[Skill Gained: Chakra Control]
I stare at the line of text I'm "seeing," it was strange as the words felt like they had weight. My mind, which until now has been a loose cloud floating on rhythm and warmth, snaps together like magnets finding their partners. The flood of warmth—of chakra—surges through me, and my chest wobbles as a very human panic tries to crawl up my throat.
'Where am I?'
The thought is sharp. It belongs to me in a way nothing else here has yet. In the same instant, my past life thunders through—lecture halls and bus stops and the smell of instant noodles. A dorm room with a light that never quite worked. A familiar phone screen and the ritual of swiping away alarms and swiping through profiles. The pieces don't vanish when the rush passes. They settle, sorted and reachable, as if someone wiped fog off a mirror. I am me again. I am also a body no bigger than two hands put together, afloat in heavy warmth, held by a heartbeat that is not mine.
I try to breathe.
Water—not water, but close enough—fills my mouth. My throat moves and meets pressure. For three useless seconds, I thrash, grabbing at a boundary that curves away and then curves back, and my small heart hammers until the larger heart around me answers and brings us both down. I expect choking, burning, and drowning. None comes. The body I am now in has been practicing a different kind of breath than lungs can manage. The practice continues, unbothered by my new awareness. Warmth flooded me, likely a response to my distress.
'Not drowning,' I tell myself. 'You're not drowning.'
Outside, people speak. It's Japanese—rounded vowels, clipped beats, the professional cadence of people doing a job—but through flesh and fluid it reaches me as underwater syllables, too blurred to separate, not that I could understand the words. I stop trying to parse it. 'No point. Focus on what you can do.'
Chakra.
The warmth I've been drifting in isn't just comfort. It had direction. It flowed and receded. When I pay attention to it, the flow pushes back—gently, like a stream feeling a fingertip and deciding how to curl around it. Understanding unfolds along with the warmth, sinking into me without words: physical and spiritual energies braided into one; chakra pathways and tenketsu pave the way for it to settle into my core.
I turn my attention inward, expecting a clean diagram: lines and nodes, a neat grid as shown in the show. Instead, I find only sensation—the rush of heat through me, the ebb of it, the way my awareness rides on top without slipping underneath. The map refuses to resolve. 'Fine,' I think. 'If I can't see the pathways, I'll see whether it listens.'
I don't try to shove. I tilt. A suggestion rather than a command: this way, not that. The flow catches on the edge of that suggestion and, for a moment, bends toward my chest before sliding down along my back like it was before. It's a tiny change, but it's a success, and the ownership of that thought steadies me like a hand on a rail in the dark.
The line in my head waits, patient. I push at it, and a definition unfolds as neatly as a note card:
[Chakra Control — Lv 1] — You can consciously direct chakra in simple ways.
[Effectiveness Multiplier: 2% — only 2% of the chakra you expend produces the intended effect; the rest is lost through leakage or misalignment.
Enables basic nudging, pooling, and routing toward general regions (no precise point targeting). Slight improvement to steadiness under strain. Developmental constraints apply.]
Two fucking percent.
'So if I pour out a cup, I get a sip.' The math is insulting and honest. But a multiplier implies change. Numbers can climb. I take the win for now.
I shape a question rather than a command: show me myself. The dark replies with an indifferent pane of text.
[Name: Ren?]
[Class: - ]
[Chakra: 6]
[Physique: 0.6]
[Reflex: 0.4]
[Coordination: 0.3]
[Vision: 0.1]
[Mind: 21.4]
The decimals make me want to laugh, but there were several concerning things that were revealed to me. No level counter. No health bar. A few nudges of my intent reveal that there is no inventory waiting for me to grab things and break the rules of physics. Just thin numbers, a blank where a class might go, and my name wrapped in question marks. The 'Mind' value looks ridiculous, but it makes sense as I'm holding two lives in my head at once. Everything else is an honest report card from a body still being built.
'Great,' I think, a little sour and a little grateful. 'A stingy system with good accounting.' I ask for perks. Nothing. The Skills list shows only the one I've earned. That's it. No starter pack, no newbie bonuses. No secret menu. Nothing to comfort me.
The screen fades when I stop holding it with intent. I turn back to the current.
The voices continue—Japanese, rising and falling as they discussed and went about their way, entirely useless to me now as I can't learn it without context or help. A door opens. A door closes. A light pair of steps. A heavier pair. When palms press the wall that contains me, the flow outside swells, and some of that swell arrives through the wall as warmth. My body has been answering it all along.
The 2% multiplier reframes everything. Waste is the enemy. If most of what I push will slip away, then I can't afford to be sloppy. I start small. Slow. Thoughtful. I guide the warmth through a single path, a path that I can't see, but since it works, I'm assuming it is there: from chest to belly to the small of my back and around again. When I try to hurry, more goes wide as it scatters, like water thrown from a bucket in fast arcs rather than poured into a cup. I slow down. The little that actually works begins to work better.
Repeating the loop becomes a discipline I can wear. 'Count,' I tell myself. 'In, out. Once around. Twice.' Even the pretend breath the body practices seems to help—my chest flexes in its rehearsal, and the flow follows the sentiment of that motion. Should I be messing with things like this I don't know, I can't measure anything except how it feels from the inside, but from the inside it feels cleaner when I keep my mind calm and the pace even. It is better to do something than go insane thinking about where I am.
I drift back into myself. My past life unspools in small, ordinary threads: a campus bus with graffiti carved into the plastic seats; a cafeteria that always smelled like pizza and hand sanitizer; the dull wood of a library desk where I shelved books while podcasts muttered in my ear. I was a year or two into a degree that hadn't decided what it wanted to be. I worked enough hours to be tired, not enough to be comfortable. My friends were the kind you acquired by proximity and habit: the boy who could poach an egg in a microwave without it exploding; the girl who cut her hair in the dorm bathroom at two in the morning; the roommate who slept with an eye mask and headphones and still complained about noise. We were no one special. 'Be boring,' I used to tell myself, as if that were a spell against disaster. 'Boring gets you through life.'
'I don't think I will have much of that anymore...'
I don't know how I died. The blank is durable. When I probe it, my gut tightens and I pull back, not ready to learn a lesson I can't use. 'Maybe never,' I promise the silence that might be a memory. 'No need to poke a dead horse.'
I return to what I can change.
Guiding the flow into regions becomes easier when I stop trying to push and start trying to invite. If I picture my attention as a slope instead of a lever, the warmth follows more willingly. I let it gather behind my sternum, then let it slide down my back, then coax a little toward my right hand. The moment I strain, everything slips away. The moment I ease, a trickle listens.
Outside, the Japanese thins and fattens, too muffled to help or hurt. I keep not listening, not that I had a choice. The wall presses; I roll by a few degrees; the cord at my belly tugs; my small hands flex without a plan. Each time the flow arrives from beyond the wall, I meet it with a route rather than a dam: here, this way, slow down, fold in, nourish me. The tiny portion that actually does what I ask carries me through the motions smoother than I deserve to be carried.
I try something foolish just to know what happens. When the warmth swells, I aim it at four different places at once: the back of my neck, my chest, and both hands. The idea collapses immediately. There isn't enough working portion to spread so thin. Everything slips. The frustration is immediate and silly—like a toddler angry at gravity. 'Stop being clever,' I tell myself. 'Make one thing good.'
...
One thing becomes two things over an afternoon or a week—time here is a flat pond without ripples—and the two become three. Not at once. Never at once. One route at a time, neat, repeatable, calm. My reward is modest: my chest's pretend breath feels smoother; my small kicks don't land as wild; I don't thump an elbow against the wall when the space around me tightens.
Another pane opens in my head when I ask for it. The stats are stubborn, the numbers sticking where they were. The Skills panel stays the same. The definition of Chakra Control doesn't offer anything new beyond the multiplier. If I want to change, I will have to build it one lap at a time.
The outside world shifts in ways I now notice without needing them to mean anything: the door slams more often; the light steps come in pairs; a set of heavier steps stands near and then withdraws without a word. Each presence drapes the room in a slightly different silence, but all of the voices spill into no meaning before they reach me. I keep my eyes sealed and my attention unsealed. The more the world tries to be experienced through ears and skin, the more I choose to experience it through the current of chakra.
The cord that connects me to my mother feeds me a constant supply that I tug at. I guide what I have into places that make the wave of chakra easier to assimilate. Emotion keeps pace with the practice: a flicker of triumph when a gentle curve takes on the warmth and keeps it; a slap of humility when a route I thought I owned falls apart because I tensed and focused on something else. A quiet joy in discovering I can help even a tiny bit. 'Keep it small,' I tell myself when the joy tries to run ahead. 'Small stacks. Don't sprint.'
In the pauses, I let myself think about my old mother—the one whose voice I can't hear here—standing at a sink, humming a song, hands in suds. I open the memory like a window and close it before the air changes. It doesn't need to hurt to be real. I let it be a soft place my mind can go between laps.
The flow outside returns on a schedule, as the room knows, and I am learning. Warmth passes through the wall and into me in a pattern with steps I can predict now: here, here, here. My routes are ready for it. The portion that works is still small. It lands where I want it more often than it did yesterday, or so I think. The steady path is worth more than any grand burst.
I test the system again because I am human and repetition is part of faith. I don't say the names I tried before—"status," "system"—because the thing never cared for those. I form the want with intent and curiosity. The pane arrives.
[Chakra: 6]
[Physique: 0.6]
[Reflex: 0.4]
[Coordination: 0.3]
[Vision: 0.1]
[Mind: 21.4]
No change. The honesty keeps me from sulking. If this were a game, a progress bar would inch forward at the bottom of my vision like a patient insect. There is no bar here. There is only the repetition of what helps.
...
Another wave of chakra presses the wall. I slide with it. I let my head turn the way it wants, adding a breath of guidance to smooth the path. I let my shoulder aim toward where there is room instead of fighting the place where there isn't. My small heart wants to hurry. I slow my counting, 'One, two, three, four,' even if the numbers tie to nothing. The body listens because it likes being included.
Between practice, I drift on the memory of rain on hot pavement, the steam lifting as if the street were breathing. I drift on the memory of shelves of books and the quiet pride of putting order where there was none. I drift on the memory of a boy's laugh in a kitchen with too many mugs. None of it changes this place. All of it keeps me as a person sane.
...
When I push too much—too quick, too large, too greedy—the working part shrinks even more. The flow goes right past my suggestion and does what it was going to do. The punishment is simple: fatigue. A heaviness in my limbs. A sense that I have asked too much of something that was only willing to give a little. I stop. I wait. I gather again in the gentler way. The flow forgives because it was never angry.
...
At some point—I don't know when, only that a stillness follows the busier hours—the room around me holds the kind of quiet that collects itself before change. The larger heart around me beats with a deliberateness I haven't felt. The pressure of the chakra returns in longer arcs. I glide it in, and in doing so, I test a cleaner path down my back, across my hip, into my leg. The little that works makes the motion feel like a glide rather than a shove. It is enough to trigger the change.
The pane comes back without being called, a small tap on the back of my mind like a teacher acknowledging homework turned in on time:
..
[Chakra Control — Lv 1 Lv 2] — Effectiveness Multiplier: 4%.
Improved ability to direct and hold chakra in chosen regions; slightly smoother transitions between routes. Developmental constraints still apply.
...
Four percent.
'We take those,' I think, and the happiness is quiet and complete. Not because the number is big—it isn't—but because the number is a tilt in the slope I'm climbing. Two to four is not a victory parade; it's a step. Steps compound. I could feel it immediately, how the blurry mess of chakra that I was used to feeling is a little sharper. I can't sense the pathways and the tenketsu yet, but hopefully with the next level, they would help.
'Keep going,' I tell myself. 'Slow. Clean. Again.'
If there is anything like prayer, it is that: repetition married to care.
I float. I work. I wait for whatever comes next with the knowledge that, when it does, I will have one more step under me than I did before. Four percent is not a promise. It is a start. For now, it is enough.
...
AN- This chapter introduces the MC's thought process and some minor things. The fetus arc would end in the next chapter as I would do slightly larger timeskips and end with the birth and an introduction to the world.