Memory

In Konoha Village, deep within an extremely secret underground base.

A tall, white-haired middle-aged man pushed open the base's inner door. He wore a red vest and wooden clogs. Most strikingly, red lines ran from beneath the bags under his eyes down to his jaw, like two trails of bloody tears.

The headband on his forehead bore a large character for "oil," unlike Konoha Village's leaf headbands.

One of the Three Sannin, Jiraiya.

He navigated the dark, hidden underground passages with practiced ease, turning this way and that before finally arriving outside a room.

"Knock, knock, knock." Even someone as carefree as him knew to knock.

"Is that Jiraiya? Come in." An elderly voice came from within.

Jiraiya pushed open the door and immediately saw the scene inside.

A boy wearing a special device lay atop a massive circular platform. Before it sat a shinobi wearing a similar device on his head. The boy was bare-chested, while the entire platform was covered in densely packed, intricate runes and Curse Marks. Their core converged on the boy's exposed abdomen, where they formed an Eight Trigrams Seal that seemed to be suppressing something. The shinobi before the platform appeared to be connected to the boy through the device on his head.

There were two other people in the room. One was a middle-aged shinobi with a high ponytail, dressed in Konoha's standard high-ranking shinobi vest. The other was the elderly Third Hokage, Hiruzen Sarutobi, Jiraiya's teacher.

"What happened for you to call me back with such a high-priority signal, old man?" Jiraiya stepped closer to the platform and got a clearer look at the boy lying in its center. In truth, he could not see much, since the boy's upper face was obscured by the machine. However, six whisker-like marks were visible on his cheeks.

Jiraiya's expression turned solemn. This little boy gave him a strange sense of familiarity, especially when he saw the hints of short blond hair at his temples.

The Third Hokage stared intently at the boy on the platform. After silently taking a few puffs from his pipe, he slowly said, "This is... Naruto Uzumaki."

Jiraiya froze. Even with a temperament forged through blood and fire, hearing the name "Naruto Uzumaki" left him dazed for an instant. But it lasted only an instant. Jiraiya quickly recovered, his expression becoming even more serious as he said to his teacher,

"Teacher Sarutobi, what are you doing? Didn't we agree to let this child live peacefully?"

The Third Hokage took two more puffs from his pipe, then said to the shinobi who had remained silently at his side, "Shikaku, explain it to Jiraiya."

Shikaku Nara nodded and explained, "This is what happened, Lord Jiraiya. Three days ago, Lord Hokage received a report from the Anbu that the Nine-Tails Jinchuriki, Naruto Uzumaki, had been behaving abnormally. Then Naruto Uzumaki himself came to see Lord Hokage and claimed..." He paused before continuing, "claimed that he had seen the future."

Jiraiya frowned deeply. "Seen the future?" He glanced at the boy on the platform and asked, "What does that mean?"

Shikaku answered gravely, "He gained eleven years of memories from his future!"

Jiraiya's frown deepened. He understood every word Shikaku had said, so why was their meaning together so incomprehensible?

"Was it genjutsu?" A shinobi's vigilance made that his first thought. Had people from another village already set their sights on their Jinchuriki?

Shikaku glanced at his good friend, Inoichi Yamanaka, who sat before the platform, and shook his head. "Based on what Inoichi has seen so far... we can rule out the possibility that the memories were implanted through genjutsu."

"So that means..." Jiraiya still found it hard to believe.

The Third Hokage spoke then. "You should see it for yourself. That is why I called you back." As if recalling something, the old man shook his head and sighed. "It cannot be genjutsu, because no one who knows about that matter would do such a thing."

That matter? Jiraiya found it strange, but he did not ask. He accepted the mental connection headset Shikaku handed him and put it on without hesitation.

"Next, I will connect my mind, Naruto Uzumaki's mind, and Lord Jiraiya's mind. Lord Jiraiya, you will be able to directly see the extra memories within Naruto Uzumaki's mental world," Inoichi Yamanaka, seated before the platform, reminded him.

Jiraiya nodded.

The Third Hokage puffed on his pipe and stared at the boy lying quietly on the platform, lost in thought.

Time in the mental world seemed to pass much faster than in reality. After only a few hours, Jiraiya had already removed the helmet.

Unlike when he had put it on, his eyes now held only shock.

He looked once more at the quiet six-year-old boy lying on the platform—the Nine-Tails Jinchuriki, the son of his disciple the Fourth Hokage, the child of the previous Nine-Tails Jinchuriki, Naruto Uzumaki.

His student.

"It can't be fake. Only Minato and I knew those details about Mount Myōboku, and Minato is already dead. No one could create a genjutsu containing such details about Mount Myōboku," Jiraiya declared outright.

The Third Hokage and Shikaku exchanged a glance. This was within their expectations.

An eerie silence suddenly fell over the room.

"Orochimaru, that bastard..." Jiraiya was the first to speak in the end.

Naruto's memories did not contain all the details of that upheaval. He had merely participated in the Chunin Exams when the venue suddenly descended into chaos. Not long afterward, he was sent to pursue the Sunagakure Jinchuriki team. By the time they returned, the unrest was already over. But who were the people present? From just the scattered fragments in Naruto's memories, they had guessed almost perfectly that Orochimaru had joined forces with Sunagakure to plot against Konoha while secretly eliminating the Kazekage and launching a surprise attack on the Third Hokage.

The Third Hokage died at Orochimaru's hands.

"..." The Third Hokage puffed on his pipe and smiled silently. No one's feelings toward that disciple who had defected and fled were more complicated than his.

The room fell into another long silence.

There was simply far too much information in Naruto's memories. Even the Third Hokage, known as the "Shinobi World Professor," and the brilliant strategist Shikaku Nara, known as the "Brain of Konoha," could not digest it all at once. Those images continued to violently shake their minds.

The Third Hokage classified the matter as one of the highest secrets, and for the time being, strictly limited those who knew to himself, Jiraiya, Shikaku Nara, and Inoichi Yamanaka.

He did not dare tell Danzo. If Danzo learned that something had happened to the Jinchuriki, who knew what he might do?

The four of them spent three days carefully sorting through Naruto's eleven years of memories and roughly summarized several pieces of major intelligence:

Orochimaru's Konoha Crush Plan; the many S-rank rogue shinobi behind the Akatsuki Organization; the secret of Pain, leader of the Akatsuki Organization; Obito Uchiha, the true culprit behind the Nine-Tails incident; Madara Uchiha, who might very well be revived; the residual chakra of the Fourth Hokage and the previous Jinchuriki, Kushina Uzumaki, within the Nine-Tails Jinchuriki Naruto Uzumaki; the plan Uchiha Itachi, Konoha's rogue shinobi, had for his younger brother Sasuke Uchiha; the secrets of the Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan and the Rinnegan; the truth behind the Uchiha clan massacre...

The Third Hokage looked at Jiraiya with an incomparably grave expression. "Jiraiya, are you certain you still want to go to Amegakure? Think it through. Even with the information from Naruto's memories, the Six Paths of Pain will not be easy to deal with!"

Jiraiya nodded firmly. Thinking of those three disciples filled his heart with heaviness. "I have no choice. I must make this trip."