It's February now. Two weeks since Aki's UA admission results came in.
And I'm sitting here genuinely debating whether to give her chakra.
Not a sentence I ever expected to think. And yet.
For context — I've been able to unlock chakra inside other living things for a while now. Birds, mostly. Small stuff at first, just to see if it was even possible. It happened around the same time I started sensing natural energy, which kind of kicked the door open for everything else. Yin release, yang release, wood release, and then the one that actually mattered — ninshu. The ability to reach out and connect with other living things through my spiritual energy directly.
That last one changed things considerably.
It sounds abstract, but what ninshu actually gave me was a complete understanding of myself. My spirit, my body, my soul — things most people lump together as just "being alive" — I could feel them as distinct, separate parts of me. Like finally seeing the gears inside a watch instead of just watching the hands move.
And once I understood that about myself, I started understanding it in others too. Which is how I figured out I could grant chakra — the ability to convert physical and spiritual energy and actually use it — to other beings. The birds didn't complain, for what it's worth. If anything they seemed healthier afterward. Like something that had always been sleeping inside them finally woke up.
So now I'm sitting across from Aki, turning the idea over in my head.
My reasons aren't complicated. One, she's genuinely a good person — not performatively good, actually good, the kind that doesn't need to be watched to behave right. Two, she's heading into UA's hero course, which means things are about to get considerably more dangerous for her. And three — maybe most importantly — she's the person I trust most in the world.
That's enough for me.
---
"Hey, Aki?"
She looks up from whatever she was reading. "Hm?"
"Would you want to become stronger?"
She sets the book down slowly, giving me that look — not suspicious exactly, more like she's deciding whether to be amused or concerned. "...Where is that coming from?"
I take a second to collect my thoughts. There's a right way to say this and about a hundred wrong ways. "You just got into the hero course," I start. "And there's something I've been meaning to tell you for a while. Something I haven't told anyone."
She doesn't push. She just waits, which is very Aki — she always gives people space to get to the point.
"You know how my quirk is registered as life force manipulation?"
"Yeah."
"That's not actually what it is." I pause. "I mean — it's not even really my quirk."
She raises an eyebrow. The look on her face is caught somewhere between what and excuse me.
"I know how that sounds," I say quickly. "But hear me out. My actual quirk is more like — you know those physique types from Chinese cultivation novels? Or Isekai? Like a heaven-defying constitution or whatever?"
Both eyebrows now. The skepticism coming off her is almost visible.
"Okay, I know — just let me show you instead of explaining it."
I hold out my fist.
She looks at it for a moment, then bumps hers against it without a word. That's the thing about Aki. She trusts first and asks questions after.
The moment our fists touched I reached through the connection and let our spiritual energies meet.
It's hard to describe what ninshu actually feels like from the inside. The closest I can get is — imagine every part of yourself that you've never been able to put into words suddenly having a shape. Your spirit, your physical energy, the thing that makes you you rather than just a body walking around — all of it visible. Not to anyone else. Just to yourself, maybe for the first time.
That's what I showed her. Her own chakra. The thing that had been living inside her her whole life without either of us knowing it was there.
I held the connection open for just a few seconds before gently closing it.
The silence that followed was the loudest kind.
Aki hadn't moved. Her fist was still loosely against mine, and she was staring at something that wasn't in the room — eyes a little glassy, breathing just slightly off. Then she exhaled, slow and shaky, like she'd been holding it without realizing.
"That was—" She stopped. Tried again. "What was that?"
Her voice came out smaller than usual. Not scared. Just... undone, in the way people get when something reaches them somewhere they didn't know they could be reached.
"That," I said quietly, "is what I call chakra. Your physical energy and your spiritual energy — when they come together, that's what it becomes." I paused. "You've had it your whole life. Everyone does. They just can't feel it."
She finally looked at me. Really looked, the way she does when she's deciding whether to say the thing she's actually thinking.
"You could feel that this whole time?"
"Yeah."
She was quiet for another moment. Then, very softly — "That must be lonely."
I hadn't expected that. Leave it to Aki to experience something that rewired her understanding of reality and come out the other side worried about me.
"Not really," I say, and I mean it. "I've got this place. I've got you guys."
It comes out easier than I expected. Maybe because it's true.
"As for chakra — it's just something I can do. Everyone has physical and spiritual energy, that part isn't special. I'm just the only one who can actually use it, as far as I know." I pause. "Or give others the ability to use it."
Aki absorbs that quietly. She has this way of sitting with information before she responds — never rushes to fill silence. After a moment she looks at me with that same careful expression.
"Is that why you asked if I wanted to become stronger? You want me to be able to use it too?
"Yeah."
She nods slowly, like she's turning the whole thing over. Then —
"Why me?"
A beat.
"Why tell me? Why — out of everyone?"
I open my mouth. Close it. There's a version of this where I say something smooth and it lands well, but I've never really been that guy, so instead I just sit with the question for a second too long and feel my ears go slightly warm.
"That's —" I start, then stop. "I mean. It's kind of a stupid question."
She just looks at me. Waiting. Not letting me off the hook.
I exhale.
"Because you're the person I trust most. That's it. That's the whole answer." I'm not quite meeting her eyes when I say it. "There's nobody else I'd even consider telling. It was always going to be you."
The words sit between us.
Aki doesn't say anything for a moment. Then she smiles — not the big bright one she gives everyone, but the quieter one, the real one — and looks down at her hands.
"Okay," she says softly. "Then yes. I want to learn."
---
Unlocking her chakra was honestly easier than I expected.
A few things worked in our favor. On my end — years of practice, the chakra-seeing abilities of my Sharingan and Rinnegan giving me a precise read on what was happening inside her, and ninshu letting me act as a direct feedback loop. On her end — Aki is, and I say this with complete sincerity, a legitimate prodigy. That, and I'd been dragging her through meditation sessions for years before any of this, which meant her spiritual energy was already more settled than most people's would be at baseline. She still would have been fast without that foundation. The meditation just removed the ceiling entirely.
Twenty-one days. That's all it took.
On day twenty-one she created and molded chakra entirely on her own for the first time. I watched it happen in real time through my Sharingan and I genuinely had to stop myself from making an embarrassing noise. Twenty-one days to do something that should have probably taken months. I don't think she fully understood what she'd just done, but I did.
After that, training started in earnest.
I still remember the expression on her face when I told her what the first exercise would be.
She'd asked, completely reasonably — "So now that I can actually use chakra, how do I go about using it?"
I had to work very hard to keep my face neutral.
"The first step," I said slowly, pausing for effect as she leaned in slightly, "is sticking a leaf to your body using chakra."
The silence that followed was beautiful.
Her face did something complicated — cycling through confusion, disbelief, and then a very specific kind of betrayal, like she'd been promised a feast and handed a rice cracker. "...A leaf."
"A leaf," I confirmed.
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she picked up a leaf.
I burst out laughing before she could even try it.
To her credit she didn't dignify that with a response. She just held the leaf against the back of her hand and went quiet in the way she does when she's concentrating — brow slightly furrowed, breathing slowed down. I watched through my Sharingan as her chakra, still new and a little unsteady, gathered in her palm and crept toward the surface of her skin.
The leaf stuck.
First try. Same day.
By day three she was holding multiple leaves on opposite sides of her body simultaneously, which requires splitting your chakra focus in two directions at once — something that should trip people up for weeks. She did it like it was mildly annoying rather than difficult.
"You're not even going to react?" I asked.
"Should I?" she said, peeling a leaf off her elbow.
By day four she was walking up trees. By day seven she had it mastered — smooth, controlled, no slipping, no overcorrection. Just her and the bark and complete focus.
I stopped trying to play it cool around day five. There was no point.
---
Water walking I left entirely to her.
No Sharingan, no feedback, no guidance beyond pointing at the water and stepping back. By that point she had a solid enough grasp of chakra extraction and molding that I figured she needed to find the feel of it herself rather than rely on me calibrating everything for her. Water walking is a fundamentally different problem from tree walking — constant shifting surface tension versus static bark — and that difference needs to be felt, not explained. It took her longer. She got there.
She always gets there.
While she was grinding through that I quietly doubled down on her physical training.
Before chakra she was working at nine times her body weight — already well beyond what most people her age could handle, made harder by the Rock Lee-style weighted gear she wears through every session. Now, with chakra constantly circulating through her system and giving her body a permanent baseline boost, that number sits at fifteen times. Not because I pushed her there. Because anything less started feeling too easy.
I noticed it before she said anything. The way she was finishing sets without that particular grimace she used to get, the slightly impatient energy at the end of a run.
"It's not enough, is it," I said one afternoon. It wasn't really a question.
She looked almost guilty. "...A little."
I laughed. Bumped the weight up.
That's the thing about Aki — she doesn't complain when something's hard and she doesn't coast when it gets easy. She just quietly recalibrates and keeps going. It makes her genuinely enjoyable to train and also mildly humbling if I think about it too hard.
Here's the honest assessment: if she'd had chakra during the UA entrance exam, the zero-pointer wouldn't have been a problem. Her chakra control still has room to grow, so maybe not a clean one-hit — but she'd have taken it down. Give her another month or two of working with chakra-enhanced strength and the "maybe" disappears entirely. Her capacity is already good. Control is where we're still building, and that's just time and repetition. If these past weeks have shown me anything, she'll close that gap faster than anyone has a right to.
---
Aki starts at UA in a few days.
Which means a few days until she gets the highest level of freedom this children's home offers. Completely unsupervised travel, flexible curfew, and — most relevantly — permission to take on part-time work, which basically every high school student here does the moment they're allowed to.
I have plans for that last one. Specifically, I plan to do absolutely nothing productive for approximately one year and let Aki fund my existence until I join her at UA and sort myself out. I'm not ashamed of this. It's a reasonable arrangement and I'm choosing to believe she'd agree if asked
That said — I've been thinking about what I actually want to do once I can work.
The obvious answer is healing. Something in the recovery space, maybe Recovery Girl's office if that's even a possibility, or general medical support work. The question is whether I'm anywhere close to ready for that. Knowledge isn't the bottleneck — between ninshu giving me an almost instinctive understanding of living bodies and the Sharingan making textbook study almost offensively easy, the theoretical side is covered. What I don't have yet is medical ninjutsu. Knowing how the body works and knowing how to actively repair it are two completely different problems, and I haven't cracked the second one yet.
For now, the way I handle Aki's recovery after training sessions is more workaround than proper solution. My blood doesn't carry healing properties naturally the way an Uzumaki's does — but if I push chakra from the Moon seal through it first, that changes. The seal sits on the back of my palm, and the chakra it stores has a quality to it that, when introduced into the bloodstream, noticeably accelerates recovery. It works. It just isn't scalable, and it's not something I could offer professionally.
Medical ninjutsu is on the list. Not urgent, but it's there.
Then there's the creative angle — music, maybe, or something in the online space. Hero society dominates the cultural conversation in this world but it doesn't own it. Regular entertainment, sports, film, online creators — all of it runs exactly the way it did in my past life, same mechanics, same audiences. There's room there if I wanted it.
I was turning all of this over with Aki one evening when she looked up from her notebook with the particular energy of someone who has just solved a problem they found very satisfying to solve.
"Can't you just use your clones? Like — do all of it? Multiple jobs, music, healing practice, run them all simultaneously?"
I opened my mouth.
Closed it.
She was right. Completely, obviously right, and somehow across all my planning it had never once crossed my mind. Shadow clones — a technique I've had for years, that creates fully independent copies capable of working, learning, and feeding memories back to me on dispersal. The single most practical tool in my entire arsenal for exactly this kind of problem. Pure blind spot. Genuinely embarrassing.
"...Yes," I said. "That works."
Aki looked delighted in the way she gets when something clicks — bright-eyed, already leaning forward. "So you could do all of them at once. The healing, the music, the job — everything running in parallel."
"In theory, all of them and more."
"Okay." She tapped her notebook. "Then I want to learn shadow clones too."
I should have seen that coming. "That's what you got out of this?"
"Think about it," she said, completely serious despite the smile pulling at her mouth. "I could train twice as fast. Three times. Work multiple jobs. You'd have to find something new to be better at than me."
She wasn't wrong about the training math, which was the more embarrassing part. Without the Sharingan passively absorbing and processing information, a person can get extraordinary mileage out of shadow clones for accelerated learning. I use them sparingly because I never particularly needed to. Aki would genuinely get more out of the technique than I ever have. Teaching her was already on my list — this just moved it to the top.
The working plan we landed on together: most of what we earn goes into savings — a real fund for when we're older and making decisions that actually matter. Twenty percent stays liquid for the present. The rest builds. It took about twenty minutes of back and forth, both of us poking holes in each other's suggestions until something solid came out of it. That's usually how it goes with us.
The logistics needed thinking through too. Part-time work for high school students is normal here, expected even, but being in a children's home adds a layer. Wages get paid by bank transfer, which means accounts in our own names, which means guardian consent — for us, that's the facility director stepping into the parental role legally. The account won't be entirely ours on paper. The home will have oversight, a portion of earnings set aside for when we eventually leave care. It's not unreasonable. It's how the system is built, and it lines up with what we were planning anyway.
Shadow clones complicate it in an interesting way. A clone is me, in every sense that matters — same face, same memories, same abilities, identical down to the last detail. Which means any job a clone works, any interaction a clone has, is indistinguishable from me doing it personally. No paper trail issues, no identity questions. The problem runs in the opposite direction entirely: legally, I can only be in one place at a time. If someone cross-references schedules, or two versions of me end up in the same vicinity, that's a conversation I don't want to have. Worth planning around carefully rather than assuming away.
I was still running logistics in my head later that night when Aki said, quietly, from across the room —
"Hey."
I looked up.
She had that expression she gets sometimes — like she's been sitting with something for a while and finally decided to say it. "I'm glad you told me. About all of it."
I didn't say anything for a second.
"Yeah," I said eventually. "Me too."
She nodded once, like that settled something, and went back to her notebook.
It was a small moment. The kind that doesn't announce itself.
I filed it away anyway.