Chapter 5

I woke up early the next morning excited for my first real day of school, it looked like Minato shared my sentiments as he was up even earlier than me. We both sat on our beds thinking about the day ahead until the bell rang for breakfast. After breakfast we raced each other to school, Minato won barely, and walked the rest of the way to class. When we arrived there were only a couple of other civilian kids there. We chose our seats and sat down to wait for class to start. As we waited more kids streamed in. There were a couple that caught my attention, there were the ones I had talked to yesterday, there were also a couple more that stood out. There were a set of twins that had the same eyes as Hishui, there was also a girl with a puppy on her head arguing with a boy that was covered from head to toe.

As I watched the last of the kids file into the classroom Minato turned to me. "Where is Gorbu, didn't he say that he was going to keep an eye on us?" I looked around the classroom and remembered something I saw a ninja do once I looked up. Low and behold there he was, standing on the ceiling. He put a finger to his lips telling me that this was some sort of test and so far only I had passed. I elbowed Minato in the side and jerked my head. When he looked up and saw the teacher hanging from the ceiling he almost fell out of his chair in shock. He got the message too though and did not draw any more attention to it.

After five minutes had passed everyone was sitting in their seats waiting for the teacher and he suddenly started to talk not moving from the ceiling. "Everyday you will have a sort of test of your ninja skills and while they will not take very long they will affect your grade." By then everyone had found out where the voice had been coming from and the response had been varied from loud shouts to simple raising of the eyebrows. "This is your first lesson and the most important you will receive in your career. Always be observant of your surroundings, only six of you realized that I was up here. Two of them were told, and will only receive half credit, the other four are now tied for the first spot in class."

He then jumped down to the front of the classroom like it was nothing. "These tests will occur everyday and not always first thing in the morning and not always by me you will have to be observant of your surroundings to find the tests, at the end of the day you will be told what the test was and how many people passed it. You will not be told who but at the end of each month a sheet will be posted at the front of school with the official rankings for each segment of every subject. At the end of your ten or more years you will be put into a general ranking, your specialization will not count towards your ranking but it will help you to get to where you want to go on your career path. Now you will give your attention to Sarave for your first language class."

With that he walked out of the room and Sarave walked in and started class. I knew after five minutes that I would need to skip this year if not several. "This year we are going to go over how to read and write. This will take some of you longer to grasp than others so we will take two years to get everyone up to the same level. The third year we will be teaching the basics of deception going deeper into it the year after that. The next four years we will be learning how to blend in to different cultures and social standings. The final year we will go over who to write official documents." I thought that the first two years sounded boring and wasn't sure about the third year as I didn't know what qualified as basics.

After that short explanation she dived right into the subject matter. I was struggling to keep myself awake. I distracted myself by dreaming up adventures for myself. I was battling a particularly vicious missing nin when Sarave ended the class and Dawari walked in. "The schedule for history is relatively simple, we will be spending a year and a half on each of the great nations and their allies. The last two and a half years will be spent going over the warring clans era."

With that he immediately dove into the history of fire country. This was much more interesting for me, and I found it fascinating I was definitely not falling asleep in this class. He talked and talked for two hours straight, sometimes drawing diagrams on the board to help his stories of history, he was both a great storyteller and a great artist. He had the whole class listening to him with rapt attention, nobody but the teacher noticed when the bell for lunch went off. He was the one to stop his story and smile. "I believe that is enough for one day, after all there have been some rumblings going on throughout the classroom." Everyone laughed at that and got up for lunch.

Minato and I got out our lunches, made by yours truly because Minato isn't allowed to come into the kitchen after he almost burned it down by boiling water for rice. Shikaku and Choza came over to have lunch with us, they both had lunches made by Choza's dad. Surprisingly Kushina came over dragging the girl with the dog over. "This is Tsume and her dog Kuromaru." Tsume bared her teeth in what I assumed was a smile and Kuromaru barked. We all ate our lunch in peace asking each other some questions. Kushina got really frazzled when she found out that Minato wanted to be Hokage. "You want to be Hokage? Why?"

I looked at Minato for an answer because I had never asked why he wanted to be Hokage. I just knew that he did. "Well I want to be Hokage because I want two things, to have a big family and I also want to be strong enough to protect them. The Hokage has the biggest family in the village and he is also the strongest person in the village." He finished his spiel with a big smile and I couldn't help but smile as well at his reason. We all kept talking until the bell rang again and we all went inside.

When we all sat down in our seats Hishui walked into the room. "As I said before in this class you will be ranked on improvement not overall capacity and control. You will be finding your starting point today by activating your chakra. If you will all please stand up and sit cross legged on your desks."

He waited as all of the students did what he had asked before continuing. "Now this part is different for different people, it has to do with your elemental affinity. If your affinity is fire your chakra will start out as an ember, if it's lightning it will be a spark, water a puddle, wind a breeze, earth a pebble. What you need to do is look inside yourself and find your center, if you find one of these try and urge it to become stronger, if you succeed then it will explode outwards. If you find something else let me know, it is not a bad thing, you may just have a bloodline."

"Now close your eyes and let's begin with searching for fire affinities." I slowly closed my eyes and tried to find an ember I could coax, I was disappointed. I heard some gasps of surprise when other people found their sources. Kushina was particularly loud in her exclamations.

"Alright for the people that found their sources, try and coax it through the rest of your body. For the rest of you let's move onto lightning." I once again looked for a lightning source. I wasn't able to find any sparks. There were a few gasps although decidedly fewer than before. Tsume cheered that she found her source and therefore was more bad-ass than anyone else.

"Good job everyone, Tsume even though you found your source it does not mean that you will be better than anyone else, all that matters is that you coax it into an intense storm, then you will officially be a bad-ass." Everyone laughed at that, even Tsume. "Now then, if you have found your element, keep coaxing it. Everyone else, shall we continue? Let's move on to water." I looked for some sign that I was water affinity, again I had no luck. There were a few gasps again more than lightning but still less than fire. It looks like Shikaku has a water affinity, you could just hear the way he sat up straighter when he found his source.

"Good job again, do the same thing as everyone else please, the rest of you do not be discouraged this just means that you do not have an affinity for the first three elements. Let's keep going. Let's try wind, before we start I will have you know that wind is the rarest element and very few have it, in fact we have less than a hundred wind users currently in the leaf." This excited me if I could find out that I had a wind affinity I would be a rarity. There was only one gasp this time and it almost startled me off the desk. It was Minato, I smiled because not only had my friend found his element I also knew what mine would most likely be.

"What a surprise, we have a wind affinity with us. This is a very rare occurrence. Please make sure to whip that source to a tornado young Minato. Let's move onto the last one." I started to look deep into myself, it turns out I didn't have to, I found it almost immediately, a little pebble of dirt right behind my belly button. I tried to coax it and gasped it was an amazing feeling when it sent a pulse and chakra into my coils. I noticed that it made a cycle and then returned to the pebble. Each time it sent a pulse out it got a little smaller but it built itself back up when the pulse returned, it even felt a bit bigger than before.

"Good job everyone, we are now going to spend the next hour coaxing your sources, but before we begin is there anyone who has not found their source?" No one spoke out; all of us were too busy circulating our chakra to pay any attention to the teacher. I myself kept sending out pulses so I could feel it through every part of my body. It felt like one of those times Minato and I went to the hot springs, incredibly relaxing yet energizing at the same time. Slowly I went deeper and deeper into the cycle, just spending out pulse after pulse until almost all of the rock had turned into chakra circulating my system. Suddenly I felt a chop on the back of my neck and I woke up on the floor. Minato looked down at me with a worried look on his face.

I sat up and looked around at the class who were all staring at me. "What young Miko has just demonstrated to us, however unintentional, is a technique called Chakra Sleep, something that can happen when a person first awakens their chakra and is also something that you will be learning next year. It can replace the need for sleep, some are better at it than others replacing it with sleep entirely. It will waste no chakra because none of it is leaving your body, it is also very good for train chakra capacity." I stood up from the floor. Minato was staying close as if he was afraid that I was going to fall over at any second, I waved him off indicating to him that I was fine.

"Now that we've gotten used to circulating our chakra, let's try to move it to specific parts of our bodies, for the first day pick a part of your body and try to send chakra there." I thought for a moment before I decided where I was going to send my chakra. I looked at Minato and it seemed like he chose the same thing as me. So I sat down and began circulating my chakra. I figured that it would be easier if my chakra was already moving. I was right, after a few cycles of chakra circulation I slowly started to push it towards my eyes, it was still difficult but I was getting closer, after a long while it finally reached my eyes, I kept it circulating so it wouldn't run out. I took a few moments before it was even enough that I could move and it wouldn't dissipate. I adjusted myself for what I assumed would be an increase in vision.

I opened my eyes and promptly fell off my desk. Yes my vision was increased, I could see better than I ever could without chakra. That wasn't what startled me, what startled me was that when I looked at someone there was a screen next to them that held a bunch of letters and numbers. I immediately stopped the chakra worrying that I somehow damaged my eyes. I raised my hand. "Sensei I think I did something wrong." He looked at me strangely. "What is wrong?" "When I channeled chakra to my eyes I started to see things." He immediately paled and rushed to me. "Do you feel any pain or discomfort around your eyes?" I shook my head now worried at his tone of voice. "Ok that's good, that means that you didn't do anything wrong. However I think we should still go to see the Hokage."