"Hey, mister." I called, standing at the rear of the shop, looking into the sweltering heat of the blacksmith's forge.

"Eh? Whatcha' need, kid?" The stern thirty-something asked, mopping the sweat and smoke off his face with a wet rag, his mask discarded nearby. "You buyin' for the academy, you go around front."

I shook my head. "Flunked out." Then I tossed the bundle under my arm onto the table. "You buyin'?"

He gave his forehead one more swipe with the rag and took a lumbering step towards the roped up bundle before fingers as thick as my ten-year-old wrists pulled at the twine holding the roll of castoff leather and unfurled it. The blacksmith made a rolling, thoughtful sound in the back of his throat as he picked up a kunai, holding it up to catch the mid-morning light. His eyes flicked to me suspiciously before running a finger along the edge, then pressing his thumb against the flat of it and sticking his tongue out as he tried to bend it. After doing this to five of the dozen kunai and an equal number of shuriken, he dropped the last back onto the roll and crossed his arms to look me over.

"Alright, where'd you get 'em?" He asked, his voice demanding either honesty or a suitably believable lie.

"Picked up broken ones at the training grounds, plus the trash that the academy throws out once kids are done with them, and a bit of scrap steel." I rattled off with a shrug. "Melted them down, remade them."

"Horseshit." The blacksmith grunted as he took a threatening step towards me. "Where'd a brat like you get a forge?"

"Made one." I replied, getting an even blunter look of disbelief in return. I rolled my eyes. "Makin' one isn't that hard, all you need is some clay bricks and something to burn. All you have to do is make sure you don't set yourself on fire while you're doing it."

The blacksmith snorted, then his gaze brightened with realization as he snapped his fingers. "Right, heard about you. That runt over at the orphanage, graduating genin brought me a bunch of your shit to look over for field work after you sharpened 'em up and treated some metal fatigue." His gaze darkened. "You've been eating my business, boy."

I winced and sighed. "Don't have to worry about that anymore. Like I said, I flunked out of the north academy. The teachers might have been okay with another student selling refurbished kunai and shuriken, but it's a whole 'nother deal when it's just some random orphanage brat." I waved at the bundle. "So I'm getting out of your hair, selling everything I've got left."

The blacksmith grunted in acknowledgement and picked up a shuriken to inspect it again, breathing in a heavy breath as he rubbed a finger over the low-grade steel. Even as good as I was, there were limits to the miracles I could pull out of my ass. While, in a pinch, I could probably make something better, selling mission-grade steel with a real edge to it would draw attention sooner or later. In theory, the stuff I made and sold could be taken on your average D-rank, but it would be suicide to carry on anything except a milk run outside of the village.

I sold them at half-price compared to official merchants, though.

I was pulled from my musings as the blacksmith stepped to the side and, with a smooth motion that threw his body forward, his right hand lashed out and slammed the throwing star into the timber across the alley. Sinking with a solid thunk, he paced forward and pulled it free with a jerk of his muscular hand before inspecting the depth it had sunk and the edge it still carried.

"You self-taught?" He asked, turning to look at me over his shoulder.

I hesitated a moment before nodding. "Yeah, never knew my parents, if that's what you're asking." It wasn't a huge leap of logic to make, really. Orphanages would take in anyone who hadn't hit puberty yet and didn't have family to stay with. A child showing up at his store like this could very well have had parents die just in the past year who'd passed on some sort of basic trade skill.

That was more likely than knowledge appearing in your mind ex-nihilo, after all.

"Name's Sagara Hoshi." He stated suddenly, thumbing the sharp edge of the shuriken in absent thought. "How's about this, kid? I take the stuff you've got now and you show up tomorrow bright and early. I put you through your paces and see what you're made of. You don't fuck up and cost me money for a month, I take you on as an apprentice. Clean the shop, keep track of the stock, run errands, and make meals. In exchange, I've got a spare storeroom you can take upstairs."

I blinked, taken aback momentarily by the offer and running a hand over my chin. "Can I take side-jobs? Wanna earn some ryo to play with for myself."

Sagara-san paused, chewing on the thought with a grimace before poking me in the chest with a meaty finger. "Maybe after a month or two I'll let you do the academy orders. Until then, you don't sell anything out of my shop without my say-so. Something breaks and a ninja dies, I get blacklisted by all their friends. You read me, boy?"

I looked him in the eyes and nodded. "All clear, sir, but it's not 'boy.' It's Kotaro. Everyone calls me Kota."

"Kota." Sagara-san nodded. "Good. Be here at the crack of dawn ready to work."

"Yes sir."

I wasn't about to turn down the chance to move out of the orphanage presented on such a silver platter. Especially after I'd purposefully failed one exam too many at the academy. The only reason I'd even bothered attending in the first place was because... well, there weren't many other options for those born in a hidden village. Even the children of civilians were expected to make a solid attempt at becoming shinobi if they could. Sure, at least half of the academy kids would fail out for any one of a few dozen reasons, but they'd at least tried to make the cut. Explaining to someone that you didn't want to be a ninja made you weird, and weird drew exactly the wrong kind of attention.

So I'd just decided to honorably fail out.

Granted, I'd had to fail the correct way, because the academy teachers were ninja and would have found botching a random selection of academic material and physical tests to be suspicious. No, I'd had to plot out a specific mixture of the curriculum that I could fail consistently and provably.

Now, a hypothetical observer might wonder why I wouldn't want to learn how to shoot dragons made of elemental power from my mouth while making magic clones of myself and running along water. Very, very bluntly, my response would be that I had an objection to a system that created and perpetuated the use of child soldiers.

In more detail, though?

The orphan known as Kotaro was not shinobi material. I had the bare minimum of chakra reserves, matching chakra control, no clan affiliation, no bloodline, and no connections within the power structure of my hidden village. I would almost certainly end up in the genin corps instead of a coveted position in a three-man squad directly under an elite jounin that would give me the kind of attention and tutelage that I needed to grow and excel.

Now, being that I was in Konoha and under the reign of the semi-benevolent Third Hokage, this wouldn't be an automatic death sentence like it would were I in Suna or Kiri. It would just mean that, when shit eventually hit the fan I'd likely be used in a human wave formation to try to slow down oncoming enemies so more important and powerful ninja would have a chance to ready their special moves. Sure, there was the slightest chance that I could buck the odds and earn a chunin promotion before five years went by to make me eligible for 'field promotions.'

It was rare, but it did happen.

...and, if I didn't have any other options at my disposal, I might have gone for it. I might have worked my ass off, kissed epic amounts of ass, begged and stolen a few techniques, and deliberately tried to catch a jounin's eye for a sponsorship or apprenticeship.

The bottom line, though, was that I did have other options.

Because, as a consolation prize for being born with barely more chakra talent than the average dirt-farming peasant, I'd lucked my way into a pretty awesome isekai cheat power. Or, well, it would be eventually. Really, it wasn't so much a cheat power as a malformation in my chakra system that likely had something to do with how limited my chakra capacity and control were. From what I understood, the 'gates' that filtered chakra from the pure world, respirated background energy, and physical reserves of vitality...

Well, they were fucked up.

It was actually something of a miracle that I could channel chakra at all. Really, I should have been like Lee and only left with the raw energy that leaked out of my soul to suffuse my body in general.

Because my chakra gates were in all the wrong positions, at least according to the one Hyuuga medic-nin that had been called in after I'd had an adverse reaction to a few training exercises. She had apparently seen that my first and second chakra gates were located along my spine while my sixth and seventh chakra gates were located in my brain, and nearly overlapped.

Even if I looked back on the moment with some black humor these days, having a woman with pulsing veins on her eyes take one look at you and declare that. "You should be dead," was intensely alarming.

I'd been marked down as a minor medical anomaly and promptly told to come back if I had a seizure or something. Combined with my mediocre performance in the academy, I'd been essentially written off by ninja society. If there had been some sort of advantage to my freakish mutation, there was a possibility that I'd be put under further examination and tried to be exploited by the military autocracy running the oligarchic private army of child soldiers beholden to the local feudal lord.

So, naturally, I'd lied my ass off.

Because, shortly after what I'd been told was probably my tenth birthday, I'd experienced a surprise during the full moon. A pulse of energy in my mind had woken me up, leaving me gasping and sweating in my bed as I was overwhelmed with pure potential in a way no mortal mind should ever be exposed to. It was bright in the same way religious texts talked about the presence of their gods. It was loud in the same way they attempted to describe their gods' words.

Struck by a paralyzing heat, as if I had consumed a tiny shard of the sun itself, my barely-coherent mind had desperately grasped at a fleeting thought to demand what the hell was happening to my body. A moment later, the suffocating pressure within me that was loud, bright, and hot to degrees I can't properly describe... had lessened.

I knew.

My malformed chakra gates had accidentally opened just a tiny bit when the nature chakra's movement had been affected by the waxing of the full moon. In an accident that probably should have blasted my soul from existence, an insignificant speck of the pure world of conceptual knowledge had leaked into my gates and been dumped, barely filtered, into my mind. In that instant, I went from knowing nothing but blinding pain and pressure to understanding in exquisite detail everything the Hyuuga medic had tried to explain and far more.

This would likely happen each and every full moon, the alignment of conditions allowing me to utilize a warped and limited sage mode which was only good for acquiring knowledge instead of punching people really hard. On the upside, my bizarre mutation meant I wasn't likely to turn to stone unless I actively experimented with channeling nature chakra. Also, this meant I could effectively acquire a new discipline wholesale during the alignment each month. Further, this being the first time such a thing had happened in my life, there had been a buildup of conceptual potential that needed to be used quickly... or it could potentially boil my brain from the inside out.

I'd then asked how and why in quick succession, burning off more of the raw potential threatening to overwhelm my very being until at last the flame snuffed itself out and I was left with only the void where once a greater potential than any other living human in this world had ever known resided.

In its place, though?

I understood.

My mind's eye had a glimpse of the true clockwork of the universe, the foundation of reality and the energy that flowed within it, the structure of souls and how they breathed revelations and inspiration to serve as a light in the dark to an otherwise aimless wandering existence. It was a grand and purposeful machination beyond which I would ever be able to naturally conceive of or believe in. I did not know if the underpinnings of creation had been designed by some truly omnipotent creator or if they were, in and of themselves the creator, joyous to see their creations dance ever onward as the perfect mechanistic omniverse spun ever-onward.

Of course, if anyone's ever had a drunkard or a pothead come up to them and explain the great truth of the universe, dude, you can imagine how well a ten year old trying to tell their orphanage matron descriptions of the cosmological firmament went over.

...I'm pretty sure they just thought I'd eaten a bad portion of the meal that night and had resolved to give me a few days to sleep off the presumed hallucinogenic effects.

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