Chapter 158: The True Heart
Insects.
Countless insects.
They carpeted the arena, a living tide that had swept through every inch of the grounds.
Tsunade, watching from nearby, did not even understand what she was looking at.
Only a month had passed.
Just one month since she had handed those four children over.
Yet the results in front of her were so grotesquely beyond expectation that her mind refused to accept them as real.
By every conventional measure, this was supposed to be the age where ninja strength grew the fastest.
Hyuga Neji, a prodigy, had personally learned the main branch techniques of the Hyuga clan.
Rock Lee had mastered the Eight Gates and pushed his taijutsu far beyond the ordinary.
Tenten, backed by wealth and talent, had refined her control over all manner of ninja tools.
By age, by innate talent, by battlefield experience, by the simple numbers of a three on one matchup, Neji's team should have held a crushing advantage.
Reality was the exact opposite.
Her pride, the so called elite of Konoha, the young geniuses she had trusted, had been dismantled in the hands of four children who had disappeared into training for a month.
To those four, Neji's team was not even a real enemy.
They were obstacles, the kind you dealt with as a matter of routine, without malice and without effort.
And according to Tsunade's own understanding, the four who had appeared on the field were not even their true bodies.
That was the worst part.
If those were only clones, then the real situation was even more terrifying.
Flower techniques, secret arts, chakra technology, and that horrifying insect technique. Everything those children had displayed lay beyond the framework Tsunade knew.
She was certain of one thing.
Aizen Sousuke had done this.
But he had not used genjutsu.
He had not tampered with their minds in any obvious way.
On the surface, everything was their own work, their own study, their own choice. The familiarity of their movements, the unthinking ease with which they employed these techniques, proved that their mastery had long passed the level of blind imitation.
They had truly made this power their own.
How?
How had it turned into this?
They had all started as ordinary Konoha ninjas. How had it warped into such a shocking, alien sight?
"Surprised?"
A voice beside her broke the silence.
Aizen stood there in his white turtleneck coat, gaze calm as he watched the messy arena. There was no astonishment in his eyes, only quiet confirmation, as if everything he saw was merely the outcome of a calculation.
"But this is only natural," he said. "Hard work produces results. It is that simple."
"Seven hundred and twenty hours of study. Is that really all you see it as?"
He tilted his head slightly, as if examining an oddly shaped specimen.
"Mediocre people think a month is not enough time to create anything remarkable," Aizen went on. "So they shrink from the future, waste their days, and then comfort themselves by saying, 'This cannot be done in just a month.'
"But that way of thinking has a fatal flaw."
For an ordinary person, the amount of time spent truly focused on learning each day was perhaps two to four hours at best.
Beyond that, the mind wandered, concentration frayed, and thoughts dulled.
Learning was, at its root, a painful and unnatural act.
People willingly tortured themselves only to obtain greater power later. That was why they called it study.
Under that model, the most one month could offer was thirty days times four hours.
A hundred and twenty hours at most.
To Tsunade, that was what training meant.
Aizen looked down at the four children waving at him from the field. Their faces were bright and excited, but their movements were stiff, their smiles a strange mix of joy and exhaustion.
He waved back, amused, then turned his gaze to the Hokage beside him.
Tsunade stood frozen, as if she had been forced to swallow a reality she could not digest.
"That calculation is for ordinary people," Aizen said softly. "On paper. As a theory.
"But true geniuses are far more terrifying than theory."
Did they really think mastering a fragment of knowledge in a day was the limit of human ability
It was not.
Genuine geniuses could grasp the fundamentals, and even advanced structures, in a single day.
Learning efficiency, mindset, rationality, cognition, imagination. Once those diverged, the results were no longer comparable.
Sometimes the distance between people was more frightening than the distance between humans and animals.
Animals never needed theories to confine them.
People chained themselves with definitions, then mistook those chains for the shape of the world.
Geniuses were the ones who shattered those definitions.
They decided what theory was. They decided where the limit lay. Numbers did not define them. They defined the numbers.
That was why Aizen felt such satisfaction watching their progress.
He considered himself excellent. But he had never believed he stood alone at the peak.
In his mind, Urahara Kisuke had surpassed him in certain areas.
Hyosube Ichibei had an even deeper grasp of Shinigami power in other domains.
Being outdone in a field did not mean those people could not stand together.
On a path where everyone strained toward the truth, outstanding individuals appeared again and again, each refining what came before. Aizen had no doubt there would be someone someday who would surpass even him, someone who would take his seat without hesitation.
Which was precisely why he refused to stop.
To walk ahead.
To show humanity how to face the natural world with courage.
To show his comrades what it truly meant to be exceptional.
If he were to fall, there would always be someone behind him to catch the sky as it caved in.
When brilliant stars burned overhead, even the filth in the deepest mud received some light.
And when countless geniuses moved forward in the dark, how could the world around them not quake and change
From Aizen's perspective, worry was meaningless.
If geniuses could not overcome the fear of falling behind, then what right did they have to be called geniuses
There would always be someone who truly wished to solve those problems. Someone whose curiosity, joy, dreams, and obsession pushed them into that unknown. Once an idea took root, action inevitably followed.
Even someone who started from boredom and a love of games would eventually open up new paths in those related fields if they loved them deeply enough.
Most people could not accept this.
The idea that such a world actually existed was too dazzling, too blinding. Instinctively they rejected it, feared it, and denied its existence.
Aizen chose to prove it instead.
Through reality.
Through these four children.
He showed them that such a world was not a fantasy.
One step forward, one honest desire, a bit of courage. That alone was enough to touch that world.
"Do not look at me like that, Lady Tsunade," he said. "From beginning to end, I never used coercion or bribery."
"What drove them was simple," Aizen went on. "Hobbies. Friendship. Rivalry. Their own personalities."
He watched as the insect clones on the field staggered, then began to collapse halfway through their enthusiastic wave. The bodies broke apart like broken puppets, and the four real children burst into startled laughter as the technique unraveled.
Aizen let out a soft sigh and shook his head, a faint smile at the corners of his mouth.
"Back to the main point," he said. "In the common view, learning is torture. But what if learning brings visible rewards and feedback What if every step forward can be felt in your own hands"
"The difference between learning and entertainment is only this," he continued. "One forces you to calculate, to analyze, to pour yourself into it. The other scatters your focus and numbs your mind.
"But in terms of the sheer amount of information absorbed, there is no fundamental difference between studying and playing a game."
"So I simply placed what they liked in front of them. The things they wanted to know, the ideas they wanted to test.
"The rest was continuous learning."
"If you strip away sleep, bathing, casual socializing, and all unnecessary distractions, they have seven hundred and twenty hours of focused time in a month. That is the equivalent of six months of normal training.
"Three months of grueling training, if you prefer that phrasing."
"On top of that, with my assistance, their thinking speed and cognitive processing have been running at roughly twice that of an ordinary person," Aizen added. "In other words, from a purely cognitive standpoint, they have experienced one year of training."
"And then there is the Shadow Clone factor."
"I can alleviate headaches and cognitive burnout with special chakra and natural energy regulation. Their chakra reserves are boosted and replenished continuously with stamina pills and mind awakening talismans. Each of them can maintain up to around twenty shadow clones at their peak, but taking fluctuations into account, we will assume an average of fifteen.
"Fifteen clones, all performing high intensity training and experimentation simultaneously.
"To the outside world, it looks like a single month.
"In reality, their accumulated experience is closer to fifteen years in the ninja world."
One month.
Fifteen years.
The contrast made Tsunade's scalp prickle.
On one side, a life spent drifting, surviving missions, filling out reports, and letting days blur past.
On the other, a life spent chasing the joy of a chosen craft, strengthening mind and spirit at every moment, pushing constantly against a limit that moved with them.
The difference between those paths was inevitable.
Even with simple arithmetic, she could see it.
Four chunin had already become something that could flatten Neji's team without effort.
If this continued, what would they become in another year
He could bear the pressure.
He could ignore slander and suspicion.
He had not chosen random children precisely because wild, undirected talent could not express true individuality. He had chosen Konoha, as he himself had said, because he was disgusted with political games. He wanted strength and results to speak for him, not factions or slogans.
And now those results were visible to everyone.
Tsunade looked down at the field where most of the spectators had instinctively stepped back.
Neji, Tenten, and Rock Lee lay there with their clothes neatly restored, even the wrinkles smoothed out by the insects. Their bodies were uninjured on the surface, their breathing steady.
Her expression shifted again and again.
Above that scene, Aizen continued in a calm, almost conversational tone, as if stating an unremarkable fact of nature.
"Fifteen years is plenty of time for a genin to become a legend in the ninja world," he said. "With new technology and knowledge, those legends can also develop with almost no obvious weaknesses."
"More importantly, they did not copy me," he added. "They followed their own obsessions. They produced their own results in the directions they love."
"That is the meaning of education, Lady Tsunade," Aizen said quietly.
"Let those who are truly exceptional choose their own field."
"Let their abilities branch and grow."
"Let all of that accumulated power become this era's heritage."
"What was once outdated and incompetent is naturally discarded. What is effective is preserved. That is how true inheritance works."
"They have already taken the first step."
"And if they continue to follow my theory over the next year, they will keep going. They will keep changing, keep reinventing themselves."
"Their anxiety, their fear of falling behind, will be suppressed by chakra and medicine. That is the price they themselves chose to pay.
"Only when they truly lose the desire to move forward, when they decide they are satisfied, will they step off the train and let the next arrivals board."
"By then, they will already have everything they need."
"Those who are content can rest. Those who still want to see more can keep going. The tracks will still be there for them."
"You can see it clearly," Aizen said. "Those children do not look like captives. They are not being forced. They are not being tortured."
"Their smiles are pure. They genuinely believe their work is interesting, that their research is fun. That is the only reason they can continue with such focus."
"That is the world I want to bring about."
"So," he finished lightly, "does my answer satisfy you, Lady Tsunade"
"…"
Tsunade stared at the man who smiled and extended his hand to her.
That simple gesture made her heart stir with something like fear.
She had to admit it.
Aizen Sousuke was the most persuasive, most dangerous man she had ever met.
He did not radiate the crushing ambition of someone like Madara, nor the suffocating presence of a tyrant who wanted to grasp everything.
He simply stood beside you, smiling gently, like a god who had decided to walk among humans for a while.
As long as your dreams were sincere, as long as they came from the depths of your heart, he would help you realize them without hesitation.
For a fleeting instant, Tsunade had a dangerous thought.
To cast aside the Hokage's mantle.
To entrust Konoha to someone else.
To follow Aizen and see just how far medical ninjutsu could go in a world like this.
But that was all it could be. A thought.
She was the Hokage.
The current leader of Konoha.
No matter who else was stirred, no matter who else decided to overturn everything, she could not. Not first.
Even knowing Aizen had not lied, even knowing it really was possible, she could not treat the village as her personal toy.
Konoha did not belong to one person.
The elders and clans had power, voices, and interests of their own.
She had to consider them as well.
Suppressing the anger and humiliation boiling inside, Tsunade looked at Aizen's outstretched hand and raised one finger.
"One year," she said quietly. "I can agree to one year."
"Limited promotion. Small scale extensions of your technology. That much, I can accept."
"But for full scale adoption," she said, "I need that year to verify the results."
"Is that your decision, Lady Tsunade" Aizen asked. "Or is it a certification period demanded by the clans and the so called advisors"
"…"
"I apologize," he added mildly. "That question might sound a little cruel. But I know Konoha is thriving right now. It is only natural that the village would feel uneasy facing an outsider like me."
Tsunade said nothing.
He lowered his hand.
His smile did not change.
"But my patience has limits as well," he said. "If my conditions are not met, then a year from now I will move myself to obtain what I want."
"Sometimes what those 'mature' and 'steady' people possess is not wisdom at all," Aizen said softly. "Their so called experience only maintains a cycle of killing.
"Just like this ninja world."
"If you truly want a different path," he said, "then you must accept new kinds of wisdom."
"It is natural for the old not to want to be left behind. Ninjas do not want to be reduced to entries in a history book, either."
"But sometimes, choices matter more than actions."
"I hope you can understand that, Lady Tsunade. That was true in my world. It is true here as well."
"You are Hokage now. The right to choose lies in your hands."
"…"
"It seems our talks are finished," he said at last. "Thank you for your cooperation."
"Well then, I will take my leave. I will spread the word in the village, and any children who are interested can come learn on their own."
He gave a polite nod.
Then his presence vanished, as if he had never stood there at all.
On the field, Neji, Tenten, and Rock Lee lay quietly where they had fallen.
Their condition was no worse than someone who had dozed off and woken from a vivid dream.
Tsunade let out a long, deep sigh.
If she could, she would have liked to run after what she truly loved, ignoring scorn and consequence.
But she was the Hokage.
No matter what happened, she had to shoulder responsibility for Konoha's ninjas.
One year.
That was the full extent of her authority.
Any more than that and the advisors and clans would move against her.
They did not have the courage to confront Aizen himself, but they had more than enough courage to corner a Hokage over "principles."
I hope your work smashes this world to pieces, Aizen Sousuke.
Smash everything that is rotten.
Everything worn out and disgusting.
As she watched the three young ninjas slowly wake, confusion and faint horror flickering across their faces, Tsunade clenched her hands behind her back and thought that to herself.
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