If there was one thing I learned early in my second life, it was that consistency beat talent.
Unfortunately, my father had both.
Not in the way any sensible man would recommend. He had talent wrapped in absurdity, discipline wrapped in shouting, and sincerity so intense it kept circling back around to looking deranged. But it was talent all the same, and worse, it worked.
By three, understanding people was no trouble at all. My mother from my first life had seen to that. Spoken Japanese came naturally enough. Reading was slower. Speaking was worst of all. My mind moved clean. My mouth did not. My tongue still fumbled sounds. My jaw tired easily. Whole sentences came out looking like they had been assembled under poor supervision.
That was one of the true humiliations of a reincarnated childhood. The bottleneck.
Children noticed, naturally. They notice weakness the way crows and coons notice shine. If I spoke too slowly, they stared. If I spoke too precisely, the adults stared. Once, trying to ask for another bowl of soup, I tripped badly enough over a word that one boy laughed milk out his nose and another asked if I had rocks in my mouth.
I hit him with a wooden spoon.
Not hard. Just enough to improve his education.
The caretaker took the spoon away and informed me that capable language was better than capable violence. She was right, of course. Did not make the spoon any less satisfying.
Dad came home like weather.
One day the compound would be full of ordinary sounds—women working, sandals on dirt, children squabbling, somebody near the kitchen already arguing over bean prices. The next day the air would split open with:
"MY SON!"
And there he was.
He scooped me clean off the ground and held me out at arm's length, grinning like he had returned to find his crop coming in strong.
"You have grown! I can feel it! The fire of youth burns brighter within you!"
I stared at him.
He stared back.
His grin widened.
That was concerning.
He still looked painfully young. Seventeen, maybe. Same bowl cut. Same eyebrows. Same sense that enthusiasm itself had somehow acquired physical mass and settled around him in the air. It was ridiculous. It was also hard to dismiss. I had known grown men in my first life who did not possess one quarter of that much conviction about anything.
"You have been training!" he declared..
"Yes." I responded, without any extra fluff because I despised sounding like an idiot.
His eyes lit up as though I had just confirmed a prophecy. "EXCELLENT!"
How one man could make a single word echo in open air, I do not know. But he did.
He set me down, dropped into a stance so fast it kicked dust around his sandals, and pointed at the yard.
"Show me!"
Now, a man has moments when he may choose dignity.
This was not one of them.
So I did a squat.
Not impressive, objectively speaking. A three year old doing a controlled squat in the dirt is not the sort of thing most civilized people stop to admire. Dad reacted like I had just founded a new school of taijutsu.
He gasped.
"PERFECT FORM!"
It was not perfect form. It was acceptable toddler form. But he watched the second squat, and the third, and by the tenth I could feel the deep working burn in my legs and hips that told me I was still a little kid.
Then Dad dropped beside me and started doing them too, louder and faster and with a level of emotional commitment squats had never deserved.
"FEEL THE FOUNDATION OF YOUR YOUTH!"
Dust rose around us. A few children stopped to stare. One caretaker closed her eyes with the look of a woman revisiting an exhausting memory.
We kept going until my legs gave out and I sat down. Dad did not. Of course he did not. He flowed straight into pushups as if rest itself had insulted his ancestors.
"You must build your body!" he barked between reps. "A strong spirit without a strong body is like a blazing fire with no wood. Bright, but fleeting!"
That, annoyingly enough, was a very good analogy.
I leaned back on my hands and watched him. Everything about him was excessive. Too loud. Too big. Too much. But underneath all that nonsense was structure. His breathing stayed clean. His balance never slipped. His rhythm held. There was nothing sloppy in him at all.
He only looked ridiculous because he refused to do anything halfway.
That was when it finally clicked for me.
This was not nonsense.
Or not only nonsense.
"Why?" I asked.
He paused at the bottom of a rep and looked over at me. "Why what, my son?"
"Why train like this?"
The words came out slow and crooked, but they got there.
He smiled then, and it was not the blinding grin this time. It was smaller, quieter and real.
"Because effort is the only thing that truly belongs to you," he said.
I blinked.
That was not nonsense either.
He stood, crossed the yard, and set a hand on my head.
"Talent fades," he said. "Circumstance changes. But effort remains."
I looked up at him. Seventeen years old. No money worth speaking of. No safety net. Taking missions to keep himself fed and me housed. Still training like the world might one day ask something terrible of him and he intended to be ready when it did.
"...Yeah," I muttered. "Makes sense."
He beamed. The small moment vanished. "COME, MY SON! WE WILL RUN!"
So we ran.
Well.... He ran. I participated.
Around the compound first, then out past the fence, then down a dirt path that had seen better years. I focused on my steps. My breathing. Not pitching forward into the ground. Dad stayed beside me the whole time, matching my pace exactly, not rushing ahead and not hauling me along. Just there, thundering encouragement fit for a military parade.
We passed a small enclosure near the edge of the compound. A few animals were kept there; goats, chickens, and one young calf with a dull coat and tired eyes.
I slowed.
Something in my chest shifted.
It was that same quiet warmth I had noticed before. Not chakra exactly. Something subtler. Recognition. The sense of life in a thing and the room it still had to improve. I looked at the calf and, for a brief strange second, the world narrowed down to particulars. Coat. Weight. Energy. Lack. Potential.
Then Dad clapped once, loud enough to scatter the thought.
"FOCUS!"
I snapped forward and kept moving, but I did not forget the feeling.
We ran until my lungs burned. Until my legs felt heavy. Until every step took deliberate effort. Then we stopped. I bent over, hands on my knees, while Dad stood there not even breathing hard, which felt rude on a personal level.
"You did well," he said.
"It was a small run," I told him.
"No, my son. It was two hundred steps of youth."
There it was.
I snorted despite myself.
We walked back slower. After a while he said, "Your body is changing."
I did not answer.
I knew it already. Balance. Strength. Endurance. Everything coming on slowly and honestly, the only way that mattered. And underneath it, that deep lake inside me was changing too. It was not fighting me anymore. It was waiting.
"You must continue," Dad said. "Every day. No exceptions."
When we got back to the yard, he stopped and looked down at me with that same impossible sincerity.
"Next time," he said, "we train harder."
Of course we would.
I glanced back toward the enclosure. The calf was still there, watching from behind the fence. That warmth flickered again in my chest. Not just vitality. Potential.
I turned away.
One thing at a time.
Body first, everything else would follow.