After that humiliating "radish" incident in the courtyard, I didn't just get discouraged I got obsessed. That failure was like a splinter in my brain, a constant reminder that my physical hardware was trash. I needed to change. I had to change. But I was smart enough to know that doing a thousand push-ups wasn't going to fix a congenital heart defect.
Brute force was a dead end. Since I couldn't build a better engine yet, I decided to focus on the software. I turned myself into a high-efficiency learning machine, pouring every ounce of my frustration into devouring theory. If I couldn't be the strongest, I was damn well going to be the smartest person in the room.
The Ninja Academy's basic theory classes were a joke. I was basically speedrunning the curriculum, finishing my assignments in ten minutes and spending the rest of the period in the back of the library. I went through everything they had: history, geography, basic tactical analysis, you name it. It all went straight into the high-def "storage drives" of my memory palace.
At home, I treated my dad's Wind and Earth scrolls like a research project. I wasn't just memorizing the steps; I was deconstructing the why. I spent my nights calculating the energy density required for Earth Style hardening and modeling the fluid dynamics of Wind Style airflows. My notebooks looked like the mad ramblings of a theoretical physicist, filled with stress-load diagrams and energy-flow calculus.
The Sealing Techniques I learned from Bunpuku were the real game-changer, though. I started seeing Sealing as a "programming language" for reality. I wondered if I could use the high-efficiency logic of a seal to minimize the waste in a standard Ninjutsu. If I only had a spoonful of chakra, I couldn't afford to spill a single drop.
And then, there were the Magnet Release notes.
Every night, when the village went quiet and the only sound was the wind whistling against the stone, I'd pull out that ancient parchment. I'd sit under the dim glow of the oil lamp, tracing the Second Kazekage's failed formulas with my finger.
"Wind and Earth fusion... frequency resonance... manipulating micro-metallic particles," I'd mutter to myself.
My knowledge of electromagnetic induction from my old life didn't map perfectly onto Chakra, but it gave me a framework. I started sketching out "frequency" theories trying to figure out if Magnetism was just a specific vibration of combined elements. I was way out of my depth, but I was gaining ground every single night.
The scary part? My theoretical knowledge was starting to lap people three times my age. I probably knew more about the "how" of Ninjutsu than most Chunin, even if I still couldn't cast a basic D-rank move without getting stuck in the mud.
But theory is just a hallucination if you can't build it. So, I turned the Maintenance Squad's shop into my personal R&D lab.
I stopped just watching and started making. I'd grab scraps of wood and metal and spend hours at a workbench. I'd use a file and sandpaper to polish tiny gears and link rods, obsessing over the tolerances. I even tried branding basic chakra-circuits into wood using a red-hot needle. I couldn't power them yet, but I was training my hands. I was building muscle memory.
I even tried to recreate that composite joint I'd seen in Sasori's workshop. It was a simplified, clunky version made of springy metal sheets and micro-pins, but the logic was there. It was a prototype.
My dad, Sharyu, saw everything. He didn't say much he wasn't really a "big talker" kind of guy but he noticed. He'd see me late at night, hunched over my notebooks like a mad scientist. He'd see my tiny hands, calloused and stained with grease, working on parts that no five-year-old should be able to understand.
He never told me to stop. In fact, he started helping in his own quiet way. I'd come to my little workbench in the yard and find "accidental" piles of high-grade scrap metal or old blueprints of precision machinery that he'd "forgotten" to take back to the shop. He'd leave better tools out for me smaller, sharper files that fit my hands. It was his silent way of saying, I see you, and I've got your back.
That support kept me going. I knew that every formula I solved and every gear I polished was a brick in the road to my future.
My body was still thin. My chakra was still a joke. But underneath that frail, five-year-old frame, a massive core of data, theory, and engineering experience was starting to glow. I was overclocking my brain, waiting for the one moment where the hardware would finally catch up.
I was like a piece of raw jade buried deep in the desert, getting polished by the sand and the wind. I was just waiting for my chance to show the world what I was actually made of.