Chapter 5: Chapter 05
For perhaps the first time in his living memory, Harry Potter felt a sheer joy in being alive. It was a curious sensation, to be unencumbered by all the messes and petty problems that the people around him were plagued with. he was above them all. Literally, he was lying on the top of a really tall tree in the little park that was once his refuge from his "family". It was wonderful really, to watch the clouds and relax, taking in the moonlight and the ever present, soothing wind. One could almost feel the whispered secrets of ages past floating by your ear, just out of reach.
Harry had taken his life in a much more positive sense after his unorthodox discovery of chakra. He maintained a constant, maniacal gleam in his eyes that had managed to subdue the Dursleys, if for a little while. It was fascinating, how suddenly becoming very very confident in yourself drove his tormentors to doubt themselves. After all, insulting and demeaning someone only really works, if the object of that treatment subconsciously at least considers the possibility that those words are true. if not well, it would be like insulting somebody in another language.
In Harry's case, he had absolutely no fear of the Dursleys anymore, and he was absolutely certain they were worthless little humans. They were just mindless idiots who really needed to get rid of their 'normal' fetish. He sometimes wondered if Petunia really was his aunt. Even if he ignored the 'love thy family' aspect of relatives, surely somebody like her could not possibly be related to him.
All questions about his family were brushed away when the moon once more reappeared as a cloud was swept away. It was a fascinating sight. At 2 in the morning, he could just make out the details of the moons crater riddled surface. He suddenly wished he had a telescope, or at least some kind of jutsu that served a similar purpose. For some odd reason, he really wanted to take a closer look at the moon and the stars. It was a singular feeling, one that he had never felt before. But it could wait. After all, even if chakra let him get out of the cupboard at night, he still need some sleep if he wanted to concentrate (albeit on his own 'studies') in class. He definitely did not wish to sleepwalk his way through school.
And so Harry pulled himself from his childish fascination of the moon and the stars to go home, a fascination that was perhaps fostered under the loving care of the Dursleys, and his resultant love of all spaces large and wide open. And what is space, but the widest of them all?
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Harry of course was not an all knowing child. It was regrettable, but true. It was also the only reason he developed what the people from his beloved manga defined as a chakra core. For when he began all he had was magic. This was actually what Harry felt and observed during his recovery from his rather ill conceived plan to find if he had chakra. Of course, magic in its raw state was not chakra, and would not do the things that Harry "knew" chakra could do. After all, chakra was the very force of life, all encompassing, and deeply linked to the elements. Magic on the other hand was change, plain and simple. It was also everywhere, but did not have the delicacy that chakra had. No, magic was the force that changed anything it touched with force and subtlety of a sledgehammer. It could turn anything into anything else (within limits) and even create life out of raw energy or matter. So when Harry suddenly believed, in the absolute manner that only the young mind was capable of, his magic reacted in what some might call accidental magic. It gave him a new power, independent of his magic, but was created by it. It was just a spark of course, but as the boy began to manipulate his energies with his genjutsu attempts, his magic began to expand the chakra system, feeding it, until one fine day, both chakra and magic coexisted independently in a young boy. Such was the power of belief on magic. The rather hilarious thing was that if the Dursleys hadn't driven it into his subconscious that there was no such thing as magic (a concept he would later disabuse himself of) he wouldn't have managed to spark a chakra core into existence. Otherwise, his latent memories of childhood would have eventually and unconsciously supplied the concepts his real parents lived on and talked around him about when he still lived with them. Magic worked in weird ways after all.
But in the end, he was wielding chakra – true chakra, as he knew it. And it was fun to play with it. He spent hours climbing trees in the remote corners of the park (funny how they let him out after chores now) until he could safely walk up and down walls. He had also managed to get a hang of what some might call tree hopping. Surrey looked very difficult when you were traveling via rooftops. And the wind was not something he really wanted to miss.
But the most important little skill he was capable of, was lock picking. It was not difficult theoretically. You infused the mechanism with chakra, and then using the chakra inside, moved the tumblers to exactly the right position. He was getting quite good at it too, at least with the new locks that Vernon had put up at the beginning of the vacation. Of course, he swore not to use it for nefarious purposes – crime was not a road he really wanted to go down, even if his moral compass was a bit off after what he'd seen the Dursleys get away with - and child abuse was definitely up there in the horrible crimes list.
He'd not really tried to do any elemental jutsu, content to prank the Dursleys with genjutsu. It was really a question of having an understanding of what you wanted somebody to experience that determined the effectiveness of his illusions. Consequently, taste was the only difficult thing to stimulate, as Harry had not really eaten much other than leftovers till now. There was no doubt that without his healing ability he would have died, period. But in any case, there was definitely some amusement in making the Dursleys think that their room had a dead body in it, or that Dudley's hair had started to gray or even that Petunias face, dutifully caked with makeup had a giant mole that appeared to move every day. Once he managed to anchor the genjutsu to an object or person, he would really have fun. But alas, he had not developed the raw control necessary to do something of that caliber. He would need to find some open water soon, or at least a bathtub for his attempts at water walking. Eventually, he would settle on the closest public swimming pool, which was near the school.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
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