After the old man vanished into the night, Naruto didn't move for a long time. He stood in the silence of the clearing, his ears ringing with the absence of the stranger's voice.
Finally, he knelt down and began to clean up the remains of the small fire. He moved with a methodical, almost mechanical precision. He buried the ashes deep in the damp earth and scattered the stones he had used for the fire pit.
It wasn't paranoia. It was just a habit—a survival mechanic he'd developed over years of being watched by eyes he couldn't see. Fires left traces, and in Konoha, traces attracted questions he wasn't ready to answer.
Far away, toward the jagged peaks of the mountains, a thin plume of smoke rose against the starlight. A forest fire had broken out somewhere higher up, likely a stray lightning strike or a training session gone wrong. The wind shifted, carrying the faint, sharp scent of burning pine.
For safety's sake, Naruto didn't linger. He didn't want to be caught near any kind of disturbance.
Instead of heading straight back to the orphanage, he detoured to a small, hidden clearing near his usual hiding spot. Night had settled in fully, and a heavy exhaustion tugged at his limbs, but his thoughts were moving too fast to sleep.
Chakra.
The old man's words echoed in his mind, repeating like a looped recording. Energy born from the body and the spirit. A balance. A cost.
Naruto sat down on the hard-packed dirt. He crossed his legs, mimicking the posture he'd seen the older academy students use during their basic breathing exercises. He closed his eyes and let the sounds of the night—the rustle of leaves, the distant hoot of an owl—fade into the background.
He didn't expect results. This wasn't an act of blind optimism; it was a baseline test. In any game, you had to check your inputs before you could expect an output.
He focused on his breathing. Slow in through the nose. Slower out through the mouth. He tried to visualize what the old man had described—that "energy" supposedly coiled inside every cell of his body.
At first, there was nothing but the sound of his own heartbeat.
Then—something.
It was a faint, flickering warmth deep in his abdomen, just below the navel. It was incredibly subtle, the kind of thing you'd miss if you were looking for a roar of power. It felt like a low-pressure zone, a slight tightening of a muscle he didn't know he had.
Naruto's eyes snapped open. The clearing was still dark, the moon still hanging high, but the world felt different.
That wasn't imagination. That was a tangible variable.
He closed his eyes and tried again. This time, he was more careful. He remembered the old man's warning about cost and restraint. No rushing. The warmth returned. It was slightly clearer this time, spreading outward in thin, precarious threads. He felt his heart rate increase—not from excitement, but from the sheer physical effort of holding that sensation in place.
Maintaining focus was like trying to balance a marble on a needle. It was harder than any physical chore he'd ever done. After several minutes of intense concentration, his grip slipped, and the sensation vanished instantly.
Naruto exhaled sharply and leaned back on his hands, looking up at the canopy of trees.
"I'm not a genius," he muttered, his voice sounding thin in the open air. "That took way too much work."
But the result was undeniable. It worked.
That was the only data point that mattered. The "Energy System" wasn't a myth; it was a mechanic he could interact with.
A sudden wave of hunger hit him, more intense than usual. His body was reminding him, very clearly, that spiritual and physical energy didn't come from nothing. You couldn't spend what you hadn't stored.
Naruto finished the last of the fish he'd saved, every bite feeling like a necessary reload. He washed it down with lukewarm water from a canteen he'd hidden under a nearby root.
By the time he finally snuck back into the orphanage, fatigue had set in properly. His bones felt heavy, and his mind felt like it was wrapped in wool.
He slipped through the front door, avoiding the third floorboard from the left—the one that creaked like a dying crow. He navigated the dark hallway by memory and collapsed onto his thin bed.
For a fleeting moment, he wondered if that warmth would come back on its own while he slept. It didn't.
That was fine. He didn't need it to be easy; he just needed it to be consistent. He fell asleep almost before his head hit the pillow.
Naruto woke before the first hint of dawn touched the horizon.
His body felt heavy, but stable. No pain. No lingering strain from the previous night's experiment. He logged that as another data point: Recovery rate is high.
He sat up and immediately repeated the breathing exercise.
This time, the warmth appeared much faster. It wasn't "stronger" in terms of volume, but it was more familiar. The "pathway" to that center in his gut felt less like a tangled thicket and more like a worn trail.
So repetition matters, he noted. Muscle memory applies to chakra too.
He didn't push it further. He stopped early, ate a small, scavenged breakfast of dry crackers, and went about his daily routine. He stayed in the shadows. He took the long routes. He watched the world move.
Days passed in a blur of observation.
Naruto practiced whenever he could find a moment of true solitude. He never went for long, and he never pushed himself to the point of exhaustion. The warmth became easier to locate, easier to guide through his limbs, though it still flickered out the moment his mind drifted.
Once, he tried to see how much "output" he could generate. He pushed too hard, trying to force the warmth to flood his entire body at once.
His vision blurred instantly. His knees buckled, hitting the dirt with a dull thud. He stopped immediately and lay flat on his back until the gray spots in his eyes faded away.
No shortcuts, he decided, his heart pounding a frantic rhythm. Not like that. The cost scales faster than the control.
The lesson stuck. In a game, if you over-leveled your spells without the mana to back them up, you just burned out.
At the Ninja Academy, nothing had changed. He was still the "dead last." He was still the kid everyone ignored or whispered about. The lessons on history and geography washed over him—most of it was just flavor text that he couldn't yet apply to his survival.
But some of it clicked. Specifically, the lectures on chakra control. The teachers talked about it like a chore, but Naruto heard the underlying logic.
Chakra control wasn't about force. It was about precision.
That thought stayed with him, simmering in the back of his mind.
One evening, after another quiet practice session in his room, Naruto felt something shift. It wasn't a physical sensation inside his body. It was something in his very awareness.
A pressure.
It wasn't emotional, and it wasn't physical. It was like the air in the room had suddenly become dense, packed with information he couldn't quite read.
Naruto froze, his hand halfway to the lamp.
Then, his vision blurred. It wasn't the blur of fatigue this time; it was an intrusion. For a split second, the world dimmed, the walls of his room receding into an abstract gray.
And then, he saw it.
Text.
It wasn't floating letters in the air or glowing neon signs. It was more subtle—like an understanding being pressed directly into his thoughts, as if he were remembering something he'd never actually learned.
[ Access Confirmed. ]
[ Initial Compensation Available: Novice Gift Pack. ]
Naruto's breath caught in his throat. He sat perfectly still, his heart racing. He didn't panic. Panic was a waste of processing power.
He waited.
The presence didn't push further. It didn't offer an explanation or a grand speech about destiny. It simply… existed. It waited for his input.
Naruto considered it for a long time. This wasn't chakra. This felt structured, external, and fundamentally logical.
"A system," he whispered into the dark.
The pressure shifted slightly, almost like a ripple of acknowledgment in a pond.
Information began to surface in his mind—not as commands, but as options. They were limited. Constrained by rules he didn't yet understand.
He understood instinctively that whatever this was, it wasn't limitless power. There were boundaries. There would be costs.
And that made it real. In Naruto's experience, anything that was truly powerful always had a price tag.
Naruto opened his eyes. The room returned to its normal, dingy state, but the "options" remained burned into his mind like an afterimage.
He didn't accept the "Gift Pack" yet. He didn't click "Yes."
Instead, he asked the only question that mattered to someone who had spent his whole life at the bottom of the food chain.
"What do you do?"
No voice answered him.
But the options remained, steady and unwavering.
Naruto lay back on his bed, staring at the familiar cracks in the ceiling. He felt the weight of the moment.
If this was a trap set by some hidden enemy, rushing in would be fatal. If it was an advantage—a literal "cheat code" for the world—then patience and strategy would make it ten times more valuable.
Either way, acting on impulse was a mistake he couldn't afford.
He closed his eyes, forcing his breathing to remain steady.
"Not tonight," he murmured.
The system—the presence, the interface, whatever it was—didn't vanish. It didn't grow impatient. It simply waited.
And so did Naruto. He had survived this long by being careful. He could wait one more night to see if the world was truly about to change.