Chapter 4: Beneath the Surface
A year can pass without anyone noticing, yet for Hajime it felt like a lifetime. He had grown an inch and a half, his voice cracked on certain words, and his chakra now pulsed through his coils with a steady, confident rhythm. Every dawn he left the village by the narrow fishermen's track, passed the mist-wet reeds, and slipped into the forest the way a bookmark slips between pages, quiet, precise, unseen.
At the foot of a weather-gnarled poplar he knelt, pressed both palms to the moss, and whispered a familiar command: "Earth Release: Subterranean Den Formation." The ground answered like a well-trained hound. Grass parted; soil softened and flowed aside, revealing a neat, angled opening no wider than a cellar door. Stone steps unfurled downward, each one smoothing and hardening as chakra laced through the grains. When he descended, the entrance sealed behind him with a dull thud, leaving nothing but leaves and dew-pearled moss where a moment earlier there had been an obvious gap.
The stairway twisted once and led into a rounded chamber large enough to hold half a dozen men. A single paper-shielded lamp guttered on a shelf, its flame fed by an air shaft he had drilled from a natural fissure overhead. He flicked through the hand seals again; the lamp brightened and, with a faint crackle, walls and ceiling shone, a thin glaze of chakra-hardened stone reflecting the light like polished slate.
Hajime's base was still modest, three rooms and a cramped alcove, but each corner testified to a year of obsession. The main hall held straw dummies riddled with thin earth spikes, terracotta tiles scorched from chakra-heated tools, and chalk diagrams of foot placement for the low-cost binds and slips he'd invented.
The scroll wall featured rough-hewn shelves stacked with merchant chapbooks, second-hand anatomy manuals, and his own journals, meticulous records of every success, every misfire, and every ounce of chakra spent. His medical nook was a pine table scrubbed clean, lined with jars of alcohol, bundles of mountain herbs, bone saws blackened to reduce glare, and a brand-new iron kettle in which he sterilized tools with boiling water and steady chakra heat.
Today he set a wicker basket on the table and unpacked his spoils from last week's market: a travel diary that mentioned pressure points along the meridian lines, a faded scroll of Sengoku-era folk cures, and a packet of coastal saltpeter he hoped to refine into antiseptic wash. All bought with coin earned from writing a flurry of springtime love letters. He grinned. Never underestimate romance as a revenue stream.
Hours rolled by in cloistered rhythm, copying diagrams, muttering theories, testing them.
He shaped finger-thin pillars from the floor, wove chakra through them, then pressed until they flexed like tough reed stems. Notes spilled across parchment: reduce diameter, lower chakra cost; add sand at core, more give, less shatter; possible application, shock-absorbing floor tiles for surgery table. When mental fatigue blurred the kanji on the page, he switched to body work: Foot-Grip Bind drills on a fresh dummy, then Earthen Blade Slip sprints across a dirt strip he kept deliberately uneven.
Muscle memory replaced ink, sweat replaced lamp-glow.
By mid-afternoon he staggered back up the stone stair. The exit peeled open, exhaled cool forest air, then sealed tight behind him as though no human hand had ever disturbed the earth. The village heat lay thick and drowsy. Hajime walked its single lane without cloak or pretense, he slept here every night, after all, nodding to fishermen patching nets and children chasing bottle caps. Outside Granny Kiko's porch he paused, lifting a wrapped bundle.
She answered his knock with the same gentle smile that had greeted him on the day he'd first arrived starved and confused. Lines had deepened around her eyes, yet they crinkled just as warmly.
"Child, you look taller," she said, voice teasing but proud.
"Taller and hungrier," he admitted, handing her the bundle. "Mountain ginseng and dried lingzhi. Brew them with chicken bones, it helps sore joints. And..." He produced a small jar of preserved apricots. "For
sweetness."
Kiko's hands lingered on the jar as if it were porcelain. "You spend too much on an old widow."
"I spend just enough," he replied. "Thank you, for last year, and the year before that."
She opened her mouth to protest but settled for patting his cheek. "Stay for supper?"
"Tomorrow," he promised. "I've writing commissions tonight."
He left her doorway lighter, the ache of gratitude scratching pleasantly at his ribs.
Night found him in his hut, the soft chatter of cicadas drifting through the shutters. While distant surf whispered against the shoreline, Hajime reread a section of the travel diary describing meridian sutures: "Strike a hidden gate at the wrist, and chakra falters for three heartbeats."
Three heartbeats could mean the difference between life and death, a window wide enough for a kunai, or for a single, perfect spike beneath an enemy's heel.
He dipped his brush, annotated margins, then reached instinctively for the mental door that led to the silent void.
In a blink he stood once more before the floating, silver-sealed vessel, unmoved, unaged, waiting. He felt no urge to summon it. Not yet. Instead, he offered the thing a nod, as if to an austere tutor.
"I'm building the classroom," he whispered. "One lesson at a time."
The geneseed pulsed once, slow and steady, like a heartbeat echoing deep underground.
Hajime opened his eyes in the candlelit hut, closed the travel diary, and stretched out on his mat. Dirt still clung to his fingernails, and chakra still tingled beneath his skin. Tomorrow he would return to the forest, open the hidden stair with a touch, and carve another meter of hallway.
There was space enough to grow, space beneath the surface where no one saw, where knowledge took root and hardened like stone. And he had a year's worth of proof that he could shape any earth he stood upon, so long as he carried vision, patience, and a spark of chakra in his veins.
He drifted to sleep smiling, and the ground outside lay undisturbed, smooth and innocent, hiding an empire of possibilities beneath its quiet skin.