After a few hours inside his own mind, Jay saved the meditation for later, deciding that he still had too little information to solve the puzzle of this world's culture.
The fox had stopped thrashing around after some time, seeing that the Fox decided to switch from anger to sulking while trying to stare a hole into his head, Jay ‘let himself’ hear him.
[Jay] - I’ll explore the village now, I’ll keep this link between us open if you decide to finally be polite and tell me your name … I’ll be working on freeing you in the spare time, this ‘spell script’ looks familiar but I know enough about it to not try my hand without some safety first, those things tend to get ‘explodey’ when you make mistakes and this ‘Chakra’ is still very new’ … -
Jay gave the fox that decided to give him the silent treatment a small wave before ‘blinking’ his eyes back in the world outside his mind …
***
Jay got up from the ground and stretched … Moving in a series of different positions … Testing his range of motion, his balance, the strength in his limbs and the different reactions of his body.
***
Yūgao Uzuki watched from afar as Naruto finally stood up from his meditation …
The assignment of watching over the boy was generally relaxing even if a bit unnerving with how ‘weird’ the young prodigy was …
Though Yūgao’s own experience working with Kakashi-san made it easier to dismiss it as just a quirk …
Her sensory talents made sure Yūgao could give Naruto the ‘illusion’ of privacy while keeping an eye out for him …
After all, the jinchuuriki of a village was an asset that HAD to be well looked after, it didn’t hurt that the boy was also the spitting image of the fourth hokage … The man’s son was already showing his parentage …
Seeing the boy perform a series of stretches was nothing out of the ordinary …
Seeing the boy do calisthenics was nothing out of the ordinary …
Seeing the boy undress completely and start poking himself was … out of the ordinary …
Seeing the boy perform internal chakra usage and spasm all over the place was VERY out of the ordinary …
Yūgao’s sensory talent could distinguish a clear internal chakra usage, crude and raw but with clear intent … Something straight out of taijutsu katas … Katas that, after the boy split his own bones during training, was something explicitly NOT taught to him at the moment, for fear of further self-injury …
When she felt the boy releasing a frankly dangerous quantity of chakra, Yūgao immediately sprung into action …
Yūgao stood from the food stand she was relaxing in and immediately performed a ‘shushin’ Kata towards the young boy's apartment.
Chakra focused through Yūgao’s body and feet … Chakra pulled-in her muscles, contracting them in conjunction with her own movements for added power and speed … The chakra in her feet soaked into the ground, attracting it tightly … That reinforced the floor while also guaranteeing her grip …
With a single leap, Yūgao’s accelerated almost immediately to her top speed, leaving a stunned vendor behind as wind rushed in to fill the ‘vacuum’ she just created by moving.
Running up the apartment’s walls, Yūgao hoped to have arrived before the boy broke another arm or worse, his spine …
***
Jay was trying out a few suppositions he made after reviewing the memories collected by his body running on ‘auto-pilot’ …
The biped form, generally taken as a ‘human analogous’ for the sheer number of realities that developed ‘human-like’ life when presented the chance … It was, frankly speaking, a wonder that this patch of the multiverse favored so heavily the ‘human-like’ form, no reality seemed exempt from it’s ‘generalization’ and his current body fell straight into that category.
To put it bluntly, it was a ‘reliable ship’ for Jay to pilot … It does what’s on the tin, has very little surprises, and in the case of this world Jay was in … it had the ‘Vanilla package + Magic’ that Jay was quite used to … So nothing ‘new’ there to study on the biology side … And while sure, there might be biological interactions with said ‘magic system’ as is a very common thing … in Jay’s experience, you could always understand what the body was doing ‘automatically’ and replicate that with other methods if you understood the ‘magic’ behind it …
So Jay focused on the chakra …
***
In Jay’s view, chakra had this weird ‘raw’ property to ‘attract’ and at the same time ‘repel’ … it did that ‘naturally’, even without much ‘objective’ in your manipulation, just ‘dumping’ chakra into something gave you ‘two’ possibilities, it would attract, or it would repel …
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
As far as Jay and his ‘auto-body’ could figure-out, there were no ‘limits’ to what chakra could be attracted to, even itself in the case of ‘chakra-strings’ that few ninjas favored … you just need to match the ‘frequencies’ properly and then sustain it …
And, if you advanced said frequency by ‘half’, you would perform what most ninjas called ‘attraction inversion’ …
You quite literally inverted the attraction into a violent repulsion …
The chakra that was previously attracting ‘something’, suddenly, like a compressed spring, violently repealed what it was holding …
Jay could already see the applications of it, using it internally to aid your muscles and skeleton like an ‘exosuit’, getting a better grip on the ground or even imparting huge acceleration to things or to yourself by timing the ‘attraction inversion’ properly …
Jay remembered his ‘auto-body’ observing a ninja more proficient in weapons literally ‘throwing’ a shuriken with hard to see speeds, the little metal blades quite literally ‘exploding’ out of the ninja’s hands with more speed than he could possibly have given them …
[Jay] “So that’s how the ‘Katas’ work … They do predictable pre-planed motions and accelerate the body beyond it’s limits and the limits of their own reflexes by attracting and repelling their own muscles and bones in memorised patterns … Boosted muscle memory … “
Jay nodded, testing the effects himself, trying to make his muscles contract and move through chakra alone …
A jerked motion suddenly sprained a muscle in his arm as he moved with more force than it could handle …
[Jay] “Hmm, there is more to it, how can their bodies endure the acceleration ? … Sure, their biology can have a high degree of adaptation and increased toughness with chakra use, but I feel like there's something missing … from what my body saw of the ‘chunins’ looking after me, their baseline is definitively beyond ‘normal human’, but also not high enough to justify to endure the kinds of accelerations I saw them using … “
Thinking on how chakra could make their bodies actively tougher, Jay arrived at one way of doing it … Crude, but applicable …
[Jay] “If the attraction was evenly spread out … That would compress everything and increase the overall ‘toughness’ of the body … Though they would have to account for the immense internal pressure … But my stint as a snake tells me that the body itself ‘metabolizes’ the chakra … If a person trains constantly under this chakra induced ‘high-pressure’, their biology would surely adapt to it … Though with a finer degree of control, they can probably soak chakra directly into the finer parts of the body, maybe even reinforcing cellular adhesion … that would make them dramatically tougher … ”
Jay let his mind pierce the pieces of all the pieces as he moved to put his thoughts in practice …
The only problem was matching all the different materials ‘frequencies’ and ‘keeping’ it stable … Chakra needed one frequency to attract to the ground, another to attract to the air, another to attract muscles, another to bones, and so on so fought … Mixing everything together created a ‘music’ but each note needed to be perfect … and with how the very motion Jay was inducing changed the ‘flow’ of his chakra … it was an ongoing process that left his spasming all over the place as he tried the possible combinations …
… If Jay stayed perfectly still, his chakra responded sluggishly but in a very predictable manner … But as soon as he introduced movements, the flow was immediately affected … Each movement made the chakra flow slightly different, with more complex motions modifying said flow to an even more complex ‘Timbre’ …
Somatic components seemed to give the most predictable changes as well as the more subtle ones …
[Jay] “So that’s where the hand seals come from … it’s just easier to achieve the correct ‘frequency’ by focusing on the hands … “
Jay was busy mapping those chakra motions to those of his body … but found that while the ‘Louder Notes’ were easy to perceive and comprehend, there were still some ‘lower notes’ below it that he was having trouble ‘listening’ to … So, Jay did the simplest solution one could find …
… First, Jay eliminated any possible interferences on him by getting completely naked so that no chakra interacted with ‘clothes’ and the likes …
And then … Jay made the signal LOUDER by releasing more ‘energy’, or in this case, chakra …
Jay could feel that his body was quickly being drained of chakra, with exhaustion coming close, but that was of no concern, Jay only needed a few moments to get at least a bit of new data …
The increased flow of chakra was proving to be quite harsh on his young body … He could see the reddening of his skin as his internal pressure predictably spiked …
His jerking motions became even ‘stronger’, to the point Jay was sure a few bones were cracking … But the clarity of ‘sound’ and ‘form’ that came with it made it worthy …
Too bad he wasn’t allowed to continue as a woman jumped through his window and gave him a palm strike charged with chakra directly to his navel … The chakra on her strike overwhelmed his own ‘flow’ and disrupted his experiments immediately … leaving his now exhausted body on the ground while she silently fussed over him and the many cracked bones and sprained muscles he now had.
[Yūgao] - Naruto, what were you thinking ?! Do you have any idea how dangerous it is trying to perform internal usage without a kata ?! Or even an instructor ?! -
Yūgao asked, focusing on her ‘medical palm’ and not really paying attention to the ‘toneless’ response she became used to … but instead of toneless …
[Jay] - Hello there Chunin-san … Or is Yūgao ? How is your day ? … Also, I don’t like ‘Naruto’ all that much, would you mind calling me ‘Jay’ ? It’s for ‘free-bird’, almost like ‘wandering spirit’ … I quite like that … -
***
Yūgao was internally screaming as once more Naruto’s weirdness made itself known … It was almost as if the boy didn’t feel pain …
There he was, countless cracks in his skeleton, muscles sprained or with an outright tear … and not a single cry in sight, not a single acknowledgment of the ‘pain’ he should be in …
But then … Then the voice came …
It had emotion now, it had ‘life’ … Yūgao almost stopped her treatment as her ‘medical ninjutsu’ momentarily destabilized as she heard Naruto’s voice … filled with … amused mirth … What did he ask again ? …
[Yūgao] - What ? I’m sorry Naruto, I didn’t get that -
[Jay] - I said hello Chunin Yūgao-san, and could you please call me Jay ? I like that better, also, could you move the hand a bit higher ? I think it’s a bit dangerously low, you know ? … -
Jay said, giving a half amused smile, looking at Yūgao’s hands …
Yūgao stopped her treatment now that most of the boy's injuries were on their way to fully recuperating … It was almost unfair how quickly the boy bounced back from injury and exhaustion … Perks of being a jinchuuriki Yūgao guessed …
But the joke ? … Since when Naruto ‘joked’ ? … Since when did Naruto make adult jokes ? … Since when did he understand adult jokes ?! …
Yūgao opened and closed her mouth for a few moments before her training kicked in.
[Yūgao] - … We need to see the Hokage … Now … -
Yūgao almost scooped the boy out of the ground and carried him at that moment, but once more …
[Jay] - Are you sure I can’t put on some clothes ? -
Yūgao saw the same unbordered smile … Yūgao expected the same cold detachment from before … but now that ‘cold’ was replaced with amused … Something … Something happened as the boy meditated for all those hours … he had … ‘emotions’ now …
[Yūgao] - Yes, right, sure, sorry, please be quick … -
Yūgao saw Naruto nod and she quickly turned away, only to hear a small giggle.
[Jay] - Now you turn away ? … A little too late don’t you think ? … I’m ready -
Yūgao quickly picked him up and put him on her back as she jumped though hoofs towards the hokage tower …
Yūgao decided to not think about any of it … her cushy job of observing the odd prodigy just turned not so cushy … hopefully she would be able to leave it at the hokage’s door step and nothing else … Hopefully … Who is she kidding, they will want a hundred page report on every single minute of the day …
Yūgao was already groaning at the paperwork she would have to do, just because Naruto decided that her shift was the right one to show ‘emotions’ …
The fact that Naruto was giggling in her ears at her groans only made her day worse …
[Jay] - I just caused you a lot of paperwork didn’t I ? -
Yūgao wasn’t sure if she should strangle the boy or not … she was glad that whatever issues the boy was having with his mind were solved … but now that he could feel emotions, he was having way too much fun at her expense …
***
