One Week Later
Standing in the power rack—a training cage with safety bars to catch the barbell if the athlete fails a lift or just collapses—I was pulling some serious weight.
"Light weight, baby! Light weight!" Roen cheered, while what felt like five tons of steel rested on my back.
The seals on the machine were slowly drawing on my energy to bind my body and give that kind of resistance. In reality, I only had two hundred kilos on my shoulders.
My body hummed from the strain and the energy coursing through it. If not for chakra enhancement, my body wouldn't have been able to lift even a hundredth of that load.
"Every rep is a step towards greatness. Come on, lift that iron!"
My massive chakra reserves, combined with my ability as a jinchuriki to regenerate quickly, let me do terrible things to myself. And without any real harm to my health. All for the sake of progress.
At first, I started with the seals turned off completely, like most shinobi do. Ninja, with very few exceptions, are focused on speed. They can't lift one or two hundred kilos, yet with their legs, in motion, they can put out force equivalent to thousands, even tens of thousands of men.
Jumps of nearly a hundred meters are no joke.
My work with these kinds of weights is only possible thanks to my strong Yang nature, an immense talent for energy control, and, to some extent, my previous experience with managing energy.
That's just how humanity here developed—everything into speed. Everything into leg work. And, sure, strengthening the body so it can withstand the loads from movement… but that doesn't help much with pure arm strength.
Without my noticing, my mind drifted into memories. But my body didn't stop working like crazy.
On the first day, my training was conducted with a whole dozen medical-nin who came in a bit later. After hooking me up with wires, they were practically drooling over the numbers for my regeneration and other aspects of my body's adaptability. To be fair, so was I. Those stats turned out to be, like, many times better than a cockroach's.
With every set, I got better at controlling chakra to enhance my body. As a result, on the very first day, my body pulled a couple of tons.
After that, they had to urgently summon the fuin master who'd made the training equipment, because my physical training sensei predicted that the seals, which had been "made with a huge safety margin" for a three‑ton load, would soon not be enough.
My training was focused on developing explosive power first and endurance second. Naturally, they drew up a program built to pump exactly those stats.
Getting back to my body's toughness and regeneration—those traits were used to the fullest.
Turned out that after each training session, I didn't need a long rest. On the contrary, if I had constant access to food, I could handle as many as three sessions a day.
For reference, only very genetically gifted shinobi can repeat that, and even then, not without steroids.
But the limits of my body were still eventually found. Only when some enterprising doctors gave me some interesting little pills and injected me with some no less interesting drugs. Because of that, on the fifth day of training, I was able to push a monstrous load—around eighty to ninety percent of my max—for eighteen hours straight. And what's even crazier—I could have kept going; my body was practically bursting with energy.
Except that by the end of that time, my heart and other organs started to slowly lose efficiency, so the doctors, quite reasonably—despite the rush from the drugs that had me in their grip and my stubborn resistance—used some jutsu to knock my ass out.
The experiment was fun. The next day was almost normal.
I'd been expecting insane muscle soreness, but nope, by morning my body had recovered even from that. In just four hours, actually, since they'd prudently hooked me up to parenteral nutrition—IV drips with all the necessary elements—so I had plenty of resources for recovery.
Only a slight fatigue throughout the morning reminded me that it probably wasn't the best idea to do that. Although, in principle, it was doable. Even without constant doctor oversight—my body turned out to be, again, very tough and much more capable of drawing resources for itself from the chakra it produced. So I didn't need any drugs just to develop normally.
At least, that was the conclusion the doctors came to after their diagnostics. And they shut down the whole "interesting drugs" operation when they calculated the chances of deformed physical development—the odds were pretty low, but, as I found out, the Hokage had forbidden them from doing anything that could harm me.
Yeah… Remembering that feeling of relentless drive and the urge to move non‑stop, I almost regret that I can't keep doing it. On the other hand, the old man's concern warms me—it's kind of touching.
By the end of the week, the doctors and Toraki‑sensei had finished building my initial training program, eventually cutting it down to two sessions a day, once every three days.
That way my development wouldn't slow down too much, but I'd free up a lot of time for other things. With certain drugs, they could have cut the number of workouts even more, but that was overkill. I still needed time to practice the body‑enhancement technique, to feel and shape chakra inside my body better, and so on. Time in the gym is considered one of the best situations for that.
The training program wasn't aimed at big muscle hypertrophy, meaning a huge increase in size. So I was never going to get anywhere near as massive as Roen.
Toraki‑sensei, by the way, had once wanted to be a shinobi. But he didn't get lucky in the genetic lottery, and for all his external power, he's only as strong as a solid Chunin. Which is actually impressive, considering people with his kind of talent usually don't become ninja at all. But by dedicating his whole life to physical development, he pulled off almost a miracle through sheer effort. Though in terms of real shinobi combat, he's not that strong—his main skill is developing and training others, so even a combat‑type genin could probably beat him. And that's despite the fact that, on paper, Roen holds the rank of senior jounin because of his achievements. He gets a huge salary, often travels around the country to all sorts of scientific conferences, and all that.
But that doesn't diminish what he's accomplished. Just walking into a room, this guy with insane determination makes your inner fire flare up and pushes you to keep going, to reach no less greatness.
Usually shinobi, to my surprise, don't hit the gym on a regular basis. The average ninja gets enough leg and full‑body training from sparring alone. Those loads, in principle, give results not much worse than if they did go to the gym. But for the sake of five, maybe ten or fifteen percent more speed, almost no one wants to pour in a ton of extra time on top of everything else. That's why the average ninja looks pretty lean, without any obvious muscles.
But the minority that does go thinks differently. You could say they're a separate breed that believes every drop of strength might be what keeps you from dying. Throwing away a chance to protect your life, when you could just trade a few hours a week for hard work instead of some random bullshit—that's dumber than dying way earlier.
With my genes, the difference wouldn't be just a few dozen percent. In one case, I'd reach the level of an average Kage—with almost no training. In the other, the level of a God of Shinobi, like the First, who eats those same Kage for breakfast, if I worked flat‑out. That's… assuming I do any training at all. But the gap is so massive that the miser in me, the part that's supposed to be hoarding money, wraps its cold little paws around my neck every time I even think about ditching all this and burying my talent.
Not that those thoughts showed up often, and with Toraki‑sensei's support they were easily crushed by the sense of inevitable progress. Compared to Roen, who'd busted his ass his whole life to tear a few tons off the ground, I'd already lifted more thanks to better genetics and a much greater talent for energy control.
They also told me about how much higher I could aim. There was—and still is somewhere, wandering around and drinking herself stupid—the Third's student. Tsunade, her name was. She's got a huge talent for energy control, and one of her main specializations is body enhancement. She got so good at it that, despite looking like a pretty fragile woman, she can lift several times more than I can right now. And what's even more important—she can land blows a whole order or two of magnitude stronger than what you'd expect from those raw strength numbers. But that's thanks to a technique that releases a burst of chakra right at the moment of impact.
She's the one I wanted to surpass. No idea when that'll happen. But it's a damn good goal.
"Excellent! Next up on the plan: high‑speed jump rope."
Racking the barbell, I followed my sensei.
My body was pleasantly buzzing from the load, and only a slight shortness of breath reminded me I'd been working with something heavy.
Even in just a week, my muscles had grown a fair bit, and their outlines were already clearly visible under my skin. It also felt like someone had shoved a crowbar down my spine from all the back training, and my posture had become perfect. The shape from my ghostly past life was slowly returning.
"You're performing the technique perfectly," Roen said. "Soon you'll be able to train without me."
I just nodded in response, focused on my tasks. Picking up a jump rope with a very tough cable and throwing a weighted vest onto my torso so I'd land faster and put more load on my body, I still decided to clarify:
"Are we going to be seeing each other a lot less?"
A bit of sadness slipped into my voice. In a pretty short time, I'd gotten used to his constant hype‑up.
"Not as rarely as you might think." With the same inspiring smile, he winked and struck a bodybuilder pose. "I don't have that much free time, and it's not rational to spend it on something that doesn't need it. Soon I'll be heading to the capital, where the competition for the title of Rengoku no Taiko will be held!"
I froze at his words and almost dropped the jump rope.
"Drum of Hell? So what exactly are you going to be competing in there, sensei?"
I was genuinely curious; the name itself didn't tell me much. Although from the way he was posing, I had my suspicions.
He stopped showing off his muscles and, as if stating the obvious, said:
"A competition for the greatest muscle mass, symmetry, proportions, and definition in the Land of Fire."
"Uh, yeah, fitting name. What was I even thinking…"
Sometimes you run into some really colorful locals who give things totally impractical names.
"Good luck, sensei. I figure you'll wipe the floor with everybody there."
"Thank you!"
After that, we continued the workout.
Soon Roen left, once my routine had more or less settled. But literally a few days later, I ran out of basic material on the shinobi arts. It was time to choose some specializations and dive into them.
Spreading myself thin over everything was a dumb move that would just leave me knowing a lot of stuff on the surface, and any narrow specialist would outclass me. So, after what seemed to me a pretty sane assessment of the available fields, I started studying medicine and fuin. For now in a general sense—later I hoped to focus on working with genes to overcome the body's limits.
My motivation was the same as ever—I need to become very strong, stronger than any human who has ever existed. The Otsutsuki threat is way too big, even if I'm still far from reaching my own limits. But those limits exist, and they need to be broken. How—that's not clear yet, but that's a problem for future me.
Besides that, though, I think I was starting to genuinely enjoy studying anything related to chakra more and more. Over time, the purely rational motive—this is something you have to do: train, grow—started picking up emotional color, turning into real interest.
For medical ninjutsu, I was enrolled as a student at the hospital. Unfortunately, the Hokage didn't manage to find some legendary sensei, but there were plenty of good and even very good specialists in the hospital. I'd just be making the rounds between them, studying the pile of information that pretty much everyone there knew at a decent level: healing wounds and diseases with chakra, and for that, anatomy and pharmacology.
First thing they did was give me access to a huge library.
Actually, as I'd later realize, it wasn't that huge. Here, in science, a lot of things are tied to how chakra works, not just how the body works. Healing, for example, doesn't require a super deep understanding of biosciences—just a reasonably deep grasp of anatomy and some chakra theory.
Or rather, not deep by the standards of the sciences from my previous world. No doubt, especially thanks to peacetime, medicine here had advanced quite a bit. But as I dug through the scrolls, I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that some things here, considered recent discoveries for real specialists, were just basic common knowledge in my past world—stuff from high school biology textbooks.
Not that it's surprising. Different world, different development path.
Medicine, even at the very beginning, wasn't some useless discipline for me. Even if, with the Mystical Palm Technique—which I still had to master—I couldn't heal other people. Not unless I learned to properly filter my chakra from the aggressive properties of the bijuu's energy. But I could heal—very effectively—myself. Just by speeding up training progress. Getting there, though, would take a lot of practice.
The Mystical Palm Technique is basic for medical‑nin. But it's also a pretty complex A‑rank jutsu. It's about pouring energy into someone's body—or your own—and kind of projecting through it the command, "Move, damn you!", making the body's internal mechanisms kick regeneration into high gear. The main thing with this technique is that you need really fine control: enough chakra so it actually does something, but not so much that you accidentally kill the patient.
After they drilled me on the basic theory, they let me practice on a nice big fish.
Knowing who I was, the medic who brought it in had already buried the poor thing with his eyes.
He was right.
When I pushed what felt to me like the tiniest bit of chakra into the fish, it instantly exploded into bloody mince.
Washing myself off, then helping clean the room, was not exactly pleasant.
Usually, by the way, from an excess of chakra, organisms go into something like suspended animation. Only with high affinity do weird things start happening. For some people, the fish might, for example, catch fire. Or swell up from increased water content. Or start getting covered in cuts, like it'd run through solid blades of wind. In my case, because of my wind affinity, something like that last one happened. Just a lot stronger than expected… Maybe the Fox's chakra got mixed in there too.
On the second attempt, to the surprise of the same doctor—who, for some reason, had called over a friend and put a weak barrier around me—and thanks to my insane concentration, the fish just started twitching, getting covered in cuts, and giving off the smell of scorched flesh. But it stayed… in one piece.
After that, though, progress went a lot slower. It took me a full three weeks to get to the point where the fish would just thrash from pain, sometimes "leak" from internal bleeding, but at the same time heal up at an accelerated rate.
At first, I felt sorry for the fish. Even though, in this life, I've personally eaten more than a few kilos of fish. But feeling a living thing's suffering under your hands and eating that same thing with tasty spices are two completely different experiences.
By the end of that period, though, I think I'd cooled off a lot.
Training became routine, and the cooling bodies under my hands became something ordinary. Even if they weren't human.
I've still got about that much practice ahead of me before I can safely start working on my favorite patient—myself.
Besides the more or less healing techniques, I studied pharmacology: creating different kinds of medicines, stimulants, poisons, and the like. For that, I ran massive tomes through my brain; in three weeks I must've read a kilometer of scrolls. To my surprise, the knowledge sank in easily. At some point I just realized my mind had gotten used to huge workloads, to constant analysis, and my memory stat had shot way up. Normal people can't just read a page once and, a month later, repeat it almost word for word, right? Usually they can't. But in some shinobi clans, even among kids, that's normal. Just not in the clan I belong to.
From what I found out, people around me chalk it up to a lucky combo of genes. I figure it's also the result of the huge strain on my brain from having an adult mind since birth. And that load has only gone up over time. It's entirely possible both explanations are right, plus some third, fourth, whatever else that nobody even suspects.
For pharmacology, they taught me a weird and not very effective—without a ton of practice—method for determining the properties of plants and some other materials, like animal parts and minerals, by taste and smell, for later use in medical ninjutsu. The idea was that if a shinobi got lost in some unknown area, somewhere really, really far away, without a local bestiary, he could still whip up primitive medicine after first figuring out what the stuff around him actually was.
The catalogs of known plants were huge; I studied them, of course. But you can always stumble on something new.
By the way, among non‑shinobi, figuring out properties by smell and taste is super inaccurate. And to learn how to boost my basic senses with chakra to a decent level, I had to spend a lot of time. And eat several kilos of random herbs along the way.
Some flowers taste pretty damn awful. But power demands sacrifice…
In parallel, I was studying fuinjutsu. Can't say it was easier, but it was definitely more monotonous.
In that field, my sensei was Hiruzen himself, since he knew it very well. His teaching didn't actually take much time though, because most of learning fuin is: studying seals, practicing them, and training yourself to pack specific properties into your chakra. On that foundation I need to push further, so I can first "read" the original seals of the masters and then start creating my own.
But not all at once. With fuinjutsu, you can't just rush in and grab everything; I needed time to get results.
And so time stretched on in this mess of different studies. Until a new, annoying, but very game‑changing person showed up in my life…
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