The board sat in the corner of my vision like a small, private map. It didn't sing. It didn't promise miracles. It only showed numbers and the list of things I had agreed to do. I liked the bluntness. It kept the work honest.
I had thirty-six hours of steady training behind me after the panel first settled, and a hundred small repetitions more than that. The orphanage was a thin, honest place: straw mattresses, a chipped kettle, and the way Mira left extra bread on the table if she thought anyone might need it. She moved as if she had decided that small things could be managed. That steadiness rubbed off on me.
Mornings began before light. Running first, the lane thick with dew. Sprint intervals. Distance days where I pushed my legs along the marsh road until the calves burned in a way I could measure. We don't do dramatic training in the village. There are no tutors and no proper sparring halls. There are mud roads, carts, a farmer's field, and whatever discipline a person can build with nothing to show for it.
After running, push-ups until my shoulders trembled the way they do when a muscle remembers both work and future demand. Then the wooden blade — not a polished sword, just a practiced plank shaved until it felt like a blade. Footwork first: the step that opens a line, the step that retreats without telegraphing fear. Minato's template kept whispering corrections to how I moved: less swing, more pivot; plant your feet as if the ground is a silent partner.
Children watched because that's what children do. They copied without understanding why the small corrections mattered. I taught them the basics: how to breathe when you make a quick step, how to keep the front knee soft, how to put your weight where it helps rather than where it drags. Teaching slowed me down. It forced me to name small things. When you force your body to speak the language of movement out loud, you notice what's missing.
Village life circled around chores. Mira sent me for water and bread and sent me out again when the roof needed another patch. The steward's men passed through like a shadow you adjust to but never welcome. They took their fees in paper and coin, and sometimes they took a little more when a tax line changed in the ledger. People talked in small huddles, careful with their words when officials were nearby. A village survives on its private compromises.
Systems missions lined up with what the village needed anyway — useful, not extravagant.
PHYS-01 had me running the marsh path in set times and building endurance. MANA-01 forced me to sit, breathe, and hold a faint thread of mana that wanted to flick like a candle in wind. WEAP-01 was repetition so the shoulders learned angles and the hips learned power that wasn't wasted. REFL-01 made me try to catch pebbles flicked at my hands with half a second's notice. TACT-01 made me take what I could see in the village — carts, crowd, a tight lane — and turn it into a small combat simulation.
It's easy to think training is a spectacle: grand leaps, burning skies. In truth it is arithmetic. Ten push-ups repeated for a dozen mornings add up to something stubborn. Holding mana for a few seconds longer on the third week is a small deposit into a habit account that compounds. Systems that hand out glory cheapen work; this one didn't. It asked for patience.
The first time I ran the multi-target simulation, I felt like an actor rehearsing a part and fumbling the lines. The board had asked for timing and space: three false targets, jars balanced on narrow stands, a limit on what could be hit in what order if you wanted to avoid spillage. I rehearsed the sequence until my wrists could twist the way the script required. When I finally ran it clean, the panel reported a small uptick.
[Tactical Exercise — Success]
[Tactical IQ +1]
[Template Sync: 11.4%]
A decimal. A small notch. Enough to feel the air turn a shade thinner. Not dramatic. Not a leap. A record.
Progress of that kind tastes like iron and sweat. It's the kind of progress you can't brag about to children who want fireworks; they want to see a big explosion that says 'you are done'. But this was more honest: accumulation. The template's gifts were reserved for thresholds. Only at 20% would I get the Genin muscle-memory pieces. That felt right. You earn things; you don't find them under your pillow.
People took notice, in small ways: Old Toma, who had a way of half-laughing at everything, started leaving an extra slice of bread on my table when he saw me pass. The baker, who never smiled, nodded once when I steadied a wobbly stack of crates at the market without breaking stride. The village doesn't shout its gratitude. It folds it into pragmatic acts.
Sometimes the training was ugly. One boy, Kori, liked to push smaller children into mud and then laugh until he had nothing left to say. I moved between them the way people move to repair a small tear before it becomes a rip: quietly and with a plan. Kori's bravado was loud precisely because it covered a lack of planning. I put myself where his force would be useless. He overreached and found embarrassment easier than victory. He backed off without anyone cheering. That small defusing mattered more than a public victory.
There were other problems that training didn't entirely solve. The steward's extra levy had become a topic that smelled like lit matches — people were careful and angry and quiet in the same breath. The baker's worry about seed grain for spring got under my skin more than it should have. A grown man, worried about seed grain, looks hollow in a way a child never could. Those days I taught the older boys how to move a plank and lift together; efficiency saves labor, and labor saves time to hunt a few extra hours of wages.
The system pinged sometimes for missions that matched these small political problems. "Design a minimal perimeter for the orphanage," it suggested one afternoon in neutral text. That fit. I mapped a low fence that didn't look like a fort, a series of rope alarms that would hiss when disturbed, and a few early-warning points at the market where a lookout could shout if trouble came. None of that looked like gallantry. It looked like planning.
The system recorded and did not judge.
[PHYS-01: Weekly targets met 78%]
[MANA-01: Hold time average 2'40"]
[WEAP-01: Drills compliance 84%]
[REFL-01: Daily average 36 catches]
[TACT-01: Perimeter design accepted]
Those lines are not inspiring on paper. They are useful on the ground.
A practical test came the day a string of stray dogs started sniffing at the edge of the village. They were hungry then determined, testing gates and fences. No one wanted to kill them; the village had too few hands to spare and too much guilt to justify blood. We arranged humane channels to move them, learned how to funnel their path away from pens, and set the boys on watch with torches and noise. The dogs took a few of the coops, which made people grumble, but no one was hurt and we beat the pack away without making a blood debt. That was training applied to life.
The months moved like that: repetitions, small tests, quiet victories. I kept a notebook with times and notes and a few human entries — what Mira needed fixed that week, who had a cough, who could be coaxed into staying with the younger ones when the market got rough. The notebook was for things the system did not track, because people matter in ways numbers don't.
Once, on market day, a man tried to snatch a coin from a woman buying bread. He was practiced—hands quick, eyes keener. Around him, people made distance like a sensible flock. I moved because I could. His hand darted; I read his shoulders and moved a fraction the other way, a tiny angle so small it looked lazy. He overbalanced and fell at the well's edge; people moved in and held him until the steward's men took an interest. The woman held her coin like a life preserver and patted my shoulder as if that resolved anything.
The system added the moment to its ledger without drama.
[Village Defense: Success — minor]
[Template Sync: +0.6%]
[Progress: 12.0%]
A small increase again. Twelve percent. Not a title. Not a ceremony. A fraction of motion woven into being.
I thought about leaving sometimes. It's hard not to imagine ways the world could reward extra effort, to imagine tutors and mentors and the capital's air that smells like opportunity. Mira always answered that thought in the same way she answered things that might upset her: quietly. "If you go, come back with something useful," she'd say, folding cloth. That was not a stop. It was a condition that kept things from being merely dramatic.
I used the town register not as a promise but as information. I went to the next town to see how registration for the Grimoire would work for people like me who did not have tutors or letters of recommendation. Red ink. Paper. Lines you fill out with your name and your age, a stamped date, a promise that shows up if you choose to stand in it. I came back with a slip, an ink-stamped date that let me know when I could be present at the ceremony if I chose. It was a small, sensible step.
Back home, the steward's men took a little more than usual one week. People tightened their budgets like a belt knot. We adjusted the orchard ladder so two men could lift a crate instead of three. Those changes were not heroic; they were necessary.
At night, I would sit with the panel tucked like a lamp at my side. The numbers ticked forward in small decimals. The board was a ledger of discipline. It felt right that way. If the Grimoire was a blade that could cut a path, the years of steady work were a whetstone.
One night, a visiting merchant gave a rumor about the Tower — who would be there, who had tutors and who had nothing. It was gossip. Gossip is useful only insofar as it helps you plan. I filed it and stored the safer facts: how the registration worked, travel times, what to carry. The rest is noise.
Progress continued. Small increases here and there — better average hold times, cleaner footwork, fewer false starts in feints. Nothing dramatic, no sudden surges. The system did not give me anything for partial effort. It reserved its muscle-memory reward for proper thresholds. That felt fair.
When I fixed the orphanage roof in late autumn, with the older boys steadying beams and Mira passing nails with hands that had seen too many winters, I walked away with dust in my hair and a small earned fatigue that felt like a proper account settled. The children practiced on the repaired beams with fewer falls. The market hummed again with less anxious faces. We did what we could.
The board recorded progress that night.
[Progress: 13.2%]
[Notes: Perimeter active, roof patched, registration slip acquired]
A stack of small truths. No fanfare. Just a list you could lean on.
I slept with the window cracked, hearing children breathing like tiny drums. The Grimoire Ceremony sat a year and change away on the board and a paper slip in my notebook. I had not gambled anything dramatic. I had not tried to stand out. I trained. I arranged defenses. I taught children to shift their feet. I patched roofs. The world would not bend because I chose to do honest work. But honest work makes a village harder to break.
I rolled the practice blade into its cloth and tied it near the bed. Tomorrow I'd run the marsh route again, then push-ups until my arms ached, then practice blade drills until dusk. The panel blinked its small light and recorded nothing more than a quiet promise to continue.
It felt like enough to be the thing I was — a small childhood stitched with a stubborn habit: show up, measure, improve. The Grimoire would come in a year and some days. For now, the slow work of keeping things whole was what I had. I would keep doing it until the numbers on the board said otherwise.