One year into compulsory education.
Going well. Suspiciously well, actually.
I answered a question the teacher hadn't finished asking yesterday.
She just stared at me for a second, like she was trying to figure out if I'd skipped ahead in the script.
So yes.
That kind of well.
Top of the class. Best in PE. Teachers have reached that awkward stage where they either trust me completely or hover like I'm about to ruin their day out of principle. No middle ground.
Socially? Smooth. I know everyone, everyone knows me. I've somehow ended up with the full "model student" package, which feels less like an achievement and more like a clerical error that no one's bothered to correct.
The only real downside is the attention.
Not the academic kind—that part's manageable. Predictable.
No, I mean the physical kind.
"Come here—just one second—"
I don't move fast enough.
It's Aki.
Two years older, fully convinced this is acceptable behavior.
Hands on my face. Immediate regret.
"Your cheeks are so soft!"
This happens more often than it should.
Mostly her.
Occasionally others, but she's the one who treats it like a scheduled activity.
I've tried dodging. Doesn't work. She adapts. I've tried pre-emptive retreat. She follows. At this point, I'm considering it a systemic issue rather than a series of isolated incidents.
It's also the kind of problem that's hard to complain about without sounding ungrateful.
Which feels like its own problem.
Either way—
After a year of that, I started training.
Properly.
Not in the dramatic, cloak-and-dagger sense. No secret identities, no "this power must never be revealed," no internal monologues about the burden of strength. I'm not operating under the assumption that the world is waiting for me specifically to fix it.
My standards are high.
Just not delusional.
The reasons are simple.
One — I want to fly. Not metaphorically. Not in the "jump good" sense. I mean properly. Irresponsibly. The kind of flight that makes gravity feel like a suggestion.
Two — I want at least one moment. A real one. The kind where you say something completely unreasonable—Gojo-level, Escanor-level—and it actually lands because you can back it up.
Three — if I'm stuck in this system anyway, I might as well aim for the top of it. UA isn't just "a good school." It's where the rules bend a little. Where having something absurd actually matters.
Four — I want to know where the ceiling is.
Because right now, it's somewhere above "reasonable."
That feels worth checking.
That's it. No grand narrative. No higher calling.
Just a very normal set of priorities.
I've technically had access to chakra since birth.
For the first three years, it didn't amount to much. Just control. Moving it around, figuring out where it sits, how it responds, how not to immediately lose it the second I tried to do anything slightly more complicated.
It's the kind of work that feels pointless right up until it suddenly isn't.
I remember the first time I got it to stay stable in my hands for more than a few seconds.
I was lying in my bed, staring at it like it might disappear if I blinked.
It did.
Progress was slow.
Annoyingly slow.
But I kept at it. And by the time I turned four, the control was there — refined enough, precise enough — that I figured it was time to actually do something with it.
The obvious first target was the Rasengan.
Conceptually, I already had everything. Shape transformation, simultaneous multi-directional rotation, containment. I'd watched it performed hundreds of times across two lifetimes. I understood the mechanics well enough to explain them to someone else.
Which, as it turns out, means absolutely nothing when you're actually trying to do it.
The canon approach breaks it into steps — balloon, rubber ball, containment — each one isolating a different component until you can put them together. Structured. Sensible. Probably the right way to teach it.
I didn't do that.
Partly because I didn't have the materials.
Mostly because I wanted to see what happened if I just tried.
What happened was two days of my hands feeling like I'd argued with a blender — briefly, repeatedly, and with no lasting evidence whatsoever.
The Sharingan and Rinnegan helped — being able to track exactly what my chakra was doing at any given moment, catching the precise instant rotation destabilized, watching the sphere collapse in slow motion and identifying exactly why — cut out most of the guesswork. The Rinnegan's sensitivity to chakra flow did the rest, giving me feedback I wouldn't have been able to feel otherwise.
But I want to be clear: neither of them did it for me.
I still had to make the adjustments. Still had to hold the rotation while simultaneously increasing output without losing containment. Still had to find the balance between power and control through nothing but repetition.
They just made the feedback loop faster.
By the end of day two, I was holding a stable Rasengan in my palm.
I spent a while just staring at it.
Mind you, I had trained for a combined total of five hours during those two days.
From there, the growth stopped being about technique and started being about scale. Chakra reserves are, in a frustrating number of ways, like a muscle — stress them, recover, repeat. Slow. Unglamorous. The kind of progress you can't actually see until you look back at where you started and realize the gap has gotten unreasonable.
By seven, my reserves were sitting at roughly a hundred times what I'd been born with.
The quality had shifted too — denser, cleaner, more responsive. Less like water finding its own level and more like something that actually listened.
Which, for the record, is a significant upgrade.
At some point, Nana-san saw me.
I was sitting off to the side, running chakra through my hands without really thinking about it.
She stopped. Looked at me.
I paused.
This felt like the part where there should be consequences.
Or at least questions.
She didn't ask any.
"Don't overdo it," she said. "And get enough sleep."
Then she kept walking.
That was it.
…
So now I train openly.
Which, in hindsight, says a lot about this world.
And probably more about me than I'd like to admit.
One thing training did give me, beyond the obvious — a pretty good idea of what my quirk actually is.
The first hint was the Rasengan practice. Every time my hands took damage, it was gone within a second or two. Not "healing fast." Gone. Like it hadn't happened.
The second hint was less subtle.
When I was born, my yin chakra outclassed my yang chakra in every measurable way — quantity, quality, responsiveness. That gap has been closing steadily. The yang side has improved to a degree that doesn't really make sense unless something is actively working in its favor.
And then there's the strength.
I haven't exactly been doing formal physical training. Just regular activity, playing around, the usual. But at four I could lift around 25 kilos at most. Now, at seven, that number is closer to 80.
I know that second figure specifically because I tested it by lifting two of the older kids.
They were fine.
Mostly.
So. Putting it together:
Accelerated healing. A body that's stronger than it has any right to be given the training I've actually done. Muscle and bone density that seems to improve on its own schedule regardless of what I'm doing.
Those are the obvious conclusions.
I'm sure there's more.
There usually is.
Or that could really be it.
Not that I'm complaining either way — it gave me something genuinely useful. A much more balanced chakra composition. Yin and yang closer to equilibrium than they've ever been.
Which, as it happens, is exactly what you want when you're eventually planning to train for Sage Mode.
So. Current inventory:
Control — check. The hax, in the form of the Rinnegan and Sharingan — check. A quirk that actively complements both — check.
All that's left is the work.
The next thing on the list was Nature Transformation.
Starting with wind.
I expected this to take a while. The standard benchmark is cutting a leaf cleanly down the middle using only chakra — precise, controlled, no brute force. Delicate work, by most accounts.
I got it on the first attempt.
I tried fire next. Same method, different objective — the leaf needed to burn rather than split. No formal guidance on this one, just reasonable extrapolation.
First attempt.
Lightning — wrinkle the leaf, disrupt its structure from within.
It collapsed into a ball.
First attempt.
I kept going. Water — I pulled the moisture out of the leaf entirely, just drained it dry from the inside out.
First attempt.
Earth — hardened the leaf until it could have passed for a small piece of rock.
First attempt.
By that point the pattern was fairly clear.
I stood there for a moment, looking at five ruined leaves and the extremely obvious conclusion, I had somehow managed to miss until just now.
The Rinnegan gives its user an affinity for all five nature transformations.
I knew that.
I absolutely knew that.
It had simply… not occurred to me to apply that information before picking up the first leaf.
In my defence, it's not exactly the kind of thing you think to check until you're already three leaves in and starting to feel suspicious about your own success rate.
Now, with all five done, the next logical step would be pushing each nature further.
The problem is "further" usually involves a waterfall, and I don't have one of those.
I could substitute — for lightning, wind, and fire, something harder than a leaf, see whether the same precision scales up. Earth works the opposite way, softer material, test how fine the control can actually get. Water is its own situation entirely — no leaf required, just the air itself. There's always moisture in the atmosphere. Extracting it directly would be a cleaner test anyway.
That would probably be the sensible next move.
I'll get to it.
But right now, something else just occurred to me.
One of the most iconic techniques in the entire Naruto canon. Arguably the most iconic. The one that got its own dedicated episode, its own emotional moments, its own recurring significance across the entire series.
Shadow Clone Jutsu.
Just the thought of actually pulling it off puts a smile on my face.
I have the chakra reserves for it now. More than enough, realistically. Shadow clones are expensive — that's always been the limiting factor, the reason it's a forbidden technique in the first place. One clone splits your chakra in half. Ten puts you at a tenth. Most people simply don't have enough to make it practical.
Most people.
I bring my hands together without thinking, index and middle fingers crossing into the clone seal like muscle memory from a life I didn't technically live.
There's a beat.
Then a poof of smoke.
And nothing else.
I stare at the dispersing cloud for a moment.
...Right.
Okay.
So it didn't work. That's fine. That's useful information, actually. A clean failure is better than a partial one — at least there's something to diagnose.
The smoke means the technique triggered. The chakra moved, the seal was read, something initiated. It just didn't finish.
So what went wrong?
I think back to what a shadow clone actually is, mechanically. Not the hand seal, not the output — the underlying construction. A shadow clone isn't just a copy of your appearance. It's a complete chakra entity. Fully formed, fully functional, capable of independent action and thought. The reason it's expensive isn't just the volume of chakra required — it's the complexity of what that chakra has to become.
I'd watched enough theory breakdowns in my previous life to have strong opinions about this. The kind of opinions that get you nowhere in a normal conversation but turn out to be extremely relevant when you're actually standing here trying to make it work.
The problem probably isn't the amount.
It's the composition.
A physical form — the body, the presence, the thing that can actually be touched — that runs on yang chakra. Structure, substance, vitality. But a clone that can think, act independently, retain information — that requires yin. The mind. The will that makes it more than just a shape.
Both. Simultaneously. Balanced.
I'd thrown chakra at it without thinking about the split.
Second attempt.
I consciously separate the two as I build up the technique — yang to the exterior, giving it form and weight and presence, yin threading through the inside, giving it something to actually run on. Two things at once, constructed in parallel, each one informing the other as the form takes shape.
The clone seal.
The smoke clears.
Something steps out of it.
Roughly my height. Roughly my shape. Physically present — I could tell that much just from looking at it. The yang component had worked.
But it just stood there.
No acknowledgment. No movement. Eyes open, perfectly still, like a photograph of a person rather than an actual one.
Dead in every way that mattered.
I walked around it once. It didn't track me. Didn't react. Just stood there being an extremely accurate and deeply unsettling statue of myself.
The yin hadn't integrated properly. The mind was there in theory — I'd put it in — but it wasn't connected to anything. Form without function. A body with no one home.
I dispelled it.
Then the Rinnegan did something useful.
The feedback came automatically — a precise readout of exactly where the chakra composition had fractured, where the yin and yang had failed to mesh, the specific point in the construction where the integration had collapsed. Not vague intuition. Actual information. Like rewinding footage and watching the exact frame where everything went wrong.
I'd been building them in sequence. Yang first, yin second, each one layered on top of the other. The yang had fully formed before the yin had anywhere to anchor — so it didn't. Two separate things stacked on top of each other rather than one unified composition.
Third attempt.
Both at once from the start. Not layered, not sequential — parallel. Yang giving it presence while yin gave it will, neither one ahead of the other, each one incomplete without the other until the very last moment when they weren't.
The clone seal.
The smoke cleared.
It looked at me.
I looked at it.
It tilted its head slightly, the same way I do when I'm thinking.
"...Huh," it said.
"Yeah," I said.
We stood there for a second, both of us processing the same thing from opposite directions.
Then I noticed something else.
I could see myself.
Not in a reflective surface — through its eyes. A second perspective, running parallel to my own, clear and steady like a second window had quietly opened somewhere in the back of my mind. My own face looking back at me from three feet away, expression caught somewhere between satisfied and mildly unsettled.
The clone had the Rinnegan.
Of course it did — it was a complete chakra copy, yin and yang both, which meant it got everything. And the Rinnegan, apparently, doesn't consider shared vision to be an opt-in feature.
I shifted my gaze deliberately. The clone did the same, and for a brief moment I was watching myself watch myself, which was exactly as disorienting as it sounds.
I dispelled it.
The second perspective closed cleanly, like shutting a door.
I stood there for a moment.
The tactical implications of that were going to take a while to fully think through.
But for now —
Shadow Clone Jutsu. Third attempt. Fully functional, independently thinking, Rinnegan included, shared vision apparently standard.
Not bad for an afternoon.