It was late into the night of his fourth week at the academy. Sengoku collapsed onto the floor after his final set of push-ups. His arms felt like lead, his muscles trembling violently from the sheer exertion.
Dragging himself up, he sat cross-legged and began his nightly meditation. Outside, the wind howled low against the stone buildings, the only sound in the dead of night.
He pushed his mind to the absolute brink, desperately trying to weave his physical and spiritual energies together. Just as his consciousness began to fray and his heavy eyelids fluttered shut, something gave way. It felt as though a rusted, heavy door deep inside him had finally cracked open.
The warm current didn't vanish this time. It surged through his meridian pathways, anchoring itself in his core and bringing a sudden, invigorating rush of heat.
Sengoku opened his eyes and lifted his hand. A steady, pale-blue aura flickered at his fingertips. One second. Two. Three. Four. Five. The light held firm before slowly fading into the cool air.
He had done it. After nearly a month of grueling physical conditioning and relentless focus, he had successfully extracted chakra.
Before he could even process the milestone, a violent, agonizing tremor ripped through his soul. It was the same mysterious vibration he had felt since his memories merged, but magnified a hundredfold. Without warning, a translucent, minimalist panel materialized directly within his mind's eye:
[STR: 0
AGI: 0
INT: 0
Available Points: 1]
Sengoku's breath hitched. His mind immediately went to the cold calculus of his survival. Through passing conversations at the academy, he had recently confirmed that the current leader of Sunagakure was the Second Kazekage, Shamon. That placed him squarely in the fragile, fleeting peace just before the outbreak of the First Shinobi World War.
With his inherently mediocre physical talent, his chances of surviving the impending global meat grinder had been terrifyingly slim. But now, the "foreign object" that had been lying dormant in his soul had finally activated.
He quickly suppressed his racing thoughts and focused on the interface. 'What are you? A system? What are your functions?' he asked internally.
Silence. The interface simply hovered in his consciousness, completely inert.
He tried a series of mental commands. 'Show Help. Status Menu. Attribute Details.'
Still nothing. Sengoku quickly realized that this interface possessed no artificial intelligence or guiding spirit. It was merely a tool, and unraveling its mechanics would be entirely up to him.
He looked at his options. Strength, Agility, and Intelligence. In a world defined by physical combat, the immediate instinct was to bolster his frail body. But Sengoku remembered the agonizing headaches from the past month, the hours wasted trying to decipher basic chakra theory, and his desperate inability to grasp concepts that clan children understood intuitively. A sharp mind could compensate for a weak body, but raw strength without the intellect to wield chakra was useless.
He allocated his single point into Intelligence.
[STR: 0
AGI: 0
INT: 1
Available Points: 0]
At first, nothing happened. For a fleeting moment, Sengoku wondered if the panel was just a hallucination brought on by extreme fatigue.
To test it, he reached for the legacy scroll containing the Chakra Extraction Method. As his eyes swept over the complex kanji and intricate meridian diagrams that had baffled him for weeks, the fog in his mind vanished. The obscure terminology suddenly made perfect, logical sense. It was as though a thick layer of dust had been wiped from the mirror of his mind.
He closed his eyes and visualized Sunada Shun demonstrating basic hand seals. Before, Sengoku had to mentally rehearse the sequence dozens of times just to remember the order. Now, he could recall the exact angle of the instructor's knuckles and the precise pressure of his fingertips. He could intuitively grasp how each hand seal connected to the internal flow of chakra.
Eager to confirm his theory, he initiated the chakra extraction process once more. The difference was staggering. The mental friction was gone. His spirit and physical stamina fused seamlessly, generating chakra at a noticeably faster rate with a fraction of the effort.
Sitting in the quiet stone room, the true value of the Intelligence attribute became undeniably clear. It didn't grant him raw, destructive power. Instead, it systematically upgraded his processing speed, his memory, and most crucially, his chakra control. It was the ultimate foundation for limitless growth.
A new question immediately surfaced: 'How do I earn more points?' Was it tied to intense physical conditioning? Mastering new jutsu? Or did he need to fulfill specific hidden conditions?
Before his thoughts could spiral further, a sudden, overwhelming wave of lethargy washed over him. Extracting chakra for the first time had severely taxed his underdeveloped cells, and the mental exertion of the past hour had completely drained his stamina.
Tomorrow, the academy would introduce new courses, and he would need every ounce of his newly upgraded focus. The answers about the system would have to wait.