The rest of that day passed in a blur.
Arata—he was trying to think of himself as Arata now—sat through another formal dinner with his father – The Daimyo. He answered questions about his studies. He nodded at the right times. He smiled when a visiting diplomat made a dull joke about the weather.
But his mind was elsewhere.
It was still buzzing from that moment in the eastern wing. The heat. The expansion. The chakra roaring inside his tiny ten-year-old body like a beast waking from a long sleep.
Now, finally, he was back in his room. The shoji screens were closed. The candles were lit. The maid had wished him goodnight and slid the door shut behind her.
He was alone.
He sat cross-legged on the futon, staring at his own small hands. Ten years old. He still couldn't get over it. His old self had been thirty-two, with back pain and an insomnia. Now he had soft skin, a child's frame, and a political target painted on his back.
Focus, he told himself. You have chakra now, that's an advantage. But you need to understand what else is going on.
Because the chakra awakening had felt… strange. Not just like a door opening. It felt like something else had stirred inside him at the same time. Something that wasn't quite chakra. Something deeper, I'll try to check.
He closed his eyes.
He had read enough fanfiction back on Earth to know how this usually went. Transmigrated protagonists always got cheats. Systems. Glitches in the matrix. He had laughed at those stories, called them wish fulfillment, and then read three more chapters before bed.
Now he wasn't laughing.
He breathed in.
Breathed Out.
Breathed In.
Breathed Out.
He tried to feel inside himself—not the chakra this time, but something else. Something underneath, deeper.
And then he found it.
It wasn't a voice. It wasn't a screen or a menu or a floating blue box. It was more like… knowledge, a memory-like substance. He tries to felt it more and a sudden, bone-deep understanding of something that had always been there but had just been lingering inside him.
The understanding came in fragments. Impressions. Feelings that translated themselves into words inside his head.
Copy.
He could copy anything. objects? Materials? Energy? Yes, I think. The understanding pulsed through him, certain and absolute.
Extract.
He could pull things out of other things. Even life itself—if he was strong enough, or if the target was willing. The thought made his stomach clench. He pushed that one aside for now.
Fusion.
He could combine things. Things he had copied or extracted. He could even bestow the copied and extracted thing he have with fusion. By going through this process he will have his own creation.
Infinite Storage.
A space inside him. Vast. Endless. Anything he copied or extracted could be kept there, stored.
Absolute Owner.
Whatever he created with these powers—it was his. Complete control. He could make it vanish with a thought, delete it forever. Command it like an extension of himself.
He opened his eyes.
His hands were shaking with excitement.
"That's insane," he whispered to the empty room. "That's absolutely insane."
He sat there for a long moment, letting it sink in. Then he looked around the room.
His eyes landed on a small potted plant by the window. A bonsai, carefully pruned, its tiny leaves dark green in the candlelight.
Okay, he thought. Let's test this.
He stood up and walked to the plant. He reached out a hand, hesitated, then touched one of its leaves.
Copy.
Nothing happened.
He frowned. He tried again, focusing harder, pushing that strange inner understanding toward the plant. Copy. Copy. Copy!
Still nothing.
Right, he realized. The limitation. I can't copy anything that has life and self-consciousness. A person has a mind. A dog has a mind. But a plant…
A plant was alive, yes. It grew. It responded to light. But did it have consciousness? Did it have a sense of self?
He wasn't sure.
He tried again, but this time he stirred the chakra inside him, using it along with the power to copy the plant. He thought of it as a thing. A structure. A collection of cells.
Copy.
A warmth bloomed behind his eyes.
He gasped and stumbled back. Floating in front of his face, no bigger than a marble, was a sphere of light. Blue. Quite soft, pulsing gently like a tiny heartbeat.
It wasn't the plant itself. It was… a copy, a memory of the entire being of the plant. A perfect, compressed, frozen copy of everything the plant was—its shape, its genetics, its cellular structure. He could feel it. He knew it.
He stared at the little blue sphere.
"I thought I couldn't copy living things," he muttered. "But it's not conscious, right? The plant is alive, but it doesn't have self-awareness."
The sphere hovered, waiting.
He didn't know what to do with it. He didn't have a test subject. He didn't want to accidentally create a hundred bonsai trees in his bedroom.
So, he did the only thing that made sense.
Store.
The sphere vanished. Not gone—he could still feel it. Somewhere inside him, in that infinite storage space, the blue light rested.
He let out a breath he didn't know he was holding.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. That worked. That actually worked."
He looked down at his own hands again. Then at his stomach. At the place where, according to every ninja manga he'd ever read, his chakra gathered and swirled.
A crazy thought, he admitted to himself. A really, really crazy thought.
He sit back down on his futon. He pressed both palms flat against his lower abdomen, just below the navel. Once again, stirring his power to duplicate.
Copy.
He closed his eyes.
For a moment, nothing happened. He felt his chakra—that roaring bonfire—but it didn't respond to the command. It just flowed, natural and unthinking.
He focused harder. Not only on the chakra itself, but on the source as well as a whole. The thing that generated it. The coils, the pressure point, the whole messy network that made chakra possible and chakra itself.
Copy.
And then—
Light.
He opened his eyes. Floating between his palms, nestled against his fingers, was another sphere. This one was larger than the plant's copy. Brighter. More complex. It pulsed with a pale blue-white radiance that cast dancing shadows on the walls.
It was his chakra. A copy of it. Perfect, still, preserved.
He stared at it.
And a thought—another crazy idea emerged, impossible, terrifying—crept into his mind.
If I have a copy of my own chakra… should I?
He stopped on his track. Not yet. But as he stored the sphere away—feeling it joins the plant in that endless space inside him—he knew one thing for certain.
He wasn't just a prince anymore.
He was something else entirely.
He lay back on the futon, staring at the painted crane ceiling. Outside, the night was quiet. Somewhere in the distance, a guard coughed.
I need a name for this, he thought. The cheat. The power. The thing inside me.
He turned the words over in his head. Copy. Extract. Fusion. Storage. Ownership.
It's like a function of making something new – forging power, he decided finally. Because I can take things apart and put them back together into something new.
It wasn't perfect. But it would do.
He closed his eyes.
Tomorrow, he would experiment more. Tomorrow, he would figure out what a copied chakra sphere could be use on to.
Tonight, he slept.