Industrious OG Timeline - Chapter 63 (Patreon)

Some people would think that bringing an eldritch pseudo-chakra beast into the physical world through the use of artificial infusion of arcane life force into a beyond bleeding edge piece of functional magitek would involve a lot of chanting, ritual, an elaborate laboratory setup... and probably a bit of the traditional mad scientist laughter.

I refrained from the stereotypes with admirable restraint.

In the end, it was a simple procedure.

Yakumo laid down on a table, I bound an elaborate seal to her eighth chakra gate, activated the companion seal on the body I'd built, and then activated the entire process. There wasn't even a need to throw a giant Frankensteinian master switch.

It was, after months of work on my part, more than a bit anticlimactic.

“Food is amazing!”

Even if there was no release of dramatic tension, though, it was still deeply satisfying.

I chuckled as Kokoro dug into yet another platter of curry, her third one in fact. Normally, I'd be worried about a child her size having the apparent appetite of an Akimichi. Or, at the very least, I'd be worried about her eating herself sick, but not this child. More specifically, I wasn't worried about that possibility because any matter she consumed would be broken down to be used as fuel in the complex chakra-tech reactor that made up her gut. It was, in other words, quite impossible for her to make herself sick, even if she decided to start eating dirt and rocks off the ground.

Although I would probably try to keep her from doing that anyway, social customs being what they were.

Satsuki and Tenten watched as Yakumo fawned over our daughter while she ate, the brown-haired girl cooing over the child that seemed only a few years younger than herself.

“She looks so lifelike,” Tenten whispered.

“Probably because she is,” Satsuki replied.

Tenten grimaced, shaking her head. “Not what I meant. You know that.”

Satsuki rolled her eyes. “Speak more clearly, then.”

“Fine. Kota did an amazing job on her body. She looks exactly like a real seven year old child. That's what I meant.” Tenten sighed.

Kokoro did look like a 'real' child, both in terms of appearance and personality. She was, in her short time after awakening, friendly, outgoing, and happy. Her first course of action had been to hug both myself and Yakumo at the maximum value of her restricted strength. Looking at the pile of crushed chopsticks she'd been attempting to use, I might have set it a bit high.

But... I did want her to be able to protect herself, too.

Physically, though... she looked like a fusion of myself and Yakumo, which was what she'd imagined herself as. Her eyes were more of a warm honey-gold than my own brown or the Kurama heiress' yellow-flecked hazel, and her hair was both smoother than my own and better-behaved than Yakumo had often complained hers was.

I'd dressed her in a relatively simple set of shorts, shirt, and an oversized hooded-trench coat with baggy sleeves and wooden sandals for footwear. All carefully chosen to make her look eccentric, smaller than she really was, and adorable to the point those ‘in-the-know’ would be less likely to hold a grudge because of her origins. The coat had Yakumo's family crest on the shoulders and my own blacksmith's mark emblazoned on the back.

In almost every way, after all, she was my creation.

“You should pace yourself, Kokoro,” Yakumo warned her for at least the tenth time.

“I'm fine, Mommy! Daddy built me a really good body! I can keep eating forever!” Kokoro bragged, and I chuckled at the look of annoyance Yakumo shot me.

“I would appreciate some help, Kota,” Yakumo sighed.

Tenten giggled and Satsuki snorted, amusement wafting off both of them heavily.

 I stepped forward, moving past the table and patting my daughter – my daughter – on the head fondly. She turned from her food, blinking, her mouth still full. “Kokoro, if you keep eating you'll run out of food and won't have any food later. And, more importantly, you won't be able to do anything else while you're putting food in your mouth.”

Yakumo sighed in relief as our daughter at least slowed shoveling food in her mouth. “Anything else, like what Daddy?”

“Like meeting your Mommy's parents. Or meeting new friends. Or seeing the outside,” I tilted my head towards one of the walls. “The real world, like you wanted to?”

Her eyes widened slowly as her head flipped between staring at the food on her plate and me standing beside her. An almost comically-forlorn expression blossomed on her as she put down her plate and almost seemed like she wanted to cry.

“Finish your food, Kokoro,” I told her with a small smile, making her blink in surprise. “We're not in a rush and it's rude to put food on your plate and not eat it, just like it's rude to take too much food so that other people don't get enough to eat.”

Kokoro's face lit up and she returned to using the surviving pair of chopsticks less as a utensil and more as a shovel. Yakumo sighed as she looked up at me and used the hand outside of Kokoro's view to make the Konoha ninja-sign for 'received/gratitude.'

“You made Mommy happy!” Kokoro squealed, her head swinging between us with a wide grin as she talked around at least one mouthful of food.

While Yakumo blinked in surprise and confusion, I patted her head. “Don't talk with your mouth full, sweetie. Chew, swallow, then talk.”

Kokoro opened her mouth to reply, froze, then rapidly followed the previous set of instructions. “Yes Daddy!”

I felt more than saw Satsuki turn to Tenten with raised eyebrows and make a few signs of her own. Thankfully, Kokoro seemed to be deeply involved in finishing her meal to the point where the distance between them was enough to buffer their emotions.

Because, as I would need to inform Yakumo, Kokoro had the innate ability to sense emotions. It was something that I wasn't sure would have properly carried over in her transition from semi-imaginary personality aspect to real-world being, but wasn't incredibly surprised about. Yakumo had even seen aspects of it before, just chalking them up to our child's unusually perceptive nature and strange origins.

Simply put, Kokoro technically had three parents.

The first was obviously Yakumo. Kokoro's 'formative' years had been spent learning from and absorbing spiritual essence and memories from Yakumo herself. Then there was my contribution. Even if it was less fun than the traditional way, the Sage's Ninshu techniques were a form of insemination under these strange circumstances. I had little doubt that my actions had resulted in Kokoro gaining proper sentience and sapience.

However, there was the question as to why and how all of this had happened in the first place. Which related to... well, something so abstract and esoteric that I doubted anyone outside of the most classified archives of the fortress-temples of the monk sects or, potentially, a few of the Hidden Villages. For instance, I had every reason to suspect Hidden Sky knew of it and had personally written up the report that now sat in the Hokage's vault.

Hidden Sky called it the Zero-Tailed Leech.

The western Elemental Nations, generally viewed as the most powerful among the proper ninja villages, referred to it in many ways, usually as an 'artificial chakra beast.'

One, you will notice, is a proper noun. The other is not.

That is deliberate.

Specifically, they want to deny Hidden Sky the honor and prestige of being a peer power by virtue of holding one of the nine great chakra beasts. Because, according to the accepted texts produced by the Sage of Six Paths, there are only nine of them and any others are from a different source, which means they don't get to share the same title.

Yes, I'm not joking. The real, in-universe reason that the Zero-Tailed Leech isn't talked about is because the majority of the Great Powers consider it non-canonical to the Sage of Six Path's surviving literary work.

Sometimes I really wish I could explain a few jokes to other people so that I wouldn't be the only one laughing at them.

I also wish Zetsu wasn't around to force me to use the qualifier of 'surviving' when referring to the Sage's work, but beggars can't be choosers.

In any case, though, I think what Sky had done was to find a place where Dark Chakra naturally pooled and coalesced, likely as a result of enormous human suffering and tragedy, and either taken advantage of or forced a manifestation of those emotions into a concentrated metaphysical form. And, as the usual laws of Saturday Morning Cartoon Metaphysics go, put enough Powerful Soul Juice in one spot and it gains something close to animal-level sentience at least.

Which, because Dark Chakra was probably 'heavier' and easier to capture than 'Light Chakra' was (which I’d spent a single bit of potential in just to ensure everything I knew about it by virtue of contact with other subjects was correct), was probably promptly overcome with the urge to maim, kill, and destroy everything around it.

So they chained it up and made it run a flying doom fortress.

 Yeah, that checks with the usual logic of this world.

The precautions I'd taken to ensure Kokoro did not do the exact same thing were their own separate report and roughly three times longer with an addendum of the same length to clarify the arcane bullshit I'd had to perform.

“All done!” Kokoro cried, lifting her plate up and handing it to me.

I tapped one seal on the bottom, which instantly sterilized the plate, then the other next to it that teleported it back to the cabinet where it had come from. I might like doing some chores out of a certain obsessive need for cleanliness, but Kokoro's timeframe construction timeframe had forced me to admit that some wastes of time were better left to mere mortals.

Despite the fact that I could have easily made a less extreme cleaning seal for myself (and, in fact, did use such an innovation sometimes), I wasn't giving up showers or baths.

I preferred to keep my shower thoughts, thank you very much.

“Alright, let's get you up and outside to see the world,” Yakumo stated, swelling with pride as she lifted our daughter up into her arms. Then she turned to me. “How far can she go away from me?”

I snorted. Clearly someone had been a little too eager to listen to my full explanation. “I want you two to stay within a kilometer of each other for the first week as a precaution. Torune and Sai graciously volunteered to be test subjects for a modified version of the seal linking you and Kokoro. If my math is right, and it always is-”

Satsuki and Tenten snorted.

In unison.

“-then the seal should be good out to ten kilometers, but that's under laboratory and simulated real-world conditions, so... as long as neither of you leave the city independently of the other, everything should be fine,” I shrugged, ignoring the disrespect that I definitely hadn't earned.

“That's just short-term, right?” Yakumo asked me, biting her lip.

 This time I sighed and swept a hand through my messy brown hair. “Kumo-chan? I love you to bits and would die for you or our child if needs required it, but please for your own safety, please listen to me when I explain complex and esoteric seals that go on your body.”

“I was kind of bu-” Yakumo muttered demurely, holding Kokoro tightly, who looked between us with her head cocked.

“Daddy, are you mad at Mommy? I can't feel your emotions?” Kokoro asked.

I smiled at her and released my barriers a smidge, just enough to let my mild frustration and exasperation slip free, along with a complex amusement and fondness. Our daughter blinked, looking to me and nodding before turning back to Yakumo.

“He's not mad at you Mommy,” Yakumo smiled confidently with all the certainty of a child who'd just shown an adult their finger paint masterpiece on the living room wall.

“Now I know you didn't explain she would be able to do that,” Yakumo pouted.

I shrugged. “Because I wasn't sure it would carry over. It didn't during the test-runs of her inhabiting the incomplete body, but I don't know whether that was because of the partial transfer of consciousness or because they weren't long enough to allow her to fully settle in the frame.”

We both looked down at the apparent little girl on cue, Satsuki and Tenten joining us for that matter.

Kokoro blinked, then shrugged.

“Worth a try,” I snorted.

“Let's go, Mommy! I want to see the real sun!” Kokoro whined.

“We'll talk about this more later,” Yakumo promised me with a smile, my own read on her emotions telling me that she wasn't angry either, but knew that this wasn't an optimal time to speak on the subject.

Then, with a quick hop, they were out of my lab and up the ladder, where Torune and Sai would be working on something and totally not waiting to be introduced to the widdlest eldritch abomination to signal the three ANBU teams, the Uzumaki sealing specialists behind them, and the Hokage and Hokage-to-be behind them to stand down.

I was proud of the fact that I'd negotiated Hiruzen down from ten ANBU teams.

I turned to the other two girls in the relationship. “You two okay?”

I asked because, regardless of their jealousy and how well they were dealing with it (very well), it was important to verbally communicate instead of leaving things unsaid for potential misunderstandings to fester.

Tenten sighed as Satsuki grunted and looked away, Uchiha-ese for, 'I'm not happy, but I understand why and aren't mad about it.'

The bun-haired girl shrugged, stepping up to peck my lips, then gave Satsuki a look to demand she do the same. Which she did, under 'duress.' “Satsuki and I are dealing. This is Yakumo's time to shine and she needs you, so while we're envious, we're going to occupy ourselves so we don't obsess over Kokoro while you cater to Yakumo.”

Satsuki gave a grunt of agreement, which had a childish petulant tone at the edges that I think was mostly performative.

Have to watch that.

“We'll give her a week to have you to herself outside of a few dinners,” Satsuki stated finally, turning back to raise an eyebrow as if she actually expected me to contradict her on the condition. The tension in her shoulders relaxed a bit when I just nodded obediently.

“After that, we'll want a bit more time with you – and Kokoro if necessary – before we go back to mostly-normal next month,” Tenten followed up.

I nodded again. “Yakumo knows and agrees?”

Both nodded. Satsuki took the lead again, a bit of pride mingling with desiccated frustration, likely from the talk in question. This time, her voice was coated in wry and dry observation of the obvious. “You've been kind of busy.”

I snorted, giving each of them a quick kiss and hug, before pulling them both together to hug them tightly together. “Look at it this way. You're going to be helping Yakumo with a child who is going to raise the very makai itself when she gets upset. If you manage this without at least one building burning down? Raising a 'normal' child will be a piece of cake.”

Both snickered, Tenten even giggling a bit before asking, “Do you really think she'll cause that much trouble?”

“No Kokoro – That's the forge! You can't crawl – Kotaro! Help!”

There was stillness for a long moment between us as I nodded calmly and turned to jump up the ladder myself. “Let's just say there's a reason I made her and her clothing nearly indestructible.”

I leapt up as Satsuki and Tenten's faces shifted to thoughtful frowns.

And they'd called me MAD when I told them I'd made her body incredibly resistant to most common elemental attacks! I'll show them all! THEN THEY'LL SEE THE GREATNESS OF MY FORESIGHT!

Pushing that thought aside, I stepped past the mother of my child to lift our little abomination out of a furnace capable of melting titanium, not at all surprised to see that she had some molten metal, carbon ash, and one of the stokers poking out of her mouth. God forbid I take reasonable precautions for the exoskeleton of a shard of sentient darkness that's never encountered a real environmental hazard in her life!

...was it too late to indulge in a pinch of insane laughter?

Light Chakra 1 (New)

~~~

Me: "The appointed time has come! The stars have aligned! The age changes! It is finally time to write the chapter I've been planning for months and-"

Brain: "No."

Me: "What? Wait, but I've had this planned for months. I have! I know what I need to do!"

Brain: "Yeah, but your copious notes on the subject don't plan out the scenes well enough. I'm going to have to fine you... hmm, twelve hours sitting a blank screen and then I'll dump almost 3k words on you hours before the weekend deadline expires."

Me: "..."

So, yeah. Enjoy. It came out well, I think. Eventually. Next chapter more reactions to Kokoro being Kokoro, to everyone's consternation.