Something is better than nothing, Maya told herself.
She activated the Bronze Lv. 5 Transformation Jutsu in her mind's eye.
And she immediately felt bewildered.
She breathed out slowly, several times. I'm a girl. A pretty girl. Swearing is unbecoming. Swearing is wrong.
One hand seal. An image of that idiot Iruka appeared in her head, performing a single seal. That was it. Done.
The big S on her pajama top — Superman's logo — rose and fell with her chest for a good while before it finally settled.
She formed the seal herself, copying what she'd seen. No chakra movement. Nothing.
This outcome was completely expected.
Naruto's twelve hand seals were named after the Twelve Earthly Branches used in traditional Chinese timekeeping — Zi, Chou, Yin, Mao, and so on. Maya had practiced forming these seals days ago, mimicking the anime. No response then, either.
The reason was simple, and she'd worked it out long before.
The Naruto world and the Marvel world operated under fundamentally different physical laws. The hand seal system was calibrated to the Naruto world's reality. It didn't translate.
Consider: even within the same universe, even within the same solar system, Earth and Mars have different gravitational constants and atmospheric compositions. If Mars were colonized and people needed cars, the underlying engine principle — liquid fuel combusting into gas, volume expanding to drive a piston — would be identical to Earth's. But Earth fuel wouldn't combust on Mars. The oxygen ratio is wrong. And if you scaled a car to Earth specs, the lower Martian gravity would send it flying off-road and into the sky.
Chakra was the same. The Marvel universe was expansive enough to accommodate chakra as an energy source — it didn't reject it. But the laws governing how energy behaved here were different. Maya was fairly confident that even if she unlocked a cultivation technique with a carefully mapped meridian pathway, she couldn't simply follow the diagram. She'd have to understand the underlying principles first, then feel out a compatible route.
Unless you'd already passed beyond the stage of energy accumulation and reached the stage of comprehending cosmic laws — at which point, none of this would matter anyway. The Marvel universe had its own laws. You could comprehend those just fine.
If Maya had transmigrated as a complete, fully-realized Kaguya Ōtsutsuki, the problem would vanish entirely. Jutsu would manifest from intent, seals unnecessary. After all — did anyone ever teach Kaguya how to form hand seals?
But this Maya was a raw beginner, freshly generating chakra for only a few days. No experience. No reserves. No teacher. She'd have to work through it step by step.
She knew a solution existed, though. Every game with skills also included skill experience packs — and Jia Baoyu, the pay-to-win-obsessed system designer, had naturally built two tiers: regular experience packs (which raised skill level) and exclusive experience packs (which raised level and increased the damage coefficient).
Take Fire Style: Fireball Jutsu. Damage = coefficient A × chakra output × skill level. Regular packs increased the level but kept A fixed at 10. Exclusive packs raised the level and modified A — and the magnitude of that boost depended entirely on how much you'd spent. The Six Paths Madara exclusive? B = 99, a tenfold multiplier. The "Academy-dropout Obito" exclusive? B = 0.1, a ten percent bump. Nearly a hundredfold difference between the two ends.
In this Marvel world, Maya suspected experience packs would manifest as explanatory content — breakdowns of jutsu principles, chakra-routing guidance, the kind of detailed instruction a teacher would provide over many lessons. After all, Naruto didn't just learn "one hand seal" at the Academy. Even Iruka — limited as his skills were — still spent six years explaining the principles behind the Three Body Techniques in class, walking students through the chakra flow in careful detail.
And Jiraiya taught three students for three full years. Naruto spent most of that time practicing the Rasengan, but the point stood — he had masters. Kakashi, Asuma, Jiraiya, Tsunade. All of them guiding him completely and without reservation.
So why didn't Jiraiya just write down the seal sequences on a piece of paper and hand it to Nagato, Yahiko, and Konan? Even the most advanced forbidden jutsu — Shiki Fūjin, Edo Tensei — involved maybe twelve to fifteen seals. A single torn notebook page could hold everything needed for a lifetime of study.
Yet Naruto learned no new jutsu during the training trip. The Rasengan was already mastered before he left to find Tsunade. Adding Wind Release chakra came after the trip, and that was Kakashi teaching him.
Why was it all so complicated? Why, when all five great villages started from a similar jutsu foundation, was Tobirama the only one who developed a space-time technique so broken it functioned like a cheat code? The entire ninja world knew the theory behind the Flying Thunder God — why couldn't anyone replicate it?
(The Cloud village tried, technically. What they came up with was the Heavenly Transfer Technique — not even close. It couldn't teleport people, required multiple users, and what it sent traveled at light speed rather than crossing space instantly. Light speed! Even the Six Paths Madara's Sage Art: Storm Release Light Fang — a beam of literal light — could still be dodged. A technique that's slow to charge, slow in transit, and isn't even instant? Best use case: Cloud village courier service.)
Because Tobirama stood on giants' shoulders. His older brother was the strongest man alive. The Senju clan dominated the era. He'd encountered more advanced jutsu than most entire villages could claim in their archives combined. Knowledge accumulation was everything.
Jutsu wasn't just about hand seals. It required deep understanding of underlying principles. Even Naruto — despite his "raw effort" image — had a string of dedicated masters teaching him continuously and holding nothing back.
More than that: hand seals weren't the cause of a jutsu. They were the launch code.
The seal was the password. The chakra-flow pathway and the underlying mechanics were the chain reaction. Chakra was the fissile material. The jutsu was the nuclear explosion.
Different countries have different nuclear launch codes. Different worlds have different physical laws. Of course the seal sequences would differ.
And one more thing: even if you somehow had the correct seals for a given world, so what? All those web novel protagonists who memorized seal sequences from the Naruto anime and then transmigrated — hiding in a corner, quietly teaching themselves S-rank jutsu from memory—
Are you kidding?
If they never actually routed the chakra, nothing would happen. Fine. But if they did get the chakra moving — even incorrectly — the consequences could be catastrophic. Chakra wasn't some forgiving energy that wandered harmlessly through the body. Might Guy made this very clear: opening the Death Gate and allowing chakra to flood the heart was quite literally fatal.
So. The Transformation Jutsu had arrived with no explanatory content, and Maya's expectations were left unfulfilled.
All she could do was hope to pull a Silver-tier generic experience pack in a future spin. Used alongside this skill, it should unlock the foundational principles and chakra-routing guidelines she needed to make any actual progress.
Gold-tier exclusive packs? Diamond-tier?
She laughed quietly to herself. That joke wasn't even worth finishing.