Chapter 10: Growing up, Part II
A hand shook me away, and I swatted it away. Blinking away the sleepiness, I circulated my chakra to speed up the process.
"Get up; we are leaving soon."
At first, I was confused. 'Leaving? Why are we leaving?' My brain finally started a few seconds later. Today, we finally make the trip to Konohagakure. I remembered the horrendously tedious training I had to do over the last six months.
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My meeting with Suto, the Uzukage, was very successful. It took some time to prove that my seals worked. After powering more and more matrixes due to the increasing quantities of Nature Energy, they were forced to believe me.
I negotiated rather well and secured a price of 1 Million Ryo and two ninjutsu scrolls per battery. I also got a grandmaster to teach me sealing three days a week and a single request that Uzushio must fulfill.
Permission to accompany Kushina was also easy to get. The village ordered five more of my battery scrolls, so I got a nice amount of cash from that.
After this discussion, my irritation began. At first, I was excited when Naito requested to be my sensei. That excitement didn't last very long.
She has a bubbly personality and is easygoing about most things, not about seals, though. When it comes to fuinjutsu, she is a demon of perfection.
She had me replicate a scroll nearly the size of the table in length and width. It was bigger than me, to my despair. I had to copy the entire scroll onto a second one three days a week, every week until it was time to leave.
I couldn't eat or leave the room until the scroll was done. She left a glass of water in the corner, and I could go to the bathroom, but that was all.
On the scroll, there were 7,777 kanji in different sizes and orientations. They all had to be perfectly replicated. The first month, I had it easy; I simply had to complete all 7,777 of them within a day.
The other five months, though, she.. 'critiqued' me. Any incorrect stoke erased the kanji I was working on and earned me a lecture. This was amusing for a grand total of 5 seconds. She nagged about my posture, speed, movements, rhythm, how I held the brush, how long it took me to check the original scroll, my walking speed, and how much ink I used.
It seemed I didn't do anything right; even when my kanji didn't disappear, I would somehow be doing something wrong. Needless to say, I stopped participating in our nightly practice at the table. After 10-14 hours of being corrected, the last thing I wanted to do was more calligraphy.
Thankfully, I had unlocked my chakra. Without it, there would be no way I could survive that practice. My fingers would be aching from holding the brush, but a few circulations of chakra were all it took to make them good to continue.
The only bright side of the training was that I knew I was improving. Every week, I would get yelled at less and less. I also didn't need to get up and check the original seal scroll as often, so my memory was also improving. I tried to get my mind off the kanji on the days off, but it didn't work. Heck, I even dreamed about seals almost every night.
The other four days a week, I spent between relaxing, training and working on different ways to use Nature Energy.
I started to experiment with drawing the energy into my body. I started with small amounts that would be harmless if anything went wrong. It had a peculiar reaction with my body.
My body doesn't seem to absorb Nature Energy unless I want it to. It's like a mental pop-up telling me how much it can take before something bad happens. It's not a percentage or a visual of some kind, more like a feeling of fullness.
I found that absorbing Nature Energy has a rejuvenation effect that is even stronger than chakra. Over time, it also has a strengthening effect.
After discovering this, I began imbuing Ashita and Kushina with tiny amounts of energy at the start of the day and the end of the night.
Over these months, I've seen Kushina get stronger and Ashita surprisingly get younger. Some of her friends and Naito have begun to comment on it. It makes me happy that I can do something like this for her; I know how much their appearance matters to women as they grow older.
The second thing I discovered is what I call baby sage mode. I haven't had an opportunity to test what it lets me do, but it makes me much stronger, faster and more perceptive. It also seems to increase my chakra reserve since it combines three energies.
I don't want to call it proper sage mode because I don't have a lot of chakra, but it should be enough to save my life if I get into a fight.
My practice is split between two small exercises I do with my sister. We race all the time, and I also run by myself. The second one is an intense game of dodgeball. The only difference is that we throw rocks at each other instead of foam balls.
To make it a little more fair; I use my chakra while she can't use hers. It's quite fun, and since both throwing and dodging are really important parts of being a ninja, it is also good training.
Ashita didn't like it at first, but after watching us for a bit, she realized we weren't throwing them hard enough to do any real damage. She also understands that getting injured as a shinobi is a certainty, so the sooner we get used to pain, the better.
-
I cringed, remembering my lessons with Naito. I got dressed and emptied the contents of my storage items.
There were my millions of Ryo neatly bundled together. My impressive library of sealing scrolls, all 450 of them, began to roll all over the place. My 12 Jutsu scrolls: I hadn't tested my chakra nature yet, but I wasn't training ninjutsu anyway. And three boxes of weapons that Suto gave to me.
There was a box for senbon, kunai and shuriken, 100 of each. He had them dropped off by a guard as a gift to our family. With all my main supplies accounted for, I put them back in my storage items.
I had a ring for myself but found insufficient space for me. I commissioned a bracelet made of chakra metal and created a new storage item. The storage capacity for this item honestly scared me; it was equivalent to a medium-sized house.
More than enough space for anything and everything, but way too much to allow anyone to access. It makes me glad I didn't give anyone else anything with chakra metal.
I kept a few things that would need to be accessible in my ring, like a few weapons and a decent amount of money. Everything else was thrown into the bracelet.
I left my room and found Ashita, Kushina, and Masumi standing with three other adults: two men and one woman.
While it was clear they would be our escorts; I didn't know if Masumi would join us.
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