The solution wasn't to halt the flow of chakra to and from a tenketsu, and I was an idiot of the highest magnitude to ever think it was (though I would later learn that this was how the genjutsu release technique was performed). But my experience taught me a valuable skill, which was the ability to use my tenketsu to force chakra back through my canals, something I would later find out that most people couldn't do.

It also led me to my next solution, which was to simply force my chakra through the tenketsu and into the other parts of my body more quickly, keeping the organ in a constant state of depletion. That was rather dangerous as well, but I had already developed my submarine splitting technique, which greatly cut down on the chance of catastrophic failure. And if any canals did get backed up, they would be the much less important ones located in my extremities.

I took great satisfaction in that win, even though it wasn't exactly intentional. And fuck, it wasn't even hard. At first. But then I added more tenketsu, and then the challenge really took off. Unlike with my previous attempts, however, I was steadily making progress.

While actively pumping chakra away from my gate, my limbs felt tight and inflated, as if someone had given me a blood transfusion but pumped me up with too much extra fluid. It was extremely uncomfortable, and I knew I was on the precipice of blowing off all my limbs.

But holy shit, it was working. After an extended session (which I privately called putting on the jets, as my canals alarmingly felt like the nozzles in a jacuzzi), I still felt a bit of that tightness after I let up, which I took to mean that I had more chakra than when I began.

I'm not a complete idiot. To make absolutely certain I hadn't majorly fucked up, I went to the hospital and got an examination. The medic-nin was baffled.

"She clearly has an excess of chakra," she told Kazuhiro, and I almost let out a cheer of excitement. "Has she had an unusual appetite as of late?"

Oh cool! I was being examined for a dysfunction in my Gate of View! Strange thing to be excited for, but I guess it just feels nice to know things.

"She has been eating a lot," Kazuhiro mused.

The medic-nin's hand glowed, and she hovered it over my stomach. "There are micro tears in her Keimon, an important tenketsu. It looks to be on the mend, but I'll heal them just in case."

Whoo! Go lady! One less thing I have to worry about. I couldn't see the organ itself, just measure my internal chakra, so I hadn't even noticed the strain.

"If the discomfort is too much, we can teach her to drain the chakra," she offered.

"Nope!" I said quickly. "I mean, I can do it myself." I demonstrated my jutsu, and the woman's eyes widened.

"Oh, my," she said, clearly taken aback. "Well, yes, that would work."

"But it's not very uncomfortable," I lied, canceling the jutsu quickly to conserve chakra. "What would happen if I just leave it?"

"If you can bear the sensation, I suspect only good things," the medic said, and I could barely reign in my reaction. "The excess, as long as it doesn't build up too far, will slowly stretch your pathways, making them larger and increasing your chakra capacity in the long run."

"How will I know it's too far?" I asked immediately.

"Oh, you'll know," she said ominously. "If you feel extreme pain, return at once. Although, I don't think you have to worry. Your Keimon had already halted its unusual stimulation of chakra by the time I examined you, so unless there's another dysfunction of some kind, you won't experience another surge of chakra like this again."

That's what you think.

"Um, I have a question," I asked. "If this is such a rare and beneficial thing, why don't medics like yourself try and induce it in shinobi?"

"Healing with medical ninjutsu requires impeccable control and a precision that cannot be matched in any other discipline," she lectured. "If a shinobi exists with such abilities, they do not exist in Iwa. And also, the Keimon isn't an ordinary tenketsu; if it is not treated with the appropriate delicacy, the patient might face devastating consequences. You are very fortunate that your injury was so mild, and that the consequences are to your benefit. People with similar afflictions have not been nearly so lucky."

I really wanted to brag about how luck had nothing—well, not much—to do with it, but I held my tongue. Kazuhiro might restrict my freedoms in the future, and frankly, he would be right to. If I, as an adult, heard about a child in my charge doing something so outrageous, I would consider it my moral duty to put a stop to it.

Or worse, I could be forced into some lab somewhere instead of being allowed to join the shinobi ranks. That would suck.

"Do you know when my chakra network will adjust?" I asked, but she shook her head.

"There's no way of knowing for sure. Just listen to your body; slowly, the sensation will go away."

Hopefully it wouldn't go too slowly. I don't know how long I'm capable of powering the Chisana Hikari no Jutsu with my current reserves, so I'd much rather be safe than sorry. So, over the next couple of days, I manually topped off my reserves, keeping my pathways tight and just shy of bursting.

It really, really sucked. I couldn't wait for my week to be up.

And not soon enough, it was.

- - - { ワナビー } - - -

Endo Ayumu stared down at the little girl, who had been waiting for her team to arrive, leaning against the wall of the tunnel. She looked nonchalant, but the jonin hadn't earned the moniker Unfoolable Ayumu for nothing; she was both an excellent sensor and a near peerless judge of body language. The girl was slightly nervous, but that was overshadowed by her excitement.

"I hope you haven't come to waste my time," Ayumu asked, just to see what she'd say or do. She felt that a person showed their true character when frightened, so that was the emotion she usually tried to elicit.

"I hope so too," she said, her voice cheerful despite its throatiness, and Ayumu blinked at the unexpected response.

"Your words imply unsurety, but your tone doesn't match," she noted, though it didn't take someone of her skill level to deduce as much. "You better be taking this seriously."

"Oh, you have no idea how seriously I'm taking this," she said, her grin turning a bit savage. Curious. "But for your information, I learned how to perform the jutsu within twenty-four hours of you teaching it to me. However, I've never actually tested how long I am able to hold it."

"Then you're not taking this seriously," Ayumu said, a dangerous look creeping over her face that had her quietly watching students edge backwards unconsciously. Though that might have had more to do with the wisps of killing intent that she let off.

The girl wet her lips, but that was the only indication she felt it at all.

"I didn't think I'd be able to hold it for five minutes," she admitted. "At first. So I developed a technique to ensure that I could."

There was no technique that could increase a person's chakra capacity in such a short time, or one that would allow someone to replenish chakra without the assistance of a skilled medic-nin, so Ayumu's expression grew even more frosty.

"I would have told you soldier pills were against the rules if I thought you would be stupid enough to use them," she warned.

The pills were the only explanation she could think of that would replicate such a feat, and they wreaked havoc on a user's body. As such, they should only be used as a last resort. If a three-year-old were to use one, they would probably suffer immediate kidney failure.

"No soldier pills," she promised. "But I won't keep the both of us in suspense any longer."

She molded the hand seals and a light emanated from her palm as she raised it towards the roof of the cave. "And the time starts now."

They waited. And waited. And waited. The only sound in the tunnels was from her own brats, who shuffled their feet in impatience.

As a sensor, Ayumu was more familiar than most with how much chakra a person of a specific demographic should have. Which was how she knew that someone of this kid's age—even if their parents were monsters in the chakra department—shouldn't be able to hold the jutsu past the four minute mark, and that was purely from a chakra capacity standpoint. There was the skill issue as well to consider. However, that four minutes came and went, and the light didn't so much as flicker.

Then, it was over.

"You're five minutes are up," the jonin announced, not even needing to count the seconds.

"Cool," the girl said. But she didn't let her arm drop, or let the light extinguish.

Obviously, the kid wanted to prove a point.

Ayumu hadn't cared enough to look at her chakra before, but now her interest was piqued. She extended her sixth sense to the girl, and it was only due to her extensive conditioning with the Red Ogres that allowed her to keep the surprise out of her posture.

The girl wasn't putting up a front. She really did have plenty of chakra left. But what was stranger, was that her chakra was moving irregularly. When a jutsu was formed, it usually exited a single or localized group of tenketsu. Chakra for that jutsu would flow to that tenketsu to be used up in the process, and if the jutsu was sustained for a period of time, chakra from farther parts of the body would have to be sucked towards the tenketsu as a vacuum was formed within the chakra network. This was the reason that sustaining jutsu was so hard; eventually, the chakra nearest to the tenketsu would be used up more quickly than it could be replenished, leaving a void that caused the jutsu to fail, damaging the user's body in the process.

However, the girl's chakra network seemed to be doing the opposite. Instead of using up the chakra nearest to the tenketsu on her hand, it was siphoning the extra chakra in her legs first, and at an impressive rate. No void was being formed in the slightest.

"Are you doing that consciously?" Ayumu asked.

"What do you mean?"

"With your chakra," she clarified, and the girl raised an eyebrow.

"Shit. You're a sensor, aren't you?"

"Answer the question," Ayumu prompted, and the girl sighed.

"I am," she said. Her arm was trembling from being held up for so long. "All my preparation was focused on bolstering my chakra reserves, and I didn't even realize there was another part of the puzzle. Good thing I can improvise. Otherwise, my light may have gone out a while ago." She grinned, and not in a nice way. "Sneaky, sensei. I wasn't supposed to pass this test, was I?"

"I already have three snot-nosed brats that I have to keep from drowning," Ayumu said, unashamedly. The three brats in question didn't say anything, but she could feel their agitation from the comment. "I didn't want to have to worry about another. But if someone else walked in on you splashing about in a restricted training area, they may not have been as forgiving as me."

"So you're saying you did this out of the kindness of your heart?" She teased, and Ayumu snorted, not deigning to comment on that.

"You said you focused on bolstering your chakra reserves," she recalled. "How did you increase them in such a short span of time?"

The girl seemed to consider the question. "It's not unrelated to this other thing I'm doing," she finally said. "I have unparalleled control over my body's chakra, while it's inside me at least. It's part that, part eating a lot and part meditation. I doubt anyone other than me can do it."

The light still wasn't out, and they were well past the eight minute mark.

"Who are your parents?" She asked.

"My mother was Omori Mana," she said. "And my father was Imai Hisashi. They're dead."

Ayumu recognized the father's name. He was a B-Rank threat. Maybe her reserves were naturally larger than average. Perhaps she even had a hidden bloodline.

"Are you in the care of the orphanage?" She asked, keeping the sympathy out of her voice. No self-respecting Iwa shinobi, prospective or official, would appreciate that.

"No, my god-brother takes care of me."

She nodded. "What do you think about entering the academy early?"

"I would love nothing more," she said quickly, and the jonin nodded.

"Three is still too young, even after this," she said, waving her hand. "But to enter the academy early, you need a jonin sponsor. When you turn four, I'll give you one."

A child joined the academy at five, typically, though some were a bit older depending on what month their birthdays fell.

Finally, at just over ten minutes, the light sputtered out, and the girl cursed.

"Thanks for the offer, sensei," she said, shaking out her hand. She looked a bit clammy. "I'll definitely take you up on it. For now, though, I don't think I'm up for swimming. I'll see you next week."

As she turned, Ayumu spoke up. "I'm already reserving this place for one and a half hours. I might as well round it up to two, so you can come a half hour early in the future."

The girl nodded and continued limping out of the cave.

"That was very nice of you sensei," Suichi, one of her students, noted.

"I'm just doing my duty as an Iwa shinobi to nurture talent," she said. "It's not something I do often or lightly. Mark my words, that girl is going to do great things one day."

- - - { ワナビー } - - -

Ow. Ow. Motherfucking ow.

The tightness in my chakra pathways was gone, but in its place was an even deeper ache that pulsed through my entire being. The processes that led to an increase in chakra capacity were supposed to be gradual, but now my canals were like rubber bands that had been stretched over something a bit too big for too long. Once the object was removed, they were permanently a bit bigger, looser and fatigued.

I needed a medic-nin. No, wait, I needed more chakra first. Not nearly as much as before, but enough to add some tension to my canals.

For that, I needed to eat and meditate, so that was the first thing I did. I crammed as much meat into my mouth as I could, and as I was in the process of making a slob out of myself, Kazuhiro walked in.

"'Lo, Nii-san," I said, a mouth full of food. "You're back from your mission?"

He stared at me, a complex emotion in his face as I tried to wipe my own off properly with a napkin.

"I got back yesterday evening," he said finally. "I came in to see you but you were…dissociating. I thought you were really ill; nothing I said got through to you. I would have taken you to the hospital, but Akane-obasan said that this was normal for you, over the last couple days. She said you'd be fine in the morning."

Ah. Now I feel bad—he looked really concerned.

"I'm sorry, Nii-san," I apologized. "I won't do that again. It's just that, healing from the chakra thing was really uncomfortable. But I think I'm better now…well, not better," I hedged. "I think I just got over a stage last night. Now I just feel sore all over, but in a very different way."

"Do you need a medic?" He asked.

"Umm… maybe. I'll try and stick it out," I I admitted I needed one, he would insist on taking me right away, and I needed to do some finagling with my internals first. "I feel bad for bothering them so much."

"Are you sure?" He pressed.

"I promise I'll tell you if I really need it." Then, softer, I said. "Sorry for making you and Akane-obasan worry."

He ruffled my hair. "It's okay, imouto. We know you were sick."

But I wasn't sick. I chose to do this, and chose to push my family away in the process, so I still felt bad.

"I need to take a nap," I said. "It was hard to sleep last night. But after that, do you want to do something?" After a fun little trip to the hospital.

"Yeah," he said, smiling gently. "I would like that."

- - - { ワナビー } - - -

If I thought I was anime protagonist enough to escape the consequences of my little stunt scott-free, I was very wrong. I had increased my chakra capacity by a significant amount, but not the reserves themselves (bar conscious effort) or the chakra regeneration rate. So now, the rest of my body had to play catch-up, something that took months.

The medics couldn't really do much for me either. Perhaps I had a faulty understanding of what medical ninjutsu could and couldn't do (which was very likely) or Iwa's medical division was just shit. I was leaning towards the first; the medics I'd seen seemed rather competent, and everything canon about medic ninjutsu that I knew came from the lips of Tsunade, who was a peerless prodigy at the art. It wasn't fair to hold others to her standard.

All they could really do was give me pain meds. Which I gratefully accepted, don't get me wrong, but I was hoping to just be, you know, healed.

Turns out I wouldn't be able to spam this strategy until I got Kisame-leveled chakra reserves, though it might get me close if I kept with it. I would definitely have to dial back the intensity, however, and increase the timeframe by several magnitudes.

But I was incredibly satisfied by the result. Once a week—not as much as I would like but better than nothing—I could get my swimming fix, and I could even fuck around for half an hour before sexy-sensei and her squad got there and I had to pretend to get serious.

Once my chakra had settled into something more resembling normalcy, I started on another project, one that had haunted my fantasies ever since I first learned about the gates.

My first step was achieving near mastery of the Chisana Hikari no Jutsu (I couldn't achieve true mastery, which, though it hadn't been defined yet to me, I took to mean being able to use it without hand seals). I practiced it at all hours of the day, paying close attention to the behavior of my chakra as I used it. As an unintended side effect, I gained the ability to use it on my opposite hand as well, though it couldn't be transferred to any other area as the jutsu was created to be used with the chakra network in a person's hand.

Not long after, I was comfortable enough with the jutsu to sequester the exact amount of chakra it required to be sustained for a minute in my hand, meaning it would cut off on its own after a minute of activation. I repeated it over and over until my precision was exact. Then I began to laugh, as I had just invented a unit of measuring chakra.

A Hikari, I named it. The amount of chakra it takes to create a lesser chakra light for a minute. I wasted no time in measuring my gates, rounding to the nearest half number for simplicity.

Now, I could finally quantify my stats, in a sense. From what my medical books suggested, the chakra in the gates boosted the associated trait, not simply dictated them, so the number of Hikari's present in each gate was more like a stat multiplier than a stat itself. Although, the actual trait conversely influenced the amount of chakra as well (for example, a higher brain activity in the left hemisphere would lead the body to allocate more chakra to the Gate of Opening). But I digress.

Kaimon ~ Logic: 13.5

Kyūmon ~ Creativity: 14

Seimon ~ Vitality: 5.5

Shōmon ~ Chakra Affinity: 2

Tomon ~ Strength: 4

Keimon ~ Chakra Capacity: 19.5

Kyōmon ~ Speed: 4.5

I was unsurprised to find that my advanced cognition had fed into my Kaimon and Kyūmon, but I was surprised at how disproportionate they were compared to my other stats. Except for my Keimon, which was rather staggering.

But taking into account the nature of the gate in question, I probably shouldn't be surprised. Its entire function was to house chakra until it needed to be distributed. So the amount of Hikari it contained probably shouldn't be compared to the amount of Hikari present in other gates.

Out of curiosity, I also measured the Shimon, the Gate of Death. It couldn't offer me anything, and I was too scared to even tamper with it at all, but I was curious about its capacity.

Shimon ~ Death: 21.5

That's how much chakra it took to run my heart for some reason, even though humans and animals in my old world got along just fine without it. Maybe that chakra had some hidden purpose. If I was ever in a position to speak civilly with Tsunade about it (as if that could ever happen), I would.

I also sorely wished I could look at other people's stats for reference, but that was similarly impossible. I wasn't a sensor, I couldn't manipulate another person's chakra, and I certainly couldn't spread my awareness to another person's chakra network. Which meant I had no one to compare myself to.

But that was okay. If I had that capability, I might settle for simply being better than anyone else my age, something I couldn't afford to do if I wanted to survive in this world. Now, the only person I was sure I could surpass was myself, and I enjoyed watching those numbers go up ever so slowly as I continued the grind.

The only one that remained completely stagnant was my already lowest stat: the Shōmon. I had no idea what to do about that, as I didn't even know what my elemental affinity was, much less how to develop it. While I desperately wished for it to be water, I knew deep in my heart that it was almost definitely earth. Both of my parents were earth natured, and this kind of thing usually boiled down to genetics. But maybe my past life experiences would come out on top, who knows?

- - - { ワナビー } - - -

AN: Oof. Barely got that done in time for my self-imposed deadline. I had an especially hard time making this particular chapter coherent, probably because of all the technical explanations.

So Kasaiki gets to enroll a year early! Thank god—finding ways for her to occupy her time when she's barely out of toddlerhood is getting more and more difficult. Now, the plot can progress.

Alas, we're not quite there yet. Kisaiki has caught the eye of another jonin, and this one's a sensor. She's got to watch her back.

Thank you for all of your support! I've gotten so many kind comments on this fic, and each one really makes my day. Most of my free time is spent working on my soon to be published work, so taking a break from the heavy editing to actually write stress free has done wonders for my creativity. I'm glad my passion project can entertain you all as well!