The Bare Minimum

 Endless chanting echoed in the grand halls of the temple from every direction. The monks sang in unison, sounding a deep ominous hum. Sat among the praying monks was a man in bright cyan who stood out from the dark robed crowd, but he was seated alongside them in the same manner with his legs folded. He opened one of his eyes to take a peek, raising his brow as he glanced to both of his sides. On his left and on his right were monks with silver grey hair, and identical silver pendants on their necklaces that resembled an upside down triangle within a proportional circle. The symbol seemed familiar, but Saturn could not quite put his finger on where he had come across its likes before. He looked down at the beads in the hand of the monk on his right, and the world around him started to come into a clearer view as he observed how the ascetic would move a bead on every count. Where am I... He wondered, but he dared not to make any sudden movements to interrupt the devout followers who had never stopped praying. He looked down, and quietly gasped as he learned that he was holding a beaded brown necklace of the same type, and his thumb was moving on its own as though it was well acclimated to the sections of the prayer that was being recited. When he noticed his moving thumb, Saturn curiously halted its movement as he became more lucid. He watched keenly and let the monk on his left take his hand, the hand with the beads. The monk's hand was warm, he noticed, and he stayed complacent with his gesture. In the blink of an eye, a large wide slit gaped open on the shinobi's hand. The monk had sliced open his palm with a well sharpened kunai.

It burns! The gaping wound on Saturn Sentobi's hand was now wrapped up in a soft white cloth, and the dark red blood stained the woven fabric. He was now dressed in a black yukata befitting the Temple of Jashin. His vision was still blurry and his memory was equally hazy. He was intrigued by the architecture of the temple, and the ambience within, but he struggled to recall how he had come to attend mass on that late evening as he sat with his legs folded in front of a peculiar hot spring within the compound. The hot spring was unique in the sense that the liquid that filled the hot steaming pool was a dark red, and smelled like iron. He could smell it. It was unmistakable. It was blood.

Earlier, he had been in the company of devout monks on either side. Even earlier than that, he was in bed. The last thing he could remember was visiting the haunted Mayberry Mansion, at the edge of the charred remnants of black forest. It was the second time that he visited the fabled mansion. During his first visit, he was in the company of two of his friends Rizuke Uchiha and Majima Nara. Upon investigation, he had discovered that the 'haunting' was caused by a homeless Genjutsu user. After informally evicting the senior citizen, Saturn had dusted his hands and carried on with the rest of his week. He was investigating a case about an overgrown cannabis plant in the house of a famous scientist - his adolescent son had thought of a few experiments - with Jun Shiabasaki, Moyasu and Z Ne when a raven had delivered a scroll to the trio which requested them to visit the very same mansion. That's when he got a wicked idea - he would go ahead and sneak into the mansion to give the others a scare. He remembered getting carried away with his plan, before finally reaching home and hitting the sack. Anything after that, was a black box until he eventually regained consciousness sitting among the monks.

Saturn sat in front of the blood spring for three days and three nights. He had learned to suppress his hunger - going without food for three days used to be a mundane thing back when he was broke working menial jobs in a crippled economy - but he had to use sensory deprivation to numb his tongue to ignore his longing for water. He was in a deep meditative state. For the first time in a long time, he felt as though he was without burdens. His meditation would not be interrupted by messenger ravens coming in with missions as he had been diligent enough to use Chakra Nullification to hide his presence to them. Besides, the new Genin in the village like Jun and Z were more than capable of handling the typical missions that sprung up. Self reflection, he deemed, was the best excuse for absconding from his duties. He sought to peer into the back of his own mind to answer questions that still lingered. The most glaring cause for concern was the issue of how he came to attend Sunday mass.

 

 "Ahhh.. that's the spot..." Saturn had looked on as a devout follower stood over the blood spring, holding his arm out in front of him. The knife in his hands cut into his wrist vertically and his blood poured down into the pool like a river. It was the second time he saw this act during his three day long meditation. It was still the second day, and the Genin's mind was hazier than it was on the third. The monk ahead of him did not so much as look in his direction as he proceeded to stitch up his wound with the use of iryojutsu, just to slice it back open again. After standing over the pool doing this act on loop for a good four hours, he eventually turned around and exited the temple. Saturn inferred from this that there were different castes of Jashinism with different beliefs, yet all revolving around a central deity.

It was on the third day when Saturn Sentobi witnessed the impossible. As he looked on, the pool of blood split in two. From inside the crimson red, a man emerged. His head came out of the pool first, his thick silver hair and chiseled physique stained with the dark red blood around him. He looked at the meditating Genin and the Genin looked back at him. His face was marked red with the blood from the pool. Saturn could not figure out how he emerged, as he had not sensed the presence of another human being inside the pool at any point, and the man clearly had a different chakra signature than either of the monks who visited to donate their blood to the pool. As he looked on, the strange blood soaked figure walked on the surface of the pool and left the area, walked calmly towards the interior of the temple - leaving a trail of blood in his wake.

That's it! Saturn had an epiphany. He realized that he had been sleepwalking. He even started to remember bits and pieces of how he journeyed to the temple in his slumber. He was stuck in a dark and stretched out dream. In his vision, he was in the backseat of a peculiar vehicle, with four comfortable seats and a window on the right. As he looked out into the road he was traversing, the thick downpour of rain prevented him from seeing anything beyond just a few meters from the transparent glass to be able to make out the lush green forests on either side. The vehicle - which had four wheels - moved slowly at first, accelerated rapidly each time Saturn looked out the window. He watched as they moved through cities, then snow, and then sand, before venturing back into the dark forest. In the front of the vehicle, he could see a mirror, from which he could see the driver's reflection. Looking at the man behind the steering wheel, he recognized the face as no other than Saturn Sentobi. When he gasped, he was in an empty white room. The walls and the floor were white, and he watched as human like figures of varying size wandered the halls of the void.

Saturn took some time to process the new environment before walking up to one of the eery looking faceless figures and placing hand hand on their shoulder. As he made physical contact, the sheer whiteness around him promptly got displaced to reveal a dark charred forest. It was a familiar area, and the Genin was sure that he had been there before. When the shinobi looked back at the specimen on whom he had placed his hand, a towering beast was looking back at him. It had thick long fangs and a snout that extended from its face. It was furry with glowing red eyes and long pointy ears. He shrieked, and vanished into thin air. The rest of his journey was blurry, but he was sure that there were more clues to unravel. He opened his eyes to reveal that his pupils were now white. A raven perched on the fence across from the blood spring had irises of the same color. Then, the bird took flight, heading off in the direction of the Charred Remnants of Black Forest.

WC: 712

Back at the Temple, Saturn's eyes remained open. The vision of the raven played in his mind like a film that overlayed the visions in front of him with a lesser opaqueness. He was in a transcendent state of meditation, which put him in a euphoric bliss. He lightly cracked a smile. Absconding was a dangerous drug. Weaving hand seals, he summoned a shadow clone who sat in front of him with his legs folded. Leaning over by planting one of his knees on the ground, the clone planted his hand on the head of the original. "Tell me, Saturn Sentobi, how did you come to the Temple of Jashin?" He used his Psycho Mind Transmission technique to peer into his own memory with the film of the raven's visuals playing over the vision of his own memories. Soon, he was standing in the barren forest as he watched his own body running frantically through the charred terrain. It was almost pitch black, but the Sun was overhead with the moon directly in front of its light to form a perfect ring, a ring whose light shone brightly enough to show the face of the troubled shinobi as he ran as fast he could.

Saturn followed the sprinting shinobi until he came to a stop in front of a dead end, overlooking a deep valley below. The raven hovered overhead before landing effortlessly on the Genin's shoulder. Saturn watched from the eye of the raven as the man he thought to be himself in the past turned to look at the bird on his shoulder. He was looking at himself and it made no sense.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, what becomes of it when the world is viewed through the lens of a bird whose perception has been hijacked by not one, but two parasites? What becomes of it when the ones responsible for overriding its perception were only separated by the ceaseless march of time ? Including that of the bird who had once lived a normal life until the cursed day when, while its talons perched on a wooden fence in the Temple of Jashin overseeing a pool of blood, came to know the powers of a man with a skewed moral compass. Two minds had thus already inhabited the feathered body of the crow when the dark silhouette in the middle of the charred forest extended his arms outwards to capture the image of the claimed avian between his fingers. They watched in horror as the shinobi sensed a familiar beam of chakra leave from the forehead of his mirror image directly towards his own winged vessel. It approached quickly at a pace that could fundamentally not be overcome from the new vessel which was already captured once successfully with the use of the same technique, by the very same man but during different times. The one mind that had captured the vessel had become two in the time that had passed between them.

When the stream of consciousness radiating from the body of the aimless wanderer in the black forest connected with the brain of the crow, the seer behind the veil was cast into a dark, unfamiliar abyss. While his body remained in the temple seated in full lotus, and his clone's warm blooded hand remained rested on his head, Saturn's eyes began to twitch rapidly. At first he winced and grimaced as he struggled to understand the nature of a foreign plane of consciousness into which his wandering mind had spawned. Then, his muscles relaxed and his head fell back as he basked in the bliss of an endless shroud of a dark blue darkness. In his vision, he saw countless silhouettes walking around aimlessly in what seemed like the same charred forest. However, it was obvious to him that he was no longer in the same plane of existence as before.Strange smells and hues that surrounded him renewed in him a sense of adventure that he had not felt since his days in Konoha riding the woods with his horse Dione. As he walked, in the distance, he could see a familiar mansion. It carried the same dimensions and worn down structure from the outside. If appearances were to be trusted, there was no doubt in Saturn's mind that it was none other than the famous Mayberry Mansion. He approached the old creaking doorway through the barren infertile patch of land that once may have homed a grand porch.

As he peered inside, pitch black humanoid figures wandered aimlessly inside. Yet he did not feel threatened by them, they seemed to be unbothered by Saturn's presence, and after some time he had grown used to being ignored by these black apparitions. "Riz? You there?" He had seen or heard from neither his teammate Rizuke Uchiha nor the mysterious dark haired Genin, Majima Nara, since the three had parted ways after investigating the haunted Mayberry Mansion together. "Majima?" He wandered deeper into the mansion until he arrived at a familiar spiralling staircase. Moonlight from the large window on the wall behind the stairs illuminated the steps. He was standing right there just days earlier, when a terrified Majima bolted out of the mansion never to be seen again.