Four days later I finally figured out where I was.

I felt incredibly stupid for having not realized it. I had been working under the assumption that I was still in my world. When I was doing my daily Observation I noticed a ship, not the same massive metal one from a while ago, but a smaller, but still quite large, wooden ship. When I Observed it I found that it was a passenger and cargo ship bringing people from the ‘main continent’ which was an interesting tidbit, but what was even more interesting was three of the people that exited the ship, they were low leveled and had rather standard jobs, a seamstress, a laborer, and a merchant. They were also born in places outside of the Land of the Moon.

Places that I recognized, and places that absolutely didn’t exist. Born in the village Hidden in the Stone. Born in the village Hidden in the Bamboo. Born in the village Hidden in the Waterfall. Stone and Waterfall were both ninja villages from an anime I knew pretty well, while I hadn’t actually heard of Bamboo at all, it was apparently a ‘Hidden Village’ none the less. I was in the world of Naruto.

Primary Quest Unlocked.

Stop the world from ending.

Failure – Capture, Enslavement, Death.

Could that be any vaguer? There were plenty of things that might constitute threats to the world here. Pain wanted to nuke a bunch of countries to threaten the world into peace, which might have counted. Obito and Madara Uchiha wanted to stick everyone inside a permanent illusion of some kind. Black Zetsu wanted to revive Kaguya, and she wanted to absorb all of the chakra or something, either way, the end result was everyone in a genjutsu as well. Hell the rest of those Otsutsuki people or whatever they were called, also wanted to do the same thing, and those were all just the main problems. What did world-ending mean? All of the people dead or otherwise incapacitated? Was it more literal and the world would explode or something?

I didn't know.

There was also weird things like the zero-tail running around that absorbed hatred or something to grow stronger, and the Sky Ninja that wanted to kill everyone along with it. There was that strange prison from that one movie where the immortal demonic flying monster escaped and wanted to kill everyone or that other movie with the weird stone of Gelel and that wasn’t even the end of it either. There was that super-powered tower thing that Kabuto was trying to use to do something to become a god or something or the guy that lived on the fucking moon who planned on smashing it into the earth at some point, that probably counted as well. What about that movie with the future telling girl, with the immortal army and the shadow demon that wanted to conquer the world. What about Orochimaru? He could probably count as well if he managed to survive long enough.

Was that where I had heard ‘Land of the Demons’ from? Wasn’t there a puppet-guy who time-traveled as well? Was he trying to end the world or take it over? Whose perspective was the world ending from mine? Was there a distinction? Which threat did I need to save the world from? It wasn’t here, was it? On this island? Now that I was remembering all of the random nonsense from the show I was reminded of the movie with the rich dude and his son, the one with the circus, wasn’t that here? How did I forget that?

I refocused before I got too far off track.

That movie probably took place on this island, sometime before Shippuden had started because Naruto was still short. Kakashi, Naruto, Sakura, and Rock Lee? They had been the main cast, I think. There was also that one dude who could turn people to stone with his hand. Had those events already happened? Or was it going to happen in the future? I’m fairly sure the king died in that movie, turned to stone if I recalled correctly. I had no chance of remembering what his name was, but he was an old dude with long hair, and his son bought a circus before coming back here. The son also had a son, and he shot people with suction cup arrows!

I don’t think any of this was going to help me, but memory worked strangely, the more random things I could remember the more related information I would probably uncover as a result.

They showed up on this island sometime after Sasuke had left Konoha because Rock Lee was with Team Seven instead of him, but it had to be before Naruto had gone on his training trip with Jiraiya. Somewhere in the interlude between Naruto and Shippuden? That gave me a timeline of sorts, now I just needed to figure out when exactly I had arrived here in regards to that timeline.

I refocused again.

Okay, if the old guy with long hair was still the king that meant it was some unknown amount of time before the events of the movie took place. If the large dude with short brown hair was king, it was during Naruto’s training trip? or sometime afterward. That was goal number one, for now, find out who the current king was. I also needed to figure out what I could actually do to stop any of these threats, and then work out the order in which they came about. Each of the threats I had thought of that could fill the criteria would require a high level of personal power to accomplish which I didn't currently have. Almost all of the world ending threats were S-rank ninjas or monsters that were even worse. I needed to be able to survive a fight with those guys at a minimum if I wanted to even affect the outcomes.

That meant that I had a bunch of things I needed to work on and no idea how much time I had to figure them out. I knew that this ability created things in line with my intentions to some degree, like the heal skill, or even the repair skill. I needed skills to become as fast as a ninja, so some kind of speed-related skill, and a way of perceiving fast-moving targets. I needed to be able to survive getting hit by jounin level ninja, people who could punch through stones and crack the earth through physical attacks alone, so some kind of full-body shielding skill of some kind. I needed to be able to deal damage to people who could tank those same attacks with ease, so an offensive ability of some kind that dealt damage in a way that could bypass durability or Peirce through physical defenses. Something that worked at a far range would be ideal.

There were many one-hit-kill techniques in this world, a simple punch from someone like Sakura would also likely one-shot me. There were conditional things as well like Nagato’s soul ripping touch thing, the God of Death Summoning. Pure overwhelming force like Bijudama, Chidori, Rasengan, and others that all qualified as well. Almost every elemental ninjutsu would kill me as I am right now. I needed a way to avoid them if there was no way out, so some kind of fast-acting teleportation that could get me out of the way regardless of obstacles. That left energy defense, I needed something to block, absorb or otherwise nullify chakra attacks, and defense again illusion.

I didn’t have anything in mind yet for the first but the second I might have gotten lucky with.

Genjutsu, if I was remembering correctly had something to do with jamming your chakra into someone with a technique to disturb their chakra, and the result was they could make you see, hear, feel, smell things that weren’t there. I didn’t have chakra at all, which was bullshit, but it might not work on me either. I also had that passive which said I was immune to ‘Psychological Effects.’ If mentally influencing me to see things that weren’t there counted as a psychological effect, it might have some form of reduced effectiveness, or if I’m really lucky I might even be immune entirely. I would have to test this out sometime in the future, and I had no idea how I was going to do that safely.

Physically I was still far below where I needed to be, I still wasn’t anywhere near as strong as the guards, although I was slowly approaching the Laborers, so there was an upside at least. I had unlocked several skills when I first started working out, but I still had to stop all the time, and Meditate was getting a lot of training when I ran out of steam. All the running had become easier over the last few days, it seemed to contribute to Vitality as well as Speed. Although Vitality seemingly leveled at a much slower rate so there was probably some better exercise specifically for it that I hadn’t thought of. It felt amazing being able to watch myself grow stronger from even simple actions and exercises.

I had stayed next to the city for much longer than usual, worrying in the bushes and the sun was high in the sky when I finally started heading back to my camp. My mind turned over what I needed over and over again, as I refined my list of goals a hundred times but I kept coming back to the same things.

I needed to continue my physical training as much as possible, that was my primary goal. My secondary goal was to find out where I was in the timeline, and my tertiary goal was to create at least one of the skills I had decided on. A ranged attack, a physical defense, and energy defense, a speed skill, a perception skill, and a teleport skill.

A week passed by quickly.

I had moved my observation and stealth training to later in the day, so I had more time to train my physicals, and I’m not going to lie, I kind of hated it all. I had never been the type of person to follow a routine, but ‘Capture, Enslavement, Death,’ wasn’t something that I could just choose to ignore, suddenly having superpowers after a life of relative mediocrity was pretty novel as well.

I would go catch something at first light and drop it into my inventory, then I would start running until I couldn’t anymore, dump all my mana into a Heal before Meditating back to good condition again. Then I would start all over again in a second rotation, only with push-ups, the gains were great, but the boredom was awful. Once I got sick of doing the same thing for hours on end, which was frequently, I would stealthily make my way to the edge of the city and try to gather some information that might lead me to some insight on when I was. The time of day I had previously going seemed to have crippled my progress because I learned some remarkably interesting information very quickly when I started going to the city later on in the day. It was a numbers game really, there was simply way more people out and about later on in the day.

Like the important-looking guy who was surrounded by a large number of guards as he wandered through the market, I only saw him for a minute, but he was one of the names I actually remembered from the movie, simply because it was so ridiculously out of place I couldn’t have forgotten it if I wanted to.

Shabadaba.

It was the guy who hired the three ninjas to assassinate the king in the movie, I’m fairly sure the guy ended up dying near the end, so if he was alive right now, this had to be sometime before the movie occurred and before Shippudden. Eventually, if the events of the movie actually took place in this world an opportunity would arise because Team Seven minus Sasuke plus Rock Lee would be coming here. I could interact with them in some way and a question had been plaguing me ever since I realized it.

Should I interact with them at all?

If I was around the time I thought I was, there was a minimum of roughly two years until the events of Shippuden? That was two years of training to turn me into a god-killing machine. It could be much more if I was several years earlier than the events of the movie. What if the world-ending threat happened before Shippuden? Should I be already heading somewhere else to stop whatever it was? If I left or ignored them if they did come here, would I be dooming myself and everybody else? What if I was supposed to ignore them?

The Stone of Gelel movie should have happened before they came here, I think. So if that was what the quest was referring to, I would probably never be able to get there in time if it hadn’t already happened. I couldn’t even remember which country that one had taken place in. Wasn’t Gaara involved somehow? Somewhere near Suna maybe? Forget the Stone of Gelel then. I probably couldn’t do anything about that. What was the next incoming threat? The possessed shadow demon guy with the immortal army from the Land of Demons? No, that happened right at the beginning of Shippuden, which was still several years away.

The chunin exams would have already happened, so the Third Hokage was probably dead. Tsunade would be the Hokage now, Sasuke would have defected to Orochimaru, whose arms are still busted? Kimimaro and his team was dead, which was unfortunate because he was one of the most interesting ninjas in the entire show. Jiraiya would soon be taking Naruto away from the village, likely right after the events that happened here. Akatsuki starts to move around now as well, they start going after the Jinchuriki before Shippudden.

Akatsuki or just Nagato might be the target of the quest, should I try and interfere with Akatsuki? Sabotage or delay them? Could I even do that? Which Jinchuriki did they go after first? I couldn’t remember the exact order but I had a rough idea of it, I think it changed depending on the medium as well? I’m pretty sure there were some changes between the manga and the anime. I was in a movie location, so I had no idea which this place was drawing from. I knew that they weren’t going after the Jinchuriki by the number of tails, I think the first one might have been that steam guy in the red armor? I think he was from Stone? Iwa? Then it was the green-haired girl from the Waterfall Village, right after the Suna-Leaf joint chunin exams. That was a couple of months before Shippuden in the timeline, who had gone after her again? Kakuzu was a from that village, Taki? It was probably Kakuzu and Hidan, when did they recruit Hidan? Didn’t Kakuzu have an unnamed partner before him? The next one was Gaara? That was like the first episode of Shippuden, so two years away at least, Deidara and Sasori went after him at Suna, he was already the Kazekage by then as well.

I still wasn’t even sure if they were the threat, I would just have to mess with everyone.

To mess up Akatsuki’s plans, I had to either try and save the steam-guy from Iwa, or the green-haired girl from Taki. Who had gone to bring in the steam guy? Deidara was a rock ninja, wasn’t he? Deidara and Sasori, maybe, if I tried to save the steam-guy, or Kakuzu and Hidan if I tried to save the green-haired girl. Neither of those was a good starting fight. Hidan was probably the weakest member of Akatsuki, but from what I remembered he was super durable, and together with Kakazu they had taken like two different teams to bring them down and they still almost failed to do it without Naruto appearing. Kakuzu himself was one of the physically strongest members, with both close combat and ranged abilities, he was durable as well with that earth technique he used.

Deidara was sneaky as fuck from what I remembered hiding inside his own attacks and generally being a motherfucker, he was a long-ranged fighter with high mobility and massive damage potential, he had defeated Gaara and almost managed to kill Sasuke as well. Sasori was an entire bag of fuck no that I didn’t want any part of, all his weapons were coated in a lethal poison that immediately killed you or something, and he could summon like hundreds of puppets at a time all with weapons coated with the stuff. I was struggling with the idea of fighting two people at once, fuck fighting hundreds of them, and he had that iron sand ninja as well, one of the previous Kazekage.

Fuck that.

Kakuzu and Hidan seemed like the safer bet if there was such a thing. The green-haired girl had an episode with Gaara which might have been filler? I’m not sure, at that joint chunin exam in Suna. I remember that she had two jounin teammates for some reason, and they kicked everybody’s asses. What a total cheater. Then some random guy had tried to steal both the tailed beasts but failed, who was that guy? It wasn’t Akatsuki that time, but some random dude with a grudge against somebody? Was he important?

I couldn’t remember.

Akatsuki had appeared somewhere near Taki, right as they arrived? Presumedly they killed the two jounin with her and then kidnapped the green-haired-girl. I had no idea how they had stumbled upon them there, but I assumed they must have at least checked Taki first and found her missing? I could find out where the next chunin exam was going to be located, and make sure to be near Taki during it, see if I couldn’t gank the pair when they attacked her. Keeping at least one of the Jinchuriki out of their reach would slow down the whole Akatsuki plot, at least a little bit. That had to contribute in some way to saving the world right?

So how the hell did I kill Kakuzu and Hidan?