Two weeks had passed since I started training more or less systematically. Mornings I crammed theory, evenings I put it into practice. Of course, it didn't always work out like that: most of the time I ended up polishing old basic skills. But my arsenal was slowly growing.
Naturally, almost right away I asked the Hokage about how "hidden" I was supposed to be. I got what seemed like a decent enough answer.
Turned out my moving around on the rooftops wasn't some crazy wow‑achievement, and no one was going to pay special attention to it. Especially since no one knew I'd learned it in just a few hours.
The fact that I was working on self‑improvement at all—yeah, people would find that out. But to learn anything more, they'd have to spy on me at the training grounds. And that's hard to do when you're being escorted by elite ninja. The only one who could really manage that was probably the Hokage himself, using some badass A‑rank technique called the "Telescope." The secrecy was more about keeping foreign shinobi from knowing too much about me.
As for the jonin they sent with me, the Hokage trusted each of them—they wouldn't blab. They weren't kids, after all. Well, except for Shisui. And one other guy.
The escort‑instructors were different each time but repeated often enough that we ended up with a pool of six shinobi, from tokubetsu jonin up to senior jonin, rotating on a "whoever's free" basis.
When it was Shisui's turn again, it was the fifth day, and by then I'd gotten noticeably better compared to day one. Because of that, I managed to pull off Shunshin—the technique he'd promised to teach me—on my first try.
Shunshin, a D‑rank technique, is basically about giving your chakra properties that lighten your body, letting you hit much higher speeds for the same effort. Shisui can move so fast with it that even battle‑hardened jonin can't always track his movements.
Turned out I had a pretty strong affinity for this technique. The first time I jumped with chakra enhancement, I also partially lightened my body, which sent me flying even farther.
But obviously, after just two weeks of training, I was still a long way from Shisui's level. Though, according to him, I'd definitely end up faster than he'd been at my age. As long as I didn't drop my training. And I wasn't going to.
Besides that technique, I also learned and honed all the most well‑known basic shinobi skills (E‑rank techniques). Among them:
I learned to walk on water. Turned out it was harder than walking on trees, but by the end of the first day I practiced it, I was using the technique just as freely.
I also learned to use hand seals to create a quickly dissipating smoke cloud with less chakra. Basically, a smokescreen to duck behind in a hurry if needed.
I also worked on improving my focus and concentration with the leaf‑on‑the‑forehead thing and trying to blank out the whole world. Supposedly, that's meant to boost overall attentiveness, which is a useful skill in general. For example, for the next topic.
Sensory stuff—sensory jutsu—is when a shinobi, usually by tuning out the world, shapes and fills their chakra with properties that focus on the energy around them—other chakra, basically. That way some sensors—as they call people trained to feel chakra over long distances—can sense someone else's signature from tens of kilometers away.
Of course, the technique has its limits. For one, you have to detach yourself; that need shrinks over time but never completely goes away, or it gets replaced by using the ground more openly as a transmitter: the shinobi puts a hand to the earth and senses enemy chakra that way. Also, to feel chakra at really long range, there can't be too many interfering signatures around, and the target has to not be constantly changing the properties of their energy, throwing off your focus, and also not suppressing the pulses of their chakra—those same pulses the sensor actually picks up as a signature.
There's another option where a shinobi blasts out a burst of their own chakra and senses how that energy passes through a hiding ninja, but even that doesn't always work if the target has really high control and way better concealment skills. Very skilled sensors—like, really skilled—can make their energy kind of transparent… better to say "nonexistent" to other energy, by giving their chakra the right properties.
The obvious downside of the pulse‑detection method is that the sensor is basically yelling over a huge distance, "I'm right here, come stab me."
Also, not all sensors know how to hide their own energy, and not everyone who can hide their chakra is a sensor. But the two techniques have a lot in common, so it's pretty common to find a stealth‑type and a sensor rolled into one person.
I got most of my information on sensory jutsu, and even a lot of the finer points, from one of my instructors. We even played a game called "Dig Up a Worm for Fishing." Or rather, he called it serious training. But it was basically a game where my instructor, an earth‑style user, would quickly hide two meters underground and move a few meters to the side (by the end of our training, he'd even try to hide his chakra), and I had to find him and dig him up. With my body enhancement, that part wasn't hard.
That way I unlocked a very useful ability to feel chakra. My affinity for it wasn't especially high, but with enough effort I could develop it pretty far, according to the instructor. It also turned out I had a much better affinity for sensing chakra at close range than far away.
When I was looking for the "worm," I tried to use my chakra‑sensing specifically, turning off my sphere vision, which, by the way, keeps slowly expanding over time. In two weeks I developed my sensory skills pretty decently. Even though at close range they're still nowhere near as good as my sphere vision. By chakra alone I can't even tell a dog from a person. I just feel that there's a little "spark" of energy over there somewhere. Even at close range, sensory skills don't let me feel an object's outline, which means they don't let me, say, dodge a shinobi's punch right next to me.
To feel chakra at close range, you don't need any special concentration, as long as the shinobi isn't hiding. Ordinary non‑sensor shinobi, at least the experienced ones, can sense chakra signatures anyway—either by turning just a tiny bit of their own chakra into sensory chakra, or without even consciously doing that. Or rather, they do it unconsciously, thanks to affinity or habit (or both at once).
The next ninjutsu area I studied was genjutsu. Or rather, the part of it that was important for me to learn, with a different instructor—the technique for breaking illusions. You do it by disrupting your own chakra flow, or an ally's if the illusion was cast on them. Unfortunately, they didn't really enlighten me on how genjutsu themselves are structured and cast; they focused on every possible way of getting rid of illusions.
Genjutsu itself is usually built on interacting with the victim's nervous system and brain via chakra. Genjutsu targets the five senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell), because that's how the brain gets information about the world. By messing with those signals using chakra, a genjutsu user can:
Make the target see, hear, or feel things that aren't there. Fake images, sounds, phantom pain.
Change how the target perceives their surroundings or the genjutsu user themselves.
Feed the victim false information to nudge their decisions or actions.
To get out of a genjutsu, the victim first has to realize they're in one. And that's not always easy. They trained me to pay attention to details. To be sensitive to my own chakra. But that still won't always save you from a true genjutsu master… and by "master" my instructor almost always meant the Uchiha.
To put someone under a genjutsu and start manipulating chakra inside them, the user has to somehow "get into" their system. Technically, you could try just shoving your chakra in directly, but that's not efficient—shinobi got smarter than that a long time ago. So they started using the sense organs as entry points, channels to deliver the genjutsu user's chakra.
Back in the earlier days of the chakra world, a lot of masters focused on a single sense, building up an affinity so it got easier and easier to push their chakra through that one sense organ. At first the idea didn't really work all that well. But now… now it's basically how everyone uses genjutsu.
The Uchiha are the prime example—they're the best in this field. Their dojutsu (eye technique) is itself a source of powerful chakra with unique properties that are perfect for genjutsu. Why and how, my instructor didn't know. Unfortunately, he wasn't in the group of scientists who dissect red‑eyes, though from what I could tell, he really wanted to.
The eyes are directly connected to the brain via the optic nerve. When a target looks into a Sharingan, they're not just seeing the eyes—they're picking up a specific flow of chakra the Uchiha is projecting through their eyes. That eye contact creates a direct "bridge" for the Uchiha's chakra to penetrate the target's nervous system and start controlling it. For their kind of genjutsu, that's the most direct and effective method. Although, say, sunglasses can get in the way of that.
Though, as the instructor also said, there are special prodigies among the Uchiha, and sometimes straight‑up monsters, who don't need eye contact at all. One of those is the head of their clan, and I got very firm recommendations to stay the hell away from him…
Lucky me, I got the nervous instructor. Up till then no one had ever tried to propaganda‑blast me with "how terrifying the Uchiha are." This guy really went all in.
I doubt everything is as that nutcase described it, though. I'm almost sure it's just his paranoia.
Said the paranoid one.
Because if it were otherwise, the Uchiha would already be ruling the world with their almighty genjutsu. Which means genjutsu aren't almighty. With insane levels of chakra sensitivity and control—which that paranoid guy later confirmed, though grudgingly—it's supposedly possible to resist even very strong genjutsu. Like the Hokage can, for example. Any Hokage. My instructor couldn't recall a single historical case of Madara putting Hashirama under genjutsu. Even though Madara had to have been insanely strong in his clan's techniques.
You can also cast illusions through other senses. Through sound, for example: when special chakra‑infused sound waves reach the target's ears, they stimulate the auditory nerve. That nerve also leads to the brain.
It sounds complicated, but it's actually doable with some effort.
Another, and for now last, area that interested me even more than all the others was fuinjutsu.
The basics of this art I got from scrolls, and I honed those skills with different instructors.
For whatever reason, the term "fuinjutsu" had two meanings. First, it's a special technique for sealing something—objects, chakra, living beings—inside something else. Basically, a kind of spatial pocket that plays with the metric of space while skewering the laws of reality on a long rod. But in this world, that's just normal.
More importantly, "fuin" also means sealing chakra properties, and the chakra with those properties, for later release. In essence it still feels like one concept, but not quite, because the release is meant to be stretched out over time and, for some reason, not as tightly tied to the creator.
A fuinjutsu master can, for example, draw a little circle somewhere and imbue it with the property of creating a tiny flame above the seal. Once the fuin starts working, the person can just get up and walk to the other side of the world and stop caring about their creation. The flame will keep burning without the creator's direct will. Only when the fuin runs out of chakra—which, by the way, can be supplied by someone else—will the flame go out. But it's also important that the flame will still go out if the fuin master dies. Because any "author's" fuin is tied to the creator's chakra. In that case, topping the seal up with chakra doesn't help once the creator is dead.
So they taught me how to feed chakra into other fuin, and also strongly advised me not to test this energy transfer technique on other people. Unless, of course, I ever needed to torture someone with my aggressive chakra.
Creator‑type fuinjutsu is only available to fuin masters. In general, you get the rank of fuinjutsu master for a certain level of ability to give chakra properties strong enough to create fuin seals of a certain power.
But fuinjutsu is also tied to certain symbols, usually kanji, that denote different effects. That means a user, even if they're not a fuin master, can draw a few symbols—say, with chakra‑conductive ink—and then run their chakra through them, and the fuin will work too. The user doesn't have to imbue the symbols with special‑property chakra; they don't even have to understand what they wrote. The fuin will still work.
The thing is, the planet's chakra, you could say, "remembers" a fuin symbol if it's been active for a long time. After that, it's enough to just draw that simple symbol, without giving it any properties.
So, in general, you can stick properties into any symbol, drawing, whatever, and after a while it'll start working on its own.
From this came a pretty surprising thought. A few times, walking around Konoha, I'd see drawings of the male reproductive organ. Could it be that some fuinjutsu master had poured something multifaceted and profound into that image—that's why some people are so irresistibly drawn to sketching this supreme art?
I'll have to try adding a fuin for better ambient chakra absorption to one of those sometime.
In general, all "remembered" fuin absorb the planet's chakra by some not‑very‑clear principles. But with an extra seal—some old design that works off weird, barely understood properties—the efficiency jumps several times over.
Maybe then the drawing will ascend to the next level.
Anyway, back to fuin symbols: there's a whole alphabet of them, with long‑ass scrolls on compatibility and different combinations. Things aren't exactly rosy there, since the data was grabbed from different countries and clans and stitched together however it fit. Some stuff's been lost, a lot of it is built on archaic logic. But there's still plenty to work with.
It's these ready‑made symbols that fuin masters mostly use, sometimes weaving in a few of their own. It's more efficient in terms of effort versus result.
Shinobi can also form symbols with their chakra on the ground or right in the air—that's a pretty easy skill to learn, which went straight into my bag of tricks. Some ninja need way less than a second to charge over a hundred symbols like that and form a fuin seal.
A fuin master can create their own symbol, or even a chain of symbols, and then spend a long time polishing them so at some point they can create them relatively quickly. But even then it'll still be slower than just drawing the standard ones.
Another well‑known but barely confirmed fact: the number of author‑type fuin you can have is limited. Since all of a user's chakra is linked, and has to stay linked for author‑type fuin to function, the more such seals you have, the more they drain their creator. The limits are very high, but they're there. That's why people who mass‑produce fuin are almost always non‑masters who just draw fuin schematics with ink on special paper. Those paper tags, mostly explosive tags, are cranked out on an assembly line. And because of how unique author‑type fuin are, a master's custom seals are even more expensive.
With one instructor I practiced creating an explosive seal, which detonates when hit with a specific chakra pulse you set in advance. I learned how to use—but not create—storage fuin scrolls. Meaning, how to seal and unseal items. And also how to put a simple paralysis seal on someone by drawing the right symbols with chakra.
This field really hooked me, because with fuin you can literally surpass your own limits. There are special seals that boost sensitivity, letting you study things in crazy depth. There are ones that help in medicine. That kind of stuff just blows my interest wide open. So once I polish my inscription skills a bit more, I'm definitely going to try and shake more knowledge on this topic out of the old man.
Those two weeks were packed.
When I stepped outside, I was already getting sick of the sight of the buildings around me, with those… pipes, which no longer triggered the old negative feelings or the urge to lecture the local builders on how wrong they were.
Before this, my training, according to the Hokage, had been "just kids' games." But for the time being, that was better than nothing. Over these two weeks, though, the old man had found people who were ready to take me on seriously.
Soon I was supposed to meet the first one.
Now I was standing in a kind of windowless gym, full of all sorts of training machines I'd never seen before. Lots of different hunks of metal, each with inlays of black metal. That stuff, as I'd read, was from a special ore, then soaked in chakra‑conductive ink; inside the metal of the equipment there could be a whole bunch of author‑type fuin.
I spent about a minute looking everything over before I noticed the door slide aside.
Then, ducking and turning sideways, a damn machine, not a man, stepped in! I'm sure if he'd existed in my old world, he would've easily taken the Mr. Olympia title.
Dark‑skinned, which is rare for the Land of Fire, but more importantly—holy shit, what a massive, jacked guy. A mountain of a man, at least from my fairly close‑to‑the‑ground point of view. Black tank top, regular shinobi pants. No hair on the visible skin except for black eyebrows.
"Yo, I'm Toraki Roen," he said, rolling his shoulders with surprising grace as he walked over and greeted me in a deep, bass voice. Then, grinning wide enough to show every tooth, he bent down and held out his huge paw.
"Hey, Uzumaki Naruto," I introduced myself back, even though that was probably obvious, and shook two of his fingers—I couldn't get a grip on more. "Are you gonna be my trainer?"
He looked seriously impressive.
At my question, his face twitched. But he quickly smoothed his expression out and went on.
"That's… You know, I'm a pretty humble guy. But still, just call me 'sensei.' To make sure we understand each other, let me clarify. I have three higher‑education degrees," he straightened up and started counting on his fingers, "kinesiology, nutrition science, and eudaimonology. I've also defended my doctoral dissertation and made a significant contribution to the development of biology and training methods."
"Whoa…" The respect in my eyes shot up, and I gave him another once‑over. He looked pretty young for that kind of résumé—around forty, at a guess. "So, are we starting?"
I asked, while in the back of my mind thinking that apparently here too there was this trend where, besides real pros, people who'd just finished some two‑week course also called themselves "trainers." If that was the case, no wonder Roen didn't want to be called a "trainer."
"Of course," he nodded, his smile not fading for a second, and then started explaining. "Let's get right to it. We'll be working together for quite a while, and I'll be adjusting your training plan. Until you really get to know your own body and don't need me anymore. I'll also put together a nutrition plan and keep an eye on your mental health and motivation. You did understand what my degrees are in, right?"
"…In short, yeah. I'm guessing it's exactly what we'll be working on?"
He nodded.
"Excellent, you know how to use logic. You'll need it in training. Let's begin. First I'll teach you the technique, and for the next week we'll be testing your limits. To make your training as effective as possible!"
"Uh‑huh…"
"But…" His smile turned into a predatory grin and he spread his arms in an inspiring pose. "Get ready for pain! Because only through pain is strength born!"
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