Operation: Ink Drop - Naruto: Akira’s Story

"Akira-san, good to see you in one piece. So much has happened these last few days." Oochuki Ryusen greeted me with a warm smile from behind his shop counter.

"Yeah, and all because of one man." I shook my head as I walked up.

"Right, damn Danzo. How does someone like that even get born?" The shopkeeper grimaced, his hands tightening on the counter.

Funny thing is, the daimyo only read about a third of what I wrote in the 'Confession and Repentance of Danzo's Subordinate.' As one great orator once said - "The bigger the lie, the more eagerly the crowd believes it." Who really knows what Danzo was up to? Honestly, I didn't care much. My goal was simple - make the ruler as furious with him as possible.

I've never lacked for imagination, so all it took was a few grains of truth mixed into the muddy waters I stirred up, and soon enough, Danzo was in the crosshairs. A monstrous lie and a drop of truth - the perfect recipe for swaying public opinion. And if that lie scared my target, all the better. The only real challenge was getting my words delivered.

The Fire Lord isn't exactly the kind of neighbor you can just slip a letter under the door for. So, my first target was Torio-san. As the daimyo's direct representative in Konoha, he had to have a line straight to the top. He was the eyes and mouth of the capital, and a guy like that never walked around without a couple of ANBU for security. I couldn't just stroll up to him at the administration building either - anonymity was key to my plan, and not even a henge would help with all those shinobi on guard.

The solution turned out to be laughably simple. If I couldn't approach him directly, I'd just pass the letter through an admin official - they all interacted with Torio-san anyway. Using my connections with Homuri? No thanks, he's a busy man, about to retire, and I didn't want to cause trouble for an old friend. Besides, there are plenty of other officials, even if they're lower on the ladder. And getting a civilian clerk to deliver a letter is child's play: make a clone, have it use henge, hand over the letter and a hefty bag of "gold."

I didn't want to rely on just Torio, since anything could happen. That's where Kiyomi came in.

You can usually tell where someone's from by their skin tone. Pale? Probably from the Land of Water, Snow, Iron, or maybe a noble or a clan. A healthy tan meant Wind Country, while Earth Country folks had a yellowish tint and more Asian features. The Lightning Country was a mix of Asian and Black. And the Fire Country? They looked like Europeans with a Japanese parent - fair, but not pale, with a healthy, slightly rosy complexion.

From the first meeting, I pegged Kiyomi as a local. No doubt she was a shinobi - too fit, ate way too much. I checked with Ayumi if she'd ever seen Kiyomi before, and she hadn't. Any shinobi who's been in the village for twenty years has seen every colleague's face at least once, except maybe Root.

Sure, it's hard to remember two thousand faces, but shinobi are trained for it, so even if Ayumi had glimpsed Kiyomi, she'd have remembered. Maybe Kiyomi was from the garrison - not all Konoha shinobi live in the village, half are stationed elsewhere to guard the Fire Country's borders. Still, she didn't seem like a garrison type, and even if she was, why fake her emotions so much?

Sure, she could fool the locals, but as someone raised on movies where acting is an art, I wanted to say, "I don't buy it." And every time I tried to throw her off, her act slipped for a moment. Kiyomi was a shinobi, probably local, faking her emotions and trying to get close to me, like she was probing for info about who I was. When someone tries to get in my head, I start poking around in theirs.

I'd steer the conversation to the weather, point out something in the surroundings, then recall a story based on that, all while watching her reactions. The content didn't matter - just keep talking and sprinkle in key words.

The human mind is funny - it always latches onto things with associative links. Like, a regular guy rides the bus to work every day, overhearing the usual chatter about friends, politics, rising prices - nothing that grabs his attention. But if some old lady, for whatever reason riding the bus at 6 a.m., says his name, his workplace, or his favorite food, his attention snaps to her for a few seconds.

So, while I rambled on about things a shinobi wouldn't care about, I'd drop in key words that might mean something to Kiyomi if she had any connection. The biggest reaction came when I mentioned "daimyo," "the capital," and famous Fire Country nobles. I also threw in "ANBU" just in case, and soon I had a clear picture.

Kiyomi was somehow tied to the nobility. I didn't know why a noble would be interested in me, but I decided to use it as another channel to get a letter to the daimyo. Of course, I could be wrong and the letter might end up in the wrong hands, but that wasn't a big deal - the main thing was to keep it away from Danzo, or at least delay it. I didn't stop at Torio and the suspicious Kiyomi - I also sent a letter straight to the capital via the postal service, using a henge and a middleman.

That's why I couldn't help but smile listening to the daimyo's speech at Danzo's execution. The words and phrases he used were straight from the letter I'd mailed. Turns out, Konoha's postal service is more reliable than the daimyo's own relatives. I'd written those three letters in different handwriting and with different content, to make it look like several of Danzo's subordinates were ratting him out for the daimyo's glory.

Once again, I was reminded that henge - the transformation jutsu - is the best technique for a shinobi, especially when combined with shadow clones. If a clone gets caught using henge, it can just dispel itself and no one will know who it was. Though, if you're dealing with the Hyuga, I wouldn't be so sure, so I sent a warning letter to them and the other clan heads through a random go-between. The clans, spooked by how quickly the Uchiha fell in this whole mess, gave in to herd instinct and all piled on Danzo.

"See you around, Akira-san."

After getting the promised written reply from the conglomerate, I headed home.

I was really hoping they'd set up a meeting and invite me to the capital, but to my surprise, the representative from the Land of Snow wanted to come meet me in person - and according to the date, he'd be arriving in Konoha in just two days.

The good news didn't stop there - my clones had finished the second stage of mastering the Rasengan.

The first stage improved my control over chakra outside my body.

After finishing the second, I learned to quickly ramp up the amount of chakra I could channel.

The third stage was about combining the first two - keeping all that chakra spinning in one spot.

Right now, I could form a Rasengan, but it only had enough punch to scratch tree bark. If you can't hold the chakra together and focus the spinning power in one place, you can't use the technique's full potential.

Given the number of days and the clones I used for the first two stages, I'd already spent 240 hours on Rasengan. Without clones, I'd have had to train 17 hours a day for two weeks to get this far.

If I remember right, Naruto also mastered the first two stages in two weeks, and that was without clones - he just trained from morning till night and used his other hand as a crutch to control the chakra flow… but whatever.

All in all, I've settled into this world. I don't have to worry much about money, my reputation's solid, and there aren't any Root agents lurking under my window. That means it's time to get to work and do what every isekai protagonist should - strive for power!

A shinobi's strength is measured by a lot of things: physical power, speed, reflexes, chakra reserves, chakra density, control, jutsu arsenal, and experience.

If you max out all those stats, you're basically a powerhouse. Maybe even close to invincible.

As for me… if I'm being honest, I'm nowhere near strong or invincible. My only bragging point is chakra density. My physical strength is at genin level, speed too, reflexes - who knows, but I definitely couldn't block a kunai thrown at the back of my head. Chakra reserves are at chunin level, experience is laughable, and my jutsu arsenal… yeah, I'm pretty pathetic.

But I'm not giving up. Guy's training program should help close the gap in strength and speed.

Plus, those workouts will boost my chakra reserves - the stronger your body, the more Yang energy you have, and that's half of what makes up chakra.

Improving reflexes and control - that's what clones are for. But if I want to catch up to the big shots fast, four clones won't cut it. Four hundred would. With that many, I could take on any Kage in a year - or turn myself into a vegetable just as fast.

If you ignore the mental strain of that many clones, there's still the question of chakra - how much would it take to make them? A ton. An insane amount. And what all the strongest shinobi in the Fourth Great War had in common was a massive chakra pool. I'm not trying to sell myself short - maybe I'll reach Kage-level chakra, but not until I'm thirty or forty.

In the Naruto world, there are plenty of ways to artificially boost your chakra. There's the meteorite from the Hidden Star Village, the Hero Water from the Hidden Waterfall, but the most effective is sealing a tailed beast inside you. Pros: huge chakra reserves and density. Cons: your lifespan drops, you have to get along with or suppress the beast, people will hunt you, and it's way too easy to have the beast ripped out - which usually means death.

The only survivors I know of after losing a tailed beast are Kushina and Gaara. Gaara was saved by some sacrificial jutsu, and Kushina… who knows how, but now she's basically disabled, unable to use anything above C-rank jutsu.

So for me, the best way to boost chakra is to combine medical ninjutsu and fuinjutsu.

I'm sure, if you can seal a giant tailed beast inside yourself with fuinjutsu, there's got to be a way to solve the low chakra problem.

Chakra's a tricky thing. I used to think of it as an extra battery in your body, but it's not quite like that. Simply put, chakra is a person's fuel. If a car runs out of gas, it just stops until you fill it up. But a person isn't a car. If you run out of chakra completely, say hello to the Shinigami. Chakra is a form of life energy, a mix of spiritual (Yin) and physical (Yang) energy. So if I want to stay alive, I have to watch both my body and my chakra levels. When my reserves have nearly hit zero and I've started feeling all over the place, I know that's a bad sign. Turns out, if I kept burning chakra in that state, I'd probably end up in a coma or dead, depending on how much was left.

I learned all this from Granny Fujiko, who I met at the Konoha cemetery during the Uchiha clan funerals.

Most of the people at those funerals weren't even Uchiha - the dead had friends and comrades outside the clan too.

I went with Kushina and Naruko, who later split off to pay their respects to Fugaku's family.

My plan was just to show up and not draw attention, but that backfired. The day was supposed to be sunny and hot, but in true dramatic fashion, it suddenly started raining. I figured I'd have plenty of time to say a word to Mikoto, Sasuke, and Itachi, and the rest of the Uchiha were strangers, so I stood off to the side, away from the crowd, under an umbrella.

For some reason, that made me stand out even more. I kept catching people glancing my way. By the end of the funeral, Fujiko - a slightly hunched, gray-haired grandma of about sixty - came over. She wanted to know who the heck I was and what I was doing there, and then shamelessly asked me to walk her to the Uchiha district, making me carry her groceries on the way.

To our mutual surprise, we both learned something new about life and death. We found plenty to talk about. Because of the situation in the Uchiha clan, the guards weren't letting outsiders in, and no one was making an exception for me. But Granny Fujiko, with just a few words, completely shut down two old men and two young guys who barely had peach fuzz. So I ended up carrying her bags all the way to her house.

She was surprised to hear I had a house in the district too, though not much. As thanks, she treated me to tea and some sweet pastries, and our conversation continued.

"Of course not, you fool. If shinobi train themselves to exhaustion just to boost their chakra, they'll meet their ancestors before they reach their goal." Granny Fujiko didn't seem too broken up about her clanmates' deaths. She'd lived through three shinobi wars and buried her own children and grandchildren long ago. Sure, she was sad about losing distant relatives - she was still human - but not enough to cry or grieve deeply.

That's how I learned some details about what really happened - like the true cause of Fugaku's death, which raised even more questions about the risks of pushing your chakra to the edge. The previous Uchiha head didn't just collapse from exhaustion - he went out in the most dramatic way possible. At the end of his battle with the clan's "traitor," Fugaku unleashed a self-destructive jutsu, pouring every last bit of his chakra into a final, devastating attack. He took Shisui with him.

Who that traitor was, and why, no one told me, but from the rumors around the village, I figured it was Shisui, and obviously, Danzo had a hand in it.

# Chapter 54 Operation: Ink Drop