The blooming of a cherry blossom tree

Chapter 1: Realisation

The day Sakura had to protect her comrade by putting her own life at risk, was the day she understood what it meant being weak. And she hated it so much that it made her want to scream her lung out. It was also the day she decided to become stronger whatever it would take.

She wanted to do it to be able to protect the people she cared for. She also wanted to do it so that people would acknowledge her. And more specifically so that Sasuke would acknowledge her and her strength. But those weren’t the only reason. There was one last reason that, every time she thought about it, made her want to cry. But, even if she would never admit it, was the strongest reason of all.

She wanted to be strong because she liked it. She liked the idea of being able to hold her own against every single person she would come across in her life. And it wasn’t always in a good way.

Sometime, she found herself thinking about all the thinks she could do to the people that underestimated her if she was strong enough. And this often made her scared of herself, or more specifically, of the dark part she knew was somewhere in her head.

But what really set her off to the path of becoming stronger was a little detail that had always been here. But to which she never really paid attention as she should have done.

It happened during her fight with Ino, when the Yamanaka girl tried to posses her body by entering her mind only to be pushed out by Inner. That’s when it clicked in Sakura mind.

She wasn’t useless or weak, on the contrary, she had something very special for herself. Something that had scared her for some time but whit which she had come to terms in the end. She had Inner, what she thought to be a simple split of her personality due to her lack of confidence.

But that was only till that same Inner somehow was able to interfere with her battle. She didn’t really understood what happened at first but she was still happy that she had been able to counter the one things that Ino was so proud about, her clan technique.

But then, the blond girl in front of her had say something. Something that stuck in Sakura head for the next two days. She had said “How can anyone have two soul living inside them”.

There it was, the thing Sakura had been waiting for. She didn’t thinks much of it the first couple of hours, but her curious nature didn’t make her last long. That same night, she sneaked into Konoha library to search about a case similar to hers and came across a very interesting book.

It was a book about human soul. She decided to take it with her back home and read all night. And what she discovered didn’t disappoint her in the slightest.

It seemed that she was, like they called them in the book, a split soul. It meant that when she came to life, her soul had a problem adjusting with her body and ended up splitting in half so that one part would be the actual soul of the body and the other part would be an excess that would forever be forgotten.

Most of the time, the people born with a split soul would not even be aware of it. But sometime, the part of the soul that should have been forgotten doesn’t totally separate from the other part.

When this happen, the concerned person might experience case of voice talking in their head like a distant sound coming from their subconscious.

That last sentence made her think of inner voice in her head and she decides to ask her directly if she knew anything about it.

“Inner, can you hear me?”

There was no voice for about one whole minute before she finally heard Inner voice.

“ Yes, Sakura, I can hear you. What do you want?”

“I wanted to ask you if you knew anything about what I just read in that book?”

“I’m sorry Sakura, but I don’t know much about it. All I know is that the first time I was able to talk to you was when you entered academy. But I can’t remember a single thinks before that. Maybe you should try reading more of that book?”

“Ok I’ll do that. Thanks Inner.”

And that’s what she did for the rest of the night. She was so concentrate that when the sun started shining through her window she had to cover her eyes from the light.

In the end, she couldn’t find much more. But she still found out that there was a way for her to use certain skills thanks to Inner and that she could enter something called “Soul Space”. It was basically a sort of different dimension in her head where time passed two time slower and in which she could train or meditate.

But that was only for thinks like chakra quantity, ninjutsu or genjutsu. Everything related to physical strength like taijutsu couldn’t be trained in that dimension because it’s something that affect directly the body development.

For the skill described in the book, she will have to test out some theory she got by reading the book. But she wasn’t sure it would actually work.

She close the book and put it on her nights table. Today was the first day of the one month break time before the last part of the chunin exam. She had to go to the training ground of team seven to meet up with her team.

Since she didn’t pass the preliminary she won’t have to participate in the last part of the chunin exam so she could use this month to start building up a good training plan and to actually start training. But she couldn’t do it in the village, she had too many distraction here.

So she decided to take this month for herself and go train in total isolation. Though she would have to ask for the third hokage permission first as well as for Kakashi’s.