves right in front of his face, he could feel the brisk draft pour in with the sunlight towards both his feet and head. He couldn't move without destroying the whole shelter, and you really did have to overcome the feeling of claustrophobia, the desire to stretch out and prove to yourself that you were, in fact, free (if you wanted to be). It wasn't unusual for the boy to find himself and his hut riddled with rats by the morning. He didn't mind it. He would destroy the shelter if he found a spider on himself, but even those he wasn't too afraid of, a little shiver down his spine tended to rid him of any lingering anxieties. Rats were different though. As long as they didn't bite him, he was fine with sharing his dwelling with the creatures, and in fact tended to find himself relating to the creatures as he watched them pulsate through the densely packed foliage. They were scoundrels without the human baggage, only seeking, wherever they could, someone else's food and warmth, infamously capable of getting themselves out of dangerous circumstances, which seemed to embolden the creature, allowing it to burrow through the unknown, and get remarkably close to even the most dangerous of creatures. In this case, a shinobi.
On that day, he found a particularly old and cantankerous looking rat, slowly digging it's way through the shelter. It was blind, like him, a kind of badge of honour for it's toughness, showing the world that he had managed to live this long on boldness alone. Tetsu wanted to follow the thing as it aimlessly wandered out of his den and into the outside world.
This was probably why the boy had to live outdoors too. Outside of his vices, he wasn't exactly motivated to seek out missions every day of the week, a consequence that lay somewhere in between overvaluing his freedom (which he ended up doing nothing with), and, for some reason, the upper echelon of the village not apparently seeming to find much use for him when he wasn't begging for work. His methods, it seemed were a bit too unconventional to keep them happy; a fact that would become more apparent as the day wore on and he continued to track the old rat to what would become it's final resting place.
Soldiers like him didn't like fame. His immediate impulse to the recognition of this trend was to brush it off as just another manifestation of the false humility that seemed to plague his little village. Any deeper investigation into that thought, however, would expose the notion as being contradictory with basic observations. The shinobi that could or did become famous for their ability rarely seemed to be shy about their strength; what they wanted to conceal, instead, was their specific techniques, giving potential opponents as little opportunity as possible to prepare, in advance, techniques that could counter them. While it was reasonable, and maybe Tetsu was so focused on it because he simply wanted to be famous and well known for his greatness, he was skeptical about how uniformly the tendency, and others like it too, seemed to manifest themselves in the shinobi world.
When he caught up with the rat, he found that it had burrowed itself halfway into a small hole, and was breathing heavily, looking out at the outside world. 'Was this going to be your last stand, little guy?' Even though the rat's eyes were completely white, the boy had a sense that it was "watching" him, and yet it didn't budge. Being kept on missions constantly wasn't good for a soldier, although it was fine for the state. You end up only being able to see the world in front of you, the immediate threats that faced you. Tetsu didn't know much about many of the infamous Ninja that had passed down vaguely from legends and hushed whispers. The shinobi of old, Sarunishi, Aion, whichever name tended to be uttered in hushed tones and passed down through the world's collective memory, but he had the same sense of these people that everyone else had. That these were the sorts of fighters who were, in some ways, known for their records of murders, but in many other ways seemed like they must have been innovators. He didn't know this for sure, of course, but was inclined to compare the success of fighters to that of a business. Those businesses that manage to rapidly generate an unimaginable amount of revenue tend to be those that basically create a new market. If you introduce a product or service that doesn't yet exist, and it's popular, you have a space of time in which you can set your profit margin as anything, basically, you want. That delay before companies come in with competitive pricing is one in which people make their fortunes from. He reasoned that it must have been the same with soldiers; that those who could create new techniques were ultimately the shinobi who would reign supreme for at least some amount of time.
As hard as Tetsu trained, he knew he would never be the strongest on brute strength alone, and now missions and competitions had confirmed this for him. He often emerged victorious, but almost never because he was able to overpower his opponent. He did it on the strength of his brilliance. Maybe there wasn't much of that, it was true, but he could conclude fairly reasonably that when it was put to the test, it seemed like he could reliably outsmart his enemies (and friends, as the need arose). The rat had finally grown still, and the boy could see it's breathing slowed, getting fainter. He reached down to lightly poke it, wondering how much strength it had left, but as he did so, it suddenly sprung back to life, biting deeply into his finger. 'Great,' He thought, 'Now I've probably got the plague...' As arrogant as Tetsu was, this pride in his own intellect, ironically, made him approach his train of thought with some hesitation and unease, and even some insecurity. He flicked the rat onto the earth, seemingly ending it's miserable existence, as he attempted to suck out and spit and vile contagion the thing might've left coursing through his veins. He was nervous because, maybe for the first time, he was going to make a serious bet in his own talent; he was going to invest into his intellect stat, so to speak, and that meant forever abandoning the conventional shinobi path to direct strength, which in turn meant that if he was wrong, he was going to pay a steep price for being a nerd.
What was immortality?
Known casually as the ultimate shinobi technique, and simultaneously as one of it's most forbidden ventures. Why? If a technique like this was really possible, then why not give access to it's pursuit to the entire world? As much as fear of it falling into the wrong hands might be a legitimate concern for tipping the balance that the shinobi villages tenuously enjoyed, unless that one person wiped out everyone with it, you might say that the continuation of this knowledge would be beneficial enough to warrant the risk of a shifting power dynamic. Was it possible that the higher ups simply wanted to keep it's pursuit to themselves? It was possible, but there were issues with that theory too. Namely, that there were many powerful shinobi that never seemed to even bother developing a technique for it. One thing was certain though, there was no textbook to guide you along through the immortality literature, you had to begin with an idea, or gain access to secret texts. Beginning with your own concept was difficult, undoubtedly, but it would also make research far more accessible, since it was less likely that the powers that be would even know what subject matter to make off-limits.
This was, essentially, what he had been thinking of this whole time. That for your average fighter, the mysteries of jutsu hardly mattered at all; the world seemed to be separated between those that could intuitively grasp the techniques, and those who couldn't. Or, perhaps more accurately, whether by blood or intuition, there has never been a recorded instance where a person was suddenly able to produce a jutsu, as an adult, through education alone. You had to have some talent, and so, what use was there in trying to logically grasp something you had intuitively perfected? Well, the benefit was that as soon as you could, then it stood to reason that maybe, just maybe, you could create something that was new. You could innovate your way to power. The boy had some sense that immortality always began with a clone technique, and, in fact, the clone jutsu, as basic as it was, was also perhaps the most incredible ability that a ninja would ever possess.
Why?
Because every shinobi only has one mind. The clone jutsu was a very specific sort of fracturing of a person's psyche. They were created in the perfect image of their owner the moment they were produced, and yet they had, in a sense, their own mind. At least in more advanced and physical clone jutsu; those that extended beyond the realm of illusion, you could create them with a command, say, to go scout out a certain area, or to help you fight. If they scouted an area out, you would gain access to the knowledge they had obtained after they were evaporated. In the case of a fight, they would come up with their own techniques to use, and yet it was generally a reliable seeming imitation of what you would have done. What other conclusion could you come to except that a person, a shinobi, could replicate their own mind? The boy picked up the dead rat, staring idly at it as he allowed himself to fall further into this abyssal tunnel of thought. Yet, he went on thinking, a clone is never afraid of death. To you, the clone is an extension of you, which is easy and natural to think about, but to the clone, if it has a sort of mind, one which is also your mind, it must think of itself so deeply as you that when it evaporates, it doesn't conceive of that instance as being any kind of death. In fact, this was not even a case of life and death, it was one of having a sort of multiplicity of identities.
In fact, when thinking about immortality, unless the technique is truly perfected, the very first concept that you need to explore is that of identity.
Tetsu didn't know, quite frankly, if he could become famous with a technique like this, even if he could come close to mastering it, but he knew that he would have an advantage over his peers. Namely, it was at lest possible, conceivably, to present something amazing as a kind of show, a circus even! And so, even if there were those that were more powerful than he was, and could possibly even perform any techniques he developed better than him, they would have all shrouded themselves in darkness, leaving the limelight for Tetsu. He could worry about his ability to survive, perhaps even against prosecution, later.
If a person lost a limb, they wouldn't suddenly be torn in two. In a way, of course, that was true, but the part of a person's body containing their mind was always the true person. The shell was almost irrelevant, and there was always the question of the borders of a person's identity. Why did it end at the skin? You could control a sword, but no one ever really, truly, thought of a sword as part of their self. It was almost certainly a practical holdover from a person's very animal brain, a mechanism for survival. Placing the rat gently down on a flat rock, he started articulating it's small limbs with his fingers. If he opened the thing up, could he bring it back to life? Certainly no one would be hurt by the effort.
So, here was the real question. If you take a technique like the Crystal Eye jutsu, you get immediate feedback from this external visual sensor. Mental techniques like this are more rare, but there was at least one clan capable of projecting their own mind into an external body. If, instead of gaining a clone's memories upon it's extinguishing, your own consciousness was projected into it, would you start to think of yourself as that clone? Could you extend your conception of your own identity beyond your physical body? Essentially, it didn't have to be real, you only needed to believe it was to reach some approximation of immortality. In other words, if you projected your consciousness into an immortal clone, and then back to yourself, and then back to the clone frequently enough, would that animal brain of yours be able to trick itself into believing that the actual clone was an extension of your identity? It didn't matter that it was a lie, if you believed it, it was true, because the truth about identity is already a lie, it's just one that's better established and more natural than the one he was proposing.
Beyond that though, how did he know that that wasn't already what was going on with a clone? Was it possible that his perception of who he really was changed as soon as the clone technique was dispelled? Well, it was possible, but somewhat unlikely given the fact that you could produce more than one clone. In either case, projected consciousness was the first goal, and even that could be flubbed. If you had an entity that thought exactly like you did, and you found a way to shut off the inputs of your own brain from your sensory organs, and cut off your consciousness, then all you needed was a sort of bridge. A bridge of consciousness. What the clone sees and hears could be your new sensory input, and what it thinks wouldn't be what you thought, but... Maybe the thought processes could be transferred as a memory. The question wasn't just if this was possible, but how to make it seemless. To turn off one mind as you turned on the other, and you would have to experiment within the borders of the meat sack, to see what it accepted and what it might reject as extensions of itself.
The boy stopped for a moment and contemplated what he had just finished considering, and slowly, it dawned on him why (he thought) immortality techniques might have all been seemingly universally forbidden. It wasn't necessarily about a need to kill people for the technique, although this was probably a common requirement (depending on what method you pursued), it was because the pursuit cheapened life. There was something about this way of looking at a person that must have been somewhat humiliating, and maybe it really was nothing more than this.
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WC: 2,549