I don't suppose really dramatic surgery would do it?

No. It's tied to my chakra system. The best I've found prior is it might be removable if I push myself into chakra exhaustion, which should give it less to tie itself to.

Well, that sounds unpleasant but if it's all that's going to work...

Yeah. That cure's possibly deadly, so I'll want to get stuff settled and try to find an alternative first.

Makes sense to me. There aren't like chakra transfusions you could get as soon as the seal was off or anything?

Maybe? You'd need a really skilled medic to do that safely, and I don't know anyone that skilled outside of the Leaf.

Well, we're likely to be in a pretty good position to encounter more skilled people what with all the shit we're stirring up.

Maybe. The Leaf has another person with this same seal, anyways, so they might be motivated to help me as an experiment. And they'll listen to their past Hokage to not try to capture me then, I think.

They're not going to think you're controlling him or anything?

I think other than Jiraiya they're mostly willing to accept I'm not hostile and even Jiraiya's accepted I'm not controlling the Hokage on that fine a level.

That's convenient. Why's Jiraiya specifically suspicious?

He was Orochimaru's teammate since they were six until Orochimaru defected. I think he's just suspicious of anything involving Orochimaru.

Six! Yikes!

I think they were one of the first teams after the Third removed minimum age requirements.

Orochimaru being fucked up is not entirely on just himself.

Oh, yeah, no, I wasn't imagining he was a purely endogenous supervillain, though apparently some people in the same situation manage to keep their crimes down to, uh, small scale sexual menace.

Their entire team's an argument against child soldiers and war. Their third member's Tsunade. She's Hokage now, and decent at it, but she spent a while drowning herself in drinking, gambling, and fights.

Mostly internalized problems unless 'fights' here means 'serial killing', so arguably better, but...

It doesn't. But, yeah.

The amount of psychological fuckery that must be going on to make any three six-year-olds... selected from the population of a small town so they're not all just one in a billion weirdos... behave like serious ninja... I can only presume to be sickening but I don't know exactly what it is. I think you can probably make it happen at twelve without being gratuitous, twelve year olds are better at molding to expectations, but six?

Yeah.

I think the thing where I injure myself while training started about six or seven. I wanted to be seen as something worthwhile. 

There's also the thing where Itachi graduated at seven and then changed drastically when he hit ANBU but Sasuke's trying really hard not to feel bad for Itachi. Feeling bad for Itachi makes his emotions go haywire. 

Well, if you wanted confirmation that competent adults who were themselves psychologically healthy would have seen that as a problem, yep.

Given that his brother thought it was cute and his father thought it was barely enough...

I think letting demons adopt babies here might be really helpful long-term for introducing any psychologically healthy adults into this world anywhere.

What, are the civilians just as bad, are little farm kids self-injuring trying to farm rice better?

Don't think so, though I think broader cultural stuff about emotions being bad and war being inevitable and children being responsible adults at twelve is more than just the shinobi.

Well, then Mrindeh and her kid might have some arguments when the kid is twelve about what twelve is and is not an appropriate age to do, since people do pick up things from peers.