My day started before most people even woke up; it had to if I wanted to get strong enough to live a long life—but that didn’t mean I enjoyed it—and sometimes, just getting out of bed was tough. Even though winter had started to give way to spring, we were still in duvet weather, making my early start that much more difficult.

The covers would get caught between my toes or I’d be a little too warm to want to leave my bed; it wasn’t an ideal situation in the least, but that’s where my contingency came in: a horrible, shrill alarm clock I bought at a flea market a few months ago.

Bringing my fist down, I slammed the damned thing into blissful silence, watching it thud to the ground. It was oddly resistant to damage, which I guess made sense. If I ever made an alarm that sounded like that, I’d make sure it could withstand a tumble—but maybe it was the flea market effect.

Most things I’d bought from them in this life and the last seemed to be stupidly durable.

I ate a quick breakfast with two hours remaining to complete my morning training. The run to and from the park took around twenty minutes, so it was closer to an hour and twenty minutes rather than two full hours—which was fine. It wasn’t as if I’d achieve anything particularly groundbreaking in forty minutes that I wouldn’t in an hour and twenty.

Unsurprisingly, there were countless public parks in the Hidden Leaf and they had it all: small streams, and a deep earthen scent accompanied by almost as much wildlife as there were trees. Not to mention the amazing views. The one I frequented was on the east side of the village and had all of the above if not more. A long, winding stream weaved through it, winding back around to Hokage Mountain.

Shrugging off my trackie, I started with some stretches after my run to the park and immediately got to work. Today was a rest day as far as rest went for shinobi. The Academy had a gym on the ground floor that was free to all students and it was where I got the majority of my weight training done—not today, though.

I hopped onto the canal, wandering along it while I thought, adjusting the chakra output accordingly. I’d more or less got the hang of water-walking. Things got shaky when crossing rapids but it wasn’t as if anyone really ran over water outside of fights. Most of the time, bodies of water functioned as leverage for jumps rather than a surface to travel on.

Once my chakra network was sufficiently warmed up, I left the canal and walked over to a particularly tall tree. I traced a hand over the many foot-shaped indents coating its trunk with a fond smile. As it always was, the tree would be the perfect training object. It was insanely wide and thick, so there was no way I’d topple it with what I’d come here to do. I’d managed to figure out two very useful chakra skills that I wanted to train: Chakra adhesion and repulsion.

Well, repulsion more so than adhesion. I wasn’t able to use it in combat yet beyond boosting my jumps as I’d done against Sasuke, so the best remedy for that was to get it to a level where I could. If I’d learned anything during the sparring matches, it was that I had to find a way to get ahead again.

The fights between me and some of my classmates had become closer than I’d liked. I knew it was inevitable. They had so many resources like specifically tailored training to bring their skills up to par, not to mention jutsu they’d be able to use throughout their careers. The Academy taught us jutsu, sure, but they didn’t teach anything about nature-releases in a practical sense.

They didn’t have the personnel for it—especially after the Nine-Tails’ Rampage—and even if they did, why teach valuable jutsu to people not even guaranteed to make genin rank? The more I thought about it, the more it made sense—which sucked, because I sure could use powerful jutsu these days.

No matter how I looked at it, chakra manipulation was the only way to get any immediate benefits to use in sparring. Its biggest benefit was in ninjutsu, but since I didn’t know any useful ones, I decided to incorporate it into the next best thing: my taijutsu style.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

The familiar warmth of my chakra spread across my body. It gathered in my gut and churned clockwise, spinning faster and faster. My chakra network was happy to receive the influx of chakra. It definitely wouldn’t have been if I didn’t walk across the canal and I’d have had a mild case of chakra burn to deal with which—for the unenlightened—was not the most fun thing to have.

The usual run-of-the-mill chakra burn was bearable. I was left sore for a few hours afterwards when it first happened to me.

Not that I’d thank the Nine-Tails for that.

With chakra being present in every living organism, it was an essential component for survival. Moulding higher amounts than necessary, however, was not and doing too much without building up to it was an easy way to acquire chakra burn around tenketsu. It was like working a muscle; without a proper warm-up, lifting heavy weights could lead to unnecessarily serious injury.

Making sure to keep the chakra rotating while I got ready, I took a stance that was part-boxing part-wing chun. I kept my right foot back and led with my left with my elbows tucked in to protect my ribs. Rather than clenching them, I held my hands open ahead of my face and eased out a calming breath. I couldn’t afford to let the nerves take hold. My chakra would react to it, making this a nightmare for me.

I slid my left foot forward and struck the tree trunk, funnelling as much of it as I could control through the limb. A soft crackling registered in my ears before I was blown away, my shoulder rotating outwards and over my head. I stumbled back and barely stopped myself from toppling over.

“...Didn’t expect it to kick like a damn mule,” I muttered and shook out my tingling arm—it was beginning to numb like I’d slept on it all night.

A few wooden chips had found their way into my palm. I picked them out of my hands and stared at the palm-sized print seared into the splintered tree trunk. If a single hit did that to a tree, I wondered what it would do to a person…

Shuddering slightly, I picked the rest of the chips out of my hand and wiped the blood on my jogging bottoms. It took my noticing the bloody pinpricks pooling all over my palm for me to realise chakra repulsion was a pretty flawed technique. It was bastardised chakra enhancement, to be honest—and with my current level of control, it wasn’t a smart thing to be doing.

The backlash sucked, which immediately made it a technique to use sparingly, but maybe I could circumvent it by using chakra adhesion to root my lead foot to the ground. That way, I could drive all the force into my opponent. I looked at the tree in apprehension and my shoulder gave a little twinge at the thought.

I certainly wouldn’t be trying it today, but with some modification, it could be a technique worth pursuing.

At least chakra adhesion was faring better under the microscope. It was perfect for my taijutsu style, adding another layer of complexity to it. Grapples became a lot harder to escape, giving me almost complete domination at close range. Ironically, Hinata suggested the idea to me… and then proceeded to block my tenketsu and show me exactly why I shouldn’t rely on it.

In all honesty, seeing how much she’d improved frustrated me, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t know it would happen eventually. There was only so far I could go alone—but that wasn’t to say I was down and out quite yet. Since my loss against Sasuke, I’d figured out a few more tricks, like using chakra adhesion to keep my feet rooted to the ground.

That alone let me leverage a lot more power into my strikes. I’d wring everything I could out of my current arsenal because there was nothing else I could fall back on except my taijutsu. But I wouldn’t ignore future additions—like chakra repulsion—just because they couldn’t bear any fruit at the moment.

I was working the long game; the sort that would allow me to extend my life, prevent a world war, and exact retribution for my parents. My open palms cut through the air as I went through one form after the next. I dodged imagined opponents, seamlessly flowing into counterattacks and combinations.

Everything I knew about taijutsu across both lives went into this style. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the one thing I could say that I put my entire being into. I didn’t rest until the back of my throat felt raw and I took deep, gasping breaths, drenched in sweat.

Wandering back to the massive tree, I put on my discarded trackie and zipped it up, trapping all the pulsing heat within its confines. My skin felt slick, like I was covered in slightly warm oil and I was painfully aware of the sweat tracking down my skin and dampening my shirt.

“Still, there’s no way I’ll risk giving myself a cold. Shower, snack, grab my lunch from Ayame, and then school,” I said, committing the list to memory. “That sounds about right.”

Padding along the grass, I jogged towards the running path leading out of the park and returned home.