Tale of the Setting Sun

Chapter 50: "Crimson Spiral and Black Thunder"

The stillness of Whirlpool had stopped unnerving him.

In the beginning, Naruto had been perturbed by the silence—how it hung in the air like held breath, how the moon never shifted from its place in the sky. But after a week of training under its gaze, he had grown accustomed to its presence. If anything, it had become familiar and predictable.

Unlike Ashina.

Naruto exhaled through his nose and dropped back into a kneel, sweat running down the back of his neck. Ashina stood a few feet away, arms crossed behind his back, his expression etched in granite.

"You're still forcing it," the older man said. "Your chakra flares with impatience."

"I'm trying to balance it—"

"Trying is not doing," Ashina cut in with a sharp wave of his hand. "You cannot balance what you do not possess. Yin must be cultivated. It is not seared into you like the Yang."

Naruto ground his teeth together. His entire body ached from the prolonged stillness. Every day—if it could even be called that—the same: meditate beneath the unmoving moon, waiting for the precise, unspeakable moment when his seething chakra quieted, harmonizing with the lulling energy of his surroundings.

It was as impossible as it sounded.

Ashina stepped into the moonlight, the white of his long hair glinting like drawn steel. "All ninjutsu is formed through the transformation of Yin and Yang. Yin is imagination—formless potential. Yang is vitality—force and substance. Together, they mold chakra into what you call technique."

He formed a seal. A flame blinked into existence, bright as any Naruto had seen—yet without heat.

An illusion.

"You think I don't know this?" Naruto muttered.

"I think you've forgotten. Or never truly understood." Ashina's gaze cut sharper. "You are a vessel filled with flame, Naruto. But all you've ever done is burn. Now you must learn to shape the smoke."

The words echoed, unsettling.

Biting back his irritation, Naruto dropped his gaze. He inhaled. Exhaled. Again and again, pushing his chakra inward, away from skin and muscle, toward the hollow center of himself. Seeking stillness.

Karin had never been particularly good with her hands.

Her strength had always lain in sensing, in precision, in analysis—not the fine motor control required for things like taijutsu or kenjutsu.

Or for that matter, weaving. But here, in Whirlpool, no one seemed to care.

After a few days of watching Karin grow increasingly listless while Naruto trained, her attendant brought her to a workroom fragrant with dried herbs and alive with the soft clack of tools. There, another woman handed her a lapful of yarn and gestured to the loom. After a brief demonstration, she simply said, "Feel the pattern, not think it."

And to Karin's surprise, she didn't hate it.

In the quiet of the workroom, the women wove seals into yarn: flowing spirals and interlocking crescents, each thread imbued with intention—protection, resilience. Beautiful, yes, but also powerful.

So Karin tried her hand at it. Her fingers fumbled often, and the dyes pricked at her skin, but after several weeks, she'd managed to make a little red cloth with a white spiral at its center.

When one of the other girls caught her tracing the spiral at the center of the cloth, Karin shoved it behind her so quickly the threads nearly tore. "It's just practice," she mumbled, cheeks warm.

The girl didn't press, but she smiled.

Later that day, while tying off the last knot on a new pattern, Karin let her attention drift and spoke without thinking. "Weaving feels like... the way I control my chains."

The clacking around her stopped. The room stilled.

The attendant nearest her—the same woman who had guided her to the moon shrine—looked up sharply. "Chains? You can summon the sealing chains?"

Karin blinked. "Y-yeah. I mean, I can't use them very often. Only when I really concentrate, or when something's… dangerous."

The attendant rose without another word and left the room. Not long after, an older woman entered. The other women straightened as she passed, but no one spoke.

She moved slowly, and with purpose. Every step was measured, as though weaving her path across the hair was a silver waterfall down her back, bound in scarlet threads. Karin recognized her immediately—she was the woman who had warmly welcomed her at the gate.

Her name was Zuchi, and she was the wife of the chieftain, Ashina. She smiled now as she had at the harbor, but there was something different in it—less ceremonial, more searching.

"I'm told that you can summon the chains," said Zuchi. "Do you know what they are?"

Karin hesitated. "They're just…chakra chains. Like wire, but stronger."

Zuchi raised a brow. "So you don't know."

"I've never had anyone teach me," Karin said, defensive despite herself.

"And the seals you've been weaving here?"

"I just copy them," Karin admitted. "I understand the flow of the chakra, but I don't know what each one means. Not really."

Zuchi's smile didn't fade, but the ends of it twitched as if in rebuke. "So your mother passed on nothing."

Karin flushed, and suddenly thought of the carved necklace her mother had once worn.

"Come to my house tomorrow morning."

"For what?" Karin asked, trying to keep the bite out of her voice.

Zuchi's gaze lingered. "To teach you what you've inherited. So the next time you reach for your chains, they don't come out wild and blind."

Then she turned and left, leaving only the scent of sandalwood—and a strange tightness in Karin's chest.

Whirlpool never shifted. Not in light, not in air, not in rhythm.

Day in, day out, Naruto sat cross-legged on the stone outcropping overlooking the village, bathed in the ever-present moonlight. It no longer felt strange—but it refused to feel comforting.

His breaths came slow and controlled. Chakra pooled evenly through his limbs, swirling just beneath the skin in a quiet current.

Still, it wasn't enough.

Ashina had said it would take time to temper the imbalance of his chakra. Meditating under the moon would align him with the Yin and if he wanted to control the fox fully, he needed to first control himself.

But right now, all it felt like was a stalemate.

Naruto opened his eyes and exhaled through his nose. "Still feels off."

A snort came from nearby.

"I could've told you that hours ago," said Amakurō, stretching his limbs out in a passable imitation of a snake. "You're like a forge that only knows how to burn."

Naruto scowled. "Then maybe stop watching and actually help."

"I am helping," Amakurō said with a yawn. "My very existence is a sterling example of the balance you so desperately seek."

Naruto didn't answer. He just closed his eyes again and tried to focus—but inevitably, his mind began to drift.

To the wandering days with Jiraiya—who offered less instruction and more vague encouragement before vanishing to "research" his next book.

To the waning evenings at his apartment, when Kakashi would debate chakra theory with him like it was a game, poking holes at every turn in Naruto's logic.

Back then, he'd found them frustrating. Now, he realized they had always been…there.

Ashina wasn't like either of them.

Training with Ashina was like throwing stones at a wall and expecting it to speak. He was exacting, unsparing, and spoke only when there was something to correct. Never praise. Never reassurance. Just silence—or cold dismissal.

Naruto couldn't decide which was worse: the weight of expectation, or the absence of everything else.

He stood with a huff. "I'm not getting anywhere."

Ashina's voice came sharp from the treeline. "Giving up already?"

Naruto turned. He hadn't sensed him—again.

Ashina stepped into the clearing, hands clasped behind his back. His gaze passed over Amakurō, who didn't acknowledge him.

"You have the power and the instincts," Ashina said. "But you rely too heavily on intuition, not refinement."

Naruto bristled. "And sitting under a moon for weeks will fix that?"

"No," Ashina replied flatly. "It's merely the first step."

He reached into his robe and produced an object—a spiraling stone nestled in a black cloth, with an unfamiliar seal carved into its very center.

"You've been stuck long enough. I hoped we wouldn't need to come to this, but it's time you saw how someone handled the other half of your burden."

Naruto eyed the seal warily. "What does this do?"

"The imprint seal on this stone carries the memory of the former jinchūriki of the Yin Nine-tails. If you cannot learn from me, perhaps his memory will succeed where I have failed."

Naruto hesitated, his pulse picking up. He didn't like the idea of reaching into someone else's life…

But the idea of standing still while the outside world fell apart was even worse.

Still, a chill passed through him—not fear, exactly. Just the sense that once he touched it, something would shift.

"…Fine," he said. "Let's do it."

Ashina held the seal out toward him. "Keep your mind open. Don't resist."

The stone was cool beneath his hand, smooth and pulsing faintly. As his chakra touched it, the world around him began to dissolve—first the clearing, then the night air, then the sound of Ashina's breathing—

—until there was only moonlight.

When he was young, Tena had been loud.

The kind of loud that filled courtyards, that echoed down training halls and made elders rub their temples. He had friends who dared him to leap from treetops and race through the whirlpools. He had a laugh that cracked like thunder.

But in the evening, no matter the ruckus he had raised in the daytime, he always returned dutifully home, to his older sister—Mito.

She had raised him after their parents died. Not with gentleness, exactly, but with a kind of fierce steadiness. She taught him how to weave seals, how to clean a blade, and how to never show his fear—even when his legs trembled.

He loved her more than anything in the world.

When the alliance was struck with the Hidden Leaf, and she was chosen to marry the heir to the Senju clan, Mito didn't cry. She simply packed her meager belongings, bound her hair tighter, and told Tena that "this was the path peace demanded."

He didn't understand it then. Only that it meant she would leave.

So, he followed her.

He crossed the sea to the Land of Fire and lived as a ghost behind her shadow, training while she grew into her role as the wife of the First Hokage. And then, as the first jinchūriki of the Nine-tails.

She never said it aloud, but Tena saw it wear on her—what the Nine-tails did to her body, how it strained at every opportunity against the seal. How her hands trembled when no one else was looking.

And then, one night, Mito called him to her quarters.

She was pregnant with her first child, and she was worried at how childbirth would weaken the seal.

"I've found a solution, Tena," she said.

He said nothing, only listened. He'd grown better at that over the years.

"The Leaf will keep the Yang," she said. "You'll take the Yin back to Whirlpool. It's safer. It's balance. You trust me, don't you?"

Of course he did.

The sealing burned worse than anything he had imagined.

The Yin Nine-tails did not enter quietly. It came screaming, lashing through his body like a limb torn from something greater. It howled for what it had lost, for the part of itself still nestled inside Mito, across the mountains and sea.

Tena thrashed for days, fevered and disoriented. When he finally emerged from the haze, his sister was gone, and he returned alone to Whirlpool.

Over time, the tailed beast inside him stopped raging. Instead, it wept. Its power spilled in low waves, like sorrow turned into chakra, as it ached with a longing for what it had lost.

The agony of that absence was more than physical—it was emptiness given form. Like a song cut short just before the final note.

The elders taught Tena to meditate, to balance his chakra with rhythm and breath. And somewhere in those long, wordless hours beneath moonlight and stone, the Nine-tails began to talk to him.

"Why did you separate me?" the Nine-tails asked him one night, its voice coiling like smoke through his mind.

"Because you were too powerful," he answered. "There needed to be balance."

"This is not balance. This is an abomination."

"I'm sorry," he said.

He did not fight it after that. He meditated. He listened. And in return, the Nine-tails lent him his power.

When war came, Tena became the moon on the battlefield—cold and silent and unstoppable. He felt the Yin Nine-tails' chakra surge like floodwaters, lifting him to impossible heights.

He was not its master. But he was not its cage.

One day, while returning from a mission, he stood by the upper cliffs of the southern shore, overlooking the sea. He was alone, as he usually preferred to be now. The overcast morning was silent, lacking the usual squawking of seabirds, lulled only by the rhythmic pounding of grey waves on the rocks.

And then suddenly—a crack of laughter, like thunder.

In the distance, he saw two small girls in a boat, laughing as they tried to guide it with a makeshift sail—one with bright red hair, the other slightly darker and sharper-eyed.

He recognized them: Kushina and Inada.

The chieftain had told him that they were to be trained. One would carry the Yang; the other, the Yin. In the future, they would become vessels of mass destruction.

But right now, they looked like joy divided between two hearts.

So over the years, he continued to watch them from a distance—these sisters not by blood, but by fate. And every time he saw them together, he felt that quiet old ache rise again.

The moonlight didn't fade. It broke.

One breath, Naruto was still standing in Tena's memory, the weight of sorrow clinging to his skin. The next—he was ankle-deep in water before a familiar iron gate.

Darkness writhed behind the bars. Smoke-like chakra twisted through the gloom.

Then—

A flash of red. A surge of heat. Two bloodshot eyes opened wide, burning.

"You're back," the Nine-tails growled, voice like grinding stone.

Its chakra pressed against the seal—not lashing, not rampaging. Testing.

Naruto stood his ground. "I didn't come to fight."

The beast snarled, claws scraping against the gate. "You never do. And yet, every time you come back, you come to take."

Naruto let the accusation sit. The seal glowed faintly before him, frayed at the edges. Every use of the Nine-tails' chakra unraveled it just a bit more. Every breath of borrowed power, one step closer to collapse.

"I know you didn't choose this. You didn't ask to be split in half. You didn't ask to be sealed in me, or in anyone."

The Nine-tails didn't respond—but its chakra stilled for a breath.

"Even so," Naruto went on, "You've lent me your strength. Again and again. And I've used it like a weapon. I've used you like a weapon."

A growl rumbled from deep within the beast's chest.

Naruto stepped closer, steady. "So... thank you."

The growl faltered. Glowing eyes narrowed suspiciously in the darkness. "...Gratitude?"

"But I'm not like Tena," Naruto continued. "I won't carry your sorrow. I'm not that noble or patient."

He stepped forward, close enough now to feel the heat rising from the bars. His chakra flared, not in challenge, but in conviction.

"So I'm going to keep taking your chakra," he said flatly. "Because I need it. People need me to use it. And the world doesn't stop to wait for balance."

Silence. Then—

"Hah." The Nine-tails barked a jagged laugh, barbed and bitter. Its tails lashed behind it, sending gusts of wind rippling across the still water. "At least you recognize your own hypocrisy."

Naruto reached out. His fingers brushed the seal—then he ripped it away.

Immediately, a surge of chakra erupted from the cage in a torrent of heat and fury. Roaring in freedom, the Nine-tails surged forward, shattering the bars effortlessly as its massive claws slammed down on him.

But Naruto didn't flinch.

He dropped into a low stance, palms pressed to the rippling surface of the water. His breath caught. His focus narrowed. And he felt it—the pull of his surroundings outside, the hum beneath everything.

It didn't roar into him like the Nine-tails' chakra did. It flowed, weaving itself into the whorls of his chakra network like ripples of wind through flame. Natural energy surged through his limbs. His eyes snapped open—burning, focused. Red markings flared across his face as his vision sharpened, and suddenly he could see every detail.

The flicker of chakra along the Nine-tails' claws. The microscopic ripping in the old seal. The way its chakra rippled like a tide straining against the moon.

The beast's power surged toward him—and stopped. Held. Contained.

Absorbed.

The Nine-tails snarled, jaws parting, "You dare—"

"I dare," Naruto cut in, voice sharp as a kunai. "Because I must."

But…it wasn't enough.

Even now—with natural energy coursing through his body, his senses sharpened to an edge, his will locked tight—the Nine-tails still surged forward. This wasn't just a battle of willpower. It was a contest of presence.

And Naruto, for all his training, all his victories, all his growth—was still barely a man, standing in front of a force older than nations.

The Nine-tails roared.

Chakra tore through the air, unraveling Naruto's form like paper in a storm. The water beneath him began to boil. His breath hitched. His muscles seized.

His feet faltered—just for a second. But it was enough.

The chakra surged past his control. Flames of red and black exploded outward, wrapping around him. Tails began to form behind him—one, then two, then three—each more violent than the last. His skin burned. His vision wavered.

No—

And then—

A flash of white. A burning seal etched across the air.

Naruto collapsed forward, coughing, the chakra torn from his limbs like a ripped shroud. The water around him stilled, and the cage doors snapped shut with a thunderous boom.

Standing between him and the gate, one hand pressed against the bars, was Ashina. The newly placed seal fluttered under his fingers—precise, unyielding.

"No human can stand alone against a tailed beast," Ashina said quietly.

Naruto's body trembled. His hands clenched into the water, lungs heaving, shoulders hunched from the weight of it all.

"I almost had it," he rasped.

Ashina didn't move. "No, you were overwhelmed by it."

Behind the bars, the Nine-tails glared through narrowed eyes. But it no longer raged. It simply watched, tail flicking lazily, as if amused.

"Come back when you know who you are," it said. "Then we'll see who owns this cage."