Shisui questioned the efficiency of his new routine regularly, but after a few months of gritting his teeth, it surprised him as he noticed the minor changes for the very first time.
He was currently still bad at measuring and even consciously noticing his bloodlust, which is why he had not noticed it decreasing. He also did not want to keep too close of an eye on it as he did not want the disparaging results to affect his motivation. What he could interpret though was that less people went out of their way to be as far away from him as possible, as long as he wore casual clothing and did not appear in full ninja outfit.
Anyone would hold respectful distance to any ninja they came across due to the sole reason that they could kill most civilians with less effort than most household chores required. Even the gap between genin and non combatants were huge, a chasm which could only marginally be closed with skill, though only the samurai of the land of iron were known to consistently produce people who could take on a genin.
Their stronger samurais also used chakra so the playing field evened out or even tipped slightly in favor of the samurais due to their discipline, which some ninjas were lacking as strong people had a lot of leeway in their manners.
Hell, most would think of Konoha's current hokage that he was a stupidly smiling buffoon with near to no skill. But no one did as he had proved time and time again that he was a very skilled specimen of shinobi. Very rare too, as very few had an affinity for both seals and space jutsu, which he masterfully combined to frightening effect and even more ridiculous results.
He single handedly stopped the last war, slaughtering a whole army on his very own in record time, though such a record had not existed previously. I would hazard a guess that he did not even want to kill anyone on this battlefield as most of his sunny disposition was not only a facade he kept up to fool his enemies.
But he probably calculated that his stunt could end the war and save thousand of lives for his own village, civilians and even the other villages. In the long run, his decision had probably single handedly saved tens of thousands of people, even if it was a hard decision to make.
Regret was something anyone who took part in the part was intimately aware of as most of the shinobi were not the stone hearted killers most were led to believe. They were aware that every killed enemy also had family, friends, kids, wives, husbands and the most important thing in any war: Comrades.
Most of Shisui's comrades were dead. Not many genin left the war alive and most others lost some part of themselves, including limbs, organs and in the worst cases their minds and rationality.
There were a few who came back from their respective assignements, but Shisui had long since lost contact with them. Both sides did not put any effort into keeping up communications as all of them had their own demons to overcome which they did not want to burden others with.
On a few of Shisui's walks he saw some of them, but each time he did not greet them in any way. He was afraid of their reaction, of his perceived intention to come at the wrong time or place or even to bring back bad memories which they had at least somewhat conquered already.
He could see it in their eyes and faces that they had the same fear and insecurities as himself, though that did not change his hesitation in communicating with them. It instead spurned him on to improve his pokerface and weirdly his acting skills. They were an important part of the academy curriculum but fell on the way side due to the war.
Se he implemented a kind of training during his relaxing time. He tried to keep it in check, but he ended up practicing how to act normal, like any other civilian so that they would not even realize that he was a shinobi.
For that he needed to change his whole demeanor, the way he walked, moved, talked, listened and more. It went against most his his instincts, but he slowly got better at it and with that, the results of his relaxation got better, his anxiety nearly vanished and he no longer cared for his insecurities.
This resulted in one important fact which was rare in this time and age. He started writing letters to anyone he knew from the past, letting them be delivered as a genin mission. He also researched who of his acquaintances were still alive. Many even answered, some wanting nothing to do with him, others telling him that they were not ready yet or did not know if they would ever be and more. Most of these had given up the live of shinobi after varying amounts of time during and after the war, most of them not able to come to terms with the harsh reality of it all.
It sounded silly, but it helped both his guilty conscience and his apprehension of what over people thought about him. Some thought that he was a monster and they were allowed to think that, but others also had praises for him, thanking him for saving their live or someone else they knew and more. While he did not search for closer contact with most of them, he did continue to periodically write them, so much even that he had a regular genin who delivered his mail as a side job due to financial issues.
He slowly got friendly with that genin too, maybe even enough to tentatively call him a friend. His only friend. A sad fact was that he was a loner through and through with many not even trying to understand what he went through at his tender age and why he was as he was.
He was one of the youngest ones to participate in this war, at least of the surviving ones, as Shisui had excelled in the academy, skipping multiple years. He did not regret that hast and ill thought of decision though, as he could save many peoples live due to his discomfort. A small consolation, but a consolation nonetheless. And it was the sad truth that his potential bloomed on those battlefields and were the only reason behind his current powers and proficiencies.
Most of those were in killing, but it was the bread and butter of the job he had once chosen with the goal to excel at it, maybe even reaching the height of his ancestors. It was a childish dream, long since lost to the grotesque scenes of an unnecessary war, but his determination and fire for his calling burned ever brighter.
In the future he hoped to once again find comrades, friends and maybe even start a family himself, though the life expectancy in his line of work was abysmal. Due to these hopes and believes he started helping his courier train.
At the start it were small advices on what books to read, what jutsu or weapon to learn and more, mostly to complement his shaky foundation as he was not the best graduate by a far shot. While his dialog partner did not transform into a genius or even got only marginally smarter, his questions slowly grew more precise while his power rose steadily, but at a snails pace. He still started taking more expansive and demanding mission, mostly focusing on courier ones, through which his money problems started lessening until he could finally sustain himself more reliably.
Due to this, he stopped taking the lowest ranked missions, though he did keep up the ones for Shisui if he was not assigned to another mission. This was actually quite rare, as Shisui's correspondence was neither often nor time sensitive, so Shisui choose to just wait for him to return.
It was one of the few things which were currently useless to him, but whereas others felt stifling, this hobby of his just felt … right. It was not about returns, repayment or anything similar and Shisui's advices for this near stranger just came from the spark of kindness in his heart which was not yet extinguished, slowly unraveling itself from the protected state the war had forced upon it.
In a war, kindness was a double edged sword. It could kill you now or in the future or archive the total opposite, saving your life at some point. But how do you differentiate between enemies, potential enemies, allies, comrades and friends?
Allies, comrades and friends could be confirmed through behavioral patterns, codes and more. This was not foolproof either, but Konoha did try its best to implement comprehensive strategies for such scenarios.
The others though were an arbitrary decision. It was a gamble, with many lives on the line. A grieving widow could kill you as easily as another shinobi, a kid could be plastered in explosion talismans or another shinobi could hide inside the body of another human being.
Obviously, there were techniques to counter those, sensors to rely on, but it was a constantly evolving aspect of warfare. At the most basic level on ninjutsu there was already one through which you could disguise yourself as virtually anyone.
Then there was surgery, physical camouflage of some kind or the extremely simple stress situation. There were so many possible routes to fool an enemy into trusting you and Shisui had more than once played a frightened young boy, only to backstab his capturers/saviors without a second though.
It was one of the things ninjas should not just be good but best at, though most villages no longer focused on the stealth and secrecy aspect of it all. They were desperate for string fighting forces and a lot of weaker canon fodder and only a rare few specialized in that esoteric field.
These specialist also had their special methods, which meant that not a single on of them was identical, which made it hard to reliable identify such experts. Naturally, there were equally specialized people to identify such personal, but they had it normally harder to adapt to others breakthroughs, as you would not know of it until you caught them red handed, which could be very hard.
Konoha, through rigorous training and effort from Danzo Shimura, had their very own espionage unit which focused on both aspects of it. Jiraiya as one of the three legendary sannin was one if not the only reason that this could be realized in this short of a timeframe as he had constantly improved his art form to spy, though it was not public knowledge that he also used it to stalk woman for most of his best seller books.
He graciously donated a full compendium of all his skills for this purpose, though most of it needed to be edited to be more user friendly or most would be scandalized by his description for some things, as he had apparently once wrote it as a draft for one of his books, though it was stopped by the previous hokage, his master, as it would be of unimaginable value to all enemy villages as some of those techniques were at the level of S-Rank, though he had not yet realized a single on of those at that point in time.
He was one of the shinobi who had a brilliantly bright mind but was plagued by a lot of baggage of his past and due to this also had a lot of weird quirks. One of them was an abysmal naming sense, whereas the other one was that he would write dissertations while drunk, before forgetting and losing them in his chaotic try of a sorting system for all his „works".
Through this new starting friendship Shisui had re-realized that kindness (and trust) was something he desperately needed to relearn, though he was still very shy and careful about giving it.