Currently we were traveling through the land of hot springs which contrary to it’s name wasn’t in fact covered in hotsprings. In fact it was just a mix of valleys and mountains that had forests, plains and of course hotsprings. We were on the way to the land of herbs apparently as I had reached the part of my training where I needed to learn medicine concoction. I still hadn’t mastered mystic palm jutsu yet as I was making sure that I mastered each possible variant before I claimed that honor. Ironically my sensei told me that she did the exact same thing when she was learning medical ninjutsu originally.-
“I get that an iryonin(medical ninja) needs to know their way around medicine but I’m confused why I need to learn how to make it. Isn’t that the job of alchemists?” I asked as we traveled the rocky road.
“While that is true, I believe that an iryonin should be able to find and use local ingredients since there is almost never an alchemist nearby when on a mission.” Tsunade said seriously.
“I suppose that is a pretty good reason. That reminds me but why are alchemists so rare anyways? Considering how much medicine is needed I’d assume they would be a very popular profession yet I only saw like four in the village.” I said honestly confused.
Herb shops were all over the place in the village but actual medicine places were strangely lacking. It was odd since this worlds people needed way more medicine than people on earth did. Shinobi in particular got cuts , scrapes, stabs, poisoned and diseased from going on foreign missions literally all the time. With this in mind medicines for fever, rash, bleeding and poisoning were rarely in stock for very long and yet alchemist capable of making those things were a rarity.-
She sighed “It’s the same reason iryonin are outnumbered in the village a hundred to one, high learning requirements. Medicine concoction is not as simple as mixing herbs and applying the result. For starters someone learning to be an alchemist must first learn herbology and plant husbandry in exacting detail. Wild lettuce for example looks nearly identical to sow thistle but if you eat both you will have VERY different reactions. There are a near endless amount of plants that look the same but will accomplish different things.”
“Then an alchemist must be able to tell crossbreeds apart or mutants of the same species of plant. I once came across a mutant ginseng plant that wasn’t medicinal but extremely toxin instead but appeared nearly identical to it’s normal variant. On top of all this an alchemist needs to know how to crossbreed herbs to get a stronger effect from the offspring plant since most plants lack potent healing abilities on their own. With the sheer variety of plants both known and unknown in this world it takes a lot of talent or time to meet the minimum requirement to learn actual medicine crafting.” she explained seriously.
“I sorta cheated huh?” I asked sheepishly at that since I had spammed shadow clones to memorize all this theoretical information in no time at all.
“Shizune assuming you were a newbie like Kenzo here and tried to use his method of learning what percentage do you think you’d be able to memorize successfully?” Tsunade asked and my fellow student paused in thought.
“About five my lady.” The black haired woman said seriously.
“Still think you cheated?” Tsunade asked me and I shook my head. “Shadow clones can indeed increase ones learning speed considerably but the method has a fatal flaw, memory. Unless you reinforce the knowledge your clones learned it will fade away and in the end you’ll only retain a small portion of that total amount. Your brain is different however as it is naturally designed to take in a much larger portion of this information thus wasting far less time and effort to memorize a vast amount like you have. You are practically made for learning at an outrageous rate.” She added and after thinking about it I had to agree.-
No matter what it was I tried to learn it always took me far less time to pick it up than anyone else I had to compare with. Shuriken throwing? A week and I had perfect scores. Handsigns? A month to learn all the basic ones and use them fluidly. By comparison even the fastest learner in my class besides me, Sasuke took almost two years to begin approaching my level with shuriken’s and hand signs. When it came to theoretical knowledge I was even faster as I studied every piece of information about history and the world I could get my hands on.-
If it was available in the public library I knew it and even then I knew even more as I also had private information from people who lived those events. It was one thing to read about how a battle between two individuals reshaped the landscape but another entirely to speak with someone who witnessed it firsthand. Records try but usually fail when it comes to emphasis on how impactful things were but people don’t have that issue. Old folks that were alive during those times were surprisingly forthcoming about the past if you bothered to ask them I had found while in the village.-
The trick however was finding those old people as unfortunately very few shinobi lived long enough to be counted. Others like the third Hokage had no problem talking about fun or interesting personal events but got tight lipped when serious events were inquired about. For example when I had asked the Hokage about details of the first and second Hokages abilities only for the old man to immediately shut me down. It made no sense to me since unless it was pertaining to a forbidden jutsu or something talking about those two long dead people shouldn’t make any difference.-
Admittedly my memorization of the public library helped considerably when using shadow clones to learn these days. Without that prior information i likely wouldn’t be able to understand many references or words in the new stuff. In a way I suppose that it could be likened to creating a dictionary in my head that let me translate the new information much faster. The broader that dictionary got with the new words added to it the faster I learned. That was where the shadow clone jutsu came in as my clone absorbed and digested the information before sending it to me where my brain immediately went to work sorting it based on topic and understanding.-
I can’t say that my sensei was a terrible teacher but it was clear that she was less hands on then you would expect. Her teaching style so far had basically been to have me memorize information and practice a few things she taught me before leaving me to my own devices. Then again I was still basically a novice at medical jutsu still so that might be the case for all medical ninja at my level.