[Konoha Year 40 – The Suna Maintenance Depots]
Time in Sunagakure was measured not by clocks, but by the accumulation of grit and the rhythmic clack-clack of puppet joints. While Sayo remained physically smaller than the other children in the logistics compound, the terrifying fragility of his infancy was finally receding. The chronic fevers had settled into a dull, manageable hum, allowing a different kind of transformation to take center stage—a cognitive awakening that felt less like a "gift" and more like a high-performance upgrade.
It began as a subtle realization.
When Sharyu or the senior craftsmen worked on complex puppet frames, Sayo found that a single observation was sufficient to encode the entire process. The sequence of disassembly, the specific torque applied to a brass bolt, the minute angle of a graver—it all etched itself into his mind with the permanence of a laser-engraved serial number.
This wasn't mere childhood mimicry. It was Eidetic Memory of a superhuman grade.
He tested the limits of this new capacity by delving into his previous life. Engineering blueprints he hadn't looked at in a decade, complex Fourier transform equations, the thermal stress parameters of aerospace-grade titanium—it was all there. Knowledge he thought had been buried under the dust of thirty years was now stored in ultra-high-definition, searchable and ready for analysis.
I've been reborn with an optimized processor, Sayo realized, stunned. The transmigration hadn't just moved his soul; it had compressed and indexed his entire life's work, granting him a mental reserve that far exceeded any natural-born shinobi.
But the "software" upgrade went deeper than just storage. His ability to synthesize information was terrifying.
When a craftsman grumbled about the grain of Chakra-Conductive Metal affecting energy efficiency, Sayo didn't just memorize the complaint. His mind automatically mapped the concept of "Chakra resistance" to "Electrical impedance." He understood the underlying logic instantly: whether you are moving electrons or spiritual energy, the laws of fluid dynamics and conductivity remain consistent.
One afternoon, he watched an old craftsman struggle with a spherical shoulder joint that kept seizing due to desert sand. Sayo looked at the primitive, friction-based socket and his mind immediately rendered a schematic for a sealed ball-bearing assembly.
They're fighting friction with lubrication alone, Sayo mused. They lack the concept of rolling elements to distribute the load.
He began to treat the workshop as a live-data feed. He would spend hours watching masters carve hair-thin Chakra Pathways into the internal skeletons of puppets. To any other child, it was just scratching wood. To Sayo, it was the "wiring" of a motherboard. He noticed that the elite craftsmen had a specific breathing rhythm—a "cadence" that synced their biological energy with the physical tool.
Control, Sayo thought. Memory is the database, but precision is the output.
He looked at his small, pale hand. While his muscles were weak, his fine motor control was uncanny. If he willed his finger to move exactly one millimeter, it moved one millimeter—not 1.1, not 0.9. His "software" was driving the "hardware" with absolute authority.
Sharyu, noticing Sayo's quiet intensity, began bringing home "safe" scrap parts—discarded gears, wooden fingers, and deactivated joints. Where other children would have banged them together like stones, Sayo sat for hours in silence. He would disassemble a mechanical hand and reassemble it, over and over, analyzing the tension of every spring and the mesh of every gear.
He began to "design" in the void of his mind.
When he saw the Maintenance Squad struggle with the weight-to-strength ratio of heavy armor plates, he thought of Honeycomb Structures and internal ribbing from aeronautical engineering. When he saw Chakra circuits burn out from high-load combat, he envisioned a "Chakra Fuse"—a sacrificial component designed to break the circuit before the core was damaged.
A silent, invisible revolution was occurring in the corner of that dusty workshop. An engineer from an age of machines was reverse-engineering a world of magic.
Sharyu occasionally caught a glimpse of this. He saw the way Sayo handled parts—not with the clumsy curiosity of a toddler, but with the methodical logic of a seasoned foreman. He saw Sayo tracing broken Chakra lines with a finger, his eyes vacant as he performed mental simulations. Sharyu eventually attributed it to "prodigious talent" born from constant exposure to the forge—a small, bright spot in his otherwise grief-filled life.
Sayo, however, was past caring about what others thought. He was addicted to the thrill of discovery.
The body is a vessel, he thought, his eyes gleaming in the dim lamplight. The mind is the architect. And with enough knowledge, I can build a vessel that never breaks.
The frail boy with the shallow breath was gone. In his place was a learning machine, running at full capacity, preparing to build a dream that would one day tower over the walls of Sunagakure.