Dusk in Suna turned the sandstorms into a hazy, golden wall of grit. I navigated the quiet streets with my eyes halfway closed, taking the familiar shortcut to the temple.
Inside, the oil lamp was flickering like a dying pixel. Bunpuku was on his cushion, looking as serene as ever. When he saw me, he gave me that small, tired smile. "Right on time, Sayo."
"Hey, Grandpa." I sat down across from him. Even without looking, I could feel the energy in the room was... jagged. The big guy in the "basement" was having a moody day.
[Hmph! Brat, you're back to annoy me again? Don't you have kids your own age to bother?] Shukaku's voice rasped directly into my head. It was loud, impatient, and sounded exactly like a grumpy neighbor yelling at kids to get off his lawn.
I know you're bored, I replied in my head, keeping my mental voice flat. I'm just here to keep you from talking to the walls. You should be thanking me.
[Tch! Who needs your company? I'm the noble Ichibi! I don't need a playmate who's still in diapers!] He snapped back, but I could feel the vibration of his consciousness. He was lying. He was practically vibrating with the need for someone to talk to.
"Sayo," Bunpuku began, cutting through my silent mental argument with the raccoon dog. "Today, we're looking at the core logic of the Four Symbols Seal. It's about the balance between space and energy containment."
He dipped his finger in a bowl of water and started drawing complex geometric patterns on the stone floor. I locked in immediately. To most people, these were mystical runes. To me, this was high-level data encryption. I mapped the "flow" of the chakra lines, recording every curve and junction in my memory palace.
[Tch, Four Symbols? That's amateur hour!] Shukaku snorted in my mind. [I've seen seals that could hold back oceans. You want the real stuff? You look for the Adamantine Chains. Those things can tap into Natural Energy... that's what you call real power...] He cut himself off mid-sentence, realizing he was giving away the "good stuff" for free.
Natural Energy. I flagged the term. I'd heard about Sage Mode in my old life, but hearing a Tailed Beast mention it in a technical context was different. It sounded like ambient power background radiation that could be harvested if you had the right antenna. I filed it away for later. I knew better than to push the "tsundere" raccoon when he was being stingy with info.
Later that night, I headed over to Chiyo's place to return a medical scroll.
Sasori was the one who opened the door. He didn't say hi. He just stepped aside to let me in, his face as blank as a fresh sheet of paper.
"Granny's at a council meeting," Sasori said. His voice was a flat monotone. "The medical archive is in the study. Knock yourself out."
"Thanks, Senior Sasori." I headed toward the study, but I couldn't help glancing at his workbench. There was a puppet arm there, half-finished.
It was a work of art. The way he'd combined flexible metal sheets with the wooden skeleton to absorb impact... it was beautiful. The chakra-conducting wires weren't just laid out; they were woven into the structure to minimize resistance.
Sasori noticed me staring. "You actually see the logic in it, don't you?"
I took a breath, my inner geek taking the wheel. "The way you used those flexible sheets instead of rigid pins... it's to kill the vibration, right? And that conduction circuit you bypassed the standard elbow nodes. You're trying to cut down on energy bleed."
I saw a tiny flash of surprise in his purple eyes. He picked up a tool and adjusted a gear by a fraction of a millimeter. "The standard circuit has a 0.3-second latency. With this layout, I can get it down to 0.1. In a real fight, that 0.2-second gap is the difference between a kill and a coffin."
That hit me like a ton of bricks. Latency.Optimization. I grabbed the medical scrolls basic stuff on the human meridian system and palm healing and practically floated home.
That night, lying on my mat, I couldn't sleep. My brain was overclocking, trying to fit all the pieces together. The precision of Sasori's puppetry, the energy containment of Bunpuku's seals, the biological regeneration of Chiyo's medicine, and the magnetic "lever" of the Second Kazekage.
"The body is the hardware," I whispered into the dark, looking at my own thin hand. "Chakra is the fuel. Puppetry is the external interface. And Sealing? Sealing is the OS that controls the whole thing."
A crazy, massive idea started to form in the back of my mind. A "mirage" of a goal that was so ambitious it felt like a fever dream.
What if I didn't just build a puppet? What if I built a "biological furnace"?
What if I could use Sealing logic to create a core program inside myself? What if I could use Puppet-style circuits to guide energy through my meridians more efficiently? What if I could use Medical Ninjutsu to "patch" my cells as they worked?
I was a transmigrator with the blueprints of two worlds in my head. I was done waiting for my body to "grow up." I was going to engineer a solution.
The puzzle pieces were finally starting to click. I just had to build the machine.