Naruto had gone into the meeting with the Third Hokage carrying an even more elaborate script in his head. If necessary, he had planned to casually mention a strange dream too—a fierce fox, enormous and terrifying, locked behind a cage in a dark place deep inside him. Step by step, he would have used that image to guide the old man toward the seal, toward the possibility that something inside it had loosened, and finally toward the most important point of all: offering to teach him sealing techniques.
But to Naruto's complete surprise, reality moved faster than any plan he had prepared.
The Third Hokage had taken the initiative. Hiruzen not only directly revealed that Naruto was the Nine-Tails' jinchuriki, he also wrapped that truth in a carefully polished heroic narrative and placed it right in front of him. In one stroke, he saved Naruto the trouble of laying groundwork, steering the conversation, and slowly baiting the old fox into making the offer himself.
Everything had gone far more smoothly than Naruto had dared hope.
His performance—a frightened child awakening strange power in the middle of panic, yet still trying to do the right thing for the sake of the village—had clearly struck the Third Hokage exactly where he wanted. That mix of helplessness and resolve had been the perfect catalyst.
So with almost no resistance, and without needing to plead nearly as much as he had expected, Naruto got what he wanted: a scroll containing the sealing knowledge he needed most.
The moment he returned home, he could hardly wait. He shut the door, sat down, and opened the scroll at once.
The techniques recorded at the front were relatively basic sealing arts: formations like the One-Sided Lantern Array, then the Fire Sealing Seal, and other foundational formulas used for containment, restraint, and control. Even the Fire Sealing Seal, which already counted as a B-rank technique, felt modest when compared with the deeper material that appeared later.
Further on came things like the Four Symbols Seal, the Five Elements Seal, and the Eight Trigrams Sealing Style—true core techniques. Compared with those, the earlier methods were limited in both function and stability. The more Naruto read, the more he realized this scroll was not some ordinary primer. It was a real treasury.
Then his eyes moved lower, and even he froze for a second.
"The Third Hokage's Three-Way Seal... the Four Red Yang Formation too?"
Naruto stared at the parchment in disbelief. The deeper he went, the more outrageous the contents became. What was this? An introductory guide? This was more like Konoha's private vault had been shoved directly into his hands.
When he flipped to the final section, the shock only deepened.
"The Four Symbols Seal... the Dead Demon Consuming Seal... and the Torii Seal of the Bright God Gate?"
Naruto sucked in a sharp breath. Two of those were S-rank forbidden techniques that could end in mutual destruction with the enemy. The other was a sealing method powerful enough to suppress even the Ten-Tails. This was not merely advanced knowledge. This was the marrow of Konoha's sealing arts—the kind of thing most shinobi would never lay eyes on in their entire lives.
Inside the sealed space, Kurama had also seen everything through Naruto's eyes. The massive fox, who had been lazily sprawled in the darkness, suddenly straightened. Its scarlet eyes widened in undisguised astonishment.
"Naruto... that is the Bright God Gate?"
The psychological scars Hashirama Senju had left behind with that technique were simply too deep. Even after all these years, Kurama still remembered the oppressive weight of those gates pinning things in place with terrifying finality.
Naruto's consciousness sank into the sealed space, and he nodded with the same stunned expression still hanging on his face.
"Kurama, I'm starting to seriously suspect the Third Hokage handed me the wrong scroll. Did he accidentally give me Konoha's complete sealing manual instead of a beginner's textbook?"
The contents were so far beyond his expectations that suspicion was the only reasonable reaction left.
After the initial shock, Kurama snorted and forced its posture back into lazy arrogance, as though it had never been surprised in the first place.
"Hmph. Why are you panicking over something so trivial? I've already memorized the entire scroll."
"...What?"
This time Naruto was the one left gaping.
Kurama flicked its tail and gave him the kind of look one might reserve for a hopeless country bumpkin who had never seen the world.
"What, you think that's strange? I'm the Nine-Tails. I've lived for more than a thousand years. Having a photographic memory is nothing special. If you want, you could return the scroll right now and it wouldn't matter."
Naruto looked at the fox's smug face and immediately sensed the chance to poke at it. So he deliberately put on a doubtful expression.
"I don't believe you. You say it so confidently, but if you really memorized it, then start reciting it for me—from the section on the One-Sided Lantern Array."
The accusation hit like a spark in dry grass.
"Brat, are you doubting me?!"
Kurama bared a row of cold white fangs, fury blazing in its eyes. Its tails lashed once behind it, sending ripples racing across the waterlogged floor of the sealed space.
"Don't mention one pathetic scroll. Even if you asked me about the words that old man of the Six Paths spoke when he divided chakra and created the nine of us a thousand years ago, I would still remember every single one!"
Naruto said nothing. He simply stared.
That steady, skeptical stare was worse than argument. Under it, Kurama's momentum visibly faltered. The fox stiffened, then slowly drooped, its earlier dominance leaking away at an almost comical speed.
"I... I did memorize it," it muttered at last, much less imposing than before. "Not a single symbol wrong. But... I can't read it out loud."
"...You can't read?"
"That's right! I can't read! So what?!"
Having already lost face, Kurama threw caution aside and barked the truth out in one irritated burst.
"Who would want to learn those tiny, irritating human symbols? I just remember them as shapes—images! I can imprint them exactly into my mind without a single mistake, but I can't read them to you. Satisfied now?"
A strange silence fell over the sealed space.
A tailed beast with a perfect memory—who happened to be illiterate.
But the more Naruto thought about it, the less ridiculous it actually seemed.
There was nothing inherently odd about Kurama being unable to read. After the Sage of Six Paths separated the Ten-Tails into the nine tailed beasts, he eventually died. Naruto still didn't know why a figure of that level could die so... ordinarily. But one thing was certain: the old man had not had the time, or perhaps the opportunity, to carefully raise and educate the tailed beasts the way a human parent would.
Kurama was a colossal creature born with destructive power beyond measure. It had always stood outside human civilization rather than within it. Throughout its long existence, humans had either feared it, coveted it, fought over it, or sealed it away. Under those circumstances, the idea that someone would sit down beside the strongest tailed beast in the world and patiently teach it reading and writing bordered on absurdity.
So this was not a flaw. It was the product of history—of fate, circumstance, and a thousand years of distance between beast and man.
But instead of laughing, Naruto's eyes slowly lit up.
Something warm and bright rose in his expression, as though he had just stumbled upon an unexpectedly meaningful idea.
"Then... let me teach you."
The words were simple. No mockery. No pity. No command. Just an invitation.
Like he was saying: There are some interesting things in the human world too. Come, and I'll show them to you.
That straightforward sincerity hit the stagnant silence of the sealed space like a stone dropped into still water.
"I won't learn!"
Kurama rejected the offer instantly. The giant fox whipped its head away and presented Naruto with the back of its head, radiating complete resistance and disdain.
Naruto, however, had long since learned how Kurama's arrogance worked. His smile didn't fade in the slightest. He simply kept sitting there, watching the giant fox's sulking back with cheerful patience.
Time stretched.
Kurama maintained its stubborn pose for a while, but in the end it couldn't help itself. Its gaze quietly shifted back by a fraction, sneaking a glance from the corner of one eye. Naruto was still watching it with that same calm, sunny smile—a smile that always somehow made Kurama irritated, helpless... and vaguely uneasy in a way it did not know how to describe.
There was embarrassment in being seen through. There was also something more subtle in being taken seriously at all.
"Fine, fine!"
Kurama finally snapped, twisting its head back with a vicious huff as if it had been forced into an utterly unreasonable compromise.
"You really are impossible. But let me make this clear—I do not want to learn your human writing. I'm only agreeing because it benefits you. Understood?"
Naruto nodded without hesitation, accepting the excuse with perfect seriousness.
"Okay. I'm the one asking for the favor. Thank you very much, Kurama-sama, for doing this for me."
"Hmph."
Kurama let out a satisfied snort. The tips of its nine tails gave a faint, involuntary sway behind it.
Then, apparently wanting to shift the subject before the moment could become any stranger, the fox added in a more practical tone:
"Teach me when you have spare time. Your priority right now is learning sealing techniques as fast as possible and taking real control of this sealed space. That's what matters most."
Naruto looked at the scroll, then at the giant fox before him, and the corners of his mouth curled upward.
He had gotten what he wanted from the Third Hokage. He had also, quite unexpectedly, found another path opening in front of him—one not of power alone, but of connection.
For the first time, the unreadable symbols on the scroll no longer looked like a wall. They looked like the beginning of something.