I did not sleep particularly well after Mikoto's birthday.
Part of that was the food. Uchiha food was too good to take lightly, and I had not taken it lightly. Part of it was the walk home and the pleasant, dangerous feeling that comes from realizing somebody has let you further into their life than before. Part of it was the ache of remembering loved ones out of reach.
Most of it, though, was the genjutsu.
I lay there in the dark with my hands under my head and listened to the house breathe around me. Wood settling. Chickens muttering in their sleep. A goat thumping once against the fence for reasons only goats understand. Dad snoring lightly in the other room like a man whose conscience was clear and whose body was tired in the best possible way.
Sparkling sunrise.
Waves on sand.
I had gone to the Academy gate upside down and emotional and apparently haunted the scenery for half the village. I needed to investigate this.
By breakfast I was irritated enough to do so.
Dad was in a good mood. That should have warned me. Men his age who are courting properly either look hunted or blessed. He looked blessed. That generally made him unbearable and bright. For an old man who barely got any sleep, it was the worst kind of thing.
He slid eggs onto my plate, set down a cup of broth, and started humming under his breath.
"Why do people keep looking at me like I'm secretly theatrical?" I asked.
Dad glanced up. "Because you are my son. It is your youthful nature shining through."
"I am asking a serious question."
"I am answering your question seriously."
I stared at him.
Then I said, "Mikoto's mother says I used genjutsu at the Academy gates."
Dad froze just a fraction.
I put my chopsticks down.
"You know something."
He coughed into his fist. "I know many things. I am a man of depth."
"You know something specific."
He tried very hard to look innocent. Nobody in the world was worse at looking innocent than a sincere man with guilty information.
I leaned forward. "Father."
He looked at the eggs. At the broth. At the wall. Anywhere but at me.
Then he sighed.
"Eat first," he said.
That was how I knew it was real.
We took the bowls outside after. Morning light was just getting properly established over the yard. The chickens were already up and negotiating their opinions with one another. The goats were at the fence. The pigs had the expression of criminals waiting for the law to make a mistake. The shine was cooling in the dug out cellar.
Dad walked to the training patch near the shed and stood there with his hands on his hips.
"I discovered it by accident," he said.
"Discovered what?"
He rolled one shoulder. "That when I feel something very strongly, and my chakra is… aligned right, sometimes people see a little of it."
I stared at him.
He shrugged, embarrassed now. "Not all the time. Not like a proper clan art. Not a cast-and-trap sort of genjutsu. More like—"
He groped for the word and found one I liked better than I wanted to admit.
"Leakage."
I looked at him for a long moment.
Then I said, "You're telling me you have emotional runoff. That sounds like a disease."
He pointed at me. "That is a cruel description of something delicate."
"It is an exact description of what you are saying."
He laughed in spite of himself, then rubbed the back of his neck.
"I didn't know what it was at first. When I was younger, sometimes training would go well and the air would feel different around me. Brighter. Sharper. People would say things like 'for a second there I could hear spring cicadas' or 'it felt warm all of a sudden' even if the sun wasn't out" He looked off toward the fence line. "The first time it happened badly, I was crying after getting beaten by older boys and my mother hugged me. She said she could smell rain on dirt though the sky was clear."
That made me quiet.
He glanced at me. "Later I started noticing it around strong feelings. Pride. Shame. Relief. Love." He grinned a little. "Apparently your hug at the gate hit hard enough to put everyone by the entrance at the seaside."
I covered my face with one hand.
"Oh no."
"Yes," he said cheerfully. "Oh yes."
I dragged my hand down. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because I wasn't sure it was me at first. Then I wasn't sure it was something worth naming. Then you were little, and your chakra was already strange enough without me adding one more worry to the pile." He paused. "And because I prefer the village not know."
That mattered.
I looked at him again, more carefully this time.
"Why?"
He sat down on the edge of the post stump and rested his forearms on his knees. For a moment he looked less like my father and more like the young man he actually was.
"Because most people do not react well to things they don't understand," he said. "A loud genin who can make rooms feel what he feels would become a joke, or a target, or a curiosity for the wrong sort of teacher. Maybe all three. They'd call it manipulation. They'd try to test it, sharpen it, weaponize it. It isn't built for that."
I nodded slowly.
That sounded right.
This village had plenty of good people in it. It also had enough bad incentives to ruin a gift all the same.
"So it stays in the family," I said.
He smiled. "That was my thought."
"Can you teach it?"
His smile shifted a little then. Less pleased, more thoughtful.
"Yes," he said. "But not the way you learn to throw a punch."
That was interesting.
He stood and motioned me closer.
"You have seen me release the gates as it isn't subtle at all. I suppose now is a good time to explain a little of what is going on. When you are older I will teach you how to open the gates yourself. For now just information will do, It ties in to how I learned to harness this ability."
"Strong Fist starts with the body," he said. "The Gates start with the body too, even though the chakra is what people notice. This is not like that. This starts with truth."
I looked at him.
"That sounds unhelpful."
"It is," he agreed. "Stay with me."
He put me in stance first anyway, because he was still Duy and every lesson in his life eventually found its way back to your feet.
"Body under you," he said. "Breath steady. Don't chase anything. You can't force this, Tai. If you try to force it, you just get bad chakra control and a headache."
I settled.
He circled once, then stopped in front of me.
"The Gates are opening what the body closes," he said. "Safety locks. Governors. Things put there so we don't spend ourselves all at once and die trying to impress somebody."
"That sounds like half the men I've met."
"Yes," he said. "And the rest are not real men."
That caught me off guard enough to make him grin.
Then he got serious again.
"When I open a Gate," he said, "I am giving the body permission to exceed its own caution. The chakra roars through channels that are usually narrowed. It hurts because the body is trying to protect itself and I am telling it no."
He inhaled once.
Then he opened the First Gate.
Even now, even having seen it before, it made the air change. The pressure around him shifted. His frame seemed to sharpen. Something in the ground under my feet and the breath in my own lungs registered danger before my mind had words for it.
He did not move much. He did not need to.
His skin flushed. Steam kissed faintly at his shoulders.
"This," he said, voice lower now, tighter from the strain, "is direct chakra overload."
Then he let it go.
He rolled his neck once, then tapped the center of his chest.
"This other thing is the opposite. Not force going outward through the body. It is feeling going outward through chakra."
He gestured for me to sit, and I did.
He stayed standing for a second, thinking. Then his whole posture softened.
Not weakened. Softened.
It was subtle enough that a child might have missed it. The line of his mouth eased. His shoulders dropped. His gaze went somewhere warmer than the yard, somewhere farther away and dearer.
"When you hugged me at the gate," he said quietly, "what were you feeling?"
I looked down.
It had embarrassed me at the time to feel it so strongly. It embarrassed me less now.
"Pride," I said. "Relief, maybe. Gratitude."
He nodded. "Good. Keep those. Don't dress them up."
He closed his eyes for a moment.
I do not know exactly when it started. There was no flash. No dramatic shimmer. Just the sense that the morning around us had begun leaning in a certain direction. The yard felt larger. Warmer. For one breath I could have sworn I was standing under spring trees in full leaf, with sunlight moving through young green branches and the smell of new grass underfoot.
Then it was gone.
I stared at him.
I rubbed both hands over my face. "Father, what exactly are you?"
He brightened. "Youthful."
"That was not an answer to the question."
He crouched in front of me.
"This only works when the feeling is true enough to carry an image with it," he said. "Not a thought. Not a sentence. An image. Something the body understands all at once. Sunlight through leaves. Surf. First rain. The smell of a clean stable. A good fire in winter. The world has shapes for feeling already. Chakra can borrow them."
That sat in me strangely. It also made too much sense.
"So I need a feeling and an image. Something that resonates?"
"And control," he said. "If you let it spill, it just happens to people. If you hold it properly, you can offer it."
"Offer it?"
He nodded. "Genjutsu that forces is one thing. This is closer to invitation."
That was, I thought, the most Might Duy possible version of an illusion art.
He made me try three times that morning.
The first time I did exactly what he told me not to do. I thought too hard, chose an image with my head instead of my gut, and ended up with a trickle of chakra behind my eyes and nothing to show for it but irritation.
The second time I found the feeling—warmth, safety, the absurd tenderness of that hug at the gate—but tried to hold onto too many parts of it at once. My eyes watered. The air around us went vaguely salty for half a heartbeat and then nothing.
Dad clapped once, delighted. "There! Did you feel that?"
"It was almost there, I was just reaching a little too far."
The third time I stopped trying to impress him and thought of the exact moment his hands had shaken on my shoulders while he told me to let the village see Might Tai. Not the words. The feeling under them. Young father. Brave face. Love so large it made him ridiculous.
This time the yard did not become a beach.
It did, however, catch for one second on the feeling of sunrise through dust. Gold at the edges. A brief, impossible warmth moving over the fence line.
Dad went still.
Then he smiled in a way I would remember the rest of my life.
"There you are," he said softly.
That was enough instruction for one morning. My head ached a little afterward, not badly, but enough to make it clear this was not something to practice stupidly.
Before we went back to the chores, Dad put a hand on my shoulder.
"We keep it secret," he said.
I nodded.
"From everyone?"
"From everyone who doesn't need to know." He gave me a pointed look. "That includes little girls with sharp eyes who ask nicely."
"Mikoto is not little when she wants something."
"She is six."
"I am five so excuse me for wanting to be filial to my elders."
He laughed hard enough to bend over.
So yes. We kept it secret.
Mostly.