Fanfic / Dig Two Graves

Dig Two Graves is a story in which Kei's mother Tomoe Uesugi takes her revenge quest across the sea in a Fusion Fic with The Untamed (with aspects of the novel on which the series is based)

Summary: For the death of her clan, Tomoe declared vengeance. As a samurai, she saw no reason to stop simply because a handful of her targets fled across the sea to preserve their lives.

Dig Two Graves contains examples of:

• Ascended Extra: Tomoe, Shinta, and Wataru are all secondary or minor characters in Catch Your Breath and The B-Plot. Here, they're major characters.
• Bilingual Dialogue: Rare at first, due to international hostilities. In narration, characters' native language is rendered in plain text, while a foreign language they understand is shown in italics. Tomoe in particular has a terrible time trying to speak any Chinese dialects due to being The Quiet One, but can understand most of what's said to her once she has enough practice listening to enough of these conversations.
• Cast from Hit Points:
  • Cultivator swords (jian or dao) require qi to wield in any meaningful way, which is the same as drawing on the user's Life Energy. Tomoe and Shinta view them as "hungry," because their katana are relatively inert.
  • Shinta's Uzumaki healing bite works by sacrificing a chunk of his qi to heal even lethally injured allies. Wen Qing reasonably points out that in most cases, cultivators have their own medicine and healing techniques, and there's no need to go to such extremes.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: Generally a trait of demonic cultivators, whose usage of undead soldiers means they tend to be unbothered by the horrors of death.
  • Wei Wuxian in particular, as the most accomplished demonic cultivator, treats ghosts and other undead in his command better than some people treat living soldiers. He mostly acts as though they're friends, with the exception of enemies he slaughtered and raised to fight their own kin. He also has nothing but respect for the carrion crows who descend on battlefields he's visited, feasting on the carnage left in his wake. Probably has something to do with how he spent three months trapped in the Burial Mounds until he created his demonic path in order to get out.
  • Tomoe also has this trait due to her Dark and Troubled Past, shrugging off the existence of The Undead soon after first encountering them. It helps that fierce corpses and ghosts barely acknowledge her in turn, which is due to her katana putting out enough of its own resentful energy to mask her presence. One of the few things she specifically disdains during the war is excessive cruelty or torture for information, which she considers a waste of time and effort when she can determine the truth at a glance.
• Crossover: Between Catch Your Breath's edition of Naruto and The Untamed.
• Culture Clash: Common, mostly between Tomoe and Shinta and the various cultivators they interact with over the course of the Sunshot Campaign.
  • Hatake Sakumo describes of the Sunshot Campaign as a war between "dojos" because cultivation sects are martial schools. He's also fairly insulated from the outcome of the war due to operating in the city of Ningbo. Barring supply shortages from the various affected regions, his operations are mostly focused on his own organization's interests.
  • On the comedy side of things, Tomoe wonders why all the rich cultivators don't seem to wear armor before thinking that they must believe arrogance alone is a shield.
• Deep Cover Agent: Because of the tensions between mainland China and the Japanese archipelago, almost every character from the islands is this. They mostly operate in large cities and pretend to be native-born citizens, living among the locals and sending information back to the homeland when asked. Some of these agents are even old or banished shinobi. The exceptions are mostly those who aren't working for Hatake Sakumo, though they're still hiding from official scrutiny for any number of reasons.
• Downer Beginning: The first chapter features the Lotus Pier massacre and the three initial characters scattering to the winds to avoid pursuit.
• Dysfunction Junction: Part and parcel of the characters, setting, and the crossover materials. Tomoe is one of the last remaining members of her clan as a result of conspiracy ending in a massacre. Shinta lost his birth family sometime prior to the story's start, and his section of The B-Plot indicates he was a victim of Human Traffickers at one point. Wataru comments that he's not allowed back into Japan alive. There's also the entirety of the Sunshot Campaign; specifically the destruction of Lotus Pier by the forces of the Qishan Wen clan, which reduces the Jiang sect to terrified fugitives and corpses, with all of the associated fallout in The Untamed.
• Energetic and Soft-Spoken Duo:
  • This is the dynamic between Tomoe almost everyone else. She's one of the least-chatty characters in the entire story, who keeps almost all of her thoughts private, and is usually paired with someone far more talkative, such as Wataru or Wei Wuxian.
  • This is also the dynamic between Lan Wangji and nearly everyone else, but especially Wei Wuxian. When Tomoe and Lan Wangji both accompany Wei Wuxian to a battle, he notes that he out-speaks both of them pretty much as soon as he opens his mouth.
• Fusion Fic: The author has stated that this is what the story is, and that the Naruto-canon shinobi nations don't exist.
  • There's a Great Offscreen War to match the Sunshot Campaign going on back in Japan. While details are sparse, the shinobi province of Iga has been invaded by neighboring daimyō, and the ripples of said conflict cause infighting among the various international spies. And some of the generals leading the counteroffensive are the Legendary Sannin.
  • While yōkai serve mostly as cultural references for shinobi techniques in Naruto, here they (and their Chinese equivalents) are very real. Wataru even speculates that the several shinobi in his employ have nonhuman lineage.
• Genocide Backfire: Twice.
  • During Tomoe's backstory, her clan was massacred and only two survivors made it out alive. Tomoe is personally responsible for the deaths of nearly every perpetrator over the course of five years.
  • The destruction of Lotus Pier by Wen Chao leads to a series of events that result in Wei Wuxian mastering demonic cultivation and raising a Cavalry of the Dead. As the dominoes fall, so does the Qishan Wen clan.
• Good Samaritan: Shinta is this, rescuing Jiang sect cultivators from Qishan Wen pursuers in the midst of the Lotus Pier massacre. Prior, he admits he tried to fight fires in the city around the cultivation sect. Doing so kicks off the entire plot.
• Gotta Kill 'Em All:
  • Tomoe's approach to killing those responsible for the deaths of her family. She's down to the last few qualifying candidates, who are sheltering with the Qishan Wen clan.
  • This is a fairly common attitude among participants in the Sunshot Campaign, on both sides. After the fall of Lotus Pier, the Qishan Wen print and distribute wanted posters all across the province for Jiang survivors, and hunt them down with as much fervor as they can manage. In return, most cultivation clans who've felt the Wen boot-heel on their backs want nothing more than to retaliate with equal thoroughness, and even those that didn't suffer directly use the tragedies of the crushed clans to fuel their war effort.
• Heroic Neutral: Common enough for non-cultivators as long as the main conflict happens over their heads among people they don't care about.
  • Tomoe doesn't care about the conflict between cultivation sects until forced to, like most of the Japanese characters. Unfortunately for her apathy, Shinta has Chronic Hero Syndrome.
  • Sakumo doesn't think of the Qishan Wen sect's ongoing war as his problem, except for how it provides a chance to fulfil the emperor's wish for immortality. He has other priorities even without that concern, due to his homeland's Civil War continuing in the background and the risk of discovery faced by all spies. He's also aware of the persecution Uzumaki clan members face, and willingly hides both Shinta and later Kushina from anyone who might be interested in their powers.
• Ki Manipulation: The common source of everyone's Supernatural Martial Arts and Immortality.
  • Cultivators spend years—if not their entire lives—building their golden core, a spiritual construct that powers their range of supernatural abilities. It processes and is made of so much qi that it's the next best thing to an extra organ. And can be transferred like one.
  • While not elaborated upon, Tomoe and Shinta's training does not result in core formation.
• Language Barrier: To different degrees, depending on the person.
  • Tomoe can't speak any Chinese dialect fluently, but she's a fairly good listener and has the most formal education among the trio.
  • Shinta is fluent in at least two dialects of Chinese and his native Japanese, but is functionally illiterate.
  • Wataru doesn't experience the downsides of the language barrier. He's essentially The Handler for Japanese agents in the country and was trained alongside people he refers to as Ninja, but has few combat skills.
  • Wei Wuxian starts to overcome this after performing Empathy on Tomoe's katana, which gives him a much better ear for her language, but he clearly doesn't have the experience to speak fluent Japanese. He finds himself in the same position as Tomoe, but in reverse.
• Mook Horror Show: Twice.
  • Tomoe catches up to one of her vengeance targets while he's traveling with Wen sect cultivators. None of them have any idea she's on them until they're already being cut down, and she only shows herself to Ito Akimitsu before beheading him.
  • Wei Wuxian's emergence from the Yiling Burial Mounds is punctuated with one of these, leaving Wen sect bodies lying all across the countryside. Tomoe comes across the evidence before anyone else and concludes the source of the carnage is more dangerous than she is, and subsequently even more useful to the ongoing war.
• Mutually Exclusive Magic: From what non-experts like Shinta can deduce, cultivation and the form of Ki Manipulation he and Tomoe use are not compatible. While both methods allow the use of Supernatural Martial Arts, the balance of abilities is different in each country and so is the underlying education.
• Outside-Context Problem: Goes both ways with regard to the soft magic system, with hints of Mutually Exclusive Magic and Unequal Rites.
  • Tomoe and Shinta don't understand cultivation very well. They know golden cores are important and can both detect them because of the sheer amount of qi concentrated into a relatively small space. So Tomoe uses it as a targeting method.
  • Cultivators running into Tomoe don't have much chance to communicate or even realize what they're up against until they've already gotten on the wrong end of her Super-Speed. Hiten Mitsurugi-ryu is not to be underestimated.
  • Wei Wuxian's demonic cultivation is in a class of its own. Tomoe immediately realizes the implications of such a power debuting on the battlefield, but others aren't so perceptive.
• Revenge: A motivation for many characters in the story.
  • Tomoe is on her fifth year of chasing down those who were involved in the destruction of her branch of the Uesugi clan, which led her and her fellow survivor to chase the remaining perpetrators across the ocean. Out of more than sixty targets, she's down to less than a handful.
  • Wei Wuxian seeks vengeance on Wen Chao, Wang Lingjiao, and Wen Zhuliu for destroying the Jiang sect, torturing Jiang Cheng and destroying golden core, torturing him, and throwing Wei Wuxian into the Yiling Burial Mounds to die. Tomoe meets him immediately after he's started checking off his list.
    • Jiang Cheng also seeks revenge for the above grievances, but Wei Wuxian gets there first.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Tomoe's personal quest takes this form. On-page, she hunts down and kills Ito Akimitsu amid a Wen patrol and her narration states she has only a handful of targets left.
• Sibling Team: Several, only partly because the Sunshot Campaign conflict deals primarily with noble clans.
  • Tomoe and Shinta, though Tomoe doesn't take him along for her revenge-centric side trips.
  • Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji, the Twin Jades of Lan, are both powerful cultivators who work together as two of the many commanders in the Sunshot Campaign.
  • Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng, on the occasions they're on the same battlefield.
• Spared by the Adaptation: More than a few.
  • Shinta survives the Uesugi clan massacre in this timeline and becomes Tomoe's Sidekick.
  • Several Jiang sect cultivators survive the post-massacre hunts by sneaking through the countryside to Gusu. By the time Jiang Cheng is finally able to do a head count, there are more than forty members of his sect still around, which helps him keep himself together during the three months Wei Wuxian is missing.
• Spirit Cultivation Genre: Rather than Shōnen, this is the genre due to the influence of The Untamed. Cultivators, court schemes, ghosts, and monsters ensue.
• The Spymaster: Because of the focus on moving through black markets and the underbelly of the cultivation world, Hatake Sakumo fulfills this role in the city of Ningbo.
• Superhuman Trafficking: A very real, ongoing concern for Shinta and other members of shinobi clans with special abilities. Tomoe and Wataru both go out of their way to hide his presence, whether through regular application of hair dye or destroying his paper trail. Hatake Sakumo goes as far as to purge agents who seemed like they'd take advantage of Kushina's budding Uzumaki powers.
• Tastes Like Friendship: A trend between Tomoe's new social circle.
  • Not long after meeting Wei Wuxian (trapped in Corpse Land for three months) and Wen Qing (Locked in the Dungeon by Wen Chao), Tomoe offers them both food. And she doesn't accept prideful refusals for an answer, taking advantage of her language difficulties to make it harder for them to argue with her.
  • Jiang Yanli is by far the most proficient, to the point of helping organize the logistics of feeding the entire Sunshot Campaign army. She also organizes routinely tea for herself, Wen Qing, and Tomoe, so all of them can conspire together.
• Unequal Rites: Cultivators are a society of prospective immortals who now form a clan-based noble class well above the mundane people, often backed by tremendous wealth and political power. They look down on practitioners of other forms of Ki Manipulation, but aren't familiar with their capabilities either.
  • The ability to read another's qi is so tightly bound to their combat abilities that Tomoe and Shinta are both Living Lie Detectors at short ranges. Because of their sheer quantity of qi, cultivators can be easily picked out at a distance and predicted well before they reach shouting or shooting distance. It even works on Wei Wuxian, who doesn't have a golden core at all.
  • Demonic cultivation is viewed as a powerful art, but also a blatant violation of the natural order that is deeply disrespectful to all of the corpses it allows a demonic cultivator to control. Wei Wuxian is the most skilled practitioner in the entire setting, and the only reason the Sunshot Campaign has pushed Qishan back to its own borders while Wen Ruohan is also using an undead army to bolster his forces. By observing Wei Wuxian and wielding a very haunted katana, Tomoe manages to replicate some of the abilities of a demonic cultivator and perform necromancy to interrogate ghosts.
• Vengeful Ghost: Common when someone dies violently or without being given burial rites, and dealing with them is a major part of the daily duties of cultivation sects in this setting. The Burial Mounds are the result of an ancient battle that slaughtered thousands and have rebuffed all attempts to exorcise them, turning the entire area into the local equivalent of the Elephant's Foot in Chernobyl. Due to the Sunshot Campaign embroiling most of their population in a war, characters note that these cases are going unresolved and will likely continue to cause death and chaos for years afterward.
  • Wei Wuxian's systematic destruction of all Wen holdings in Yunmeng features using these in combat, as an advance guard he sends out ahead against soldiers before he starts raising everything as a fierce corpse. The sheer weight of those vengeful dead and their resentment powers the Artifact of Doom called the Yin Tiger Seal, which allows him to control thousands of them at once.
  • Tomoe is mistaken for one of these by her targets. That said, Tomoe's katana Yukishiro is haunted by the ghosts of her slain family members (complete with their lethal injuries), who incorporate ghosts of her targets into their ranks as she kills them. Her sword is so steeped in resentful energy that it allows her to use low-level demonic cultivation.

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