I'm encouraged by the reviews that I've gotten already for just the first chapter. I have noticed that a good deal of them ask for more information on what happened on the night of the genin graduation tests, and I'm afraid that I have to be mean and say that you will just have to keep reading to find things like that out! There will be hints dropped and clues given, but I will not come right out with a flashback or a complete explanation until I am ready. If you are impatient, then you will just have to try and figure out the stories secrets on your own. Everyone who guesses something correctly before it happens will get a shout out at the end of the chapter that it's revealed in. One guess per review (per chapter) though to keep it fair.

On with the story!


After a full night of training and experimentation, a somewhat tired Naruto returned home to his apartment to grab some ramen before he headed out to meet up with his new team for their first day of missions. He would never get tired of ramen, it didn't really matter that the delicious noodles now provided him even less sustenance than before.

He was surprised to find a small rectangular package on his table. There was a note on top which read:

I think it's time that you learned to do more with your power than parlor tricks. This book should give you a helpful nudge in the right direction.

~R.A.~

Curious, Naruto opened the package to find a thin book bearing the title "Mana and Ki: An Introduction to Power Manipulation".

If the note had any other signature at the bottom, Naruto would have been surprised and wary of mysterious packages showing up in his room without any of his traps or warning alarms being set off. However, this was not the first time that the mysterious R.A. had left him a note with a small bit of advice. He had been receiving such notes throughout most of his life, and the advice had never steered him wrong before.

The advice had been especially helpful with dealing with the events that transpired a few weeks ago…

He eyed the small book with no small amount of interest. Only once before had he received a gift from R.A., another small book that had taught him just enough about the art of stealth that he was able to expand on them to the point that he could evade most ANBU for at least a few hours if he had time to plan his escape out beforehand.

He flipped the book open to the introduction to get an idea of what he was looking at.

All living beings contain energy. From the grass on the ground to the animals that roam the forest to every last sentient creature out there, humans included, all of them contain both energy and the potential to harness it. Most beings out there, lacking the intelligence or interest to experiment with these energies, end up using the absolute minimum required to keep themselves alive and functioning. That is just so much wasted potential.

This internal energy can be divided into two forms: the physical energy known as Ki, and the spiritual energy known as Mana. Ki can be harnessed to empower the body: increasing such attributes as strength, speed, stamina, physical defense, pain tolerance and more. Some adept Ki wielders even develop greater abilities such as flight or directing Ki externally into attacks in the form of blades or balls of energy. While Ki is an energy that is greatly attuned towards physical empowerment, Mana is an energy that allows the wielder to impose their will on the outside world, so long as the wielders will is strong enough, they have a very solid and detailed idea of what they want to do, and they have enough Mana to do it.

It is very important to always member the factors that limit use of Ki and Mana. The primary limitations have to do with the natural order of all things.

You can use Ki to empower your body a great deal, but the exact amount you can increase your attributes is directly proportional to your true physical limits. There is an exponential increase in the amount of Ki required to safely increase your abilities past a certain multiple of your true physical prowess. This limit can be ignored if the Ki wielder is willing to suffer extreme damage to their body, or even death, once the power up wears off.

You can use Mana to impart your will upon the world, but the outside world has natural laws and Mana of its own to enforce them. The greater your will conflicts with the natural order of things, the more difficult it will be to enforce and the more Mana will be required to enforce it. If you desire to manipulate a nearby lake so that the water is directed to attack an enemy, the Mana cost and difficulty will be much lower than if you desire for such a thing to occur when there is no water nearby at all. In that case, you must pay a Mana cost to summon the water from elsewhere, as well as the cost for manipulating it too behave in ways that defy nature.

All of the natural rules of the world are enforced by the ambient natural Mana that permeates the world, and if you have a strong enough will, a keen enough focus, and enough Mana than all of the world's laws can be turned on their head at least for a short while. The amount of ambient Mana is not the same in all areas, and there are some places which, by chance or by design, have much less protection for the laws of nature. These places are where the greatest magic can be wrought.

Ki and Mana can be mixed internally to form a kind of energy that has some properties of both (ie: allows for some physical enhancement and also allows the laws of nature to by slightly overturned), but this is not recommended as the total amount and ratio of Ki to Mana used must be very precise in order for these energies to be properly manipulated. Since manipulating your inner stores of Ki and Mana causes them to grow over time the more they are used, utilizing this method of mixing the energies will naturally be much more difficult for those with large energy reserves, those who have much more of either Ki or Mana, and even those who use the mixture regularly.

If you decide to mix Ki and Mana in such a manner, it is recommended that you take the time to regularly fine tune your control to keep the mixture usable, since it becomes much harder to use Ki or Mana alone after using the mixture exclusively for a long period of time.

Naruto was amazed. This was an incredible book that held the kind of information that he desperately desired about chakra manipulation! Apparently chakra was a mixture of Ki and Mana, and someone a long time ago must have decided that ninjas would only use chakra for some reason. He could immediately see that he probably had many natural reasons why it was so hard for him to control his chakra, such as his large reserves and the Kyuubi unbalancing everything, and he only wished he could have had access to a book like this sooner!

Now that he knew that he had natural issues with wielding chakra, he decided that he would experiment with separating his own back into its Ki and Mana components since apparently those energies had no issues that he could see so far with his own large reserves.

He would see if he could master using these more basic energies. If all the other ninja were going to be using chakra, than would the odds be that they were prepared to deal with a shadow teleporting Mana wielder?

Once again, the least predictable ninja would be the most dangerous ninja.

As it turned out, D-ranked missions were nothing more than chores. Oh sure, a good deal of them were made much easier by applying ninja techniques and technically there was an opportunity to develop teamwork but really it was the ninja equivalent of hazing the new rookies.

Team practice was a bust; all that ever happened was that Kakashi drilled them with teamwork exercises such as throwing balloons and eggs to each other blindfolded and they were given vague instructions to keep themselves in shape.

They would do two or three D-ranks which would take maybe six hours total, then another two hours' worth of team practice and then they were let go for the day and told to meet up tomorrow at the same spot.

To be fair, it was standard procedure for fresh genin teams to go through a month long period where they did nothing but D-ranks and generic team exercises without being taught anything new for a couple of valid reasons.

The first and most important was to see which genin would take it upon themselves to train and improve their skills on their own time, and which genin would treat their new career as a day job. It was very important to catch that thing early and then take steps to eliminate such a mindset, as it would easily get a young ninja killed to be so carefree and lax in their approach to the ninja life. This wasn't a game anymore.

Another reason was loyalty. In general, even though it is very possible to train a young shinobi up with jounin level skills, it was frowned upon to give such power to someone so young who hadn't yet proven their loyalty to the village. This wasn't to say that they weren't trusted because they would have been removed from the shinobi academy at the first sign of potential disloyalty, it's just that there are too many ways for things to go wrong by giving powerful weapons to untested soldiers.

So basically, it became very clear to Naruto early on that he would need to spend all of his spare time improving himself if he wanted to get any better, because he sure wasn't going to become strong just by going on 'missions' and attending 'team training'.

That suited Naruto just fine, since he had recently come upon a great source of training material that he didn't want anybody to know about anyway.

He spent a great deal of his time that month out in the Forest of Death. He had learned a lot from that little book and he had a lot of ideas he wanted to work on. The book had been short and to the point, explaining the ins and outs of accessing your Mana and Ki and giving examples of how they could be used and what factors would make any specific application require more or less energy, focus, and practice. The book had claimed that with enough experience and power it was possible to create new moves on the fly for any given situation, but Naruto wasn't going to risk that kind of thing until he had been using it for a while and even then only if the situation called for it.

He didn't want to look like a fool in the middle of a fight by trying to create a fireball or something for the first time. That kind of thing could get you killed.

He was really eager to start experimenting with Mana. Ki sounded pretty useful, but a little too straightforward to rely on too much. The nature of Mana enthralled him, the very idea that he could make something that he wanted to happen just because he desired it caused him no small amount of anticipation.

Unfortunately for Naruto, it would take him two weeks to consistently separate his chakra into Mana and Ki, and an additional week before he could consistently call upon one or the other. While it bugged him that it took so long, he consoled himself with the thought that it would have taken much longer if he hadn't already learned how to call upon his chakra.

And so, finally having access to his Mana, he started to experiment. After a few amusing applications that demonstrated that he was doing it right (causing a fisherman to get slapped in the face by fish repeatedly was fun, and making the Thirds tobacco disappear from inside his pipe while he was smoking it was something he'd never forget), he decided to settle down and try to create something that would help him in a fight.

Now, the book had told him that an important part of using Mana to manipulate reality was having a very good idea of what you want to happen. Using a specific set of gestures and a name for a technique or spell would be a great aid in using magic because it would distinguish one spell from another. It would also help with focus; otherwise you might get distracted halfway through and have something entirely unwanted happen instead of the original goal.

Naruto interpreted this as justification for kickass sounding attack names and dramatic poses, which while technically correct, were not very stealthy or ninja like but then again he never planned to be a conventional ninja anyway.

And so, he spent his days (and some of his nights) trying to see what awesome things he could do with his new powers over Mana…

Of course, the first thing that he tried to do was fly. Now, he managed to achieve this after a short while but since he was using Mana to bend the laws of nature rather than using Ki to improve his physical abilities this ended up costing him quite a lot of Mana to maintain. He had massive amounts though, so he didn't really mind since flying was awesome but he realized that it wouldn't be practical to always be flying when on a mission since it was so taxing.

He managed to solve his problem with standing on the air though by lowering the force of gravity on himself and standing on particles of dirt in the air, which was something. It cost much less Mana to do, a negligible amount really, and the only downside was that he would go flying a stupidly far distance if he was hit while weighing so little so that was something to work on.

He developed the ability to coat his body in a thin and invisible layer of Ki. This would make him take much less damage when he mastered it, but at the moment it wouldn't stop much more than a scratch which could probably come in handy against a poisoned weapon or something.

The book made sure to mention many times that the more unlikely something was, or the more it went against the natural order, the more difficult it would be to make something happen. Well, as it just so happened Naruto had discovered, through a strange series of events, that it was very easy to influence probability. As in, really really easy. So easy in fact that he had been doing it all his life. He always thought that he was just really lucky but apparently he had been unconsciously manipulating insignificant matters of chance in his favor, most likely because he thought that he never got a break or something. He wondered if there was anyone out there who subconsciously manipulated probability in different ways… like someone who didn't think they deserved to win at cards so they never did… or someone who always ended up in perverted situations…

Anyway, the point that Naruto took from all that was that it was easy, fun, and good practice of his Mana manipulation to make small chance events happen around him for his own amusement. Since chance events are already within the bounds of what is naturally possible, almost no Mana was required to influence such things.

He experimented with many other things, with some successes and some failures but he eventually hit a wall were he couldn't move forward without testing his ideas out on others. He couldn't practice with his teammates since he didn't want any of them to know what he could do or get curious about him, which meant that he would need field experience. In other words, a real mission.


At the end of the month, as his team reported for their daily missions, Uzumaki Naruto decided to give fate a little push by using his Mana with the intent to get a mission that would give him a chance to test himself. It worked.

"Team 7 reporting for duty Hokage-sama." Kakashi announced, half reading his orange book as he waited for the expected D-rank mission. He was disappointed.

The Third Hokage carefully observed the group before him. Kakashi looked bored, Sakura looked resigned, Sasuke looked impatient to get things over with, and Naruto seemed anxious. He was probably desperate to get out of the village and go on a "real mission". He smirked to himself. The boy had changed somewhat since the day of graduation, but he was still as eager to prove himself as ever. That would probably never change.

He looked down at the list of pending missions and decided that they could try a C-rank mission and if it went well their mandatory probationary period would be over. 'Hmm… a bridge in the land of waves? That will work nicely. I've been hearing things about that place lately. I'll have Kakashi do a little recon while we have the excuse to have our ninja openly in their country.'

"I have decided that today you will receive your first C-rank mission." The Hokage announced, satisfied by how excited the team before him looked at the prospect of 'real ninja work'.

Naruto was overjoyed that his first attempt to manipulate something important had seemed to succeed. This manipulating reality stuff was great! The book had warned that he should be very careful what he desired when he worked magic, but really he had been pretty straight forward.

He wanted an awesome mission where he could really push himself to the limit, and he got one. What's the worst that could happen?