After school, Gojo Yoru didn't head home. The moment he stepped out through the academy gates, he veered away from the main streets and made for the Naka River instead.
At this point in time, the Uchiha Clan had not yet been forced to relocate to the area around the Naka River, so the place was still quiet and thinly populated. Beyond the river rose cliffs and dense forest, a perfect stretch of hidden ground for someone who needed room to experiment.
In the forest above the river, a dark blur shot from treetop to treetop, vanishing almost as soon as it appeared.
It looked similar to an ordinary Body Flicker Technique, but only at first glance. Most ninja left something behind when they moved that way—a faint shriek of displaced air, a tremor through the branches, leaves shaking loose beneath the force of their footwork, sometimes even footprints pressed into bark when their chakra control slipped.
This one left nothing.
The black afterimage passed over the canopy in utter silence. No leaves scattered. No branches creaked. No trace remained.
It wasn't especially fast—not yet—but the degree of control required to move like that was enough to make even an all-round jonin who had mastered multiple nature transformations stare in disbelief.
There was no question about it. This was the movement of a true master of the Body Flicker.
Bang!
After streaking through the forest for a long time, the shadow suddenly slammed straight into a massive tree that would have taken several adults to encircle. The impact rang out with a heavy, painful thud. For one hilarious second, the figure seemed plastered flat against the trunk like a badly hung painting before sliding down to the ground.
"Ow… damn, that hurts!"
Once he landed, Gojo Yoru clutched his already-reddening face with both hands, hissing through his teeth.
If any of his classmates had seen him like this, the image of the cold, tyrannical school bully would have shattered on the spot.
He rubbed at his nose, relieved to find it hadn't been flattened by the collision, then glared at the giant tree in front of him. "Using mobile phasing to go through obstacles is still too hard," he thought grimly.
That was right. Just now, Gojo Yoru had tried to combine movement with his space-time ability and pass directly through the tree.
He had failed. Spectacularly.
And this was only his first real attempt.
The growth he had enjoyed over the past several months had, inevitably, made him a little full of himself.
When he first awakened his spatial power, Gojo Yoru had assumed the change was simple: only some of his cells had gained the ability to extract space-time energy. Looking back now, that judgment had been far too shallow.
The evolution had not been partial at all. It had been comprehensive.
Seven months had passed since the day his space-time power awakened.
During those seven months, Gojo Yoru's body had changed dramatically.
First was his height. At only seven years old, he had already grown to 1.43 meters.
In the Land of Lightning or Kumogakure, where tall builds were common and physical development tended to be more extreme, that height would not have stood out much. But in Konoha and the other shinobi villages, among children his age, it made him tower over the crowd.
After all, when Naruto Uzumaki graduated at twelve, he was only 1.47 meters tall.
Just like one of his classmates had once complained, anyone who didn't know better would assume Gojo Yoru was a fifth- or sixth-year student.
His body's premature development had also pushed his chakra reserves into a completely new tier. He had already possessed more chakra than an ordinary genin. Now, he suspected he had surpassed the average chunin.
He still couldn't compare to monsters like Kakashi Hatake, who had been able to use the Shadow Clone Technique in his first year, but his current reserves were more than enough to justify learning techniques like Shadow Clones and the Rasengan.
The problem was that as his total chakra increased, the proportion of space-time chakra inside him dropped. What had once been one-third of his reserves had now fallen to roughly one-fifth.
Second—and this was the change that mattered more—something had happened to his mind.
Whether it was a natural affinity for space-time power or some side effect of evolution, Gojo Yoru couldn't say. But in the last half year, he had clearly felt his brain, nerves, and reflexes improve at a frightening pace.
At the academy, students and teachers alike already called him a genius.
But only Gojo Yoru knew the truth.
He had never actually been one of those once-in-a-decade prodigies.
To be precise, he was nowhere near the level of monsters like Kakashi, Minato, Orochimaru, or the true freaks of the great clans. In his previous life he had only been an ordinary person, and even after transmigrating, the advantages he enjoyed had mostly been built on discipline, resources, and a mature mind.
He slept early, rose early, ate well, trained systematically, and benefited from strong family genetics. That gave him chakra reserves far beyond those of his peers.
But compared to five-year-old Kakashi Hatake, he hadn't even been qualified to carry the other boy's shoes.
After refining chakra, he had practiced tree climbing and water walking to sharpen his control. He had mastered the Three Basic Techniques, and in pure combat he had long since surpassed the rest of his class. Even many sixth-year students were no match for him.
And yet Minato Namikaze, with only a single semester of growth behind him, had nearly killed him with nothing but terrifying reflexes and natural combat instinct.
Orochimaru needed no explanation. Even Tsunade, the Hokage's granddaughter, blessed with Senju blood, had not overshadowed him in childhood.
If he couldn't match freaks like that even when they lacked bloodline limits, then how could he hope to compete with those who had both talent and bloodline gifts?
If Gojo Yoru had not awakened his space-time bloodline limit, then once his advantage in foreknowledge began to fade, being left behind by Minato would have been inevitable.
That was the cruelty of talent. Hard work could narrow the gap, but not erase it. Only an extraordinary power of his own could let him fight on equal footing with those monsters—let alone surpass them.
But now, at last, Gojo Yoru truly had the right to call himself a genius.
Because he had discovered that his thinking was faster. Sharper. More agile. His reactions had climbed with it.
When he watched Minato fight now, or faced him in combat again, he no longer felt that crushing sense of helplessness he once had. For the first time, he experienced the bliss of seeing the other person move as though the world around them had slowed to a crawl.
It was like watching someone trapped inside slow motion while you alone had been granted fast-forward.
The sensation was intoxicating.
No wonder Orochimaru and Danzo Shimura had both been so obsessed with the Sharingan.
Under the influence of those changes, Gojo Yoru's training in ninjutsu and chakra control became dramatically more efficient.
That was why he had grown arrogant.
In just six months, his Body Flicker Technique had improved by leaps and bounds.
It was a little like how an unfinished Rasenshuriken could be thrown the moment Sage Chakra was added to stabilize it. Gojo Yoru still couldn't combine ordinary chakra and space-time chakra to cast the Five Element Release techniques, but he had managed to fuse the two when using the Body Flicker Technique.
The result was startling.
With space-time chakra folded into the technique, his Body Flicker didn't just become faster. It became silent, ghostlike, almost disconnected from the world around him.
When he could eventually spread space-time chakra across his whole body in motion, then obstacles would no longer hinder his movement. He would slip through the world itself, merging with space, becoming even more phantom-like than he already was.
And if he could take it one step further, it might stop being a mere Body Flicker altogether.
It might become true teleportation.
That was the direction Gojo Yoru had set for himself.
After the pain in his face finally subsided, he launched himself back into the forest and resumed his practice.
He moved until sunset, until the last traces of red light could no longer pierce the leaves overhead.
Only then did the black blur break away from the forest and race back toward Konoha.
***
After dinner, Gojo Yoru returned to the basement hidden beneath his house.
The room's walls were covered in spell formulas, sealing script crawling over every surface. It had probably been designed to isolate the space from perception techniques, clairvoyance, and outside detection.
But tonight he had not come down to revise his old game guide.
He formed hand seals and drew the space-time chakra inside his body into motion.
In the next instant, his figure slowly sank into the floor as though the earth beneath him had softened into water. Without a sound, he phased through the basement and left Konoha behind.
Gojo Yoru didn't know whether Hiruzen Sarutobi had already mastered the Telescope Technique. Nor did he know whether Danzo Shimura had taken an interest in him yet—as a civilian-born genius, as the orphaned child of two dead shinobi, or simply as a useful seedling worth pruning into shape.
So, just in case, he never trained advanced ninjutsu at home or inside the village, apart from the Body Flicker Technique and the C-rank Five Element Release techniques appropriate to his age.
It wasn't because he was afraid of being targeted.
It was because he was worried they might notice too much talent and decide to force him into early graduation.
After all, hadn't Itachi Uchiha used the Shadow Clone Technique in his first year? The academy teachers had more or less concluded there was nothing left to teach him and helped push through his early graduation themselves.
Maybe that kind of thinking was one of the reasons the Uchiha Clan had ended so badly.
What kind of sane system looked at a six-year-old child who still hadn't finished his cultural education, then declared that because he was already strong enough, he ought to graduate and go kill people?
Wasn't that just a violent illiterate with too much power?
No wonder so many of them turned out deranged.
Gojo Yoru emerged beyond the village and kept traveling until even Konoha's distant lights disappeared behind the trees.
Then he began his real training.
He practiced the Body Flicker again and again, folding ordinary chakra and space-time chakra together while trying to preserve stability at higher speed. He repeated the motion until the technique became instinctive, until every route through the forest was burned into his nerves.
He stopped only when his chakra reserves ran low, then sat beneath a tree and began refining chakra to recover.
The night air was cool. The forest was quiet. In the darkness, his pale hair and icy eyes seemed almost unreal, like something not entirely meant to exist in this world.
That thought lingered with him longer than it should have.
He had crossed into the Naruto world. He possessed an adult mind, the knowledge of a transmigrator, and now a space-time bloodline limit that should never have existed in the first place.
So what, exactly, was he?
An outsider? A mutation? A mistake? Or the first sign that the rules of this world were never as fixed as its people believed?
He didn't know.
But every time his body evolved, he came closer to finding out.
And every time he grew stronger, the pressure inside him eased a little more.
Not enough to let him relax. Never that.
But enough to let him believe that surviving this era was no longer a fantasy.
By the time he returned home, it was deep into the night.
He slipped back through the basement floor in silence, washed away the sweat and dust of training, then went to bed with his body heavy and his mind still running hot.
As he lay there, staring into the darkness, the image of that failed collision with the tree returned to him.
He could still feel the impact in his face. The stupidity of it. The arrogance behind it.
And yet beneath the embarrassment, something else remained—anticipation.
He had failed because he had tried too much, too quickly.
But the fact that he had even gotten close meant the path itself was real.
Someday, he would phase through obstacles while moving. Someday, Body Flicker would become true teleportation. Someday, he would stand above everyone who currently looked down on him, everyone who believed genius was the privilege of bloodline heirs and destiny's chosen few.
That day hadn't come yet.
But compared to the boy he had been seven months ago, the current Gojo Yoru had already undergone a genuine transformation.
He had more chakra. Faster thoughts. Sharper reflexes. Better control. A stronger body. A clearer path.
And perhaps most importantly of all, he had proof that his evolution was not over.
If the space-time power within him could change his body this much in only seven months, then what would happen after the next evolution? And the one after that?
Would his chakra become fully space-time chakra?
Would phasing become effortless?
Would teleportation truly be possible?
Would his bloodline limit mature into something even more outrageous?
Those questions were enough to make his pulse quicken.
But this time, unlike that first terrifying evolution, there was no fear in it.
Only hunger.
In the darkness of his room, Gojo Yoru slowly closed his eyes.
A grin tugged at the corner of his mouth.
This world was still dangerous. Still cruel. Still filled with monsters, schemes, and looming wars.
But for the first time since coming here, he could look ahead and feel something close to excitement.
He was changing.
And the next time he tried to pass through that tree, he wouldn't crash into it.