Preventing The Inevitable

Chapter 17

Though Sakura had tried her best to hide it back then, even Shisui, whom she had met once, had noticed her abnormally small chakra reserves.

That was why he had made Sakura train her stamina—that was also bad as fuck—instead of teaching her the Body Flicker, as she had suggested.

Her tests from the Day of Endless Misfortune—as she had taken to call it—also showed that her chakra pool was exhausted after only twenty minutes of tree-walking and nearly empty after a half-baked Shadow Clone that immediately disappeared even though she had made sure to meditate and use her chakra sparingly.

Even so, wasn't it strange that it had worked in the first place? Her reserves weren't big enough for that; it shouldn't have been poss—)

Using up whatever she had left to push Shisui on various occasions turned out to have drawbacks she didn't want to have in the middle of a fight. Well, she'd probably die with her current abilities before she could get anywhere close to using up her meager chakra reserves.

So that was why she was heading to the library. Meditating to expand her chakra pool was not an option because of another problem she had encountered that was way too troublesome and headache-inducing to be on her mind right now.

Sakura, as a medic, concentrated more on maintaining the body's condition at an efficiently functioning level, not growing abilities or making people any stronger than they needed to live a long and healthy life. She didn't know any other techniques that would help her in being able to use more than six consecutive E-Rank jutsu.

Walking around the village felt... different in a way Sakura couldn't quite place. Maybe it was because this place had been almost fully decimated once.

The Village had been rebuilt after Pain's invasion, but even then, the places and buildings that had been painstakingly reconstructed by everyone had never truly felt like a home to her, and the Konoha of her childhood had existed only in her slowly fading memory. At least that was the case during the few years before Konoha was fully destroyed this time.

As Sakura entered the market, swarming with people she had fought alongside on the battlefield, people she had once treated at the hospital, people whose graves she had probably walked past at the graveyard after the attack at the Chūnin Exams, people she had never gotten to meet because either she or they had died before she had had the chance to get to know them—

Oh.

And it suddenly struck her—like leaving the eye of a tornado she had been standing in the whole time, like being hit by the full force of a tsunami she had seen coming from miles away—that she was back.

This was home.

Sakura didn't even notice how she had gone along with the flow of the crowd and come to a stop in front of a stand.

—

The market was bustling with people, as was usual for Konoha, a place widely favored by merchants and travelers.

"Hey, you in the green coat! Interested in a chance to win two thousand ryō?"

The brown-haired man stopped in his tracks and eyed the middle-aged man standing behind a stand. Boldly colored lettering on a poster in front of him said, 'Solve the puzzle, win a prize!'.

Huh.

The man wasn't a local, as was apparent by the build of the stand, made to be easily portable. He stood in front of a large board depicting a diagram of a large rectangle, divided into five areas. Rooms, probably. There were doors between the rooms and also ones leading 'outside'.