Over the weekend, Maya split her time between babysitting and watching Michael Jordan fight for a three-peat. She also squeezed in some serious training.
In fact, she'd invented an entirely new training method of her own — and given it the embarrassingly dorky name: the Hansen Sage-Ninja Technique.
The logic was simple: extract chakra, circulate it through the dantian to convert it into golden chakra, stop extracting, slowly draw the golden chakra out of the dantian and let it dissipate through the meridians strengthening the body, then extract again. Repeat indefinitely.
The Hansen Sage-Ninja Technique had one major limitation, though: it couldn't be practiced for long stretches. Physical hunger was easy — just eat something. But spiritual hunger was different. It required hours of rest to recover. Every time the mental energy burned out completely during extraction, she experienced a sensation she could only describe as: I am about to die. Looking back on it, she still felt a chill.
Because of that, Maya kept careful control of her pace. The moment she felt mental fatigue creeping in, she immediately stopped extracting and went to play with little James instead.
After two days of this regimen, Maya could already extract thirty percent more chakra than before. Her dantian had also expanded slightly, allowing it to store more golden chakra. The progress was partly a result of starting from such a small baseline — but even accounting for that, the rapid improvement confirmed that the Hansen Sage-Ninja Technique was working, and her earlier theory had been correct.
She ignored Jennifer's rosy-cheeked goodbye to their neighbor Guqi and went straight to sort through the large bags Jennifer had hauled home.
Maya finally gave an approving nod. At least Jennifer hadn't completely lost her head — she'd remembered to buy two large cans of formula for James.
That evening, after a dinner of slow-cooked hen with shiitake mushrooms, Jack settled in the living room to watch TV and Jennifer disappeared to organize her haul. Maya made a decision.
Tomorrow was Monday. She had two more months of school to get through. But tonight, she was going to do something that practically every person who'd ever transmigrated into the Naruto world had done at some point.
Chakra control training: tree-walking and water-walking.
No system guides needed. She could practice these herself. The only reason she'd waited until now was chakra volume. Running out midway up a tree and snapping an ankle would be a spectacularly stupid way to ruin everything.
Tonight, though, she was mentally sharp and her dantian was full of golden chakra. Time to try.
No trees were available at this hour, obviously. But she could learn from Spider-Man — wall-crawling worked just as well.
She didn't put on her usual school shoes. She pulled out a pair of sneakers from the shoe rack instead.
Laced them up. Focused inward. Channeled chakra to the soles. Ready. She gave a light hop toward the wall—
THUD.
"Ow — my butt! What happened?! I didn't even take a step!"
Maya sat on the floor rubbing her backside, genuinely baffled.
"Even if I'd cracked the wallpaper I'd understand. But I was stuck there for zero seconds. I hadn't moved at all!"
She took the sneakers off. Tried again barefoot, channeling chakra to the soles of her feet, and hopped at the wall—
"Oh my god—"
She was crouching on the wall. Like Spider-Man. Actually on the wall.
"Okay, let me try walking — oh, this works too! This is incredible—!"
She moved cautiously at first, wobbling slightly, then steadier, and then — she was running laps along the wall, giddy and breathless.
When she felt her chakra running low and sweat dripping into her eyes, she finally leapt back to the floor, panting hard.
Then she burst out laughing.
"Ha! Magneto — you will never haunt my nightmares again!"
The childhood encounter with Magneto had left real psychological scars on young Maya. Witnessing the terrifying power he'd unleashed had given her recurring nightmares for years, jolting her awake in the middle of the night.
Something about finally conquering that fear made her feel lighter than she had in years — and more clear-headed, too.
Feeling good, she started thinking through what had just happened.
The wall-running confirmed her chakra control was exceptional — whether innately or because her soul carried memories across two lifetimes.
But why did the shoes ruin everything?
Maya's mind started wandering. Even Obito wore open-toed shoes. She vaguely recalled that Obito had even painted his toenails. Purple. Somehow… kind of ridiculous. Okay, that's derailing the train of thought.
She snapped back to the real question: chakra paper. Those special strips that reacted to a ninja's elemental affinity, made from trees that grew by absorbing chakra. Because the paper was chakra-saturated from birth, it was sensitive enough to detect elemental affinities even before the ninja had consciously awakened them.
That was the key.
The entire Naruto world had been contaminated by the God Tree's fruit. The world itself was chakra-infused — which meant even ordinary objects produced within that world (clothing, shoes, tools) had an innate resonance with chakra. Standard shinobi sandals, even the plainest pair, were natural chakra conductors.
But the Marvel world operated on fundamentally different physics. The fact that this world could accommodate chakra didn't mean its materials were chakra-conductive. A random pair of New York sneakers had no relationship with chakra whatsoever.
That's why the shoes broke everything. Chakra couldn't properly penetrate them, and even if it did, the control precision would drop dramatically.
But then — why did walls work, if walls weren't chakra-conductive either?
That brought her to how wall-walking actually worked.
She was certain that chakra wasn't functioning like glue here. Simple logic: a wall hook can hold a jacket. Try hanging a full-grown person on it and the hook rips out, taking part of the wall with it. No matter how "sticky" chakra was, it couldn't bear a person's body weight. Especially on a tree — the bark alone would strip right off.
So the real mechanism wasn't adhesion — it was grip. Passive versus active. A person coated in glue relies on the surface sticking to them. A person gripping a cliff with their fingers, or wedging a spike into the rock face — that's active force applied outward.
Wall-walking was the second kind. It was about using precise chakra control to actively grip the surface — not about whether the surface was chakra-sensitive.
Shoes, on the other hand, were insulating the contact entirely. Whether or not chakra could even pass through them, the control precision was already compromised too much.
So… do I have to go barefoot all the time?
She thought about cosplaying as a wicked enchantress from some demonic sect for about half a second.
Then she remembered this was Hell's Kitchen.
Walking home barefoot at night and stepping in something unspeakable wasn't a hypothetical scenario. It was basically inevitable.