Chapter 7
Have you ever thought about which of the Six Paths you'd choose if you could only take one?
It came up a lot in my previous life. Most people went straight for the Deva Path—gravity control, hard to argue with. Point at something, watch it suffer. Very clean, very direct, doesn't ask much of you intellectually.
A smaller group picked the Asura Path. Extra limbs, missiles, lasers. The appeal was obvious in the way that explosions are obvious.
If you'd asked me back then, I probably would have said Deva too, if only because I hadn't thought hard enough about the alternative.
I've since reconsidered.
The Asura Path is criminally underrated.
Not for what it was shown doing—but for what it quietly allows.
The first thing I tested was the obvious.
Turning my arm into a weapon.
It worked exactly as expected. Smooth, precise, unnervingly natural despite being anything but. No resistance, no instability—just a clean shift from organic to mechanical, like my body had always known how to do this and had simply been waiting for permission.
I held it there for a moment. Flexed slightly. Reverted it.
Effective. Also not particularly interesting. Which, in my experience, is usually a bad sign—the more straightforward something feels, the more likely it is that I'm missing something.
So I stopped thinking in terms of weapons.
If the Asura Path is fundamentally mechanical reconstruction, there's no reason it should be limited to combat. That limitation only exists if you decide it does.
I decided not to.
The mental shift took about ten seconds. The implications took considerably longer to fully appreciate. That's usually how it goes—the obvious conclusion arrives instantly, and then you spend weeks slowly realising how far it actually reaches.
The first actually useful result was turning my fingers into ports.
USB, charging interfaces—anything I could reasonably reconstruct from memory. Getting it right took longer than expected. It wasn't enough to look correct; the internal structure had to match, connections had to align, and whatever I was building had to function rather than just resemble something that did.
After a few failed attempts—and one configuration that I'll be taking to my grave—I got it working. Cleanly, too.
There was, however, a small oversight.
There was nothing to connect it to.
In hindsight, obvious. In the moment, genuinely annoying. I'd spent three days getting the ports right and hadn't once considered that a port without a device is just a very committed aesthetic choice.
Right. Wireless, then.
The antenna took a month.
Not because the transformation was difficult, but because I had no idea what I was actually building beyond a very confident assumption that I could figure it out as I went.
That assumption lasted about three attempts.
I started borrowing phones from the high school kids. Repeatedly. Often enough that one of them eventually just handed me his without asking what I needed it for—which felt less like trust and more like resignation. I appreciated it either way. He got it back every time, which I think is what mattered most to him.
Here's what I learned, in increasing order of humiliation:
An antenna, on its own, does almost nothing useful. It sends and receives electromagnetic signals. That's it. It doesn't understand them, doesn't connect you to anything, and doesn't particularly care what you're trying to accomplish. I'd been treating it as the hard part when it was actually just the front door.
What I actually needed was a transceiver—hardware handling modulation and demodulation, turning raw signal into something workable. And even that was only the first layer.
So I studied. Signal transmission, frequency ranges, modulation standards, how data gets encoded across different protocols—significantly less intuitive than they sound when you're trying to build all of it inside your own forearm. There was a period of about two weeks where I was spending more time reading salvaged electronics textbooks than sleeping, which says something about either my priorities or my sanity. Probably both.
The Sharingan helped. Moving through material quickly, retaining details I'd have otherwise missed, replaying structures in my head with enough clarity to catch inconsistencies. It did not, unfortunately, do the understanding for me. That part still required time, and a frankly unreasonable number of failures.
One attempt produced what seemed like a real signal—stable, consistent, clearly picking up something. I spent forty minutes convinced I'd cracked it before realising I was receiving the same corrupted fragment on a loop and had no idea where it was coming from.
I dismantled that one and started over.
The other thing I kept running into: raw signals are noise without the right decoding. A perfectly transmitted packet is still meaningless if nothing on the receiving end speaks the same language. I wasn't trying to build a cellular tower in my forearm—I was trying to piggyback on infrastructure that already existed. Open networks, publicly accessible, already doing most of the heavy lifting.
That reframing helped considerably. It's a useful mental habit in general—when a problem feels impossibly large, there's usually a version of it that someone else has already mostly solved, and your actual job is just to find the seam where you can slot in.
By the end of the month, I had something functional. Not elegant. Not efficient. But stable enough to matter.
The second phase was worse.
Having a transceiver isn't the same as having a connection, and that gap turned out to be larger than I'd accounted for. I won't walk through every failure in detail—partly for brevity, mostly for self-respect.
What I will say is that at one point I received something clean. Stable, properly structured, unmistakably real data.
Then lost it before I could process what it was.
That one earned a few minutes of just sitting there, staring at nothing, reconsidering several life choices that had led me to this specific moment of failure.
Still. Progress.
Eventually—after more repetitions of study, test, fail, adjust than I'd like to admit—it worked. The Rinnegan ended up smoothing out the interpretation layer near the end, which, in retrospect, I should have leaned on sooner. The instinctive understanding extended further than I'd given it credit for.
I'm choosing to frame this as working smarter rather than wasting two months. It's a better narrative and I'm the one writing it, so.
The first stable connection wasn't dramatic.
No sudden revelation. No moment where everything clicked into place.
Just a quiet shift from nothing to something—like a background process finishing without announcing itself. Information became accessible. Structured, filtered, manageable. The Rinnegan doing what it apparently always could have, had I been less stubborn about it.
I tested the limits. Anything behind authentication was inaccessible—secured networks required credentials I didn't have, and I wasn't bypassing anything. Just accessing what was already publicly available to anyone who could reach it.
Which, as it turns out, is still an absurd amount.
I spent a few minutes just browsing. No real purpose. Just confirming it worked, and also—if I'm being honest—enjoying the fact that it worked. Four months of effort tends to earn a few minutes of aimless satisfaction.
Four months of work. A questionable application of a god-tier ability. A result that probably shouldn't exist.
I pulled up a random page just to confirm it was still working.
It was.
…Worth it.
Which brings me to the part I didn't initially account for.
The Asura Path doesn't stop at internal reconstruction. It extends outward.
I'd assumed the limit was my own body—everything I'd done so far pointed that direction. Weapons, interfaces, signal systems. All contained, all self-referential. Neat little upgrades.
That assumption didn't hold.
The boundary is flexible. Appearance, for one—superficial changes are trivial once you understand the underlying structure. Hair, build, proportions, none of it is fixed unless you decide it is. White hair takes about as much effort as not having it, which I discovered accidentally and then spent about ten minutes appreciating in a reflective surface before moving on.
Wings are possible. I tested them briefly. Functional, structurally sound, and exactly as impractical as they sound for everyday use unless you're specifically going for a dramatic entrance, which—fine, I'll admit it—has a certain appeal. Probably not worth the commitment. The option exists either way.
But more interesting than any of that—
It builds.
Not tools. Not in the conventional sense. Constructs. Mechanisms formed directly from my body and extending beyond it, as if the distinction between "me" and "what I'm making" is mostly a matter of perspective.
I tested that with something simple. Relatively simple.
An Iron Man suit.
"Suit" is generous. It isn't something I wear—it's something I generate.
The first attempt wasn't pretty. Material extruded, layered, hardened—and then immediately developed a stress fracture along the left shoulder because I'd distributed the load wrong and hadn't accounted for how the plating needed to interlock at joints. It held together long enough for me to feel good about it, then made a sound like a disappointed sigh and partially collapsed.
I stood there for a moment, one arm fully plated and the other looking entirely normal, and reflected on the image I was projecting.
Second attempt: better. The interlocking logic clicked faster than I expected—once I understood the shoulder problem, the rest of the joint system followed a consistent enough principle that I could extrapolate forward without rebuilding from scratch each time. No discrete components, no clean separation between structure and function. Just continuous construction, layer over layer, hardening as it forms, locking into place.
By the third attempt it was covering me fully and holding.
The propulsion was a separate problem. Vents through the hands and feet, output adjusting dynamically—in theory, straightforward. In practice, "adjusting dynamically" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The first time I engaged it I shot sideways into a wall at an angle that I can only describe as geometrically embarrassing. The wall was fine. My dignity less so.
The issue was calibration. The vents were working, the thrust was real, but I was handling stability manually before I'd figured out the right instinctive adjustments—which is a bit like learning to ride a bike by first understanding the physics of angular momentum. Technically correct approach. Not the fast one.
The Rinnegan helped here too, more than I expected. The same instinctive processing that had smoothed out the wireless interpretation layer apparently extended to spatial orientation and output management. Once I stopped trying to consciously manage every adjustment and let it do what it wanted to do, things stabilised significantly.
After that, it was iteration. Output consistency. Control refinement. Finding the ceiling of how fast I could push it before the whole system started complaining.
It's not refined. There's room for improvement—a lot of it. The output still fluctuates more than I'd like, and sharp directional changes require more lead time than I'd want in any situation that actually mattered.
But—
I can fly. Actually, genuinely, honest-to-God fly.
The first time it worked cleanly—full coverage, stable propulsion, no immediate structural failures or geometry-based incidents—I just hung there in the air for a moment and didn't do anything. Just existed in the air. Let that be the whole thing for a few seconds.
It's one of those experiences that sounds unremarkable when described and is somehow still completely worth it in practice.
It also looks cool. Objectively. I've seen the reflection. The fully-formed plating, the propulsion vents, the whole construction from a distance reads as something that has no business existing and yet clearly does.
That's not a priority.
…It's not not a priority either. Let's be honest about that at least.
Compared to five months fighting wireless protocols from first principles, the suit came together in a matter of weeks. Which is either proof that I've genuinely internalized how this ability works—or confirmation that I massively overcomplicated the antenna situation and the suit was always going to be easy.
I'm going with the first interpretation. It's better for morale, and I've already put the antenna behind me.
For now—
I can fly.
That's enough.