The basis for a map is to first know where you are, then determine where you are going, and finally plot a course between the two points. This foundational bit of navigation is vital to both traversing physical geography as well as plotting a more metaphorical course. In short, if one wants to reach a goal of some sort, they are best served by understanding what their current status is in relation to that goal, determining what they need to reach that goal, and then plotting out a course that uses what you have to get where you need to be.

For example, if you want a job at a certain company, you might take stock of what skills, education, and experience you currently have, then average out the job requirements for the positions you're looking to be hired for. Once you have both lists, you can understand the steps you need to make to meet each requirement and, in theory at least, accomplish your objective.

I was an apprentice blacksmith.

I wanted to go to space.

Heh.

"Welcome to Creation, here's your shovel."

Now,surelythere were more advantageous positions in the village for me to aim for than a blacksmith's apprentice, weren't there? Well...yes, but no. Getting access to better resources would require one of two things on my part.

The first was being adopted (or born into, but the ship had sailed on that part) a ninja clan. Even a minor clan would have given mesomepolitical power to leverage into resources or protection, but I was an orphan.

The second possibility was earning a better rank in the village, which required either money or chakra and preferably both. I had neither. Or, at least, I didn't have money and only possessed a paltry amount of chakra.

So, instead of having access to the extremely bizarre schizo-tech hoarded by the ninja, I was stuck with a blacksmith's forge and what I could make with my own two hands.

This was because virtually anything advanced enough to be useful to me was under lock and key as a vital military resource. Ninja had batteries, refrigerators, cameras, clunky CRT televisions, video recording and broadcasting capacity, and a host of other things.

All of which were built, maintained, and repaired by individuals who failed out of the Genin Corps, which was in and of itself, considered something of a dumping ground for those who would never make jounin rank. Those positions were career paths of last resort, handed to those who were still ideologically loyal, but otherwise just couldn't function in the field for whatever reason.

It would have taken me adecadeto prove that I was worthless enough to be relegated down to what was, in many peoples' eyes, 'barely a ninja.' Absolutely no one wanted jobs that saw you sitting behind a desk fixing electronics every day when they could be out doing their patriotic duty for their village and comrades. It was such a source of utter shame, in fact, that the only reason I knew about it was because those ranks were spoken of to academy students as cautionary tales for those who couldn't handle real duties.

No, if you wanted a job in a laboratory ferreting out the secrets of chakra, inventing new electronics, and making advances to help the village, you needed to get to chunin rank first to demonstrate you were dependable or dedicated enough to deserve such a position. Either that, or get lucky and grab a post doing paperwork under an aforementioned chunin, but those were usually saved for crippled or long-term wounded ninja who needed extensive recovery time.

It would have beenniceif I could have just left the village and headed to the nearest factory and started off my career picking scraps out to take home for my own uses, but there's something important most people don't realize about factories in the Elemental Nations.

They explode very easily.

By accident, of course, and not intentional sabotage.

Fer realz.

Which very neatly ties into why anything more advanced than an oil lamp was put together as a cottage industry in the bowels of some well-defended bunker underneath the village. Vital to Konoha's operational capabilities as they might be, sites like those were also incredibly juicy targets for other villages. Much like power plants, which Konoha did haveat least one of given the number of power lines I'd glimpsed around the residential sector frequented by ninja, but had no clue where it would actually be located.

Which was by design, I'm sure. If a random civilian could pinpoint vital infrastructure in your secret ninja village, you were in for a bad time.

To make a very, very long story short, I knew that therewasindustrial-era technology available for me to build from, but I couldn't get access to it inside the village. I could totally leave the village to do so, but beyond the fact that shinobi tended to frown on people outside their village having access to that type of thing in a general way, the samurai and the daimyo they served didn't particularly enjoy peasants having nice things.

Even if those nice things would probably be destroyed in the next war, be it a shinobi war or a war between the normal political factions that was only moderately backed up by shinobi.

Of course, ninja would also be up for destroying that kind of infrastructure in peacetime just to practice their sabotage skills and prevent the general quality of life from rising high enough that they would start to not need ninja to do stuff for them or samurai to protect them or daimyo to govern them.

What this meant was that, while things like plumbing and electricity were not unheard ofoutside of hidden villages, they were definitely rare.

Oh, and that's if you didn't get killed by bandits while you were traveling. Either actual bandits or ninja who decided that someone leaving their village thatknew things was too big of a risk.

Returning to the topic at hand, though, there is the fact that I had a handful of years to go from an open flame and a hammer to launching myself into space where I could both avoid any potential Otsutsuki Bad End and turn myself into a one-man post-scarcity resource economy.

I just couldn't use traditional digital electronics to get there because the privately-owned oligarchic military dictatorship I lived in was not fond of those without sufficient (or any) rank possessing them. Some random village orphan owning a television would likely land me under observation at thevery least, which I did not want.

So I had an unusually thorough understanding of the underlying mechanics of chakra-magic, how the wheel of reincarnation functioned, how my peculiar little power worked, and the broad underpinnings of the metaphysical environment. I'd grabbed blacksmithing as a proof-of-concept for a practical skill once I'd understood exactly how poor my chances of becoming a skilled ninja were, then tried to advance myself faster by grabbing eidetic memory.

Which did not work because it was apparently a trait and not a skill. So instead I'd picked up a generalized 'cognitive performance enhancement techniques,' which was a bit wordy but probably increased my mental performance by a third. At some point in the future, I'd have to see about trying to invest further in that discipline, but it was likely a field with pretty sharply diminishing returns. Finally, I'd used the previous month's potential to pick up the skill of meditation.

Mainly because I had the attention span of a hummingbird on most days and could use the help focusing.

"Kota! Stop lollygagging and get those displays cleaned!"

See, I needed the help.

"Yes sir!" I replied sharply and returned to the ritual task of cleaning each and every display item, the shelf underneath them, and then replacing it all in a careful display the owner had been using for years.

Sagara grunted as he returned to the back of the shop.

As I picked up a box of nails, I sighed and began sorting through them. It would have been a lot more fun if the store only sold weapons, but the reality was that locals needed a lot of the more civilian crafts to help pad out our bottom line. The real money was in shinobi weapons, of course, as evidenced by the fact that they were all kept either behind the counter or in a glass case to show off samples. Anything that wasn't on the shelves required either an academy identification card or active-duty shinobi registration to purchase.

A chime at the front door made me look up.

"You got that, boy?!" Sagara shouted from the back.

"It's Tenten, sir!" I replied in equal volume, sending the girl a small smile and shrug.

"Hey Sagara-san! Just here to trade in and stock up!" The girl in question shouted, giving me a grin before waving at the empty doorway to the rear.

A particularly expressive and vocal grunt was the only response to be had.

Tenten snorted, shaking her head. "I see the old man is still the same as ever."

Ah, to be young enough that thirty-something is considered old once again...

Drawing myself from my musings, I replaced the box I was working on and made my way back to the counter. "So, just a trade and restock you said?"

Smiling, she nodded and pulled out a leather pouch that she laid down on the solid block of scarred wood available for inspecting weapons. Thankfully, most customers were smart enough not to dump a load of sharp metal directly onto the glass section. I hummed as I pulled the tie and began sifting through the kunai and shuriken she'd brought for exchange. "Five ryo, two for that one... I'll give you six for that..."

Tenten watched me as I worked, objecting here or there to bargain me higher. As per my orders from on high, I let her win a few but refused to budge on others. As a very frequent returning customer, it wasn't worth busting her ass over every single coin, but at the same time I couldn't let her walk all over me. In the end, I raised an eyebrow as I swept what was left into a pile to the other side. "Ten ryo for the trash." She grimaced, about to complain when I held up a hand. "None of it's salvageable and you know it. That's a good price for scrap that we're going to have to melt down."

Her head drooped, showing off the two buns she wore her hair in even at this early age. "Fine, fine. Give me an even split of the zodiac and a half-dozen kunai. I've got enough to make up the difference."

I rolled my eyes and turned to grab the ropes holding hundreds of shuriken even as the budding-kunoichi's eyes followed me greedily. "I swear, the different styles never actually flew any differently when I was using them in class."

"That's because you only know how to make weapons, notuse them." Tenten riposted in a continuation of our friendly argument. She picked up two different styles of shuriken, one with three triangular blades and another with tiny gear-like teeth. "Oxes have a completely different feel than roosters."

The 'zodiac' was ninja-slang, at least in Konoha, for the twelve 'standard' types of shuriken that most local shinobi used and stores kept stocked. In actuality there were probably a few hundred different styles, but anything outside the zodiac was either special-order or custom-made by demand, both of which were orders of magnitude more expensive. Unless you had a specific trick you needed one for, it was best just to pick a single style and just stick with that.

Unless you were Tenten, who wanted to master the minute differences between each kind.

"Any luck on the sealing?" I asked idly as I finished counting out her purchase.

Tenten scowled. "The teachers still won't sign off on it. Only final-year students can check out those scrolls in the library."

I clicked my tongue in commiseration. "Sucks to hear, wish I could help." I mean, Icould... if I stuck to my plan of grabbing a first-tier knowledge of fuuinjutsu next month, but... I'd also need to explain where it came from.

Tenten shrugged and sighed. "Not your fault." She dropped a handful of coins on the counter and began sweeping up her purchases. "Thanks again, Kota. Keep an eye out for a cheap blade, will you? I'm saving up for a wakizashi, but I wouldn't say no to an uchigatana at the right price."

I snorted, rolling my eyes. "The only way you're likely to get one you can afford before you start doing missions is if the old man lets you buy out one of my cast-offs."

Her eyebrows rose and she grinned as she pulled the drawstring on her pouch tight. "Deal!"

I opened my mouth to respond that it very much was not a deal before she managed to scamper away and out the door. Sighing, I decided to just explain it to Sagara-san and hope he chalked it up to the girl being her regular weapon-nut self. Pausing and flicking a glance towards the back of the store, where the sound of hammering banged away, I leaned in for a closer look at the pieces of scrap 'trash' and picked out a handful to slip into my pocket.

One kunoichi's trash was another civilian inventor's treasure.

Maybe one day I'd tell Tenten exactly how much of my projects her scrap metal helped support, if only to see her face when I told her what I did with it. Analog computers took up a great deal of tiny metal gears and cogs, after all. As Charles Babbage could attest.

Potential Spent:

Metaphysical Physiology: Unique Mutation (Kota)

Metaphysical Cosmology: Reincarnation Cycles

Metaphysical Physiology: Reincarnation (Aberrant)

Metaphysical Physiology: Respiration of the Soul

Metaphysical Cosmology: Akashic Records

Blacksmithing

Cognitive Performance Enhancement

Mechanical Computers

Horology