Kotori's eyebrows rose at Kanade's suggestion that she could remedy even the worst of screw-ups with Nolosha's power. If that were the case, and yet she still needed Kotori's help, the situation must be serious. To know the risk, and to suggest this course regardless, prepared to fend off the chaotic turns of Nolosha's will... Kotori looked away, suddenly aware of how personal and essential this request must be to Kanade. The emotions welling in the older woman's eyes made a little more sense now.
"...Okay, yeah." She turned and paced a few steps back and forth, wringing her hands anxiously even as she resolved to help.
"If I can help you, I will. I promise. Yeah, anything to help me concentrate is probably a good idea too."
She followed along with Kanade as they made their way back towards the surface, and all the while the proposed task gnawed at Kotori. Resolve was one thing, action was another; how was she going to do this? How was she going to start? She couldn't go in blind. And almost as if Kanade had been reading her mind, she suggested experimenting with something altogether less catastrophic first.
"I had the same thought," she admitted and offered a feeble smile. The moment stretched out between them before Kotori eventually stepped over to the hen house. The irony of her practice location was not lost on her, given where she'd
hoped to be mastering these powers shared the name. She reached out slowly to pet the hen first, then tossed a handful of seed from a nearby container to usher it out of the enclosure. Then knelt before the nest and closed her eyes, concentrating her mind inwards.
Several times now she'd channeled the mysterious energies of Nolosha no Ukiyogenma in the heat of battle, both consciously and unconscously. Sometimes it came easily, with power gushing out of her like an opened faucet, directed in her hands as effortless as if she were born to it. But other times there was nothing—a void where there should be power, a mental block between herself and the genma. Or, worse still, the power came like a tidal wave, bowling her over and leaving her fighting desperately against a power and current that would sweep away nations in its fury. But today she had time to think. Time to reach out carefully and react, to open herself to the genma in as controlled a way as Hachiya Kotori had ever known. She felt her awareness of the world fade and her conciousness slip, felt her mind falling, falling inwards. In a distant, unknowable place, familiar yet unfamiliar, she made her plea to the Phantom Beast of Life. It took an instant and an eternity, a conversation forgotten before it had even completed, a bargain made.
When next she opened her eyes they blazed with golden fire. The earthy scent of the hen house hit her with new ferocity, and beneath that the subtle perfume of Kanade, nearby. The dim light of her surroundings struck her with vivid clarity as her body came alive with Nolosha's chakra, and she could suddenly feel every ripple and rut in the ground beneath her knees. Energy, sweet life itself, coursed through her body. Twisting reams of gold bled into the air around her, a shimmering light radiating from her skin and a faint halo flickering into shape around her head. Power, but...
peaceful. A sunrise after a stormy night. A reflection of fireside warmth in a window. The comforting glow of a lover's smile. Two purple ropes of chakra, like tendrils, extended from the back of Kotori's head, mingling with her hair and waving gently in an unseen, unfelt wind.
Imbued with such power, she reached out and wrapped hands around one of the eggs, then gently allowed the euphoric energy to bleed into the shell.
Grow, she thought,
be birthed and be free!. The egg grew warm, then in the next moment hot and blackened, and she dropped it with a gasp. When it hit the floor it shattered. Didn't crack, or splatter, but
shattered, splintering into dark, unidentifiable fragments, causing her to gasp and reel backwards, sharing a momentary horror with Kanade.
Nothing happened with the next attempt, and after a few minutes of concentration she broke open the shell to reveal a half-formed, unchanged embryo. By the fifth egg she'd learned to concentrate on the essence of life within, linking it to the energies she wielded to help it grow and develop. But that breakthrough alone wasn't enough; the next few chicks grew too fast, or in the wrong ways, ending up misshapen, broken, or deceased. Each failure weighed her down as she refined the technique, learning how and when to wield the life chakra to achieve her desired effect. By the twelfth, she tentatively peeled away fragments of shell to reveal a ball of sticky wet yellow feathers that quivered in her palm, struggling to sudden life. Still small, feeble, fragile, but bigger and more developed by far than the others had been. She shared another look with Kanade, a silent hope, until the new chick suddenly reverted back to an earlier, unformed state. Kotori winced, eased its passing, then swallowed her frustrations and tears and turned back to continue her attempts.
Only by the seventeeth egg did she feel she'd achieved the technique, able to reliably and permanently—or so she thought so far—advance the age of the unborn chicks in a controlled and careful manner. Eighteen proved her mastery of it, but even so, it did not feel like enough. She turned her attention to seeds in the ground around them and continued trying, learning the new targets and experimenting until she sat surrounded by new plants blooming in their prime. She reached out to the mother hen, and on her first attempt aged it perfectly, then reversed it, and repeated the cycle several times. Only then did she return to find Kanade and report her tentative success. It still didn't feel like enough. Still too much of a gamble, but what else could they do? She didn't need to speak her worries, written across her face as they were.
Guerdon of Tomorrow
C-Rank Ninjutsu
Prerequisites: Ukiyogenma Form 2
The user channels before unleashing a refined wave of Life energy. The wave will spread from the user at [control] speed for up to 10 metres and can be up to 10 x 10 metres in size, enveloping living targets it touches with a bright golden glow. Struck targets immediately advance in age anywhere from a few months to as much as ten years per application, and can be reapplied to continue the ageing further. The technique is permanent, leaving the target at their new advanced age unless reversed by de-ageing Ukiyojutsu.
