'Chakra Points Disunion Syndrome'

My defect as a shinobi. It's a bit of a mouthful, first spoken to me out of the mouth of the medic-nin in my hospital room when I was nine years old. Apparently, I was the first one to get diagnosed with my condition in over thirty years.

The symptoms vary wildly from case to case, all centered around a general loss of ninja abilities. There's no known cure, even between Mom's knowledge of medical ninjutsu and Dad's Yin-Yang Release. Some people randomly get better after a few months. Some cases last their entire lifetime. I'm the latter.

It uniquely affects only ninja with excellent chakra control. Only the ones good enough to subconsciously sever the microscopic connections between tenketsu without any conscious intention to.

It was first documented during the Second Shinobi World War, affecting medic-nin that suffered from PTSD and tried too hard to push through it. Sometimes just a few too many of their friends had died, just a few too many lost causes made it to their table, but they'd just get used to all the shaking in their hands and keep going anyway. Something in their head would snap. The same abilities they had learned to use on others—making precision cuts to vital parts of the anatomy, manipulating electrical signals in the nervous system—would turn on their own body like some sort of autoimmune disease.

Nothing that horrible ever happened to me. I just made a stupid mistake as a kid.

I was sparring with another Leaf Ninja a few years older than me. Someone way stronger and more popular than I was. They were taunting me and encouraging me to go all out. I was getting really pissed off.

It was around this time that I had started learning medical ninjutsu—including chakra enhanced strength, the technique that used pinpoint chakra control to focus and release all of one's chakra in a single spot—giving the user superhuman strength. Apparently, according to Mom anyway, I was some sort of prodigy at using it. When I was nine, I could already hit at about 40% of the strength that the Fifth Hokage could manage during her prime, and about 20% of max strength that she could manage. Mom also told me to not use it until I had trained more and gotten used to it, but parents can never quite control everything their kids think and do.

I punched the other kid as hard as I could. We weren't supposed to use killing techniques on each other. I just kind of figured it would work out like those times Mom hit Dad. Stupid, stupid thing to do.

He was hospitalized in critical condition. I saw a bunch of tubes coming out of the spot where I detached his ribs from his skeleton. If I had aimed my fist a little higher, he probably would've died from the shock to his vital organs.

I think I realized at that point something that most Postwar ninja have the luxury of not knowing. Ninja villages today talk about peace and love and how fighting is bad and how we should always try to talk our problems out first, but the reality of the techniques we use wasn't quite as simple. We were learning techniques that were designed to kill and disable enemies before they could do the same to us.

—Something in my head snapped. I collapsed the same day I had gotten into that fight.

I ended up in the same hospital room as the kid I put there. I didn't recover quite as well as he did.

There was an overall 80% reduction in my total chakra capacity. Additionally, the damage I had done to myself had caused an onset of juvenile arrhythmia, and I had lost motor function in my right leg and would need intensive care to walk again. And there was a particular quirk no one had ever seen before.

—My once-blue chakra was now permanently colored green.

Or, to say it a little more clearly—I can only heal people. I can't hurt them. Not even if I want to. Not even if they're another ninja trying to kill me and my life depends on it.

It's not just harder for me than it is for other people, or all in my head, or anything like that. It's physically impossible.

Taijutsu? Each time I hit someone, my hand or foot glows green and heals them instead. The harder I hit them, the more they heal.

Genjustu? Didn't work either.

Ninjutsu? The only chakra-based stuff that I can use anymore are those that can only actively and exclusively mend another human being. Basically, I'm limited to Medical Ninjutsu. And I can't even use all of that. Anything that's too heavily based on Yang Release or otherwise chakra-based and has the potential to harm someone—like Chakra Scalpels, or the Chakra Enhanced Strength that I misused—it doesn't work any more. And I know that for a fact. I've tried.

And that includes the Rasengan. Which I've trained every single day since I got out of the hospital. And every single one of those days—I've never made any progress—even though I was already past steps 1 and 2. Even if I was in the middle of learning it right before everything changed. It doesn't matter.

I'll never master the Rasengan like the rest of my family. It doesn't matter if spend the rest of my life working harder than everyone else, giving speeches about my ninja way or whatever. A bird with clipped wings cannot fly, and a bird that loses their wings will never get them back.

That's Chakra Points Disunion Syndrome, my 'defect', the one that I've been talking up so much today. I'm not some troubled prodigy, or some super-talented hero with one critical flaw, or some airheaded kid with some dumb curse that conveniently powers them up once they feel sad enough. I have a disability. And when it comes to combat, and all of the cool stuff that makes a ninja a ninja—I'm the weakest, and I have the weakest potential for improving out of everyone in the village. By far. Sorry if I gave you the wrong idea by being all indirect about it.

—I was looking out the hospital window after the medic-nin in my room got done explaining my symptoms. He told me my medication schedule and the year's worth of rehab they had scheduled to help me get walking again. And then he told me that I'd likely never be a ninja again. I didn't listen to the rest.

The whole time I was in there, Mom had been taking time off work and coming down from her office to visit my room and talk to me. Dad came a lot too. A lot of friends I didn't even know I had showed up too. They were all a lot more emotional about the whole thing than I was.

I wasn't really talking that much myself. I couldn't move around and do the things I loved anymore, so it was getting a little hard to express myself like I used to. Think it was around this time Inner Minato first popped up so I'd have someone to understand all of the things that were spiraling around in my mind.

—The day I was diagnosed, Shinachiku got me out of bed and wheeled me up to the hospital roof.

We didn't say anything to each other. He just silently stood there behind me the whole time, his fingers vised around the handles of my wheelchair.

We stayed on the rooftop like that and watched the sun rise and set. The long shadows cast over the village by the faces of Hokage Rock stretched further than they ever had before that day.