About 80 years ago.

In the village of Konohagakure, in the land of fire, a young Genin named Shimabukuro Fumio had just failed the written portion of his Chunin exam, denying him his promotion. He sat forlornly while his teammates attempted to console him.

“Don’t blame yourself, Shimabukuro. People fail sometimes, but there’s always the next exam!” one of Shimabukuro Fumio’s teammates said, patting him on the back.

“Yeah, Shimabukuro-kun. You’ll pass next time for sure. We’ll be waiting for you as Chunin, okay?” said the other, giving him a beaming smile. He truly believed that it would happen, that they would all be Chunin together.

Shimabukuro smiled and picked his head up.

‘This isn’t the end of the world,’ he thought.

‘I can do this!’

About 75 years ago.

Shimabukuro Fumio was crying. He was the eldest ninja taking the Chunin exams this year again, and he had failed again. Again and again and again. This time, it was in the Forest of Death, where he nearly died, and his team’s Jonin mentor had to save him.

Shimabukuro was crying. He just couldn’t help it after letting his team down like he had. He had covered himself in butterflies to try and hide the shame of crying after failing, ‘For the twelfth time in a row,’ his treacherous thoughts reminded him, even though he knew that covering himself in butterflies just made it obvious he was hiding something.

His teammates had been so excited to have him on the team. And he couldn’t bring himself to admit to them that no, he couldn’t walk on walls yet, and no, he couldn’t hit a target with a kunai, but check out this cool silk he could make! No, Shimabukuro couldn’t take their cheery expressions and excited babbling and break it over his knee by telling them he wasn’t worthy of being called a ninja. Instead, he lied.

“Just think of me as your Onii-san! I’ll protect you!”

His team hadn’t spoken to him since his failure, and he knew the exams were over.

‘Next time,’ he thought, ‘I’ll pass for sure.’

About 67 years ago.

Shimabukuro’s wife massaged his shoulders as he nursed his tea. He was tense. No surprise, of course. They had gotten married three years ago and five times since then he had been like… this.

“My love… maybe you just aren’t cut out to be a ninja. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You can help me and my mother run the tea shop, you can do anything else,” she said, lifting his head up by the chin so she could look him in the eyes, “you’re killing yourself doing this, Buku.”

Shimabukuro’s eyes began to water and his shoulders began to tremble.

He felt small.

“It’s okay, darling. It’s fine. Ol’ Shimabukuro always comes back. I’ll pass next time for sure!”

“You need to admit to yourself that it won’t happen. I married you because of your incredible spirit, but it’s holding you down. You could have done so much in all this time but you’re just… obsessed. It’s sad to watch, Buku. And it’s embarrassing.”

“So this is about you then,” Shimabukuro spat, tea forgotten, “not me? Because I want to be a ninja. I want to pass this exam, and I will. I just need one more try. One more! I need this.”

“Fine, Shimabukuro, fine. I give up. One more try.”

About 64 years ago.

“I can't live like this, Shimabukuro. I was alright with you not being a ninja if you just settled down and found something else to do but this has gotten far too embarrassing to live with. I can't hear 'one more try' from you any more. We're getting a divorce.”

About 60 years ago.

Shimabukuro was in the forest, accompanying the Jonin who served as the team leader for his Genin team during this round of Chunin exams. The Jonin hadn’t told him exactly what he wanted to talk about out in the forest, but he had an idea that it concerned his latest failure.

He scratched his unshaven face and wobbled slightly.

‘That marks year twenty,’ he thought. His feet shuffled forward. He had grown in those years. He finally learned how to walk on walls, for one thing. He picked up a Genjutsu or two, after losing a fight to a Genin who was particularly talented in Taijutsu. He had even started to develop some water-style jutsu.

None of it helped, evidently.

His team leader stopped walking, and Shimabukuro did so a second after him.

“Shimabukuro. I’m going to be honest,” he placed his hands on his hips, “you're never going to be a Chunin. For everyone’s sake, if you insist on continuing to try and take the exam, I’m going to insist you leave. You almost got my Genin killed last night, and frankly, it’s disgraceful that a fully grown man like yourself is still losing fights to children. Your youth is behind you. Either admit to yourself that you’ll never do this and promise you’ll never take the exams again, or walk into the forest now so I never have to see your face again.”

Shimabukuro laughed. He laughed until he fell onto the ground. He laughed until he was curled up into a ball. He laughed until he cried.

By the time he was done, the Jonin was gone. A swarm of beautiful blue and black butterflies gathered on the trees around him.

‘Guess I was wrong,’ he thought.

Shimabukuro walked into the forest.

About 20 years ago.

Shimabukuro was wandering his patch of forest. It was quiet today, which was nice. Some days, Shimabukuro found it difficult to find peace, even isolated from people and their noisiness. When a furious storm passed through and threatened to drown rabbits and foxes in their burrows, he could not simply rest and train, not without helping. When a stray ninja used a fire jutsu carelessly and started a forest fire, it was up to him to cut it off before it did any significant damage.

Shimabukuro smiled and took a deep breath. He smelled the flowers. That he planted the bulbs, that he tended to their growth, that he got earth beneath his fingernails doing so… that was beautiful. ‘You don’t get this from being a ninja, do you?’ he thought to himself.

“Who are you trying to fool, Shimabukuro? Of course you still want to be a ninja… time to get to work.”

He sat down on his knees and bowed his head slightly. In front of him was a tree, a mighty, ancient tree. As far as Shimabukuro could tell, it was the oldest in all of the forest around Konohagakure. Around forty years ago he had found this great tree, and he had decided to visit it every day since then. On the days where he felt alone, on the days where his failures haunted him and he did not have the will to go on, the tree was there. Sometimes, when the wind blew through its leaves, he swore he could hear a voice in the rustling.

He always chalked that up to the isolation.

He closed his eyes, feeling his chakra flow through him. He focused on the beauty of life. On everything he had learned in his isolation, on the countless millions of lives all around him, from the smallest insect to the venerable tree in front of him. He felt the flow of quenching water seeping through dirt, reaching the roots of thirsty sapling, and that sapling beginning to grow its very first fruit in the spring. In his time in the forest, he had this growth happen to dozens upon dozens of trees. Sometimes he even gave them names.

His chakra was the dirt which cradled the tree. His chakra was the water which nurtured life. He was simply a caregiver.

Shimabukuro did not know how long he spent sitting in meditation that day, but when he opened his eyes, in front of him sat a fresh sapling. New, magnificent life, nurtured by him.

For the first time in decades, he felt like he had truly made some progress in becoming a ninja. Tears in his eyes, he looked up at the immense tree and whispered a silent, “Thank you.”

“This jutsu is nature’s gift. I shall dub it… Wood Style.”

About 1 year ago.

Today was a turbulent day in the forest. It had been a year since ninja began to pass through regularly, and in that year Shimabukuro knew that those ninja he would spot dashing through his forest were not only from Konohagakure. Some days, the ninja would get into skirmishes and leave the forest devastated. His butterflies spied on some occasionally and all reported the same idea.

War.

A ninja war was no good thing. And without contact with Konoha, he had no idea how the war was going, or if the people he had once known were in danger. Even despite restless nights spent perfecting his ninjutsu, Shimabukuro did not return to his village to inquire about any of this information. After all, he was no ninja. His job was to tend to the trees, to ensure the safe continuation of the circle of life, to observe the streams and speak with the wind.

Today, however, he wasn’t doing any of that. Today, he was hiding in a cave, because some very powerful ninja were battling nearby and the reverberations of the blows alone were sending chills down his spine. The battle had started hours ago and still it went on.

Shimabukuro took the time to observe his own progress. Ever since he figured out Wood Style, all those years ago, his other jutsu had flourished. His connection to his butterflies had grown, to the point where he could command them with a thought and understand them instinctually, and he swore that they had properties beyond those of normal animals, even if he could not test this hypothesis readily. It would be a shame to hurt them, but he swore they were stronger than usual, and they flourished around his chakra-infused Wood Style trees. His Silk Production was something new he had developed after a particularly invigorating display from a common spider; truly, even the smallest among us were capable of great feats. He felt… accomplished, after all of these years.

The fighting was getting further away now. ‘Should I investigate?’ he asked himself, ‘What if one of them needs medical assistance?’

A mighty explosion shook his cave, sending pebbles raining down over his head. He yelped in surprise.

‘Maybe not.’

Then, he noticed the silence. Absolute silence, like he had never before experienced in all his years living in this forest. A silence like something truly terrible had come to pass.

Shimabukuro decided then that he would seek the loser of the battle. At the very least, he could get some answers.

Stepping outside, the forest felt foreign. Normally, there were hundreds of little ways he spoke to the world around him. The familiar dirt between his toes spoke in tones of softness and wetness, the air spoke in the smells it carried, the water spoke in gentle flows and raging currents. Now, it was as if all had gone silent. If the world was speaking to him now, it was in a language he didn’t understand. Despite that, his feet moved forward almost as if on their own accord. Not long after, he found himself exactly where he had expected to find himself, and in a place where he never could have guessed the ninja would be.

Right in front of that grand tree which he visited daily was a man with a head-sized hole in his chest, kneeling and motionless. He wore what looked from afar to be a headpiece fashioned like the head of a beetle.

Butterflies were sent to examine the body and reported back that the man was dead.

Shimabukuro could not say why he did it, but when he approached the corpse in front of him, he removed the man’s headpiece. No, not a headpiece. The way it adorned his head, the make of it… it was a crown. He could not say why, but he removed the man’s crown and slipped it over his own head.

All of a sudden, it was as if the forest was once again speaking a language he could understand. The grass beneath his toes, the wind in the air, the bugs crawling in the dirt, they were all suffused in a great energy not unlike his own chakra. Greatest of all was the massive tree in front of him, now vast beyond reckoning to his new sense, brimming with energy that danced a hypnotic pattern. He was like a snake, being charmed.

Shimabukuro focused on this energy. Making himself just one more stop in its passage, letting it flow through him. Almost in response, his focus was drawn to the man in front of him. How this corpse could feed the forest and its many residents. How this tragedy would nevertheless foster growth.

Many things happened almost at once. First, a breeze passed over Shimabukuro, drawing his attention for a second to just how long his hair had gotten over the years. In the instant his focus was drawn away from the trance-inducing flow of nature, it was as though he began to get sucked in to that flow, becoming less of a stop in an unending road and more of the final stop, giving the energy a place to terminate, as his consciousness warped for only an instant with the grass beneath beneath his toes and he was the wind in the air and the bugs in the dirt.

Shimabukuro tore the crown off his head with a start, finding himself breathing heavily. Blearily, he noticed that the dead ninja was no longer there. In his place was a large tree, still dwarfed by the venerable oak which he venerated, but mighty nonetheless.

“What is this crown?” he wondered aloud, “Why have I been given it?”

“Because, Shimabukuro Fumio, you have the potential for greatness,” the tree replied, not in words but in the remnants to that connection through the flow of water in its sapwood.

“No, no I do not. I am a failure. That man was clearly a great ninja, who am I to take his crown?” Shimabukuro said, standing and shouting at the silent tree.

“You have proven, through your actions and your growth, that you are prodigious. You are reverent towards the world around you. In your years, you have done a million kindnesses to this forest,” the tree replied in its verdant growth and its roots which never wanted for water.

“What am I to do, then? Leave, after all this time, and return to… to the village? To those people, who never believed in me, who knew me only as a failure? And for what, a title? It is childish. I am no slave to the folly of youth,” Shimabukuro said, though he knew he was lying to himself, and was ashamed to be lying to the tree.

“Your body has aged, Shimabukuro, but the spirit of youth lives within you. You need prove nothing to this place. You need only prove to yourself that you are deserving of respect, and of kindness,” the tree said, sighing in the sway of its branches and the creaking of its bark.

“What am I to do then? This crown it almost - it almost killed me, I’m sure of it. I lack the skill, the training to wield its power.”

“Training is not necessary. You possess the courage, the strength of character, and the heart that you require to grow, as you have nurtured so many to grow in this place,” the tree said in the chirping of birds whose nests sat comfortably in its heights and in the hordes of squirrels hidden away in its many crevices.

Shimabukuro smiled, convinced. Maybe he could do this, after all.

Now.

Shimabukuro sat in his favorite ramen shop in Konoha, eagerly slurping down bowl after bowl of delicious ramen.

“Sir, you should really slow down! You’ll get sick eating like that!” said the cook, a daughter of the previous proprietor of this place who had sadly passed away.

“You don’t understand,” he mumbled through a mouthful of food, “it’s been sixty years since I’ve had ramen and your mother’s recipe is just as delicious! Besides, can’t an old man celebrate?”

“What is it you’re celebrating anyways, old-timer?”

“I’m taking the Chunin exams! Even after all this time, they had my paperwork. And this time, I’m going to get promoted for sure!”

Shimabukuro hooted and hollered into the sky, earning him odd looks from the other patrons of the ramen shop. Tomorrow, he would be meeting his team.

He resolved to make a good impression.