As I had expected it to, the art of writing had come very naturally to me, allowing me to achieve perfect typography in less than a single day of effort.
Honestly, with my aversion to ever picking up bad habits, which I knew would be a pain to break out of, I probably would not have bothered even trying to learn prior to my academy days where an instructor would have shown me the proper way to grip a pencil or brush for maximum efficiency and comfort.
Luckily, I had been a nerd in my previous life and greatly fantasized about being allowed to hold pens and move my hands. The dozen of hours I had wasted on video tutorials had made me somewhat confident in my ability to see whether I was holding my tools the right way, and I had, therefore accepted to undertake the risk.
The act of actually learning to write had been as simple as it could possibly get.
Basically, I had opened the little children book where each page was dedicated to either an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter, a number, a punctuation mark, including apostrophes, commas, accents, parentheses and symbols.
For each symbol I needed to learn to write, I had twelve attempts per line, which at twelve lines per pages meant I had 144 tries to get the perfect script for each version.
Abusing my eidetic memory had meant I had simply had to filter through the whole booklet, simply picking the version I found the most flawless and assigning it to my muscle memory, making a mental link between my intentions and the resulting arm movements.
In the end, I had found myself capable of mindlessly reproducing an exact carbon copy of my penmanship any time desired, and therefore, granting myself a handwriting as beautiful and neat as any printing press could ever hope to achieve.
Even then, such progress had barely taken three hours, and most of my time was spent actively exercising my newfound skill, as despite my mind being flawless in its execution, my body still struggled under the strain over long periods of times, my hands cramping after only a few minutes of calligraphy.
It wasn't all that bad, honestly and it opened the door for me to learn how to draw. I had already made plans on purchasing a few additional transparent sheet of paper to pencil over maps from my geography books, in order to be able to create detailed maps with all important topology, including useful landmarks, altitude changes and bodies of water.
It wasn't an immediately useful trick, but it wouldn't help to have someone capable to do so on the field, especially when tracking or ambushing others.
I knew I would probably never overstep on Sai's expertise, but being able to draw or paint things was a very attractive proposition for me, and I knew I would be dedicating a few hundreds hours to develop the skill, the ability to create perfect portraits or mugshots much too important to pass up and who knows, maybe even impress a girl or two down the line...
Yeah, maybe that whole not socializing with anyone quite yet was a mistake, if the crippling loneliness that peaked through from time to time was any sign...
Speaking of, I had taken up a new hobby for whenever my time wasn't occupied by working on my chakra with the Leaf Concentration Exercise.
Stalking.
Well, really it was more like walking around the village, keeping my head held high and smiling politely to anyone I met, but really, not a second passed where I didn't mentally catalog every sight I could.
From the drunk man stumbling around the corner after a long day at work, the little boy crying for his mother after falling and scraping his knee, or the nosy school girls gossiping as they made their way back home for lunch.
Nothing escaped my notice, as I made sure to walk everywhere around the village and spy on as many different archetypes as I could.
The cocky young man strutting around as if he owned the road on which he walked, the shy girl stealing glances at her crush or the beautiful woman scowling and walking away with a huff after hearing cat-calls in her direction.
Everything was stored for use at a later time, their facial expression, their posture, the length of their stride, how much sway there was in their hips, where they looked while walking, the amount of time they kept eye contact with others, the timber of their voices and even how often they blinked.
Everything.
I might not have learned the Transformation Technique yet, but I was already amassing a database of patterns and body language to better fit in into any role I might need to play both for missions as well as to ensure I could move around the village without attracting too much attention upon myself.
It wasn't limited to humans either, as despite what the fictional technique was supposed to do, I knew the Transformation Technique was not an illusion where you still held the same proportions, but was really a fully fledged transformation jutsu, allowing to take the size and form of anything so long as you had the skill to do it and the chakra to maintain the change.
It didn't take a genius to realize that the second I managed the technique correctly, I would be impersonating squirrels and hawks to spy on all the training grounds and hopefully learn a few more techniques' hand signs that way from unaware Genins or uncaring Chunins.
I might not have the Sharingan or an innate ability to immediately copy any technique and chakra manipulation I got my eyes on, but with my perfect memory and a willingness to work hard on training, I was confident in my ability to become a Copy-Ninja in my own right.
Still, before that, I needed to master my chakra exercises, but also find a teacher to correct me in how to best use the different hand signs, as while I had decided to risk winging it through my own knowledge when trying to hold a pen, there was no way in hell I would do so for something as important as the hand signs, running or any fighting practice.
I had read too many fanfictions where learning the wrong form had permanently screwed over the character and his growth to ever risk the same happening to me.
And the reality of things was that I might actually need an instructor much sooner than I had previously anticipated as I had severely underestimated the rate of my progress.
Indeed, I had, when calculating the amount of training required for me to master the Leaf Concentration Exercise assumed the worst case scenario where one needed all four years stuck at the academy to reach an adequate level, resulting in ten days of intensive training.
My Uzumaki genes and Jinchuriki status clearly had other ideas in mind, making my potential much higher than someone like Rock Lee, and I had easily noticed on my second day of training four hours a day, that the leaf was now sticking to my forehead, even when gravity should have made it fall.
At that point, I had obviously canceled my plans for the day, eager to test out the kinks of this new ability and achieve complete mastery of it like I had done for my writing.
I knew my tendency to go all in on one thing I was doing at a time, rather than pacing myself was a quirk I had developed in my previous life where dealing with user interfaces was a pain that wasted ten minutes of my time due to my condition. As a result, it had been better for me to completely finish whatever it was I was doing, whether it was a TV series, a book or even homework in one sitting, rather than have to waste minutes at a time to close and reopen the relevant application multiple times.
I wasn't sure whether it would hold me back in the future but it was too ingrained in me to try and combat it yet, so I had settled for the day, sitting in front of my bathroom mirror, keeping my eyes fixed on the now crunchy leaf to catalog any change my chakra caused in its positioning.
The first thing I had tried was to play around with the amounts of chakra I was making use of during the exercise, starting off with the default amount that had worked so far, before slowly raising it until the point the leaf was pushed away from my skin and onto my sink.
I had then done the exact opposite, slightly lowering the amount of energy expanded, looking for that exact moment where my chakra was no longer potent enough to hold onto the foliage.
As a result, I now had a mental slider of how little chakra I could expand to keep the leaf attached to my body, as well as how much I could pump into it before it became too much.
For most people, my actions would not have proved very beneficial, but I wasn't most people, thanks to Kurama blessing me with his support, and most importantly, my improved synapses.
Whereas most would struggle keeping a continuous stream of chakra without any fluctuations, I was a creature of pattern, and so long as I had pinpointed exactly what I was supposed to do and achieved it, even if only for a fraction of a second, I would always be able to reproduce the feat, no matter what.
In practice, what that meant was that I had spent the whole of the next day naked in my bathroom, consecutively sticking a leaf to every part of my body, mentally mapping the pathways required to exude chakra from every inch of my person, from my hair, to my ears, my eyebrows, lips, neck, ribs, coccyx, all the way down to every crack between my toes, mapping EVERY. SINGLE. POSSIBLE. location on my entire body.
It was a very... awkward experience, and quite a time consuming one at that, each of my armpits alone having taken about forty different mappings.
Despite it being extremely boring and a tedious chore of an activity, the benefits far outweighed the six hours in total I had wasted on improving myself, as I now held a considerable enough familiarity with the exercise for the academy to pass me in its usage.
Of course, being adequate enough for the academy would never be the stick by which I measured my successes and already, I had established some ideas for how much further I could take my mastery before I could feel like I was ready for actual chakra manipulation, let alone tree or water walking.
First and foremost was the amount of time I could keep a leaf stuck to my body, as despite a vast improvement, I still tired after a few minutes.
I needed to be able to keep a single leaf stuck to my body the whole day to be completely satisfied with my performance, which tied in for my second requirement.
I needed to be capable of holding the chakra flow active whether I was actively concentrating on it or doing something else, like walking around the village, stalking the populace, or even mentally reading more of my books.
The third step would logically be the ability to move the Leaf all over my body, slightly changing the flow of chakra on different points and body parts to make the leaf dance any way I wanted, as well as maintaining such changes while distracted and for long periods of time.
Reaching that point was enough for me to be satisfied with the exercise's completion and moving on to the next one, but further down the line, I planned on increasing the difficulty and ensuring I could multi-task by adding more and more leaves to my body.
It might also be interesting to try using objects of varied sizes, shapes and even weights, like coins until I had instinctual mastery over the exercise.
Of course, such attention to detail and level of proficiency would take literal months for me to build, so I was better served putting the exercise on hold beyond that point until after I had gotten my hands on the Shadow Clone Technique.
Still, now that I was less than a few days if not weeks from reaching the same mastery over the exercise as a rookie of the year from the academy graduating class, I definitely should start looking for someone to teach me the basics of using hand signs.
Luckily, I had the perfect person in mind for such minor issues.