Naruto: The Medical Ninja

Chapter 390: Chapter 387 ~ This too shall pass

A king once posed this question to his scholar: What is the one thing that, when heard, can make a happy man sad and a sad man happy at the same time?

The answer is – ’This too shall pass.’

And like all things, good or bad, Hoki’s happy life came to an end by an accident.

The poison that made the Shimura feared, Hoki had also been working on that poison. After years of study, and as a means of defence and as a further research subject, she had recreated the very poison smoke bomb.

She thought she would use it in an emergency if ever surrounded by enemies again, but the poison did not care what she had intended it for.

One night, her younger daughters found the enclosure. It was locked away, but curious kids will always find a way. They made a duplicate key using the puppet material lying around. They thought their mother was hiding some valuable jutsu and wanted to impress her. She was the famous wind-ninjutsu expert in the village.

Hoki had marked it clearly and warned them never to touch her things without her. But the girls had seen the harmless smoke bombs used during lessons and mistook the sealed poisonous one for the harmless one. They accidentally triggered the poisonous device.

Smoke started expanding.

It pushed through the doorway and rolled across the village, reaching nearby homes before anyone understood what had happened.

Hoki moved before fear could stop her.

She carried the antidote from house to house, measuring each dose as per the weight of the person and forcing the liquid in their throats. The wounded from the neighbouring homes kept arriving. Her husband carried the unconscious children to a shaded room while Hoki treated one villager, then another, then another. Although not everyone was affected, enough people had inhaled it for the antidote supply to be insufficient.

Kugutsu, Hoki’s husband, asked, ”You... why are you not taking it?”

Hoki replied, ”I will take it last... even if a single person is left behind, I will not be able to bear it.”

With every dose, the store of antidote dwindled further. By the time the last villager was treated, the antidote was gone.

Hoki sat beside her children. The girls had inhaled the most smoke. Their breathing was shallow but steady. They would live. They would not wake for a long time.

”Now everyone is out of danger,” Hoki said.

Kugutsu looked towards the room where the children lay. ”And the kids?”

”They are also fine. They will not be waking up anytime soon.”

Relief loosened his shoulders. Then his face changed.

”Mother If everyone is safe...you can take the antidote,” Hoki’s eldest daughter said.

”There is no antidote left,” Hoki replied.

Kugutsu’s expression turned grim. ”You are joking.”

Hoki said, ”It is fine. I am relieved that nobody else was harmed.”

Hoki gave him a tired smile. ”I have a little immunity. It is partial, earned from years of handling the poison I recreated, but it is only partial. It will not save me; it will only prolong the suffering. I always told you that partial immunity can be worse than no immunity with certain poisons.”

”If you have little immunity ... we can make more antidote,” her son said.

”Not in time. The ingredients are rare, and this season is also wrong for collecting some of them,” Hoki replied.

Kugutsu stared at her with disbelief. He understood the meaning but kept denying it in his mind.

”no...no..”

Hoki looked towards the room where her youngest daughters slept peacefully.

”It is fine, dear. I have no regrets. I lived a wonderful life. I had a wonderful family, a husband, and children. My only regret is that I will not see my grandchildren.”

Her husband, eldest son and daughter all began to cry.

”It is fine, you two,” she said again. ”I had always taught you two that life is like a beautiful flower, and real flowers wither; only fake ones are forever.”

Her children nodded, crying. They are at an age they could start their own family, so they took it better than expected.

”I have one last request. Let me go home to die. I want to be buried beside my father.”

They could not believe what she was saying.

Hoki continued, ”I do not want the children to watch me die. The poison will not make my death easy, and I will not leave them with the memory and regret of it. They must not spend the rest of their lives believing they took their mother’s life.”

He had heard the stories she told in fragments, enough to know that the place she called home lay far beyond the desert.

Kugutsu shook his head. ”I will go with you.”

”I want to go alone... that is enemy territory... I can’t take away their father too...”

”But you ... you are asking us to leave you to die, alone.”

Hoki’s mouth softened. ”You forgot. I had a friend there.”

”You never told me his name or anything else about him.”

”Because even I do not know it. I promised I would keep him a secret; he does not like being bothered, but I will bother him one last time.”

She had never told him about the nine-tailed fox. She had kept her promise to him.

Kugutsu covered his face with both hands. ”What will I tell the children?”

”Tell them I went away to cure myself, as major ingredients are in the east. You can explain the rest when they are mature enough. Perhaps when they have children of their own, so they may understand me more.”

She gathered water, food, medicine, and cloth for the journey. Everyone in the village cried when they learned she was leaving. Before she stepped onto the road, Hoki called her elder daughters to her and placed her father’s dagger in their hands.

”This belongs to my father,” she said. ”Keep it in the family.”

The girl held the blade as if it were something sacred.

Hoki turned towards the east.

She did not know that the day she left would become a custom in the village. The people would honour her sacrifice on that day, and the most important events, including marriages, would be held on this day for generations.

Her face paint would become a tradition as well. Hoki had first covered her face because the fox warned her that Masanori would send someone to find a girl matching her description. Her daughters looked like her, so she painted their faces too. Other families copied them. In time, the reason became distant, but the patterns remained on the faces of girls and, sometimes, boys.

Behind her, the village watched until she disappeared beyond the first rise of sand.

She kept walking towards her father’s grave. She was now familiar with the ways of the sands and knew how to survive in the harshest of the regions in that part of the world, so the journey was not difficult for her except for the poison and pain in her veins.

She reached the forest after the Valley of the End. The place everyone stops moving forward because there is a beast that they assume will eat them alive.

But it did not stop Hoki from entering that region.

The poison, held at bay for days by sheer force of will, had finally overtaken her blood. Her knees buckled. She stumbled through the underbrush and collapsed heavily onto the damp, cool soil. Her hand twitched in the dirt as she tried to drag herself forward.

”Just... a little further...” she whispered, trying to force her limbs to obey, but her body had reached its limit. She lay pinned to the earth, unable to rise.

”You look even more terrible than the last time you wandered into my territory,” a voice said.

Hoki forced her heavy eyelids open. Massive crimson paws rested in the darkness ahead, and the towering silhouette of the nine-tailed fox loomed over her.

A faint, trembling smile touched her lips. ”You... you look exactly the same...”

”What happened to you?” the beast asked; its massive face came near Hoki, but it did not scare her this time.

”I came... to see you...” she said.

”Why?”

”Because... I couldn’t die without telling you,” she managed a raspy chuckle, ”that I found a good husband... even with this loud mouth.”

The massive fox smiled and asked, ”Did you live a happy life?”

”Yes,” Hoki said softly, warmth rekindling in her heart despite the icy chill creeping into her lungs. ”I have beautiful daughters and a brave son. All of them inherited my beauty, guts... and my brains.”

The fox gave a low rumble that sounded like dry thunder. ”I doubt that last part. What is wrong with you? Did your uncle finally catch up to you?”

”No... he didn’t,” she murmured, her chest heaving. ”He never found me. Life just... caught up to me instead. Even though I am dying, I have no regrets.”

She gathered the last embers of her strength to look into the giant creature’s eyes. ”I came to say goodbye to you... and because I wanted to see my father one last time. To join him. Will you... please bury me next to him when I die?”

The fox stared down at her fragile form in silence. Slowly, a warm, crimson aura flared around its giant paw. The fox extended a single finger, gently resting the tip against her back, and let a trickle of its raw chakra flow into her body.

A sudden surge of heat rushed through Hoki’s veins. The suffocating weight on her lungs lifted, and her cheeks regained a flush of life. She sat up, breathing deeply, though the dark veins filled with poison beneath her skin remained.

”Do not mistake this for a cure,” the fox warned. ”My chakra will only temporarily revitalise your body. It will burn away soon, and it cannot stop the poison.”

”Thank you,” Hoki breathed, feeling whole for the first time in weeks.

She walked towards her father’s grave, and nine tails followed. After remembering her father and giving him her final respect, her motor-mouth started up, working nonstop. She sat near the giant beast, talking rapidly about the years that had passed—about Kugutsu, his wooden puppets, the bustling life in the desert village, and the antics of her children.

”Oh, and I heard something interesting,” Hoki added, leaning back against a mossy root. ”A travelling merchant once mentioned that people have stopped calling my old clan the Yoshimura clan. It goes by the Shimura clan now. Everyone is using this name now.”

The fox listened in quiet silence as she rambled on, sharing small details of a life lived fully despite the shadow of death looming behind her, which could take her life at any moment.

As the crimson glow around her skin began to flicker and wane, Hoki’s voice slowed down. The warmth in her chest began to fade back into the cold quiet of the forest.

”Thank you for everything ... and remember me...” she whispered softly.

Her head rested gently against the earth, her eyes fluttered shut, and her breathing stopped for the final time.

The nine-tailed fox remained still for a long moment. Then, raising one massive hand, it extended a single, gigantic claw and gently scratched a deep pit into the earth right beside Kageyama’s grave. Lifting her frail body with tender care, the beast laid Hoki to rest beside her father, burying her beneath the shade of the trees she had finally returned home to see.

A/N:

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