Another Life [Flashback]

Ningyo had been having difficulty sleeping. Perhaps it was the dangerous missions she had been sent on recently. Maybe it was the training berween her and her Sensei, Airi.

She had been struggling with visions of the past, a past she hardly knew existed. One that she had blocked out and still couldn't completely remember except for in flashes. Tonight Ningyo's mind flooded with these painful memories that had been blocked out of her conscious mind.

She floated in and out of consciousness and seemed to have strange dreams about another life, a life she couldn't completely remember. In these visions of her other life she was born into the main branch of the Hyuuga family as an Uchiha-Hyuuga hybrid.

In these unclear visions she was born a member of the main family, yet treated from her birth as a freak because of her dual-doujutsu capabilities. This brought with it a set of problems, to both clans.

Birth of the Cursed Red-Lotus Mutant Hyuuga 突然変異体
Somehow, in her earliest memories, she was a child brought before a meeting of both clans. A sword was raised above her as the council debated cutting her in two peices, one half for each clan.

Her birth was the consequence of a variation on the archetype of a 'Romeo and Juliet' saga, a forbidden error in a secret breeding program, lovers from two of the most fiercely rivalrous clans in a generations long war. The love of Ningyo's biological parents placed a schism in the genetic program to create a new kind of shinobi, culminating in her unstable birth a generation too early. Instantly it was deemed that she be given a curse seal mark on the forehead, to control a potentially dangrous mistake.

Yet, the Hyuga clan was not allowed to brand Ningyo with a curse seal that would melt her brain, because of the diplomatic situation. She was a cross hybrid Uchiha-Hyuga (a member of both clans) and the Uchiha therefore objected to the placement of the curse seal as she was 'joint property' of the clans and it went against their custom. It was argued who would claim authority over the child.

Eventually a tenuous bargain was struck, and it was decided that Ningyo would live in the Hyuga compound for the first ten years of her life, to finish her introductory training in the gentle fist style. During the subsequent ten years, the teenage years, she would live in the Uchiha clan compound, and train with the Uchiha clan.

While disdained by the Hyuga, she represented an olive branch between the two clans. Neither clan wanted her to be kidnapped or the secrets of their doujutsu to be comprimised, (which was doubly likely, since she exhibited the possibility of possesing both their doujutsu, a new unstable, mutant, dual-kekkai genkai, which for the purposes of brevity will be refered henceforth as the Byakusharingan). Because of the delicate situation, the village elders in general supported Ningyo's existence and didn't want her killed.

Ningyo's existence served as a symbol of inter-clan co-operation and potentially bought Konohagakure 10 to 20 years without another Hyuga-Uchiha interclan civil war, the kind that had plagued Konohagkagure for hundreds of years, sapping and fissuring it's vital strength. This span of time could be used by the guiding hands of the administration make a new Land of Fire (united by the clans) that could become the dominant military force of the realm.

It was decided that Ningyo's gentle fist training be brutal, for if she died, the Hyuga clan wouldn't have to worry about her existence posing a threat to their clan secrets, and wouldn't be bound by the treaty she created. Not only that, but if she survived, she would be placed under hypnosis and memory regressed. Her memories of being a Hyuga would be deleted using a complex forbidden jutsu in a ritual taking place on her tenth birthday. This would protect them from divulging any information to their dreaded enemy, the Uchiha.

If she managed to survive the intense training, it's brutality would be difficult enough to make her capable of protecting the secrets of the Byakugan located within in her skull.

The Training of the Forbidden Pure-Blood Exile 純血 亡命
In any other case, Ningyo would have been selected as the clan heir of the Hyuga, yet due to her tainted Uchiha blood, she was treated with contempt. Her gentle fist training was made to be difficult enough to potentially kill her and she was to be the Hyuga's forbidden secret.

At birth she was locked in an underground chamber, left in a room that contained only the bare essentials of training, and a yin and yang symbol surrounded by the eight octograms.

Her training itself became a deadly ritual. Once she became of age, she was made to practice Jyuken twenty four hours a day. She was never allowed to leave the steel reinforced walls of her underground chamber-prison. She was fed special medicine and kept under a rigorous special diet, to give her a chance at surviving.

Desiring to be rid of the problem of a freakish Hyuga, and to minimize the resources of training a part-Uchiha, the Hyuga clan elders saved time by providing Ningyo with only the most spartan conditions, and never allowed her to leave the chamber.

From her first day all that was contained within her quarters was a prison style bed, a toilet, the elaborate Baqua symbol in the center of the room, and a medical acupuncture doll, with the tenketsu of the body mapped out.

This sort of isolation training was employed only as severe punishment for members of the clan, and the students doomed with extended incarceration either went insane, died of exhaustion, or emerged from the dreaded chamber as monsters, who showed rapid progression in the short periods of their imprisonment.

Of all the taijutsu styles, Jyuken, (Gentle Fist) is the one recognized as being the most difficult and the most deadly to master. The Hyuga devote their lives to it, and often start as early as the age of three.

They sent a branch family clan member to descend into the chamber to train Ningyo. But, secretly, the servile branch family caste members of the Hyuga were often superior in Gentle Fist technique, and because of this the branch family vassal selected was incidentally a genius.

This jaded branch family member, with no opportunity for advancement within his clan because of his curse seal, decided as a joke against his inferior clan masters to instill within Ningyo flawless form, by teaching her a more ancient style of gentle fist called 'Porcelian Yin Chessboxing' Jyuken.

The footwork for this style was based directly on the I-Ching trigrams, hexagrams, and grand octogram, but otherwise it was nearly imperceptibly different to normal Jyuken. In this style each part of the body was mathematically correspondent to each other part, in transitioning motion to motion, ensuring the equilibrium of the elements of the body and the balance of all the tenketsu points. Because of her bloodline, Ningyo's body was perfectly suited to adapt to this style.

Every movement was essentially an equation, hidden with the yin and yang symbol. As Ningyo traversed the Octogon symbol etched into the ground of the hidden chamber, her footwork was literally set in stone as the hexagrams in the middle of the candlelit floor dictated the path of her motions. She was entrained, move by move, taught from the time she could walk, the pinnacle of the ancient art of Jyuken. Ningyo's mind and body were occupied with no other stimulus.

As there are 64 squares on a chess board, so there are 108 palms. The Yin Chessboxing variant of Gentle Fist emphasised perfect body positioning of form and structure. It was usually considered to take too long to learn, and so the Jyuken had been bastardized or diluted to it's current condition. Common Jyuken was allowed certain shortcuts and pragamtic movements, to deal with real life scenarios. Once the old Yin Chessboxing form was discovered hidden in the dusty libaries of the Hyuga scrolls, it was too late, the and practitioner had already internalized the common Jyuken flaws as well as wasted movements.

Jyuken itself was one of the four primordial gentle styles of antiquity. These series styles contain the 'circle' or air form, the 'line' or fire form, the 'square' or earth form, and the 'wave' or water form. Ningyo was taught some of the complimentary positions from the primordial forms, making her stances less awkward and more formal (alternatives to stances such as the stance taken before 64 palms). She was also given a simplified handset without foot movement, due to the enclosed space she trained in. With these additions her form became more nuanced in small ways.

The disciplined style of the older Jyuken forms adhered to stricter a more complex formula of counters, counters within counters, and responses to each of the hand positions of Jyuken. Each hand position was designated with a corresponding I-Ching hexagram, hence it's nickname 'Chessboxing'. For these aspects of training a Mu Ren Zhuang, or form dummy was implemented.

The training emphasized the 'gentle' aspect of the gentle-fist, with the chakra flow being allowed naturally by alignment of all the body angles, the accuracy of tenketsu strikes, and surgical form. Being a variant of the Jyuken style, it attacked the meridians of the chakra circulatory system directly and required no physical strength.

Much to the chagrin of the elders, the mutant Ningyo rapidly avandced as a genius of the style even at a young age. The combination of her rapid progression, the the rigidity of the chessboxing style, and all of her time dedicated to practice due to being quarantined in the ritual prison, it became appearant and inevitable that she would become stronger even than the intended heir. She withstood the brutal regimen well, and received none of the adverse side effects of insanity from the isolation, only a peculiar disposition and snow-white complextion.

She was nicknamed the Pure-Blooded Exile, and was considered to be "a poisoned pawn" or "a poisoned dragon", a glitch in the breeding program of the clans, and a failure in the ruse devised by the Hyuuga that had strategically backfired.

By and large, locked away in the chamber, Ningyo was forgotten about, and the serious portion of her training began from the age of about 3 to about the age of 9. She trained relentlessly in Jyuken day in and day out. The clan elders hestitated to simply assassinate her, because of the complex diplomatic inter-clan situation, but there was also the matter of her "Blue-Bloodedness" the connection to the royal lineages of the Hyuga and Uchiha, that gave the elders pause before murdering an heir of their own family. It was debated back and forth, but a clear conclusion could not be reached. Yet, before the clan elders could make a descision regarding Ningyo's fate, her ten years of isolation and indoctrination within House Hyuga had been completed, and she was released into the charge of the Uchiha, as per the terms of the treaty.

On the final day of her training, the night of a full moon, she was brought before the elders to systematically demonstrate the Jyukenpo forms. After her performance the elders were bewildered. She showed rapid progress of almost triple speed the usual rate of instruction, and while her gentle fist appeared to be at the level of a mature student, her form possessed the mysterious qualities of the secret art of the 'Porcelian Yin Chessboxing' variations, transferred to her by the rebelious branch family master-instructor. It was argued that she be killed on the spot, and that she was a 'Rose with Poison Thorns'.

Yet, instead of death, the clan heads opted for her to become the victim of ritual memory erasure jutsu. Spread out on the floor within a complex fuuinjutsu, handseal were performed and chakra was poured into her mind so that her brain was wiped clean. She was forced to forget everything about her training, Hyuga secrets, and every single technique of Jyuken that she had spent ten years (the entirety of her life) learning since birth. When she was finally transfered to the Uchiha clan compound she possessed an unaturally porcelian shade of skin, brought on by a lack of sunlight in her upbringing.


The Apostasy of the Amnesiatic 108th Kata Prodigy 健忘症 天才
Despite the amnesiatic barrier, the body remembers, and unbeknownst to Ningyo she was the inheritor of a forbidden substrain of the Hyuga gentle-fist, that had been honed for countless hours over the years. She was trained by the Uchiha as a typical clan member and given a surrogate family in the Uchiha clan district.

Secretly, she was tormented by a fragmented, malfunctioning memory and strange marks on her body from an elite and ruthless training that she couldn't remember. The residual memories she had been implanted with didn't add up, and her cover memories experienced frequent breakdowns, causing subsequent psychological distress and disorder.

It is not so easy to forget an austere life of child training, the growing body and neuro-pathways tend to remember mechanically the motions formed in the application of the deadly arts. Often the movements would erupt spontaneously, causing her memories to resurface. Ningyo's instincts and reflexs contained the secret within them, and the martial movements were often the key to breaking inside the locked away memories. Sudden relapses of memory seemed bizarre as she recalled scenes from a life she could not place, hidden by the trauma of subhuman treatment within the basement of clan Hyuga.

Inexplicalibly, she manifested a Byakugan seemingly out of nowhere. As it activated she was able to see in 360 degrees. This re-awakening of her Byakugan further puzzled Ningyo, as well as her ability to switch between Sharingan and Byakugan freely.

But life went on as usual and Ningyo participated in academy life as an Uchiha student, and subsequently life as a Genin. The rest of her history is known and documented, and continues to unfold.