The Awakened Soul (Naruto SI)

[Welydora]

Same day. Kakashi's hospital room

The jonin was finally sprawled out in bed, reading his little book as usual. The day had been… intense. He was still processing what he'd seen in the Land of Waves.

The way the door slid open without a sound caught him completely off guard, and in the doorway appeared an elderly woman known in and beyond Konoha.

"…Elder-sama?" Hatake's only visible eye went wide in surprise. He instinctively tried to hide the book under the blanket, but it was already too late.

"Exactly, brat," Utatane Koharu stepped into the room, her cane thudding dully against the floor. "I heard about your mission after your… 'vacation.'" She practically spat the last word. Then she quietly slid the door shut behind her. "You've completely lost both your strength and your wits, Kakashi. You let the enemy lure you into the simplest trap. You didn't do reconnaissance, despite the direct suggestion of the junior member of your team. You endangered genin and would be dead if not for my student. Over the years, the only thing you've really improved at is jerking off." Utatane jabbed her cane contemptuously toward the little book. "But in every other respect, you've just gone soft and predictable. I've got a few things to say to you."

Pointedly ignoring the chair, she stayed standing over his bed, looking down at him. What followed for the white‑haired man were twenty very humiliating minutes of insults, mixed with a tactical breakdown of exactly how he should have acted on that mission. Although Koharu definitely spent more time comparing his professional qualities to various types of organic waste…


The next day, I managed to join Hinata's team. Technically, they were called Team Aoba, since he was their commander. But it was more convenient for me to call them something else.

First thing in the morning, I dragged my ass over to their training ground.

"Yo," I called out, stepping out from behind a tree. "Feel like going on a mission?"

Just like that, I threw it out there.

Hinata lit up the moment she saw me and nodded without hesitation. Kiba and Shino exchanged glances. Their sensei, Aoba Yamashiro, looked up from the scroll he was reading and eyed me with interest.

"Uzumaki-san," he said calmly, then paused for a few seconds to think. "Unexpected. I believe your assistance would be useful to my team. And if we're going, we might as well take something more serious than a D-rank."

Holy shit. I thought I'd have to talk them into it… But here he is: sharp, decisive, reasonable, and flexible. Not like some other sensei… flashed through my head.

I nodded in agreement. A moment later, our ears were assaulted by Kiba's joyous yelp-slash-roar; he was clearly thrilled about a higher-ranked mission.

It turned out to be their first C-rank mission. Getting it really perked the whole team up. You could tell they were probably getting bored with constant work in Konoha. It showed especially on the dog boy. Riding that wave of positivity, Inuzuka called me his bro and, in his excitement, tried to hug me, but a fatherly smack upside the head calmed him down.

After that, we headed to the Hokage's residence.


Finding a merchant's missing daughter. That was the mission we were given.

A hundred kilometers is nothing to a shinobi. Moving at a leisurely pace along the tree branches, we reached the merchant's small estate in less than an hour. We were met by a sweaty, short man whose face showed a mix of desperation and hope.

"Shinobi-sama! Thank the gods you're here!" he wailed as his servants led us inside. "My daughter… She didn't just disappear, she was kidnapped! I've heard of this gang, and they're demanding a ransom! A huge ransom! I don't have that kind of money!"

He looked at us hopefully. The client didn't really understand why there was one more of us than usual, but he was clearly happy about it.

Aoba was about to open his mouth to offer sympathy and agree to the new terms, but I beat him to it, placing a hand on his shoulder.

"One moment, Aoba-san." I turned to the merchant, my tone going cold and businesslike. "So you're saying the mission's changed from a 'search' to 'combat against an armed group and hostage rescue'?"

"Y-yes, but—"

"You do value your daughter, don't you?" I went on, not letting him cut in. "Our team, as you can see, consists of young genin. We were also geared up for a different type of assignment. We're going to have to push ourselves to take on an entire gang. Risk our lives." I swept my gaze over my temporary teammates. Kiba, Shino, and Hinata were looking at me with a bit of skepticism, clearly not seeing yet where I was going with this. They were genin; beating up regular bandits really wasn't a problem for them. "Tell me, Mister Merchant, do workers you pay that little really bust their asses for you?"

The client went pale as he caught the hint. Aoba, on the other hand, watched with interest, seeming to understand I was giving his students a lesson they wouldn't find in textbooks.

"I… I…" the merchant stammered. "I'll increase the reward! Five times! Just bring my daughter back!"

I turned back to my temporary teammates. Their faces were stretched in shock. You could practically read on them something between Wait, you can do that? and Damn, this guy…

"Deal," I nodded, seeing from their faces that they agreed. "But there's one more condition. After we return your daughter, you're going to tell all your friends and colleagues what valiant shinobi work in Konoha, how lucky you were that I, Uzumaki Naruto, personally ended up on your mission, and what a kindness we showed you by agreeing to such modest terms."

The merchant nodded hastily, though in his eyes I clearly read the fleeting thought: Next time I request a mission from Konoha, I'm going to make sure you're not on it.


Once we were away from the house, Shino quietly remarked that it had been a pretty dirty move on my part to force the price up. Kiba, catching the vibe and being his usual brash self, decided to butt heads too, declaring that this was their mission and they'd try to finish it themselves first. To his surprise, I agreed.

"Fine. It's your mission now. I'm just support and a coordinator, if needed."

Then I explained what technique I'd be using to coordinate them.

Well, what did he expect when, basically, he asked me not to bother too much? Besides, there was another plus in this: Hinata's team would be able to polish their teamwork even more. And to make sure everything went even better, I added one last touch, speaking through the mind-link:

Yamashiro-san, don't interfere unless there's a real chance of someone dying. Let them show what they can do.

He gave a barely noticeable nod.

And Team 8, in fact, showed some solid teamwork.

Kiba and Akamaru, like hounds, picked up the girl's scent from one of her things, and in just an hour we were at the gang's hideout.

Shino sent his kikaichū out for recon, and ten minutes later we had a complete map of the hideout—an old, abandoned warehouse—and the exact number of enemies. Hinata, using her Byakugan, confirmed Shino's data and spotted several primitive traps on the approach.

For genin, their coordination was impressive, at least by what I knew of Konoha's average genin level.

The assault plan was simple and effective. Shino's bugs silently "put to sleep" the two sentries at the entrance, draining enough chakra to leave them weak and drowsy. Then Kiba and Akamaru crashed through a small wooden gate like a pair of rhinos, going in with their Fang Over Fang tactic. The move worked off the jutsu of the same name, where Akamaru takes on his master's form; then the two of them drop to all fours, leap, and spin rapidly, creating visible whirlwinds and delivering a barrage of quick strikes to their target. Right off the bat they created chaos and dragged most of the bandits' attention onto themselves.

That was when Hinata went to work. While everyone's eyes were glued to the Inuzuka's furious charge, she slipped into the building like a shadow through a side entrance.

I watched her especially closely. There wasn't a trace of her old hesitation left in her movements.

Coolheaded, with precise Jūken strikes almost invisible to their targets, she disabled the bandits in her path, shutting down their tenketsu. If Kiba was charging through like a runaway freight train, Hinata's actions were just as decisive, but completely different in their finesse and precision.

In one of the back rooms she found the merchant's daughter, tied up and scared. After freeing her, she gave the signal, and a few minutes later the entire gang was down and trussed up.

The leader of these poor bastards, by the way, turned out to be smart enough not to harm the hostage, hoping for a lighter sentence. He probably understood that this kind of business doesn't last long before you get bagged. What he didn't factor in was that confiscation of all his "hard‑earned" loot could also be part of the punishment. But he could be surprised by that in court.

After the beatdown… that is, the main part of the mission, I walked over and started praising the team's actions, especially Hinata's, which made her a little embarrassed.

Aoba also expressed how pleased he was with the team's results, talking about how much they'd grown…

After that, we returned the girl to the merchant. Sure, the mission hadn't been carried out perfectly; we could've arranged everything way more subtly. But it worked like this too, didn't it?

On the way back to Konoha, the group's mood was high.

Kiba wouldn't shut up about how he and Akamaru had wrecked the bandits, Shino nodded silently along, and Aoba listened with a faint smile, occasionally throwing in tactical comments. I, for my part, noted with satisfaction how well they'd meshed. Their specialties complemented each other perfectly. But what pleased me most was Hinata's progress. She hadn't just done her part of the plan—she'd done it coolly, efficiently, without a hint of her old indecision. A real shinobi had awakened in her… and it was disgustingly cute. With that face of hers she looked like an ultra‑cute combat kitten. If she had cried out "Nya!" with every strike, I would've just melted on the spot.


"I'd like to see how much you've grown," I said to Hinata the next day when we met at our usual training ground. "Want a quick spar?"

She hesitated for a moment, then determination flashed in her eyes. She nodded firmly, taking the Hyūga clan's fighting stance.

We'd done plenty of spars back in the Academy and even a few outside it. Hinata was used to me being stronger, and she knew that in a fight with me she didn't have to hold back.

I didn't underestimate her, rushing in right away with the kind of speed that usually left my peers stumped. I wanted to see her limit and how she'd react to real pressure. But what happened next genuinely surprised me.

Hinata didn't retreat or block. Instead, she started spinning, releasing blue streams of chakra from every tenketsu in her body.

"Kaiten!" Her voice, though quiet, was full of resolve.

A rotating sphere of blue chakra formed around her. Before I could reach her, I had to jump back so the technique wouldn't just launch me away.

I stared ahead in surprise. Absolute Defense… that's what they call it. She'd mastered one of her clan's most difficult techniques.

"Good, Hinata. Very good." I couldn't hide my admiration. "But you can't win a fight with defense alone."

"I know," she replied and, stopping her rotation, rushed into the attack herself.

Her movements had become faster and more precise; training in the clan had clearly intensified. Had she kept quiet about it just to surprise and impress me? It'd make sense—she knows my personality and could easily have predicted that. And that, together with what she was showing now, was really impressive.

She activated her Byakugan, and her chakra-laced fingers immediately went for my tenketsu.

I dodged her thrusts easily, and even parried some of them in a similar way, flooding my own limbs with chakra and releasing it at the moment of contact.

For several seconds, blue flashes and waves of chakra flew from us in all directions.

But she didn't give up, trying to force me into a combo. And I didn't back off, waiting to see what else Hinata would show.

"Eight Trigrams, Thirty-Two Palms!"

Her attacks turned into a flurry of precise, lightning-fast strikes. Our arms blurred from the speed. Two palms. Four palms. Eight. Sixteen. I parried each blow, not letting her hurt me—or herself. The exchange only grew in speed and power.

Thirty-two palms…

Hinata exhaled heavily as I knocked aside her final strike.

The fight stopped.

I wouldn't say it had been hard for me, but it wasn't exactly effortless either.

"Definitely chunin level," I said, without a trace of irony in my voice. "Kaiten and Thirty-Two Palms… Hinata, that's incredible progress. I'm honestly impressed."

A familiar blush spread over her cheeks, but she didn't lower her eyes. Instead, she looked up proudly… not at me, but off to the side. And that alone was already big progress…

"Thank you… Naruto-kun."

"This calls for a celebration," I suggested. "My treat."

The evening at a small, cozy restaurant that served the best dango in Konoha went by surprisingly easily. Hinata still got flustered when I praised her, but again, much less than before. She could hold a conversation, laughed at my jokes about Kiba and his "rhino" tactics, and even talked about her training and how cutely her little sister Hanabi huffs and puffs during practice. I pointed out that Hinata was no less cute during our spars, which made her blush even harder.

Our friendship, it turned out, was getting warmer and deeper. I felt calm around her. That comfort was a pleasant break from my endless race for strength and all my other dark plans.

All in all, the rest had gone well. I'd recovered my strength, helped a friend become even stronger and more confident, and spent time with someone I genuinely liked. But as I headed back late that night to my empty, quiet mansion, I knew the break was over.

Down in the basement, in the cold of the sealing fuin, the material I'd obtained in the Land of Waves was waiting for me. My main project demanded attention, and now I had everything I needed to take the next step.

It was time to push science forward.

---

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[Welydora]

My teammates were still in the hospital and were supposed to be discharged tomorrow. So I dedicated the whole day to experiments.

No, I didn't immediately jump into the final testing of my pile of theory-hypotheses on live "material." Instead, for the first half of the day my brain got hijacked by a different topic—also pretty damn interesting.

Soul research.

Same old lab. I was looming over the operating table with Subject One, while above me—hanging a bit off to the side—were massive metal rigs with black inlays stuffed to the brim with my chakra: fūin analyzers and stabilizers. The first one was self-explanatory. The second existed so the "material" wouldn't die ahead of schedule. Both devices radiated energy loaded with huge bundles of properties, doing their jobs the way a normal ninja would with jutsu—only on a much deeper, more efficient, and more powerful level.

First, I put my hand on the subject and, using a not-particularly-high-end technique, instantly drained his chakra circulatory system—CCS—of excess energy.

After that, dozens of blue chakra threads burst out of me.

The soul sits like it's not quite in the same space as the normal world… but I could shift my chakra into that, so to speak, "other" space and still touch the soul with it. And even though other people's souls weren't visible to my soul-sight because of their chakra… despite the whole "different spaces" thing, it turned out it wasn't that simple.

Whatever. That problem was fixable for analysis.

The threads sank into the subject's arm with surgical precision. Some of them, picking the right "layer" of reality, groped for the soul, while others methodically ripped major chakra channels out of the body.

On my earlier command, the stabilizing seal pumped blood away from the work area, while the analyzer calibrated under my control, sending streams of information straight into my consciousness.

Soon I found the metric I needed, and first in soul-sight—and then, thanks to the fūin analyzer tuning itself to match that ability's properties—in my mind, the subject's soul "aura" flared up in microscopic detail.

"Green-yellow?" I noted the color.

As expected, souls came in different colors.

With the right properties set, I latched my chakra threads onto the subject's soul with a technique similar to how ninja stick to vertical surfaces.

Thanks to the analyzer, I had a read on the structure—barely different from my own—and the soul's durability. The second part differed a lot, and not in a good way… which just meant I had to spread my grip over a larger area. Anything to keep the body pinned to the table and slowly, relentlessly drag the soul out.

The subject was under insanely strong anesthesia, so his body didn't even twitch. But the space where his soul existed filled up with emanations from the tiny doses of energy leaking out of him—emanations with properties that read as emotions: agony, terror, and other similar stuff, just less pronounced. With the analyzer, I couldn't just tell if someone was lying—deepest, smallest emotions couldn't hide from me either.

The CCS—even heavily drained—still held the soul in place. So to separate body and soul I had to burn through the CCS's internal reserves hard, to pull the soul out in one piece.

Soon, held in my threads, a green-yellowish soul hung in front of me. Same outline as the subject's short body. Same sphere with a core inside the "aura."

And even this kind of desecration didn't wake the soul up… damn it.

I had a long list—very long—of what I needed to test in a soul: traits, functions, abilities. But I started with one of the most interesting items.

The threads slowly cut an opening in the chest, opposite the core. The part of the soul that used to be "aura" peeled back like skin as a slow current of energy pushed out from the subject's soul. The energy was almost transparent, but faintly tinted with the soul's color.

The analyzer and my sphere-sight immediately pushed inside the soul, running yet another comprehensive scan. A cloudy sphere—old and stagnant.

Ten minutes later, almost all the energy had flowed out of the subject's aura, though it didn't stop completely, still trickling thanks to the internal reserves of the sphere.

Next part of the experiment: the threads—this time using noticeably more force, though still nowhere near my possible maximum—punched an opening in the outer core. Energy from the subject's soul rushed out under much higher pressure.

In terms of raw volume, what got released here wasn't even a drop of my chakra. But the stream looked powerful—and because of that, beautifully detailed—purely thanks to how hard I was pushing my sphere-sight sensory output while focusing on the subject's sphere, plus the analyzer. Figuratively speaking, it's like a fart: normally you can't even see it. But put on a thermal imager… Yeah, not the best association, but with that soul color? Kinda symbolic.

There were properties in the subject's energy, but they were extremely weak and scattered. And barely interpretable for me. A lot of them were even smaller—so small that even with the analyzer I couldn't make sense of them. Souls were one hell of a puzzle… but that didn't mean—not even close—that I wasn't getting data. I was getting a ton, and I could sort and process it for a long time. And I've still got other projects, by the way.

When the flow almost stopped, now releasing only little by little from energy generated by the core and, to a much lesser degree, by the walls of the outer core, I moved my threads toward the core to open that up too.

In general, all energy generates energy. Weird law of the world. Why, and where it comes from—no clue. But it's just how it is. The higher the concentration of energy—like in a shell, for example—the higher the generation.

Once I did it, the emanations of terror quickly died down, while the core's own energy radiation increased. My perception got flooded by literal oceans of properties—some sharply imprinted, some so faint I could barely tell them apart. All intertwined, all moving in a strange, incomprehensible, chaotic dance.

For about half an hour I tried to make sense of it; the process sucked me in that hard. By then the core had barely started to dissolve. And something else was interesting: the CCS—and then the body—started dying off after the core got damaged. Like there was a connection, and when the soul that they depended on apparently died, everything else followed right after.

Yeah… so that was my first kill. And it happened pretty damn routinely…

And what's worse: the soul isn't immortal. It's very much destroyable. Meaning, presumably, I can be killed completely and permanently too.

Those facts put me in a mild melancholy. Still, it didn't stop me from continuing to study.

When I opened the third subject's soul—purple, by the way; everyone's souls had pretty different colors, while mine was still gray—a hypothesis popped into my head.

I'm Ashura's reincarnation, right? Meta-knowledge says yes.

After that thought, I finished up with Number Three quickly and, without much enthusiasm, moved on to studying myself.

I didn't have to poke holes in myself, since I was working with my own energy—energy that, ever since my soul awakened, could pass through my own shells without any resistance.

But at first, I couldn't find it.

Then I figured: if souls exist in those weird layers, I should probably search in that direction. So I did.

The world felt multidimensional. And with my energies—without fully understanding how exactly it worked or what it precisely led to—I could affect those other dimensions. Similar chakra manipulation I'd only seen in high-class space-time techniques. And even then, that field was barely studied.

The search went on until evening. And ended in failure too…

Nope. Not that simple. Maybe Ashura's soul—the one I'm reincarnating—sits too deep. Maybe I need a different approach.

Whatever. I'm stubborn. And I'm almost completely sure something has to be there.

So, deciding I'd keep trying for a month and if it didn't work I'd come back later when my skills improved, I went to sleep. Today was productive.


The morning was normal. I slept well as always and woke up in my little mansion feeling pretty energized. Three "numbers" I'd deprived not just of life, but even of the possibility of reincarnation, still didn't make me feel pity. When I think about it, yeah, it stirs up a weak, unpleasant feeling—but nothing more. So, to fully detach from it, I went back to business.

My teammates were supposed to be discharged already, and despite the pretty extensive circumstances, our mission continued.

First thing I did was swing by Sakura's place. She lived in a normal-looking, two-story house—standard Konoha.

So I wouldn't have to meet her parents and waste time, I climbed up to the second floor, to Sakura's room window, and knocked.

She was in her room, and when she came over she saw my face—pretty damn surprised.

Even as I approached, my sphere-sight picked up Sakura's appearance, which had… changed.

"…Naruto?" Sakura asked calmly (!)—even though she absolutely should've pointed out I'd climbed up to her like a creep instead of using the damn door. "Why not through the door?"

She said it just as calmly, and when she noticed my stare she looked away, embarrassed.

"It doesn't suit me, does it?"

She drew my attention to the thing that surprised me: her hair had been cut into a bob.

"Well, it actually does," I said. She looked good even without long hair. "How're you feeling?"

I hopped down onto the floor softly, trying not to think too hard about why she decided to change her image… Teen brains. I'm afraid if I truly understand how they work, my psychiatrist's note might stop being valid.

"Good. And… thank you. For everything." She hesitated again and looked away. Her eyes snagged on the note I'd left on the nightstand, the one with fūin on it. "That was really direct… and nice. Thanks for that too."

Her words—and her expression—were disgustingly cute. So I couldn't help it: I reached out and ran my fingers through her pink hair.

She got even more flustered.

"You're welcome." I shrugged, then pulled my hand back.

For a second there was this weird silence between us. I broke it without shame.

"Ready to head out to the Land of Waves today?"

"Yeah. Five minutes."

Nodding, I teleported off to gather the rest of the team. No point peeking in on minors. Now, digging around in corpses—that's different, that's my thing. But staring at living people is usually unethical.

After a while, when it turned out everyone really was ready for a quick move—even Hatake—we arrived at Tazuna's place. And then I got to witness a pretty weird scene.

"Sasuke," Sakura addressed him. Her voice—unlike her previous attempts to talk to him—was firmer than ever, without that extra timidity.

The guy slowly turned his gaze to her.

"I want you to apologize," she said, looking him straight in the eyes. "For what happened on the bridge."

"…" The Uchiha didn't get it right away. But when he realized who said it—and what exactly—his eyes widened to unnatural sizes and his mouth fell open on its own.

"Until you apologize, we don't talk outside of missions. I'm not your property, and I'm not an obstacle you can throw away when it's in your way."

Then she simply crossed her arms and turned away, waiting.

But under my and Kakashi's surprised looks, she obviously didn't get anything.

Sasuke snorted and turned away too.

So we stood there like that for about twenty seconds.

"M-ma…" Kakashi summed up the situation.

"Yeah," I agreed.

Sakura, still not getting an apology, shot the Uchiha a look full of hurt.

"You sure you're okay?" I asked gently, trying not to provoke… possibly someone who wasn't entirely stable, with sharp movements or tone.

"Uh… yeah?" She gave me a confused look.

"…If anything, I've got good connections at the hospital. Come to me if something's wrong."

"…" Sakura didn't understand what I was getting at, but nodded.

After that we headed for Tazuna. He turned out to be at the construction site, not home. Looked a bit worn out for so early, and he had a black eye under one eye.

"Greetings to the honored ninja of Konoha," he said, bending in a bow like he'd never bowed in his life, which surprised me again.

"And what the hell happened to you?" I asked.

"Excuse me?.." Tazuna didn't get it either, but he noticed my whole team staring at him weird and started to panic.

"Yeah… forget it." I waved him off. Honestly, it wasn't that interesting. And I could already guess—his own people probably smacked him around for that sideways attitude toward terrifying demo—ahem. Toward respected ninja.

"Any incidents while we were gone?" Kakashi asked, finally getting to the point.

"None, Hatake-sama," the bridge builder reported respectfully.

"M-gh. Good," Kakashi noted, then stepped a couple of paces away and turned to us. "Team Seven. You might not know this, but your teammate—Naruto—not only dealt with those two ninja, but also Gato's cartel."

That surprised all three of us. Sakura and Sasuke because I wiped out the cartel, and me because Kakashi actually bothered to verify mission intel after my report to the Hokage. Did Koharu bite him back there when I sicced her on him? No, they're not like that… or are they?

"However," Hatake continued, briefly glancing at Tazuna's confirming nods. "Our mission isn't over. Until the bridge is finished, we'll guard the perimeter of the construction site. And we'll guard Tazuna at night, when he's home. But first, I have something to tell you."

No, she definitely bit him. Where else would Kakashi get a sudden attack of responsibility and a craving for work?

We moved away from Tazuna, leaving him to do his thing. And Kakashi just… started breaking down our fight: what Sakura could've done better, what Sasuke could've done better, where they screwed up, what they did okay, what they did well. He even broke down his own fight. Me, he didn't mention at all—probably just in case.

After that, Hatake went on watch with Sasuke. The jōnin would instruct him on what to do and how. Yeah, we got taught this in the Academy, but Hatake would show more—and in practice.

Sakura and I were left alone with our own schedule. In six hours it'd be Sakura's turn to go, where she'd get the same kind of instruction; after that, mine; after that, Kakashi's.

"What a morning," I said, watching the two of them walk off. Then I turned to Sakura. "How about a light training session? Feels like the perfect time."

"Tell me, Naruto…" she started, also watching them. "If you… finished Gato off. Doesn't that mean our mission has no point?"

"Heh. Glad you noticed. The mission isn't mandatory. But it's a good time for me—I can just send a clone, and it'll barely burn any energy. And it's a good time for you guys: nobody's distracting you, tons of free time. You can focus on getting stronger."

"That's so you," she said, turning her head toward me. "Will you tell me more? Like… how you dealt with the cartel?"

"It's not a bright story."

"Please."

I glanced at her. At least her curiosity survived.

"Fine."

After I told her—and Sakura listened closely, asking a few clarifying questions along the way—we did a short spar. Then I gave her a new chakra-control exercise that didn't take much stamina, told her I was leaving a clone with her, and went to the lab to handle my own stuff.

Days moved forward.

While my clone stood watch over Tazuna and patrolled the area, it still spent most of its time training with Sakura—polishing her chakra control, taijutsu, and helping her process the lessons from that fight. That's how it happened, by the way, that Sakura and the clone (rotating replacements), so random people wouldn't distract them, moved into the mansion that used to belong to Gato.

In my lab, I—the original—buried myself in experiments. Days and nights flew by while, scanning my own chakra core, I tried to feel out, to catch that anomaly—"Ashura's construct"—which I was sure was hidden somewhere deep, in other "layers" of reality. It was exhausting, meditative work that demanded absolute concentration specifically from me, the original.

But doing only one thing was way too little for me. So, on top of that, I tasked dozens of other clones with parallel work in the sterile halls of the underground complex.

On many tables, under the light of fūin lamps, lay immobilized test subjects. My clones started the final verification of my hypotheses.

One clone, using a modified Mystical Palm, sent hair-thin chakra impulses into the subjects' muscle fibers, stimulating accelerated growth and transformation even without micro-damage—on a different principle, where muscle changes without the extra intermediate stages. The results showed up right in front of our eyes: the fūin analyzer streamed models and live graphs of tissue density and strength changing in real time.

Another clone worked with the nervous system of several people one after another. The chakra flows, boosted through fūin, were crammed with so many properties the technique was more complex than Hiraishin. The energy wrapped the spinal cord and major nerve nodes, stimulating myelination of nerve fibers—done to increase signal speed and push reflexes even closer to absolute.

A third—actually, a whole group of clones—tested and studied the body's natural renewal processes. They also tried, after breaking the Hayflick limit—the cell division limit I'd learned to remove a while back—to test different ways of increasing cellular resistance to cancer, DNA damage, and restoring that DNA; and on top of that, ways to detect, isolate, and destroy whatever cancer cells still appeared anyway. That group was basically working toward biological immortality. But besides hacking the cell-division limit, there were still a lot of obstacles on the path to that goal… Over years of studying, I'd figured out how to bypass many of them. Still, everything had to be tested.

And there were other clone groups too. We were working on every system in the body.

Work was boiling on all fronts for my body-improvement project. Data piled up.

And I… could feel it. I was standing on the edge of a huge discovery.

---

If you enjoyed my work, feel free to check out my Patreon. There you can read up to 20 chapters ahead and get early access to any new stuff that I publish

 

[Welydora]

The days kept rolling by. Different teams of clones worked themselves to the bone, and of course I—the original—didn't slack either.

There were a shitload of results from the groups working on the body-enhancement project. But most of it just meant more experiments—sometimes with tiny tweaks, sometimes with not-so-tiny ones.

On the soul-research front, I put clones on it too, even if they could only work through "crutches"—the analyzer. They had a kind of soul-sight; since they don't actually have souls, they could only fake it using chakra, and even then it was way more crooked than what I used thanks to my natural ability. To use that sphere-vision properly through chakra, you first had to actually understand it better. But there were no big, fat breakthroughs there, which made me—the original—pretty damn irreplaceable. The clones, again, leaned on the fūin analyzer, which couldn't fully replace my inborn sense, but in a lot of aspects it was actually even better.

With the tools we had plus a pinch of materials, the clones managed to detect soul emission from the test subjects on one of reality's layers—emission that leaked past the chakra "veil." Meaning: radiation spreading outside the body and readable by my sensitivity! After that, the clones poked around "to the sides" from that point to figure out what spatial ranges that emission usually showed up in, and using those data they created a Soul Analysis technique.

The jutsu gave you data on a soul even while it was still inside a body. It didn't work as well as ripping the soul out, and sure as hell not as well as ripping it out and then studying it with a fūin analyzer. But it still let you determine the strength, color, and a bunch of other minor—sometimes not so minor—traits. Using that technique, the clones ran a huge study with over a hundred thousand people from different countries. The end result was some pretty notable, pretty reliable data.

Everyone is born with slightly different soul strength. With age, the soul grows stronger. But after around fifty, ordinary people hit a plateau. After sixty, degradation ramps up more and more. For shinobi it's a bit different: the more chakra you have—or the stronger a soul you were born with in the first place—the later that degradation starts.

Hiruzen had impressive chakra reserves in his youth, and his soul—unlike his body—is still bursting with energy. Even if it turned out weaker than mine. His chakra, though… chakra can degrade too. Age. Especially if it doesn't get "refreshed" for a long time. It can accumulate damage that healed badly or wrong. In theory, if he still had those special sections in his Chakra Circulation System—the ones responsible for potential and letting it grow more—then that aging could be fixed. But local science has pretty damn little data in that direction. And the guy with the most extensive knowledge on it is staring back at me from the mirror.

Even so, like before, I had no way to just start mass-producing those sections on an industrial scale. Though I was close to cracking how to do it anyway.

This whole topic needed research, because it looked like even if I solved the problem of cell durability, actual biological immortality would still require working on chakra too.

The clones kept collecting data, and they were going to keep doing it for a long time.

But the greatest discovery these days was a real goddamn breakthrough! Found it! I found that thing inside me!

Yeah, it sounded like a kid who'd been using the potty without ever thinking about how it worked suddenly discovering there's something weird and unusual down in the genital area. But it wasn't quite like that for me.

So. Asura. First: my soul is not his reincarnation. Neither is my body. Or rather… my body… I think it's becoming the reincarnation. But I still need to sort that out.

A long, painstaking comb-through of spaces inside my body and a little beyond it followed. I checked every square centimeter. And since the search wasn't happening in three dimensions, the search volume over those days got so massive that if you converted it into normal 3D space, you could build a launch site for an Earth-to-Moon rocket there and still have some room left.

So yeah… that explains why, after all that, my eye was twitching and I was basically baring my teeth while staring down a little sphere—white with a faint bluish tint—glowing with energy.

I called it Asura's construct. Not a soul. I might be kinda shit at sensing under certain abnormal conditions—like when you're dealing with a brain-melting multidimensional space—but I can tell chakra apart from soul energy.

This crap was, as expected, in shifted space, in the area of the center of my chakra hearth. Right in that little flame. It was a kind of energy body: not especially thick in raw power, but very thick in terms of how many properties were stuffed into it. Its very existence was sustained by fūin—unknown to me before, but woven into Earth's chakra a long time ago. The construct had no soul, and without those fūin it shouldn't have been able to exist at all.

What was even more interesting: the construct was eating my energy, even if only bit by bit. It processed it and output a slightly smaller amount—and, most importantly, in a slightly altered form. That was supposed to slowly reshape my chakra toward the type it radiated… and even more than that.

Before, I didn't even feel it. Maybe my senses just got used to what's been happening to me… I don't know. Since birth? Even earlier?

This heretical Asura construct got me seriously interested. This was a legacy of the descendant of an ancient alien—not the work of modern, or even merely recent, minds. Which meant there could be a lot in there that I'd never understood before, but that could be insanely useful.


Days took off again. Most of my time was now eaten up by studying souls, the construct, and ways to strengthen the biological "container." That didn't mean I had no life outside the lab… at least, the clone did.

Back to the construct. Over a few days I studied it properly. And it was just… something else.

But in order, and relatively brief.

The construct has the progenitor's body template—presumably Asura's. Following that template, using the CCS as a conductor and a tool of influence, the construct alters the host's body. From that influence, much more slowly, affinity for manipulating elements and Yang also grows.

Compared to modern research—especially my own—the construct works slowly, and inefficiently at that. But it's effective and safe for the host.

The Mystical Palm Technique can visibly change the body right before your eyes, healing wounds. The construct's work is designed for long years.

Based on just these surface-level facts, even without deep details, you can already form a pretty solid hypothesis about why certain events happened the way they did. Specifically: why Hashirama was so strong. Answer: he was apparently the only reincarnation who managed to (a) be born with extremely high chakra growth potential and (b) live to an age where he could actually realize (a). The construct runs on the host's chakra. Without a monstrous reserve, at its current efficiency—and especially when the construct only takes a small percentage of energy production—a shinobi with even an average jōnin's strength would have to learn how to live for centuries to reach the transformation the First Hokage went through.

The template includes a body capable of far higher physical performance than normal, with insanely strong regeneration. A body that can produce far more Yang and can even exist without food and water—living purely on its own generated energy. Those were the obvious abilities; there were more, just less noticeable.

Pretty significant, right? Especially in the shinobi world, where people constantly clash up close and use life energy a lot.

Hashirama was very strong. The construct boosted him even further. The First had a lot of Yang, and over time the construct made it even more. He could heal himself mid-battle, without hand seals… a massive achievement among med-nin that officially nobody managed to replicate.

Well, not exactly: with my control and chakra, it's within my abilities too. And thanks to meta-knowledge, I remember Orochimaru has a powerful healing technique that's supposedly also impossible for local med-nin. And maybe there are other people who can pull off something like that. But now I'm nitpicking.

I had access to Hashirama's cells. That's how I understood the Asura construct had fully finished its work on the First. Too bad it didn't help the Second God of Shinobi survive anyway. That same access to the First Hokage's body had previously kicked off many of my sub-projects inside the grand body-enhancement project, so the Asura construct isn't valuable to me for every single part of it.

The most important thing in the construct wasn't the template itself, but the mechanism that rebuilds the body to match it. A real treasure—once I studied it, ideas lit up in my head in whole armfuls about how to copy it and improve it.

This new data changed a lot in my experiments, and I needed to adjust things so the body-enhancement project would turn out even better. But… later.

Lately, I'd gotten way too fixated on studying. So the next day I gave myself a "day off," so to speak. Especially since I had a reason.


Today was March 28th—and also Sakura's birthday.

Since that mission in the Land of Waves—which, as far as I was concerned, was still ongoing—the girl had gotten… stranger. Or rather, more sane, but compared to her old personality, that looked strange. Sakura used to express her emotions loudly, but now she stopped reacting that way to unusual events.

And also—and this looked weird too—she started treating me more respectfully, especially during training. Exactly "more respectfully," like in those sketchy Chinese cultivation novels, though not quite that extreme—just that kind of tone.

Still, the fact nobody was calling me "Master" suited me fine. Because considering our "species"—twelve- to thirteen-year-old kids—that would've been weird.

My gift wasn't expensive, so she wouldn't stress later about needing to give me something equally pricey. And it wasn't the usual crap like a set of kunai or a technique. Sakura liked board games, so I figured a quality set brought from another continent—not too expensive, but actually emphasizing our personal connection and mutual understanding—was the right kind of gift.

So I took it and showed up at the clearing where she was doing her morning exercises to wake herself up properly. Then I made it clear that I, as her mentor, was declaring today a day off and dragging her to Konoha to celebrate.

Her confused questions—like, aren't we on a mission right now?—were heard, but only so I could deal with them. Because after I towed Sakura over to the rest of our team, Kakashi and Sasuke got informed they were pulling double watch today—covering Sakura, and, while we're at it, me too. And then, ignoring Hatake's complaining, I teleported myself and Haruno back to the Leaf.

After that came a full day of exploiting either me or her, which I used to the max for our "rest." As in: with me repeatedly asking, to her embarrassment, "What else would you want?"

We visited her parents, who were surprised she'd shown up in Konoha. We went through an interrogation that was embarrassing for Sakura but not for me—a guy fully intending to relax and have fun—about what kind of boy their daughter had brought home.

And it wasn't just me enjoying her embarrassment. The Haruno family enjoyed it too. They knew the jinchūriki by face, didn't have any negative feelings about it, and actively played dumb to crank that embarrassment up, like a bunch of clueless little stumps.

After that we gathered our old crew of former classmates. According to Sakura, they weren't prepared because they hadn't gotten invitations, and she hadn't even planned to celebrate, and calling them would be rude, and maybe they had stuff to do, and blah-blah-blah—broken apart by a couple of my lines. Don't overcomplicate it, and the main thing is to have a good time, right?

Nobody actually had anything urgent, so our core group assembled within a few hours at a restaurant I paid for.

I'd wanted her not to feel like she owed me too much afterward. Didn't quite work out. But my explanations—that I did it from the heart and didn't want anything in return—seemed to get through. Hopefully.

We stayed like that until night. First there were questions about why Sakura changed her image, but after her brief, no-deep-details explanation that the mission left a heavy mark on her memory, it shifted into shared stories about who had what happen on assignments. Then to other topics, just whatever was going on.

The most wild story, in my opinion, was mine—where I told them how "a friend of mine" screwed over some sucker from the capital.

Sakura's birthday, honestly… yeah, she liked it, but it could've been better. But how many emotions she got because of me—that was… something. Especially for her. At least, that's how she put it at night, before I left her to sleep at home, in her usual bed.

That was the break. I acted pretty pushy, organizing everything like that, but I understood Sakura's personality and the others' too, and I knew that in this specific case I could do it this way and it'd be better. If I tried to organize Hinata's birthday like that, she'd burn up from shame, and that would be very not good. Here, though, it was a lot more good than bad.


When the break ended, our routine in the Land of Waves continued. And my lab work resumed with new force.

After I put the clones on new experiments based on data from the test subjects, and after I studied Asura's construct inside me, I couldn't just ignore its "bro." Indra's construct. And my teammate, Uchiha Sasuke, was supposed to be its host.

The very next day I baited him into my lab. It was elementary. I offered Uchiha a serious spar with no restrictions. He, of course—after a bunch of personal training and awakening the Sharingan—agreed, burning to prove his prowess and superiority. As you can guess, it didn't work out for him.

In the heat of battle, I "accidentally" hit him a bit harder than necessary and knocked him out. Then, putting on a show of extreme concern for my "dear" comrade's condition, I kept him under my fūin analyzers for several hours. Ahh—what a kind soul I am.

Knowing where to look, I barely wasted any time. The right sphere—only coal-black, with the same faint blue glow—was also found in shifted space at the center of Sasuke's chakra hearth.

The data I got from it was insane. I even surprised myself when I realized Indra's construct worked noticeably more efficiently than Asura's. Which made sense. It was mostly made of Yin chakra—the energy of mind and spirit. Yin sets form and structure, while Yang—raw power—without Yin is almost uncontrollable. Even the Adamantine Chains technique—no matter how much I'm glowing gold—I use with a hefty Yin component too.

Indra's construct, unlike Asura's, focused almost all its attention on transforming the dōjutsu and the CCS, touching the rest of the body only as a side note. And it did it pretty efficiently, focusing on the finest, microscopic changes.

In Sasuke's case, the process was moving fast. The properties embedded in his construct were even deeper than mine, and some of them even my analyzers couldn't fully catch. It became clear that dōjutsu development is a ridiculously complex mechanism—one you could sink a lot of time into studying.

But my current goal is body enhancement. There's a saying: "Chase two rabbits, and you'll get smacked in the face by both." Or was it not exactly that? Whatever. The point is: be consistent.

Judging by a quick analysis, the construct will finish its work on Sasuke by the time he's fourteen or fifteen. The process depends a lot on how hard Uchiha himself trains, but even then, the result won't be all that obvious to outsiders. To them, he'll just be a childhood "genius" with pretty dense chakra. Actually, he already is—but later he'll be better.

And yeah, dense chakra doesn't mean you have a lot of it. Sasuke got decently lucky with chakra potential, but compared to my reserves, he's one of many mediocrities.

I copied everything I could from Indra's construct onto a special metal capable of storing chakra imprints. I didn't know how that mechanism worked in full, but watching its end result in the future would definitely be interesting. After that, I put the construct back, patched Sasuke up, and sent him out of the lab, "making him happy" with the news that he'd lost again.

And yes, I could create a copy in the form of a similar energy body—the kind constructs themselves are. But I still hadn't figured that out properly, so I copied the properties the best way I could, as accurately as I could.

Studying Indra's construct wasn't useless at all. Its template gave the host very strong Yin, tweaked the brain a little, and slowly built affinity—as if the host trained nonstop—giving solid aptitude for using techniques. Among other people Sasuke is a real diamond, capable of a lot, and in the future, even more.

But as a person… well, I didn't pick Sakura for "raising" as a better candidate for delegating some of my tasks in the future for nothing. No matter how problematic she could be, she didn't have a deranged brother who made her relive her parents' murder over and over in Tsukuyomi, and her psyche was way healthier.

Back to the construct: the data I got gave me a colossal chunk of understanding about transforming energy itself. Ideas were literally flashing before my eyes—what I could now do with the Chakra Circulation System!

The constructs were living examples of targeted strengthening of Yang and Yin. Exactly what I'd been aiming for for so long—just implemented differently. And now the picture finally came together. I got working hypotheses for how to do the same thing, but on a much deeper level. Not just force chakra to match the progenitors' template, but calculate that template myself—make it way more powerful. Artificially increase the number of those CCS sections responsible for reserve growth.

My body-enhancement project, and the chakra-enhancement project that had only just been born but was practically finished thanks to the new data, merged into a single whole.

Test subjects started flowing through the lab like a river. There were even more clone teams. We were all in for a titanic amount of work.


Running projects in the lab, of course I didn't forget my development as a shinobi. To my—again—surprise, after my talk with Koharu, Kakashi even… I still can't believe it actually happened… offered me a spar himself.

Thankfully for my mental health, he did that a lot only during the first week. The second week—less often. After that I had to drag his ass out myself again, just so I could "motivate" his kidneys, liver, lungs, and other vital organs with my fist. Otherwise the poor guy will wither away without me.

On April sixth, the bridge was finished. After that, our team moved back to Konoha.

After that, time seemed to go even faster. Endless experiments…

If I packaged everything I did with the clones into scientific dissertations and then implemented it even at a basic level among the general population, there'd probably be enough material for over a thousand professor degrees.

After thoroughly working through CCS enhancement and almost finishing the project, I saw another big opportunity—enhancing the soul the same way. The idea was that now, with a wide base of experience in transforming energies, I wanted to transform, say, my chakra into the energy my soul absorbed when I reincarnated. That was what made me multiple times stronger in a very short time. So why not do the same for other people? The soul clearly has some kind of ties to chakra, like my clones noticed.

Except it didn't work.

Transforming the energy worked. I had to do what I'd had to do for previous experiments too—order a whole lot more fūin metal to build a single device stuffed with a damn sea of properties that helped with—or rather, almost entirely did for me—the chakra transformation according to a template. The template wasn't something I remembered in perfect, tiniest detail so much as something I refined based on current knowledge, my own gut feeling, and the sensation of the soul itself—how it "felt better."

But carefully introducing what I got into other people—nope, didn't work. The soul only absorbed that energy if it got into immediate proximity to the soul core. Even when I tore out a test subject's soul and placed it into what looked like the same conditions I myself had been in back in that space—where there's tons of "nutritive energy" around—it still produced no result.

And there had been hope: souls in babies are very young, meaning in that space they do absorb energy and rejuvenate before being born. So if they weren't absorbing it in my artificial space, then I was doing something wrong. And what that "something" was—who the hell knows.

The second option—chronologically it was actually the first—where I forcibly made a hole in the soul with a probe of my own soul and pumped the needed energy into it, did work. The soul strengthened and purified. But after absorbing the nutritive energy, the souls started growing around the probe right where I'd made the hole. And with that hole, souls functioned badly—usually losing more energy than they produced—and because of that, presumably, the soul felt like shit. A week later—yeah, it turned out that due to permanent depletion, the soul started breaking down faster.

That was not okay.

But after a bunch of failed attempts, I decided to risk it. And do what I'd managed to do before. Converting that same nutritive energy from my own chakra, I pulled it inside with my own soul… and it worked.

The energy tasted a little "off" compared to what I remembered. But I knew my soul could regenerate, and thankfully, as a complex organism, it sent me signals when something was slightly wrong versus when something was seriously wrong. While absorbing the energy with my soul, the sensation was somewhere at the lower edge of "something's kinda off."

My soul was stronger than any soul of any creature I'd ever met. But my chakra, compared to it, was stronger by three orders of magnitude. Just a reminder of one of the reasons I mostly use chakra in this world—when something is a thousand times stronger, you feel it.

Since my "bootleg" nutritive energy wasn't ideal, my soul probably absorbed it with less-than-perfect efficiency, and after gulping down half my chakra reserves in one go, it basically responded: "That's it—one more sip and I'll pop." So I flat-out couldn't "pump it" at a crazy pace.

Well, I could: those half-reserves raised my soul strength by about sixty percent, which compared to the previous pace of around twenty percent per YEAR was just monstrous. So that "efficiency," which was low because I couldn't make the energy closer to what was needed and the soul had to "digest" it down to the right level, felt pretty damn insignificant.

But with my chakra-enhancement project in mind, my soul would catch up to my chakra—if I completely ditched developing the latter—only very, very slowly. And again, chakra has undeniable advantages in affinity, plus the sheer mountains of local knowledge about it, which I also possess. Still, the soul had its own advantages, which is why I kept pumping it too—while experimenting with what doses and frequency worked best.

Over the week—while still buried in the rest of the experiments—pumping my soul showed itself especially well. Or rather: holy shit, it worked insanely well.

After digging into it, I didn't fully understand what exactly happened, but it was clearly something huge. With soul strengthening, my intellect, control, and sensitivity crawled upward fast. And the second and third didn't scale proportionally to the first.

It felt like I'd regained the kind of growth potential for control and sensitivity I had in early childhood.

The clones went to check that hypothesis—dug through ninja medical records, checked the ninjas themselves—and it turned out: yes. Those rare few who were born with stronger souls had higher potential for chakra control! That discovery, with a snap of the fingers, made soul development so important that now I always keep my soul at least strong enough for that potential to stay.

That potential, by the way, doesn't get realized too fast, and soul growth itself goes much quicker. But now I'm definitely not stopping that development anytime soon.

Years of prep, and the guns I'd set up weren't just firing one after another—turns out I'd loaded other, hidden weapons too, and they started blasting as well. Now all that was left was to polish the last strokes and reap the big harvest.

So there was nothing surprising about the fact that soon—after a lot of tests—it was time for the final stage of the body-enhancement project… Time to make my child's, relatively weak body truly powerful.

---

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[Welydora]

With a tired sigh, I opened my eyes. Sitting on one of the fūin circles in a huge, dimmed-out room, I got up and swept my gaze over the two dozen clones sitting in the same kind of circles—then headed for the big vertical glass chamber in a stone frame at the center of the array.

One step—and the clones dispersed into chakra, getting sucked back into me. A couple more, and the chamber, hissing out steam, clicked open, revealing a naked man.

Clean skin—like some model who lives on the most expensive creams. Defined muscles, those aesthetic ripples that could give even Apollo a complex. And silky black hair falling over a face with damn-near perfect features… except for those tiny little tells that still let you recognize the guy who'd been transformed into this walking embodiment of pretty. Even the "two hundred seventy-three" kanji carved into his forehead didn't ruin the picture anymore—healed up on its own, not a trace left.

"Still can't believe something this good can come out of such ugly freaks," I thought, looking over the next test subject.

That was another thing I'd built into my body-enhancement project: appearance changes. Not even close to the biggest achievement, by the way. What mattered way more was—

The subject's eyes slowly opened, focusing on me. Then, the next instant, they bulged wide.

"Nooooo!!!" he screamed, recognizing me. His limbs instantly started moving, trying to get out of the chamber, but all he managed was one awkward flail—and then he just ate the floor. "No… no… no… just not again…"

He tried to crawl, but his limbs—so powerful now, but brand-new—still didn't have the neuromuscular connection trained in. So all he could do was this clumsy, splayed-out scrambling with hands and feet.

"I haven't run the painful experiments on you yet. For now," I said, walking up. Then I just lifted the thrashing body by the neck and dragged him deeper into the lab, toward another room.

The subject kept screaming and trying to break free—and in barely ten seconds he got a handle on his new limbs enough to land a couple heavy hits on me, the blows echoing with a dull, meaty thud.

"Hmph." That was all I gave him before I pushed my chakra through my arm almost unhindered, dropping him into unconsciousness with genjutsu. "Genin-level strength, with chakra-reinforced strikes, in a worthless nobody like this. Yeah. That's science shitting on talent and hard work."

Soon we reached the destination, and the subject was strapped into the fūin analyzer.

This was the finale of the project. And it wasn't the first today—wasn't even the tenth overall—where I once again confirmed my calculations were dead-on.

I could calculate a whole damn lot. Not everything, though. The first three corpses from this stage of the body-enhancement project would confirm that. But together they gave me enough data that the numbers for my own body came out insanely close to "perfect." Close enough that if something did go wrong, odds were even higher I could patch it up afterward.

In a few days, once I stockpiled more clones with full chakra reserves, I'd perform the essence of the project—an EX-rank technique—on myself.

May 1st. Rebirth Day. Third-person POV

In the center of the biggest hall in the laboratory stood a horizontal chamber—like a coffin of cloudy white crystal. The analyzer's metal framework hung over it. And all around—on the floor, the walls, even the ceiling—insanely complex fūin circles and schematics pulsed, weaving into one living network. Twenty stable shadow clones sat at the key nodes of that network, ready to do their work with jeweler-level precision. These fūin were "crutches," necessary for a procedure that even their original's already-boosted control still couldn't pull off solo. Sure, the recent rise in sensitivity and control from the soul's growth let him add a few more strokes to the final calculations, making the technique a bit stronger than planned—but it still didn't let the one whose body slept in the sarcophagus cheap out on the number of clones.

That web of interlaced fūin… was the most perfect, most complex thing this world had ever seen.

The moment their creator sank into complete unconsciousness, without hesitation, the clones got to work.

Each formed a different series of hand seals, and the fūin symbols in the room started to come alive right before the eyes, sliding around in seemingly chaotic motion. Then, with one unified smack of their hands against the floor, part of the fūin "flowed" onto the sarcophagus, wrapping it and lighting up white.

The body's reconstruction had several stages. The first had just begun.

First, chakra streams guided by the clones began rebuilding the body's frame. Fūin analyzers linked to the chamber transmitted every tiniest transformation into the clones' minds, each change obeying the new will forced onto it.

The procedure started with the skeletal system. Chakra stimulated an insane densification of bone tissue, altering its crystalline structure and making it 30–40 times stronger than normal. At the same time, natural growth was preserved—important, so the original wouldn't end up stuck in a kid's body later. Bone marrow underwent deep modification, starting production of a new type of blood cell more tightly tied to chakra, able to carry energy more efficiently.

In parallel, the muscular system was rebuilt. It was surgery at the cellular level. Muscle stem-cell growth was stimulated, and they began forming new fibers. 90% of the muscles were repurposed into "power" and "burst" types, their density increasing 50–60 times. The key point was this: the old, even if effective, mitochondria were replaced by new, more functional "chakra energy generators." Basically mitochondria, just feeding directly on chakra—able to work indefinitely without needing oxygen or glucose. Now the muscles could work indefinitely on chakra; though at the peak of their capabilities—about three minutes—they were designed to dump colossal, inhuman strength on the back of equally inhuman energy reserves, in short but destructive bursts.

At the same time as bones and muscles, tendons and ligaments were rebuilt too. Their strength increased 110-fold. Elasticity hit a level unreachable by normal methods—they could handle the loads of the enhanced muscles and wouldn't tear. An extra layer of collagen and fiber flexibility gave insane mobility; braided through with thin chakra channels, they guaranteed flawless linkage with the new muscular system.

Inside the crystal chamber, waves rolled under Naruto's skin. For a moment, his body lit up from the inside with a mesh of new, shining channels—not just the original Chakra Circulation System, but thousands of new microscopic paths being built in real time, threading through every cell.

After several hours of work, the stage was completed. The fūin wrapping the chamber vanished, and after a few seconds' pause the clones again formed different combinations of seals in unison and slammed their hands to the floor. All so the second portion of the room's fūin could "crawl" onto the chamber and flare to life.

The clones' focus shifted. Now they worked on the systems meant to feed and control this new, stronger "engine"—the parts of the body that had just been reinforced.

The cardiovascular and respiratory systems were rebuilt in sync. The heart transformed into a powerful "chakra pump," able to circulate chakra-enriched blood through the body with ridiculous efficiency. Vessels were strengthened to withstand higher pressure, and the capillary network expanded threefold, giving unprecedented nourishment to every single cell. The lungs were kept, but reoriented: their volume and alveolar surface area increased significantly, and the endurance of the breathing muscles—like all the body's muscles—rose. Now they could function without air indefinitely, always filling with the owner's chakra to spread it in high concentration throughout the body. Chakra could already nourish the organism well, but with these changes the cost would become far more targeted. That meant lower chakra expenditure, bigger results with fewer losses—or, at rest, much lower energy consumption.

Then the clones moved on to the subtlest and most complex stage: the nervous system and brain. This demanded absolute, surgical precision. The myelin sheaths thickened and were replaced with new, more chakra-conductive channels, boosting signal transmission speed 20-fold. Synapses were optimized for instant reaction. In parallel, the brain was rebuilt: the neuron count increased tenfold (significantly higher than in any test subject, thanks to feeding off Naruto's colossal chakra reserves), and connectivity between them was strengthened. The sections responsible for chakra control were reinforced the most. That led to an exponential rise in computing power, learning, and analysis—to an unprecedented level. A micro-construct of "combat adrenaline" was also embedded into the brain: a reflex program for auto-acceleration in danger, switchable on consciously.

The fūin analyzers transmitted into the mind—like pictures on a display—the moment they recorded an unbelievable, blinding spike of neural activity. The map of the nervous system literally "lit up" with light.

A long time passed before that stage ended too. The clones repeated their floor-smack ritual, and new fūin flared across the chamber.

The clones moved on to the systems meant to push the body to a completely new level of existence, making it semi-autonomous and hypersensitive.

The digestive and endocrine systems were radically altered. The digestive system was preserved as a backup, but now it was optional. The body was fully rebuilt to feed on chakra. It could process any organic matter into pure energy, utilizing food with almost no loss (99.9% assimilation efficiency). The endocrine system was placed under full conscious control, allowing deliberate hormone control, switching off pain, and regulating emotional states as needed.

The immune system and regeneration became the apex of all transformations. The Hayflick limit was disabled at the genetic level—cells no longer aged naturally. DNA gained repair mechanisms and anti-cancer safeguards capable of instantly neutralizing pathogens and restoring damage. Antioxidant enzyme levels increased. Instant healing of minor wounds became automatic, requiring no conscious control. Limb regeneration took hours if the body was unconscious, and minutes if conscious and under the reborn one's control. Recovery from critical damage took minutes. More than that: based on the pattern found in chakra—so-called "affinity," which exists in all shinobi—a construct was built inside the body that enabled this regeneration. Simply put, all templates were inside it now, and chakra had something to follow even without conscious effort. And on top of that, it boosted regeneration so much the body could survive even decapitation—the head would be restored from the template and the soul's memory. Though that would require conscious assistance from the soul, so realistically only Naruto could pull that off.

The senses underwent final calibration. The number of photoreceptors in the eyes increased, allowing much sharper vision. Hearing expanded from infrasound to ultrasound. Smell became capable of deeper analysis of scents, and touch became inhumanly fine. The ability to "dampen" sensitivity improved to avoid overload from the new sensations. Though, considering the brain's increased capacity, that last part was really just a secondary measure.

Again: hours of work, the end of a stage, and a transition to the next.

The final—and most important—stage: rebuilding the Chakra Circulation System itself. Using all data gathered from Asura's and Indra's constructs, a long-term reconstruction of the CCS began according to a new, "ultimate" template.

New growth zones were introduced into the CCS. A process of balancing Yin and Yang was launched—something that had been skewed since birth. A new growth vector was set: for now and the near future, doubling the reserve every three months with intensive training (and enough chakra to "feed" that growth, a big chunk of it coming from the Kyūbi). Chakra density would increase too.

In short, the body was rebuilt on a far more perfect template (with the CCS only on its earliest foundations) than even Asura's or Indra's. It became the strongest foundation—the highest step of evolution.

The procedure was finished. The fūin on the floor, walls, and ceiling went dark, their glow slowly fading. Only the node points remained unchanged. The clones, drained—almost all their energy spent building new parts of the CCS inside the original's body—dispersed into chakra and returned to him.

The sarcophagus clicked open, releasing a cloud of cold steam. Inside, under a soft hiss, lay a body that was both familiar—and completely alien.


The first thing I felt was silence. Not the room's quiet, but internal silence. There was no familiar background noise of a working body—no heartbeat, no breathing, no stomach rumbling. There was only the steady, powerful, soundless pulse of chakra, rolling through my body in waves.

The world crashed into me in an avalanche of sensation. I saw dust motes inside the chamber, dancing in the beams from the lamps piercing through the glass's semi-transparent surface—and with a clarity that used to be a pain in the ass to achieve even with chakra. I heard the hum of power cables deep beneath the lab floor, and the beat of a moth's wings outside, beyond the thick walls. My sense of smell separated ozone from working seals, the scent of metal, and the cold, sterile aroma of medical solutions from other rooms. And my brain—rebuilt and ramped up—processed that flood of data without the slightest strain.

Sensations I used to get only by using techniques and concentrating chakra were now just my default state. And they were ready to shoot way higher if I used chakra consciously.

The sarcophagus opened, releasing a cloud of cold steam. Awkwardly lifting my hands, I barely managed to hook my fingers over the edges to sit up… and heard the chamber crack from that simple motion. The body was light—insanely light—yet at the same time packed with monstrous, spring-loaded strength. But. It still hadn't learned how to use that strength.

Letting chakra threads slip out of my fingers—easier than ever—I used them like tentacles to lift myself and set my feet on the floor.

The threads slowly transferred the weight from themselves onto my limbs, and I felt it clearly: the solid floor under me just caved in. After the upgrade, my body should've weighed a little over a ton and a half—about thirty times more than before.

Yeah… If scientists from my old Earth found out what and how I did to my body, they'd call me a heretic and burn me at the stake. What I did here would be, I guess, very unscientific over there. But this world has its own rules.

My legs moved wrong. My brain gave a small command—"stand up"—calculated for old, weak muscles and slow nerves. The new body responded with such speed and power I almost lost my balance. The neuromuscular connection was snapped, basically near zero compared to what it used to be.

Almost falling, I took a step. Clumsy, shaky—like I'd decided to get wasted for the first time in my life. Second step—more confident. Third—even steadier. With every movement, every muscle contraction, I felt my new brain rewriting old reflexes at a crazy pace, calibrating itself to the capabilities of a perfect shell.

Chakra moved through my legs, effortlessly spreading my weight over a larger area so the floor wouldn't buckle.

After ten steps, my gait went from crooked and inaccurate to even. After twenty—into something absolutely silent, smooth, and predatory, like a panther going out to hunt.

Reaching the doors leading out, I smoothly pressed my fingertips to the nearby panel, and after a pulse of chakra the fittings unlocked. Watching that, I clenched my fist. Then my gaze dropped lower, to muscles so even and aesthetic it was almost stupid.

"Perfect~" I whispered, and my voice—no longer needing breath, produced through naturally generated Wind-nature chakra—came out especially even and clean. "But I need a test…"

---

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[Welydora]

After getting dressed and making sure I hadn't forgotten my ninja gear, I dragged my ass over to the familiar section of the Jōnin Reserve.

Before long, I was in a circular room where, like almost always, jōnin were sprawled on couches along the walls. Ten of them.

Three of them gave me surprised nods—my obvious physical changes were hard to miss. I'd sparred with those three before, separately.

I nodded back, and before they could start grilling me with questions, I threw it out there, shameless as hell:

"I'll bet a hundred thousand ryō each that I can beat all of you at once. I'm using only taijutsu and kenjutsu. You guys can use whatever the hell you want."

The three exchanged looks, while the other seven let out skeptical snorts. One of the second group stood up—then a taller, broader guy got up too. If I remembered right, he specialized in taijutsu, and our fights were always the most interesting… and the hardest.

"Hold it," he said, putting a hand on the shoulder of the younger one who was about to run his mouth. The kid just blinked and shut his open mouth. "Uzumaki-san…"

"You look different," I finished for him, not about to wait while he struggled to give birth to a thought. "Muscles tougher, face even more irresistible, hair silkier, eyes sharper. I've got a mirror at home, so yeah, I know. But the point is, I'm trying to make some money. So what's it gonna be—ten of you against one kid?"

The provocation hit perfectly. The condescension in most of their eyes flipped straight into irritation. The hulking taijutsu guy—Doro, if I remembered right—let out a heavy snort.

"You've gotten even cockier, Uzumaki," he said, rolling his neck.

The respect in his voice—like before our first spar—was a lot thinner now.

"Your mouth is way too confident, even for you. But…" The shinobi smirked. "A hundred thousand ryō is good money. I'm in."

He glanced back. After a few nods, he looked at me again.

"We all accept your challenge."

"Perfect," I said, grinning.

We headed for an empty training ground. None of us wanted to pay for repairs to this building—and a couple of the neighboring ones—after the brawl they were probably imagining. And, in my case, after what I was imagining, it would've been a few city blocks.

Ten minutes later. Training Ground No. 11

Ten jōnin spread out, circling me.

"You laid out the rules," Doro said, settling into a fighting stance. "Only taijutsu and kenjutsu. Start."

I didn't wait. My very first burst was aimed straight at the weakest link in their chain.

My body wasn't spilling excess chakra—it was trying to find the perfect balance for reinforcement again. I'd already found a balance for everyday life; now I needed one for combat. The point was to spar, not to crush everyone's morale by flexing my chakra. And also—important detail—everyone here was supposed to stay alive.

The first seconds were pure chaos. My body—still getting used to what it could do now—reacted with excessive, almost uncontrollable force.

My lunge was so fast I almost shot past my target.

Then my dodge from flying shuriken was too sharp, throwing me off perfect balance for a split second.

I snapped a kunai strike aside with my tantō, but I put way too much power into the block—my opponent got launched like a rag doll for several meters instead of just having his weapon redirected. Good thing I had enough precision to set the blade right, or I would've been left without it. I probably looked like a clumsy but absurdly strong monster, and that seemed to mess with their heads.

But that didn't mean we stopped.

With every movement, with every wave of chakra spreading through my body from my heart, I felt billions of new neural connections in my brain snapping into place. Calibration.

"He's strong, but he's clumsy! Hit him from all sides!" some jōnin I didn't recognize yelled, stating the painfully obvious.

They'd picked a decent path. It just led nowhere.

Every second, my clumsiness burned off. My movements became perfect—efficient, smooth, lethal.

Doro, realizing things were going the wrong way, charged me, his fists wrapped in dense chakra.

"I'm your opponent!"

He was fast. His punch had serious weight. I moved my tantō flat to parry, but instead I set it at a slightly wrong angle…

Not every time I'm gonna get lucky.

CRACK

With a deafening sound, the blade of my expensive, high-quality—yet, unfortunately, completely ordinary—tantō failed to handle the clash with Doro and shattered into several pieces.

For a heartbeat, I froze, staring at the hilt in my hand.

"Useless chunk of metal," flashed through my mind. "Though it did at least take the hit."

The very next second I moved—faster than I'd ever moved in my life—and grabbed Doro by the arm he'd pulled back. Just so I could smile, clamp his limb with my free hand, and with one violent swing of his whole body, hurl him a good twenty meters away.

No strain… so far.

"Hands, huh? Fine. Hands," I said, looking at the jōnin who'd actually paused at that little stunt. "That's even more fun."

I dropped the tantō hilt.

This stopped being a spar; like expected, it turned into a beating.

One of them swung a sword at me—I caught the blade barehanded. Steel groaned as my fingers tightened, leaving deep dents in it, and I ripped the weapon out of my opponent's stunned grip. From the squeeze, the sword cracked right in my palm.

Another tried to hit me in the back—I didn't even turn, just drove an elbow back, precise, without extra force so I wouldn't kill him, right into the solar plexus. He dropped, gulping air.

A third started forming seals for a Fireball—I was next to him before he could even exhale, and a light chop to the neck put him to sleep.

Doro attacked again, his taijutsu was excellent. But I could see everything—every move, every trick. I slipped his strike, let it pass, and answered with a short palm strike to the chest. He flew back like he'd been hit by a battering ram and slammed into the ground, unable to get up.

Thirty seconds after my tantō broke, it was over. Ten Konoha jōnin were scattered across the grass. Some groaned, some were unconscious. And I stood in the center, not even winded, clenching and unclenching my fists, enjoying the control over this new, insane strength.

I walked over to Doro, who was trying to rise.

"Looks like you owe me a million ryō."


The fight was… bad. Really bad. I hadn't used even a tenth of my full power.

In a slightly shitty mood, I stopped by a confectionery to test what my upgraded tongue could do with flavors. After that—if not fully happy, then at least satisfied enough—I headed for the residence everyone here knew.

"How's life, Hokage-sama?" I walked up to the chair by the desk and sat down.

"I'm fine, Naruto," the old man sighed, like always setting his papers aside the second I showed up. Then he reached into a drawer and handed me an envelope. "But not everyone can say the same."

"Oh, that was quick," I said, casually pulling a stack of bills out of the envelope. I looked them over, shoved them back in, and started spinning the envelope in my fingers. "They decided to pass it through you," I stated.

"Correct. And, as you asked, they requested to never be invited to spar with you again." Hiruzen sighed. "Ohh, Naruto. You short on money? But… more importantly—what the hell happened to you? You've changed."

"Did an artificial body enhancement," I shrugged, like I'd just said I ate ice cream.

Hiruzen's look shifted. He stayed silent while I listened to his blood pressure climb right in front of my eyes. Would be real bad if he had a damn heart attack…

"Naruto," he finally said. "You didn't run experiments on Konoha's citizens, did you?"

"Uh…" I cut off, then spread into a grin. "Actually, yeah."

Hiruzen's eyes blew wide with fear, and then a huge disappointment started building in them.

"But I know the Land of Fire's laws, and I got written, notarized consent," I said, pulling a single sheet from the seal on my bracer and handing it to the old man.

At the sight of that one page, he froze. Suspicion flickered in his eyes.

He snatched it out of my hand, and after he read it, his eye started twitching.

He carefully set the paper on the desk. It basically said that I, Uzumaki Naruto, allow Uzumaki Naruto to perform any medical procedures on Uzumaki Naruto.

"That was a bad joke."

"Sorry," I said, actually a little guilty, shrugging.

"And… messing with your own body can be extremely dangerous. You're a medic—you should know that."

"I covered my ass with precautions."

He went quiet again, then leaned back in his chair a second later.

"The tests were done on Gatō's people?" Hiruzen hit the bullseye.

"Exactly."

Silence again.

"I… can't say I don't understand you," Sarutobi finally said. "But I hoped you'd find more light in your heart to guide them, not… do that."

"I think the citizens of the Land of Waves wouldn't understand your hopes, specifically."

A mournful sigh escaped the old man.

"Still, I think I showed enough kindness. Toward those same citizens of the Land of Waves. Didn't say it before, so I'll brag now: I gave them a chance at a better life. The officials and daimyō are under control and will do everything I order. They'll trade using a few modern strategies my clone saw in one country on a neighboring continent. And besides that, I financed them with my own assets. Well—assets that used to belong to Gatō's cartel. So they'll be back on their feet soon and living way better than before. Oh, and they'll pay me a little for it too."

Hiruzen listened with a dark, thoughtful look, and when I finished, he pulled out the most important bit:

"Naruto… the Land of Waves is following your economic directives… and has to pay you back… Did you just annex the economy of a neighboring country?"

"Well… yeah. I did them good—no reason to screw myself over."

"…" Hiruzen looked like he wanted to say something, then changed his mind and switched topics. "Fine. Why are you here?"

Finally, the point.

"I want to order an S-rank mission from the village." Hiruzen's eyes widened, and I just handed the envelope back. "I want to fight a real taijutsu master. At full power."

A flicker of confusion crossed the old man's face. He slid forward and took the envelope.

"So the fight with those jōnin wasn't enough?"

"That wasn't a fight. More like I lightly patted them and they immediately dropped. And I can't even tell how easy it actually was."

"…Gai will be here tomorrow. He's on a mission right now."

"Great. Tell him I'm covering all medical expenses."

That was that. A million ryō for the spar I was planning was kinda low. Honestly, I'd charge more for something like that. But Gai is, uh, very well-mannered and way too, uh, kind. And even for a "simple spar with a jōnin," he'd only take that kind of money from the Hokage—and even then only because he respects him a lot.

I went home to prepare and to look forward to it. I might actually have to go all out.

The next day. Training Ground No. 24

The most remote training ground from Konoha—isolated. Perfect place to let loose. Standing on green grass in broad daylight, I waited.

Right on time, a green dot showed up on the horizon, rushing closer at high speed and leaving a trail of dust behind it.

Maito Gai was a man with massive black eyebrows, a bowl cut, and sharp cheekbones. He wore a long-sleeved green jumpsuit, orange leg—uh, leg warmers, and a green jōnin vest.

He stopped in front of me, bursting with enthusiasm and what he called the "Power of Youth." It didn't look like he fully understood why the Hokage had called him in for an S-rank mission.

"Hey there, Uzumaki-san!" he thundered, striking his signature "good guy" pose with a thumbs-up. "Ready to feel the full power of Youth?!"

I smiled a little. We'd sparred before, but back then he hadn't needed his main technique… the Eight Gates. Each one makes a shinobi stronger. This time, I was sure that would change.

"Maito-san, I didn't pay for an S-rank mission for nothing," I answered calmly, then let my voice get a bit more serious. "I've gotten a lot stronger. Don't hold back."

"Ha-ha! A million ryō!" he laughed. "I'm sure you overpaid, young friend! My youth is priceless—but not that priceless!"

"Instead of arguing, let's just check," I suggested.

For a moment, Gai stopped smiling. His gaze turned serious as he looked me up and down. No contempt, no doubt—just a nod, and an excited spark in his eyes.

"Yes, I see it—the fire of Youth burns so brightly! Very well! I accept your challenge!"

He struck his "good guy" pose again. I couldn't help appreciating that. He didn't doubt, didn't hesitate—just decided to confirm it himself. Kakashi could definitely learn something from his rival.

We met in the center of the training ground.

Like shinobi sometimes do, we started by testing each other out.

Gai opened with his Strong Fist style—every strike fast, powerful, precise. But for me it was… easy. At that speed my movements were nearly perfect; I redirected his attacks without effort, feeling his knuckles slam into my forearms without leaving so much as a mark.

Maito immediately realized I was different now. He could feel the insane density and power in my body. The tempo climbed, but I still wasn't attacking seriously.

"Good, Uzumaki-san! I understand! Time to raise the stakes!" he shouted, and his body began to change. "First Gate—the Gate of Opening! Second—the Gate of Healing! Third—the Gate of Life, OPEN!"

His skin flushed red; his veins bulged. The fight jumped to a new level.

But after a brief exchange, Gai realized—surprised as hell—that even this wasn't enough.

He started getting fired up. And so did I.

"Fourth Gate—the Gate of Pain! Fifth—the Gate of Limit, OPEN!"

His speed and strength shot up. Now it was closer to even. Our strikes collided, sending loud shockwaves that crumbled the ground under our feet. I blocked attacks that would've shattered anyone else's bones, feeling only heavy impacts.

The training ground started coming apart.

Our speeds blew past the sound barrier.

This is better. Still not it.

I started pumping a bit more chakra into strengthening my body, and the advantage slid back to me.

Every lunge I threw carried a pressure wave so violent oxygen ignited in flashes of flame, and the air tore with thunderclaps.

Maito could only parry those monstrously heavy attacks.

Gai, pushing himself to the limit and unable to land a counter, realized even that wasn't enough.

He sprang back, breaking the spar for a moment.

"I see it, Uzumaki-san! This is… incredible! My fire isn't enough! Then I'll blaze it hotter, to clash with yours!" he roared. "Sixth Gate—the Gate of Vision, OPEN!"

A hurricane of green aura erupted around him. The cracked earth at his feet crumbled into dust and swirled up into a vortex.

For the first time, I took a truly serious stance. Now the real fight starts. I released more chakra too—the ground around me split, and fragments began to rise into the air.

The air filled with the loud howl of our energies.

"Boom."

With a brutal kick, Gai launched me high into the sky.

Even surprised by the force, I stabilized easily in midair—after letting him do it. I could've dodged with Hiraishin, or just jumped away. But no. My goal was to test how tough my new shell really was.

"Morning Peacock!"

Gai was already above me, and his fists came down at an insane speed—dozens, hundreds of blows. The air around me flared from friction, and behind Maito, the windup motions of his strikes formed a fan of fire like a peacock's tail. Each hit was like a small explosion.

I crossed my arms in front of me, reinforcing them with chakra, and took the whole storm head-on. My jumpsuit tore to shreds, burns bloomed across my skin—but I didn't even twitch. My mind calmly rode out the pain, analyzing his technique, feeling my body endure that ridiculous onslaught.

The attack ended. I got blasted down, slammed into the earth, and a crater several meters across exploded around me. Gai landed nearby, breathing hard.

I rose slowly. Right in front of his stunned eyes, my burns and abrasions sealed up with a light hiss. My gaze met his—and mine was pure excitement.

"Excellent, Maito-san! Ha-ha-ha! You actually made me work! Now it's my turn…"

I jumped back, tearing open distance. In my core, a storm of chakra spun up, and part of it leaked out. The air, just starting to quiet, screamed even louder; trees at the edge of the training ground bent under the pressure of the energy pouring off me.

Gai understood he'd have to use everything he had.

"You truly are a monster, Uzumaki-san… But I am the Noble Green Beast of Konoha!" he roared again. "Then let us show all our strength! Seventh Gate—the Gate of Wonder, OPEN!"

A dense blue aura of evaporating sweat wrapped his body. Muscle fibers began tearing under the monstrous strain.

He raised a palm in front of his face, tapped it with his fist, and formed a hand sign like a tiger. White aura began forming around him.

In response, I settled into my stance. I wasn't using the Eight Gates. But thanks to the seal, an even more monstrous amount of chakra started concentrating inside my body. The air around me turned red.

The air around each of us distorted and flared, shaping into silhouettes of roaring tiger heads. The roar was so loud it drowned out everything else—and so physical it kicked off an earthquake.

"HIRUDORA!" we yelled almost at the same time.

A gigantic white tiger of compressed air and my slightly smaller—but denser, like it was overflowing with Yang—red tiger surged straight into each other.

They collided. My vision flooded with white light, most of it slamming downward.

The explosion was colossal, but almost silent. My ears instantly went dead.

A shockwave of pure pressure and energy erased everything. The training ground was practically wiped out, turning into a crater about two hundred meters deep and around a hundred and fifty meters across. For an instant the temperature spiked so high the ground instantly glazed over with a molten crust. Trees within nearly a kilometer were ripped out by the roots and lit up like matchsticks from heat over a thousand degrees. Chunks of earth were torn up and shredded in midair. Farther out, fewer trees were uprooted—but the superheated shockwave still started fires all over the area.

The blast hurled us both more than a kilometer away. I crashed into the forest, broken in several places, and hit the ground.

Slowly—very slowly—I stood up.

"Haa… what a madman. If I hadn't redirected most of that technique's energy downward and onto myself, he would've been torn apart…"

A disgusting, wet crunch and a series of clicks followed—my broken bones slid back into place, and torn wounds knitted shut right before my eyes. Swaying at first, then walking steadier with each step, I jumped toward where Gai's body was.

While moving, I formed a string of hand signs, dumped in more chakra, and created a technique that quickly dragged storm clouds across the sky and unleashed a pouring rain. The fires had to be put out fast.

"That was… magnificent," I said, looking down at the defeated master. His body was twisted up, and his skin was almost charred from burns. But he was alive. "You're a worthy opponent, Maito-san. Though you take way too many risks."

I dropped to my knees, and my palms flared with bright green light—modified Mystical Palm. I didn't say I'd cover medical expenses for nothing. And I needed to do one more interesting thing too…

---

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[Welydora]

The lab sounds made for a strangely calming vibe. Which was perfect, because that's exactly where I was.

On the table in front of me lay Might Guy, wrapped up in thin threads of chakra. Another modified version of the Mystical Palm pulsed softly, feeding straight into the patient's chakra pathways. The familiar "easy" damage—torn muscles, broken bones—had been fixed almost instantly, basically back in the forest, on the fly. But that wasn't the end of it.

The Eight Gates—Hachimon—is a forced overclock of the body and the chakra circulation system. A targeted activation of a cascading breakdown. It literally burns cells, dumping all their life energy into one short, destructive burst. Structural degradation of tenketsu, the channels losing integrity on a subatomic level… basically, the body "burns" itself to squeeze out way more than a hundred percent of its original max.

There's a reason this technique is forbidden. Modern medicine says the damage Hachimon does can't be fully repaired, period, and it hits the organism hard. The brawling brute sprawled next to me was lucky—he happened to be on good terms with, probably, the only person alive who could actually fix him completely.

Healing Guy's chakra circulation system wasn't "impossible" for me—just a pain in the ass: you have to do a ton of calculations to generate a system like that for a specific body, then patch it up point by point. All in all, it took about an hour.

When Might woke up, he opened his eyes and for half a minute just stared at the bright ceiling. Earlier I'd moved him into another room of the lab—one without any equipment.

"I've never felt this good…"

"As a med-nin, I've got access to certain… special means," I said with a faint smile, standing about a meter from the bed Guy was sprawled on.

He sat up without any trouble and looked at me, confused. Everything was lined up perfectly for realization to bloom in his eyes, and—

No. He didn't get the joke.

Instead, he immediately launched into a speech about what an amazing spar we'd had. How, for a man living for taijutsu, it was the highest honor to fight a worthy opponent. To go all-out, and all that stuff.

I listened for about four minutes before I managed to shake off this "Noble Beast."

Truth is, the spar really was good. I just didn't enjoy listening to some weird dude shouting his lungs out.

Hirudora—Daytime Tiger. Using my body and chakra circulation system to the fullest, but without opening Hachimon, I managed to replicate it… kinda. My body was just titanically strong and tough. If Guy had been my enemy, and if I hadn't redirected the energy of that strike, I would've gotten away with nothing but a burn. But for Might, even just using the technique was already breaking bones—and if I'd piled on more load by meeting him head-on, he wouldn't have held up.

The idea that I don't use the Eight Gates isn't exactly true. The first gate—the one that lets you use a full hundred percent of your strength—is basically always "open" for me. Or rather, it's not even there, because my body's durability lets me do without it. But I can open the others. Now, after studying Guy up close—someone whose chakra has already opened those Gates—I can say for sure: I know how, and I can do it.

And not just the seventh.

My body is on a completely different level. The regeneration I built into it is so strong that, by my most plausible theories, I could even afford to open the Eighth Gate of Death. Of course, it won't be consequence-free. The technique still implies "burning" the body and the chakra circulation system itself—only even harder than with the Seventh Gate. If I burn through half my reserves in that mode and live, I'll end up weakened by way more than half after the fight. I'd have to spend a long, tedious time patching the scorched circulation system and restoring my body. In the near future, there probably won't be a reason for a suicidal burst like that. But the very fact it's possible is… motivating.

Speaking of possibilities. My sensory perception after the upgrade also hit a new level. Sensitivity to chakra flow, to muscle movement, to the structure of techniques themselves became comparable to the Sharingan—if not straight-up better. That's exactly why I could analyze and copy Daytime Tiger on the fly, just from seeing how Guy formed the pressure and concentrated power.

I was already thinking what to do next. After I finished with Guy, I wanted to rest a bit. Maybe meet Hinata, or check how Sakura's training was going. But those plans weren't happening. I didn't even make it out of the house before an ANBU guy materialized at my door.

"Uzumaki-san. Hokage-sama requests your immediate presence at the residence."

So much for rest. I've got a pretty damn clear guess what the old man wants from me.


Hiruzen looked like someone had beaten him with a sack and then punched him in the gut—completely wrung out.

After greeting him, I sat down across from him.

Without a word, he put an ANBU report in front of me, along with a photo that I assumed was taken with some Telescope-Technique knockoff.

"This… was your doing, Naruto?"

The picture showed a fresh crater. Huge, melted over, like a meteor had slammed into the ground. Around it—a whole kilometer-wide zone of forest burned down to nothing.

"Yeah. Sparring," I answered shortly. "Got a little carried away."

"'A little'?" His voice was pure helplessness. "Naruto, you changed the country's topographic map! Sensors all along the border recorded a chakra burst comparable to a Bijūdama!"

I squinted at the photo harder, picking it up.

"They're full of it. A Bijūdama's weaker."

Hiruzen just stared at me in silence. I could see his world collapsing in his eyes. A world where he was the Hokage—this wise mentor, a guardian. All of it was falling apart, because it no longer fit his picture of reality. Now, in front of him, sat a conduit for power he couldn't understand and couldn't control.

"Oh, quit panicking like that. Everything's fine." Trying to calm the rattled man down, I turned the photo toward him and started tracing it with my finger. "Look, right here in the pit, a lake's gonna form soon. And just look at this weird ground—burned black. Huge area, totally clean, nothing to clear out. You could build a resort here, the kind you won't find anywhere else. The forest over there is already knocked down—construction will be even cheaper. Imagine it: scorching sun, palm trees on freaky black soil, and all of it by a deep lake. I mean—perfect project, right?"

Then I put the photo back on the desk and watched Hiruzen stare at it blankly.

A bit more time passed before the old man let out a loud sigh.

"You know… Naruto. I already regret bringing this up. So I'll only say this: Guy's mission was classified. The only person who knows you did this is me."

"Mhm. Secrecy," I nodded at his measures. No point letting enemies know too much about what we can do. Then a thought flashed: if they didn't let me relax now, maybe they'd let me later. "I worked a lot to get this strength. And I'm tired. Maybe there's some mission for me… something harder?"

Yep. I considered an S-rank mission a form of rest. But I didn't get what I asked for. Still—since I'd brought up dangerous shit, they did tell me something interesting.

The Hokage gave me info on Akatsuki. A currently small group of elite shinobi whose goal is to collect the bijū. It's sold as some utopian endgame where they use the tailed beasts' power to bring peace to the world. But right now the organization isn't having the best time—they need to toughen up and even recruit more members.

Meaning they'll come for me as the Nine-Tails' jinchūriki—just like in the Naruto story I know from meta-knowledge. But everything the old man told me basically meant one thing: I've definitely still got time. Two years, at least. Which means I don't have to start sprinting around cutting everyone down right this second. I can stay in a relatively safe village until they start moving and keep building power. Because once they start, it'll be obvious—since I, as the host of half the Nine-Tails, would be sealed last anyway: the Kyūbi's chakra volume is too huge to seal first.

Even now, I've got decent odds of handling all of Akatsuki alone. With tactics and shinobi squads involved, those odds get stupidly high. But Akatsuki are still pretty damn dangerous enemies—one of them has the Rinnegan, for starters. And if I've got the option to quietly "bulk up" a bit more, I'll take it.

After saying goodbye to the Hokage—who approved my approach of "sit in the village longer"—I finally went to rest.


After inviting Hinata and Sakura to one of the nicer snack places in the Leaf, we had a good evening. They ate themselves full; I ate myself stupid. After that, in good spirits, we split up.

Both girls were pretty shocked by the changes in me, then started worrying I'd done something wrong to myself. Mostly Hinata. But a few minutes of convincing them that I'd checked everything thoroughly before trying it on myself was enough to calm them down. Sakura relaxed faster—she'd seen more of what I can do and is way more inclined to believe me right away.

Then the next day, watching Sakura train, I was thinking.

Basically, it just happened that the girl was completely dependent on me. And that meant I could do a whole lot with her, and there wouldn't be any uproar because of it…

So, waiting until she was worn out and absolutely, definitely couldn't resist, I… offered her a body-enhancement procedure.

She completely gave herself over to me—meaning, to my philosophy and instructions. As weird as that sounds for a thirteen-year-old girl. Over that time she'd earned my trust—way deeper than before.

Sakura accepted my offer with honor. I patted her on the top of the head and reminded her she wasn't from the Land of Iron, so she didn't have to act like a samurai, then went off to do the calculations.

Crunching a template for her body—which is female, meaning it differs from a male body pretty damn strongly—wasn't that hard. In my research I never focused only on myself or only one sex. So a few days later, holding her hands, I helped Sakura climb out of the chamber. And then—after making sure she was fine, and waiting until she learned to walk normally without my help—like the absolute asshole I am, I led her straight to the scale…

The look on Sakura's face when it hit her how much she weighed burned itself into my smug mind forever. The camera I used to capture the moment, though, got snatched away and smashed with indignant outrage. But my memory's still with me.

Sakura's enhancement is different from mine. Different balance of changes, different energy distribution. Because her base body was a bit weaker, her strength wasn't proportional—by weight—to mine… but her brain, on the other hand, got improved especially well.

Considering I used my reserves to first build up the potential of her chakra circulation system and "inflate" her reserve to the size of three jōnin. That ate several of my own chakra stores—which, compared to a normal jōnin's, are holy-fuck huge. In the end, she became multiple times stronger than her old self, while her improved brain made her control jump especially hard.

That kind of reserve let me densify my student's body to the point the scale showed a three-digit number that started with a "2." That didn't mean her strength was only seven times less than mine—no, it's less than that, and there are a lot of factors, the main one being chakra power. But Sakura wasn't worried about those details. She was worried about that number.

Reassurances that she was way lighter than me and basically "lightweight" for real, for some reason didn't help. Riding that wave, Sakura kept bitching at me over my jokes, and I found it kind of cute. Like messing with a fluffed-up cat that wants to scratch you but can't—because "the owner's a nimble bastard" and keeps yanking his hand back in time. Honestly, after a period of low emotions, it was really nice to see "old Sakura" showing again.

Still—good things in moderation. That's probably what she decided too, because after a few minutes she calmed down… and started apologizing for her "unworthy" behavior. Not like she'd just gone a bit too hard with her expression—fully deserved from my point of view, by the way—but like, I don't know, she'd accidentally burned down my house and my lab worth over a hundred million ryō. I accepted the apologies fast and started convincing her she hadn't done anything wrong. After a minute of coaxing she gave in and accepted that everything was fine… out loud. My "eloquent" look made it obvious as hell I didn't believe her, and she just turned away. Anyway, we dropped it.

After adding "cut off the supply of samurai literature into Konoha" to my to-do list—before Sakura picks up even more crap from there—I started planning the next project.

Going by meta-knowledge, what is this world most famous for? Honestly, I don't know—I haven't seen any statistics. But according to the authoritative opinion of one reincarnator, this world's famous above all for special eyes—the Sharingan.

That moment when, right in the middle of a fight, using nothing but sensitivity to energy and all-around vision, I copied Guy's technique was just—holy shit. And I really wanted an even cooler analyzer. And the fact that I already had a ton of bioengineering data on the topic—and, on top of that, I'd even touched those special eyes and had a pretty blurry idea of how to make myself something like that—only fed the itch.


Getting samples for research was easy as hell. The scheme was already tested: offer Sasuke a spar; knock him out; drag him into the lab for a few hours. And for comparison—minus the "offer" step—I also dragged Kakashi into the lab with his Mangekyō.

After I was done with the Uchiha and finished copying all the data off Hatake too, before I really dove into the research, I had a short talk with Kakashi. The reason was the fūin seal I found straight up in his brain, which—yeah, that one surprised the hell out of me—made it possible to remotely subjugate the jōnin.

"Where'd you pick up this kind of crap?" I asked when he woke up.

"No idea," he answered, clearly not in the loop.

I nodded, deleted that filth, and after telling him not to wander around sketchy places—unless he wanted to "catch" something else—I kicked him out of the lab. And only then did I get to the real work.


It took a few days to organize all the data, but in the end I had a pretty broad knowledge base on the Sharingan. Put simply, these eyes turned out to be an insanely complex biomechanism—the result of intertwined genes and fūin commands shaping their structure.

If I dumb it down hard and really try to force the analogy, you can think of dōjutsu as a core and layers. The core is a semi-unique set of chakra properties and genes. The layers are what the core grows over itself, like tree rings. The first completed layer is the three-tomoe Sharingan. The second is Mangekyō. The third—the deepest and most complex—is the Rinnegan. Each next layer is stronger, but each demands way more from its user.

And here's the main thing: the stronger the layer, the "thinner" its properties are—and the worse they get passed down. Kakashi's eye, for example, will never evolve into a Rinnegan—its core simply doesn't have the necessary "blueprints," everything got lost among the bastar—ahem—among time. Sasuke's eyes are different, but not because of his bloodline. Indra's construct is slowly but surely embedding the missing properties into his core, preparing him for future evolution. Even so, that process is unbelievably delicate. I could understand and copy the properties for Mangekyō, but the Rinnegan still stayed beyond my perception.

Moving on to what I actually managed to study—regular Sharingan. Roughly speaking, it has two main functions. The "Eye of Insight"—super-perception that lets you see chakra flows and track movements so fast it feels like you're seeing the future. And the "Eye of Hypnotism"—a powerful genjutsu tool, from simple suggestion all the way to full-on control. Sure, I could plant commands in someone's mind myself, like I did in the Land of Waves, but the Sharingan made that whole process stupidly easy.

On top of that, there were two ultimate built-in techniques—Izanagi and Izanami. Both "burn" the eye, almost like the Eight Gates burn the body. Izanagi briefly turns reality into an illusion, so to speak, letting the user "rewrite" their death or injury—restoring the body to an ideal state using an embedded template, a kind of affinity (similar to my regeneration construct, except it's instant). Izanami creates a self-restoring genjutsu construct that locks the target in an endless time loop. You can only escape it by accepting your fate. And that "fate" is chosen by the user.

Next—Mangekyō. Besides access to Susanoo, the huge chakra warrior, awakening this stage gives the user two unique abilities. And this is where heredity gets really interesting.

You can imagine the core of each dōjutsu as a "tub" full of potential properties. That "tub" gets inherited with different levels of "fill." Then, using that "tub," plus the user's knowledge and even their desires, the core forms unique abilities. Sasuke's "tub" had lots of stuff tied to genjutsu (Tsukuyomi) and black flame (Amaterasu). Kakashi's (or rather, Obito's) "tub" leaned toward space-time techniques (Kamui). Meaning the abilities weren't pulled out of thin air—they formed for pretty understandable reasons.

So yeah: regular Sharingan properties are fairly "thick" and almost always get passed on in full. Mangekyō properties are much thinner, and what you inherit depends on how lucky you got with your ancestors. Rinnegan properties are even thinner—like, insanely thinner—and in the eyes I studied they didn't manifest at all, lost across generations of their predecessors. Only after Indra's construct does evolution into the Rinnegan become possible. Well. Probably.

That thinness is almost inversely proportional to the dōjutsu's power. And to how many properties you need for the evolution in the first place. Maybe whoever designed this shit—if there even was a designer—understood what kind of power they were handing out, and weak inheritance was necessary. The inability to reliably inherit it through inbreeding could also be a safeguard. Both against the dōjutsu, in one possible timeline, ending up on someone else's side. And, probably even more importantly, so weak, diluted descendants don't awaken eyes that can kill them. A vassal is only good if you can get something out of him. Getting something out of a dead husk dried up by an energetically overpowered dōjutsu is a lot harder. All of that's guesswork, but it sounds true enough. Those eyes came from the Ōtsutsuki, and they've got a main and a branch family, supposedly. Members of the younger branch, being weaker, could very well fail to withstand the Rinnegan. Just like normal people wouldn't withstand it either—hell, even very talented jōnin feel like shit from Mangekyō alone.

Though that second point is either less likely, or it's just a second line of defense. Because a host that isn't strong enough, even after Indra's construct does its thing, still won't awaken even a basic Sharingan unless they meet the strength "requirements."

Studying all this gave me ridiculous opportunities. Essentially, I got a manual for using other people's techniques. Amaterasu, Tsukuyomi, Kamui—now that I knew their "code," I could model and reproduce them.

With all that knowledge, my clones and I immediately jumped into experiments.

Awakening each stage of a dōjutsu is based on concentrating a special chakra in the eyes—formed by the brain under the influence of strong emotions. But you also need strong chakra to begin with. Sasuke, even if I carve up his whole family in front of him ten times, still won't awaken Mangekyō right now. Not enough muscle.

But I didn't need emotional spikes. Thanks to what I knew from constructs, medical ninjutsu, the structure of the dōjutsu themselves and the techniques—especially Izanagi, for even cleaner deconstruction—I could directly transform subjects' eyes according to the needed template. And thanks to the raw power of my chakra and no less ridiculous control, I could "force-awaken" the stages I needed in them. It was complicated, sure, and I couldn't do it without crutches like fūin to make the process easier. But it was doable.

Test subjects started flowing in again, in little streams. I needed hundreds of tests, to check every hypothesis. God, it's good I've got clones—everything can be done in parallel.

Days flew forward. If not for trips outside, for time spent with Hinata or Sakura, I probably would've completely lost my mind… though maybe I already did. But as long as my research kept producing results, and the people close to me were okay, it kept me steady.

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