I woke up to a vision of a sterile white ceiling and a feeling of bone-deep tiredness. "Ow."

A shuffling near the edge of my vision caught my attention and I turned my head to see a dark-haired man wearing a white coat approaching. "Awake, are we? Can you tell me your name and where you are?"

I worked saliva into my mouth. "Kotaro... and, I'm guessing this is the Konoha hospital?"

"Good, good. I'm Uzumaki Ise, your attending physician." Something in my gaze must have given me away because he chuckled and nodded. "I get that a lot, the name's by marriage." The doctor nodded with a slight smile as his fingers blurred through a casual set of activation seals before masking his hands in blue-green energy. "Alright, this is a basic diagnostic jutsu to check things out, but I think your diagnosis is just simple chakra exhaustion. Judging by your medical records and what your teacher said when he dropped you off, you attempted the body flicker and collapsed when it drained you. I don't need to tell you how serious this is, but-"

No, he really didn't need to tell me.

Lesson fuckinglearned.

…

"Hu-hu-how am I this-hu-tired?" Yakumo asked, huffing for air as sweat poured down her face and soaked the training outfit she'd worn for our session today. Exhausted, she flopped back from her sitting position to lay on the sunny grassy hill we'd seized. Below, on the wider expanse of the Kurama clan grounds, their 'backyard' so to speak, Satsuki and Naruko were sparring as they danced around each other with acrobatic strikes and lightning-fast chakra-enhanced moves. As Satsuki was using a wooden sword and Naruko was superhumanly tough on her worst day, I'd given the green light to anything they would normally be allowed to do in the academy.

It was, at the very least, better than the two of them deciding that I was made of glass and needed to be constantly attended to outside of Sagara's shop.

"How do you think?" I asked, wiping off my own forehead as I stared back at her, my question curious.

"What?" Yakumo blinked, staring at me.

"How and why are you tired?" I rephrased my previous question, sincerity in each word.

Yakumo frowned in thought. "I... don't know." She looked down at the grass we'd been meditating upon. "We've been just...sitting here for hours as I worked through the exercises you've been explaining, but it's not like we've been doing anything."

I chuckled, shaking my head as I spread my hands. "That's a basic misconception of how your body works. I've explained the various muscle groups and how they grow stronger through use, yes?" She nodded. "Each flex of a bicep or twist of your abdominals you go through, if it is tight enough, will strain and damage the fibers of the muscles in that group. What most people do not understand is that you can leverage these muscles against each other."

Turning my hands so that the heels of my palms met each other, I pressed them together with force as I exhaled. "Here, reach out and touch my arms." Her fingers, warmer now two weeks into our sessions, slowly felt along the lines of taut muscles underneath my deceptively soft skin. "This is a more obvious example, but the principle applies to the whole of your body." Releasing the tension in my arms, I reached down and pulled my simple short tunic off as Yakumo's eyes trailed down my chest and her cheeks pinkened at the sight of the clean-cut shapes of my abdominals.

I took a breath and moved my muscles in a way that made my student's eyes widen. Looking to me for permission, I nodded, and her fingers began tracing the tense patterns along my stomach.

"Every day, every hour, every minute." I instructed her in controlled breaths. "This is the art you must learn. An art of precision control of oneself and one's own body."

Yakumo took a deep breath, the conscious exertion clear in her frame as she pulled air in the way I'd been coaching her to. Getting adequate oxygen to her tissues and organs was going to be the real challenge, but that wasn't for a few months. As it was now, all I really needed to do was instill the basic foundations that a true practitioner of Prana-Bindu should have learned at infancy. Thankfully, it seemed that the enhanced learning curve common to chakra-users was aiding and abetting my attempt to condense the curriculum.

It had intrigued and bothered me, just a bit, how quickly Tenten and Satsuki had picked up the sword-styles I'd been teaching them, something which I knew was more than a bit hypocritical of me. Eventually, with the pool of metaphysical knowledge at my disposal and my own understanding of human physiology through the Bene Gesserit's art, I'd deduced that the yin component of chakra was definitely increasing their learning speed, something which I had very, very carefully started to emulate a few months back by cycling chakra in controlled patterns through my body.

It was incredibly dangerous, though, even under controlled conditions.

Still, the way that a natural chakra-user seemed to use it as an innate and unfocused skill... it had allowed Tenten and Satsuki to learn sword styles that tookyearsin mere months. True, they were nowhere near mastery yet, but they were far closer than they had any right to be. So close, I was likely going to need further investment fairly soon if I was going to teach them much further. As it was, though, I had them practicing permutations of the various patterns I'd personally created in addition to moving them to chakra-enhanced training with the inclusion of a third axis of movement.

It helped that, gratifyingly, I'd managed to get to the point where I could hold my own for a good half-hour in combat before my reserves gave out.

"If that's what it takes, that's what it takes." Yakumo nodded as she took a deep breath and began to work on the cool-down exercises I'd taught her the week prior. She sighed and shook her head as she did so.

"Something wrong?" I asked patiently, running my own body through another cycle of raising my metabolism to its limit, working each and every muscle as if I were running a marathon at full sprint... all while keeping my voice perfectly level and maintaining a civil conversation as well.

"Mostly I just regret not being able to achieve being a kunoichi without learning taijutsu." Yakumo stated with a sigh as she took a long gulp from the thermos of water sitting nearby. Seeing me looking at her in curiosity, she quickly waved a hand as if to wipe away her previous words. "Ah, I don't mean that this training isn't important to me, it's just..."

"Naruko told me you wanted to be like Lee Rock." I nodded in understanding. "A ninja who adhered to only one of the three schools due to your physical disability."

The Kurama heiress smiled in relief, happy that she hadn't offended me as she swept a lock of hair over her ear. "Yes, exactly."

I smiled and shook my head. "Tai, Nin, and Gen-jutsu are false abstractions." I sighed as she furrowed her brows in obvious incomprehension. "That is to say, the groupings of techniques are for the ease of reference, not strictly because there are stringent divisions between them. Ultimately, all three reduce to the manipulation of your internal reserves of energy."

Yakumo frowned and shook her head. "But Lee-san can't manipulate chakra."

I huffed quietly in amusement, my heart rate peaking as I let myself slow down to a relative 'jog ' for a few moments. "I'd need to investigate more thoroughly, but I imagine that's not quite true. In all likelihood, whoever is teaching Lee is doing much as I am for you, save in different ways." I reached out and took a drink of my own water. "Much like how the use of illusions and medical techniques can alter the flow of energy through the body, the state of mind and the flow of the body can do so as well. Where a 'normal' shinobi would manipulate their internal reserves to boost their strength, speed, and stamina, I imagine Lee is being trained to manipulate hisbodyto force his energies to cooperate."

Yakumo's eyes slowly widened as she stared off into the middle-distance. "Th-that's... but, no-how..." Her mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. "I never thought of it like that."

"I imagine most don't." I replied. "But it is something you'll need to get used to. If the idea of learning taijutsu truly bothers you, though, think of what I am teaching you as a style of kugutsutsukai."

"Puppetry?" Yakumo asked in surprise, then nodded slowly. "Puppetry using myself as the puppet, manipulating my chakra in order to properly move without straining or damaging my muscles and tissues." She giggled, a smile crossing her face. "Thank you, sensei, that does help. At least a little bit."

I rolled my eyes. "If you've got enough energy to sass me, I want to see you run through a cycle of abdominal muscles. Ten seconds tense, ten relaxed while relaxing the rest of your body and keeping it from moving."

She took another drink of water even as I finished my own cool-down cycle and began to work my arms and legs in tandem as if I were swinging a sword. Once I got Yakumo through the 'basic' muscle control techniques in about two months, I'd move on to another four months of nerve-feedback control. After that we'd move deeper into her body step-by-step, focusing her attention on the glandular systems, then building on what she'd already learned to manipulate her autonomic nervous system and involuntary physiological processes. I estimate it'd take her about eight-to-ten months depending on how talented, focused, and motivated she was during that time.

Once she got to that point, though, she should be able to adequately compensate for her condition. If that didn't pan out, I had a far more dangerous ace up my sleeve that I could give her a crash course in the last few months.

I really hoped it didn't come to that, though, and I could spend the remaining time coaching her through a few more advanced neurological-control techniques.

…

This month, the last of the year, featured a rare second full moon. It was a phenomenon I'd heard referred to as a 'blue moon' during my first life, but never truly paid attention to. In this life, though? It was cause for serious celebration. With Satsuki and Tenten squared away for the moment, my Prana-Bindu training paying dividends for Yakumo, and Naruko lacking enough of an attention span to demand anything more than specific bits and pieces of any given art...

I finally had time to advance my own plans. Even if grabbing 'ruggedization' was somewhat basic, it would allow me to multiply the durability of not only my swords, but my clockwork creations, which I hadideasfor creatively applying at some point in the future.

Truthfully, though, the plans I'd once had were very thoroughly shot to hell. Keeping in mind the sunk-cost fallacy, I didn't want to permanently leave the Elemental Nations, which... rather put me between a rock and a hard place, because the Elemental Nations had a great many very serious problems, of which Otsutsuki Kaguya was arguably only the most readily and easily apparent.

There were any number of potential civilization-ending cataclysms hiding just around the corner, especially if any of the content I remember from the movies was actually real. If that was the case, there was a thousand-year-old potential regional-scale implosion carving buried somewhere in the wastes between Konoha and Suna.

Just as one standout example.

So to refer back to my original thoughts on plans and goals many months prior...whatwas I going to do andhowdid I plan on doing it?

I'd... have to get back to myself on that one, given I really wasn't sure at this stage. My reasons for not wanting to be a ninja held true, but I couldn't deceive myself over how important my contributions could be to victory over Orochimaru, Zetsu, and Pain. Assuming, of course, that they hadn't been swapped with Jiraiya being the Traitor, Yahiko being the leader of Akatsuki, and Zetsu... fuck, I don't know, maybe Madara went rogue and fucking Danzo is his dupe in this timeline instead of Kakashi?

That's not a terrifying thought, not at all...

Before any of that, though, I was going to learn the god damn body flicker.

"You don't need to do this." Satsuki stated, crossing her arms and trying very hard not to look as though she was concerned.

I sighed and shook my head. "Don't worry, I learned my lesson, but I'm going to learn this stupid jutsu."

Satsuki grimaced, but nodded before reaching into her backpack and pulling out a container and thrusting it at me. "Here. For lunch."

I blinked, belatedly recognizing the container as a bento, before taking and opening it to find a standard, if high-quality layout of traditional lunch-foods. I smiled softly, closing the box again and tucking it away. "Thanks, Satsuki."

She grunted, still not looking at me and not aware that I could see the trail of her blush at the tip of her right ear. "...Mom helped me, so it's not all my work."

I shook my head. "I'm sure it will be delicious."

Her chakra jumped a bit, an unusual sensation for my preternatural senses, but one I could easily interpret.

Then a buzzkill landed in a flash of orange and blue. "Hey there, lovebirds! I hope I'm not interrupting."

Satsuki sputtered and I sighed as I stood, extending a hand. "Do you have the long-form of the technique?"

Obito frowned as he pulled a small scroll out of his belt and rolled it over his fingers. "You know, I had to do some digging for this? No one uses the long-forms of the techniques these days. I actually had to poke Shisui himself to get it." He sighed as my hand stayed out-thrust and my expression didn't change. "Look, all I'm saying is that you better appreciate this and not put yourself into the hospital again, okay? 'Cause if Lady Kushina and Satsuki's mom hear that you passed out on my watchtwice, I'm in deep shit."

Satsuki, still blushing slightly, smirked in satisfaction.

"Duly-noted." I nodded, flexing my fingers. The ninja sighed and let the scroll drop into my waiting grasp. I greedily unrolled the scroll and memorized the twenty-plus set of hand-signs, complete with focus notes and time stamps for how long you were supposed to hold each one. "Hmm..."

"So, enlighten me as to why you wanted this?" Obito asked, popping a joint in his neck and dropping onto the fallen tree nearby to sit. "Because, like I said, no one uses the long-forms of the techniques anymore. You can either do the short-form or you probably shouldn't try it at all."

I sat down in the grass as I studied the scroll more intensely, taking care to walk through the hand-signs in slow motion as I felt the nascent draw of an unactivated technique building, but not forming given my lack of focus.

Yes, this is exactly what I needed.

"Because the long-form technique actually tells you what chakra gates you're supposed to draw from in the proper sequence and amounts." I stated, my tone that of someone explaining the basic facts of the universe, which I was. Ugh... god save me from people who get to jounin-rank and don't know the fundamentals of the fundamentals. I'd hoped that was solely a feature of the anime, where Naruto was an idiot so the audience could get an explanation of how things actually worked.

Eh, maybe it's just because he's an Uchiha with cheaty-eyes.

Obito cocked his head, his eyes focusing on me as he frowned while Satsuki turned to give me her full attention out of the corner of my eye. "Sorry." The older ninja stated, dipping a pinky into his ear and wiggled it around. "Say that again?"

I sighed. "So, basically, you know that hand-seals are instructions for your chakra on how to perform a ninja technique, right?" Obito and Satsuki nodded. "Alright, so the deal is that specific hand-seals and specific sequences actually correspond to drawing chakra from specific gates within your body, because the different gates each process chakra in different ways. Chakra cycles through the pathway system from your cells and tissues into the gates where your soul connects to your body and refines the energy into a more usable form before redistributing it throughout your body." Both Uchiha stared at me vacantly and I shook my head. "Think of it like your blood having to go through your heart, into your lungs, and back to your organs before making the same trip again to keep you alive."

"...and the specific gates?" Obito asked leadingly, rubbing his chin as he stared at me intently.

"I'm not going to do a full breakdown of every gate; find someone else for that." I waved him off. "But, just as an example, the Gate of Opening and the Gate of Healing contribute primarily to yin-yang transformations, although the Gate of View contributes a bit to yang refinement and the Gate of Wonder does the same for yin. But View and Wonder are much more strongly linked to linkages between the different hand-signs. The Gates of Life, Pain, Limit, and Death do most of the elemental transformations, but that depends on what order the signs are in and the proportional pauses you add when performing a technique. That's probably where things went wrong for me, since I was using the short-form technique that generalizes the types of chakra you need to apply as well as the sequence, especially since my system is fucked up."

There was silence for a moment as I went through the set of hand-seals again, faster, and inwardly observed the partial formation of the technique again. I still didn't allow the chakra to properly form and disperse to activate it, but I could see exactly how the body-flicker did what it did.

I grinned and pulled out a pencil before making a few sketch marks on the scroll as I personalized the technique properly so it wouldn't nearly kill me.

"So... where'd you learn all this?" Obito asked casually.

Deep in my after-market alterations of the body-flicker, I shrugged. "It's obvious, isn't it?"

"Why do they only teach us the short-forms in the academy?" Satsuki asked, leaning over to watch what I was doing.

I shrugged again. "You don'tneed it, really. The short-forms of the technique hand-signs are good enough for people who have moderately-sized pools of chakra to work with." Even if 'pool' was something of a misnomer, really. "It probably helps that when someone teaches someone else a technique, there's this kind of...chakra resonance between the two. It's not like... telepathy or mind-reading or anything, but the one teaching the technique is feeding their students a lot of unconscious tells through their chakra about how to form the jutsu properly." I reached up to scratch at my temple. At least Satsuki had the excuse of being a student. "Basically, you learn a bunch of short-cuts in the process of being taught the technique that you use subconsciously to cut out steps that you'd have to go through normally."

Because, surprise-surprise, hand-signs actually meant something. Which, considering that they descended from the ancient space-faring Otsutsuki... Well, it shouldn't actually be a surprise that they weren't just arbitrary finger-puppets with a complete lack of metaphysical significance. No, it was bizarre to consider, but hand-seals were somehow tapping into the underlying human soul-psyche to properly form techniques and allow jutsu to happen.

They weren't a programming language for reality or anything like some forms of magic were characterized as, but... at a stretch, you could describe them as a way to hack the human soul in order to force metaphysical energy produced by it to do your bidding.

Satsuki gave a surprised hum and nodded. Obito made some kind of movement that I didn't really catch, but Satsuki's next question took my attention. "What's that?" She pointed at my scribbles.

I frowned, but decided to throw the hospital under the metaphorical bus. "While I was recovering from chakra exhaustion I asked to read a few medical texts and one of them had some stuff on how iryo-nin write out complicated medical techniques when they need precision work on certain patients. Since they're using the short-form of the technique too, it's less about making the jutsu perfect and more about making sure it targets exactly what you need it to and how you need it to, because with the technique scripted on a scroll you don't need to concentrate on forming or maintaining it. That frees the medic performing it to focus on application instead of the technique itself, but I figure you can write out the long-from technique with a proper formula notation and personalize it to your own needs."

I stood and nodded. "If you do it all correctly, you should be able to maximize the effect while cutting the chakra cost far below what most people would consider the minimum. Of course, I can't exactly write down the formula for this, but knowing all the proper notations is an extra layer of insulation against something really bad happening." That last bit was something of a lie, since I didn't want them to suspect I was going to simultaneously draw the full formula in my mind and perform the hand-signs as well to further optimize the technique.

Taking a deep breath, I focused as I built the full jutsu formula within my mind, adding various notations for distance, elevation, and specifying speed instead of relying on the general multiplier. "The drawback to all of this is, of course, you're modifying a technique on the fly and if you get a single detail wrong the best case is that the entire thing collapses and outright fails."

Another breath and untyped chakra settled into my fingers an instant before I spun through two-dozen hand-seals. Prana-Bindu pushed my proprioception to a degree likely beyond that of most amateur ninja, allowing my fingers to dance like lightning and complete the series at a speed comparable to some academy kids I'd see doing the basic clone jutsu. Of course, a basic conception of the simulfow technique allowed me to maintain both the design of the formula and build the technique the old-fashioned way, something I doubt all but a few could do.

A fraction of a second passed as chakra flowed along the technique formula held inside my own mind and drawn with exacting precision by three-times the 'short-form' number of hand-seals.

Then, in a cloud of dust, I was ten meters away.

Take that Shunshin!

Obito and Satsuki merely blinked at my triumphant smirk.

Unbeknownst to them, this success had given me a much more firm idea of what and how to apply myself.