In hindsight, performing an A-rank lightning jutsu indoors was not my best decision.
To be fair, it wasn't my worst either. My worst was assuming that sound doesn't travel through walls.
It does. Extensively. With enthusiasm.
The Chidori, for the uninitiated, is not a quiet technique. The name translates roughly to "One Thousand Birds." This is because it sounds exactly like one thousand birds — all of them personally offended, all of them expressing this opinion simultaneously and at maximum volume. The electrical chirping that erupts from your hand is sharp, high-pitched, and absolutely merciless toward the concept of a peaceful afternoon.
I had approximately three seconds to appreciate what I'd created before I heard footsteps in the corridor.
Fast footsteps.
Multiple sets.
I looked down at my hand — lightning still crackling between my fingers, very pleased with itself — then at the scorch marks spreading across the floor in a very artistic and completely unintentional starburst pattern, then back at the door.
The math was not in my favour.
The staff, to their credit, were very calm about it. Professionally calm. The kind of calm that takes years of experience to develop and communicates more disappointment than any amount of shouting ever could. There was a long silence during which I considered several explanations, discarded all of them, and settled on a dignified: "I can explain."
I could not explain.
Which is how I ended up here.
I dragged the mop across the floor with all the enthusiasm of a man attending his own funeral.
This is what I was reduced to. A person — well, technically a child, but mentally a teenager with a set of the most powerful eyes in fiction — mopping floors because I forgot that sound travels.
The Rinnegan. Mastery over all five nature transformations. Gravity manipulation. The Six Paths. Potentially the ability to raise the dead.
Currently being used to wring out a mop bucket.
I leaned against the handle and stared at the ceiling for a moment.
The scorch marks were staying, for the record. As a monument to my brilliance. I'd decided this approximately thirty seconds after being handed the mop and I was committed to the position.
But here's the thing — the Chidori had worked. Perfectly, immediately, embarrassingly well.
Being a Naruto nerd at one point in my previous life, I was pretty knowledgeable about its lore. And from what I remembered, Sasuke's Rinnegan wasn't something he worked toward — it awakened when Hagoromo gave him his Six Paths Yin Power. Not exactly the most satisfying acquisition story for one of the most broken eyes in fiction, but here we are.
Going into my little testing phase, I'd assumed the Rinnegan granted affinity for all five nature transformations. That's what I remembered, and in my head, it made perfect sense.
Then I tried the Chidori.
Yes, I still remembered the hand signs after decades of not watching the series. Some knowledge just refuses to leave. Monkey → Dragon → Rat → Bird → Ox → Snake → Dog → Tiger → Monkey. Burned into my brain right alongside other vital information like the Pokémon theme song and how to spell "necessary" correctly on the first try.
I took it slow. Carefully moulding and shaping the chakra, guiding it through the transformation. I already had the Rasengan down, and the Chidori is really just a Rasengan that took a wrong turn into lightning country — a failed Rasengan with a nature transformation slapped on. For someone with a Rinnegan, it should have been a mild challenge at best.
Both eyes activated — Sharingan pushed all the way to Mangekyo and the Rinnegan humming quietly alongside it. Just a precaution. Probably overkill. Definitely overkill.
The chakra responded immediately. Instantly. Almost eagerly. Electricity crackling and coiling around my hand like it had been waiting for permission.
That's when it clicked — this wasn't affinity. This was mastery. Complete, absurd, embarrassingly overpowered mastery over all five nature transformations, apparently included in the package with no assembly required.
Which, admittedly, does fit the whole "god of creation" and "god of destruction" branding they had going on. Hard to sell yourself as a deity if you're just a little better than average at fire jutsu.
That realisation then led to a slightly more uncomfortable question: how much do I not know about the Rinnegan?
Obviously I couldn't just ask someone. The Naruto series doesn't exist in this world — there's a famous ninja anime, sure, but it's nothing remotely close. Bleach exists here though, and it's actually pretty popular. Dragon Ball, DBZ, and DBS are practically cultural institutions at this point. But Naruto? Never existed. Which means my only source of information on arguably the most powerful eyes in that universe is whatever's rattling around in my own head from years ago.
Great.
I dragged the mop across another section of floor, pointedly stepping around the scorch marks.
One thing at a time. Figure out what the Rinnegan actually does, don't accidentally destroy any more floors, and maybe — maybe — think twice before performing an A-rank lightning jutsu indoors.
Lessons learned. Probably.
The rhythmic slap of the mop against tile had just settled into a kind of meditative monotony when the door creaked open.
I didn't look up immediately. Then I heard the whispering.
Hushed. Poorly executed. The kind of whispering that announces itself from across a room.
"We can do it fast, they won't notice—"
"They'll notice, they always notice—"
"So? He always helps us, we can't just—"
I looked up.
A small crowd of kids huddled in the doorway, clutching various cleaning supplies and glancing between me and the hallway behind them with the sharp, guilty alertness of people who had clearly not thought this through. Kenji gripped a dustpan like he was ready to die for it. Two of the younger girls wrestled with a second mop nearly twice their height. And just behind them, barely hidden, Aki's cat ears poked into view.
Something uncomfortably warm settled in my chest.
"Go on." One of the caretakers appeared behind them almost immediately, arms folded. "Back to your studies. All of you."
A chorus of protests erupted.
"But he always listens to us—"
"He helped me talk to you about the window latch!"
"He plays with us even when he doesn't have to—"
"Rules are rules," the caretaker said firmly, though to her credit she looked mildly pained about it. "Back. Now."
They went. Slowly. Dramatically. Kenji shot me a look of profound solidarity on his way out, dustpan still in hand, like a soldier being pulled from the front lines against his will.
The door clicked shut.
I stood there for a second, mop in hand, staring at the closed door.
Then I turned back to the floor and kept mopping.
...Okay. Maybe the three days were survivable.
Mop. Slap. Drag. Rinse. Repeat.
Right. Back to the actual problem.
Not what the Rinnegan does. I knew that. Broadly, at least — well enough to rattle off the Six Paths in my sleep, which I had, once, in a way that apparently concerned a caretaker.
The real question was the ceiling.
Canon was useful as a starting point and practically useless as an endpoint. The series had shown these abilities operating within a very specific context — a world built entirely around chakra, with characters who had decades of training and very clear narrative reasons to not immediately end everything. Limits existed because the plot needed them to. Cooldowns, range restrictions, costs — how much of that was genuine and how much was just Kishimoto keeping his story from being three chapters long?
That was what I actually didn't know.
The Six Paths were the obvious starting point — Deva, Asura, Animal, Human, Naraka, and Preta. Six abilities, each broken in their own unique and creative way. My personal favourite being the Asura Path — and not just because of the drills and rocket launches I remembered from the series. In this life I'd learned it was less a combat tool and more a blank canvas. Mechanical reconstruction with no hard ceiling, if you were creative enough about it. Internet access through my forearm, a fully generated suit of armour, functional flight. The series had shown maybe ten percent of what it could actually do and called it a day.
Honestly, criminal.
Take the Deva Path. Gravitational manipulation — attraction, repulsion, the ability to politely inform physics that its services were no longer required. Nagato had a five-second cooldown baked in, which in hindsight was probably the universe's way of applying a safety rating to something that could level mountains.
Mine didn't have one. I'd already confirmed that — tested it back and forth in quick succession, waiting for the delay that never came. Which raised an obvious follow-up question: was Nagato's cooldown a him problem, or a fundamental property of the ability? Because if it was a him problem, that meant the canon version of this ability had been running at a fraction of what it could actually do for the entire series.
That was a significant distinction.
I'd filed that one under think very carefully before using in public and moved on.
The Preta Path was a different kind of question entirely. In the Naruto-verse it absorbed ninjutsu — chakra-based techniques, fundamentally. Quirk attacks weren't that. Some were pure physical force, some were elemental, some were biological in ways that had nothing to do with chakra at all. Would it absorb a fire quirk the way it absorbed a fire jutsu? Would it absorb anything from a world where almost no one was even running chakra?
I genuinely didn't know. And I couldn't test it without either finding a cooperative quirk user or getting into an actual fight, neither of which was on the schedule for today.
The Amenotejikara I'd also tested in the most boring way imaginable — swapping places with a chair. Then a book. Then the mop bucket, which had been funnier in theory than in practice. It worked. Perfectly, immediately, with zero resistance. But Sasuke's version had gone further than swapping. Portals to other dimensions entirely. Whether that part carried over, or whether it was tied to something specific about the Naruto-verse's cosmology, was the kind of question I couldn't answer from an orphanage in Hamamatsu with a mop in my hand.
The Outer Path sat in a similar blind spot. Revive the dead, bind Tailed Beasts with chakra chains, create Six Paths of Pain — all supposedly in the toolkit. But the series had only ever shown these at specific scales against specific targets. Was there an upper limit on what could be revived? Was there a range restriction on the chakra chains that just never came up because no one in canon ever tested it properly? Did the Six Paths of Pain scale with my own strength or did they operate on some fixed output?
Unknown. Unknown. Unknown.
Beyond the Six Paths there were the passive perks — chakra perception, the ability to see otherwise invisible barriers, enhanced vision, and the nature transformation mastery I'd recently and loudly confirmed.
And then there were the things that technically weren't Rinnegan abilities at all, but sat in the same general category of things I theoretically had and hadn't properly thought about.
The Six Paths Yin Power seal, for instance.
I glanced down at my left palm without really meaning to. The crescent moon-shaped mark sat there quietly, exactly where it had always been — dark against my skin, doing absolutely nothing, looking very pleased about it. Hagoromo's gift, technically. The same seal Sasuke had carried. In the series it had been used precisely once for anything definitive: combined with Naruto's Yang seal to imprison Kaguya inside a Chibaku Tensei. A one-time trump card, and then gone.
Mine hadn't vanished. There was no Naruto here with the matching Yang seal, no Kaguya requiring imprisonment, no dramatic finale to spend it on. It had just... stayed.
Which left the obvious question of what, exactly, it was doing in the meantime.
The seal was Yin Release at its core — the chakra of imagination, form, spiritual energy. The part of chakra that shaped things rather than energised them. In theory, that was an extraordinary thing to have sitting in your palm. In practice, the series had been frustratingly vague about it. "It can be presumed that it augments the user's abilities" was the scholarly consensus, which was a very polite way of saying nobody actually knew.
What I did know — what I'd figured out gradually, quietly, over the past few years — was that the seal stored chakra. Passively. Continuously. In the same way the Strength of a Hundred Seal did, the same principle Tsunade and Sakura had spent years exploiting. Chakra accumulating in that mark on my palm, building reserves that bypassed the normal limits of what a body could hold at any given time.
Except the Strength of a Hundred Seal had taken Sakura three years of deliberate, painstaking effort to form. She'd had to divert a constant trickle of chakra into it every moment of every day, maintaining the concentration required while also training, fighting, and generally not exploding anything.
The Yin seal had just... started doing it. On its own. From the beginning, as far as I could tell, without my input or instruction or awareness until I'd thought carefully enough about it to notice.
I had a theory about why. The Strength of a Hundred Seal required medical-grade chakra control to build. The Yin seal was Hagoromo's. And whatever Hagoromo's baseline for "chakra control" looked like, it was presumably somewhat above the level of "took three years and a lot of concentration."
What I didn't know was how much had accumulated. I hadn't released it. I wasn't sure I was in a hurry to find out what happened when an unknown quantity of Yin-natured chakra dumped itself into my system all at once, and the orphanage had suffered enough structural damage for one week. But it was there, building, and at some point the question of what to do with it was going to stop being theoretical.
I'd added it to the list. Just below the Chakra Enhanced Strength and just above the Mangekyo, in the growing section of the list labelled genuinely impressive things I am not going to test indoors.
Which brought me to that.
Chakra Enhanced Strength.
It was a Tsunade technique, originally. Sakura's too, eventually. The principle was straightforward enough — precise chakra control, medical-grade concentration, storing chakra in the hands or feet and releasing it at the exact moment of impact. The result was the ability to hit something so hard the ground disagreed with you philosophically. Tsunade could do it with raw muscle as a baseline. Sakura had learned it through gruelling repetition and a training regimen that had apparently involved Tsunade coming at her with full force until the concept stuck.
I have, objectively, better chakra control than both of them.
Or so I'd been assuming.
Not because I'd trained for it specifically — although, to be fair, I'd spent the better part of seven years doing exactly that. Not deliberately, not with a clear goal in mind, but constantly refining, adjusting, and getting used to how chakra moved and responded since the moment I could access it.
More importantly, the Rinnegan's nature transformation mastery demanded a level of inherent precision in how chakra was shaped and directed that put medical-nin levels of control well within reach as a side effect.
If I could mould lightning into a Chidori on my first attempt — chakra crackling and coiling exactly where I directed it, not a fraction wasted — then concentrating that same chakra into a fist and releasing it with pinpoint timing shouldn't present any meaningful challenge at all.
Which meant I was probably sitting on the ability to hit things with the force of a small natural disaster.
And that was before accounting for whatever was sitting in the Yin seal.
I looked down at my free hand. Opened and closed it once.
...I was going to add that to the think very carefully before testing indoors list as well. Lessons were being learned today, even if the lesson about sound and walls had arrived slightly too late to be useful.
The embarrassing part was that for all these years I'd barely scratched the surface of any of it. The only things I used regularly were the Sharingan's perception and memory enhancement — glorified study tools, essentially. I hadn't even touched the Mangekyo for anything serious. The Mangekyo. One of the most catastrophically powerful upgrades in the entire series, just sitting there, completely untouched, collecting dust like a sports car parked permanently in a garage with nowhere to be.
Then again, there hadn't exactly been much call for it. I'd never been in a fight. Never encountered a villain in person — the closest I'd come was watching hero-villain incidents play out on TV or reading about them online like everyone else. Which, objectively, was a perfectly fine way to experience those things. Ideal, even.
But it did mean my actual practical knowledge of my own abilities was embarrassingly thin for someone theoretically sitting on this much power.
I slopped the mop into the bucket with perhaps more force than necessary.
That was the part that needed fixing.
Not urgently. There was no threat on the horizon, no villain with my address, no timeline I was failing to meet. Just a gap between what I theoretically had and what I actually understood — and the quiet, persistent awareness that gaps like that had a way of mattering at exactly the wrong moment.
One day. One day I'd actually sit down and properly map everything out. Push each ability to its limit, figure out what carried over into this world and what didn't, stop operating on decade-old memories of a series that no longer existed here.
Just... not today. Today was mopping.
Besides, I was seven. There was no real urgency. I had time.
Though I did know what I wanted, broadly speaking.
Strong. Rich. Famous.
The kind of famous where millions of people show up to airports just to catch a glimpse. The kind of rich where buying a small country is a financial inconvenience rather than an impossibility. The kind of strong where people talked about you the way Jujutsu Kaisen talked about Gojo and Sukuna — in that reverent, slightly terrified whisper reserved for people who had simply transcended the normal scale of things.
Was that a lot to want at seven years old while serving cleaning duty for blowing a hole in an orphanage floor?
Probably.
Did that make it any less valid?
Absolutely not.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Author's note:
Chapter 8 here.
I've got to say, I genuinely enjoyed writing this chapter. I originally started writing because I wanted to create something based on the fanfic My Hero Academia: Blink, and I just posted whatever first came to mind.
At the time, I had no idea what I was getting myself into or how much time writing a chapter would actually take.
When I write, I usually start with an idea I think is nice, then derail from it, and just try my best to finish the chapter and post it.
But with this chapter, I really enjoyed the process.
Just wanted to get that out.