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Life at the Ninja Academy had become a necessary formality for Sayo. The Taijutsu drills were a struggle of attrition; his shuriken throws—limited by his meager strength—barely cleared ten paces, and the extraction of his thread-like Chakra was a grueling mental marathon. His frail body remained his greatest shackle, yet his inner world was a sprawling laboratory that never stopped expanding.
After school and on rest days, he returned to his true sanctuary: the Fourth Logistics and Repair Squad. Only here, amidst the scent of oil and the clatter of wood on metal, did he feel his soul align with the world.
He was no longer content as a passive observer. With his first faint perception of Chakra and an adult's mastery of fine motor control, he began to "play" with a terrifying level of focus.
While the craftsmen took their tea breaks, Sayo would sidle up to dismantled puppet husks. His small hands traced the intricate inner transmissions, feeling the mesh of gears and deducing the logic of every lever. He scavenged off-cuts of desert ebony and scrap metal, using the workshop's basic tools to grind and assemble them into purely mechanical structures. Without sufficient Chakra to drive them, he focused on perfecting the physics of the machine.
"Huh? Look at this little fellow," an old craftsman whispered to Sharyu during a break. He pointed to Sayo, who was currently filing a wooden tenon with a precision that bordered on the obsessive. "Look at the angle of that cut. That's not a child's clumsy work. Old Sha, your son might be a puppet prodigy."
Sharyu looked up from a complex Chakra-conducting joint, his gaze lingering on Sayo's focused profile. Conflict flickered in his eyes. He saw the boy's talent, but he feared the cost.
"He's just tinkering," Sharyu replied vaguely, his voice heavy with a father's protectiveness. "He's too weak for the field; this is all he can do."
That afternoon, the workshop received an unexpected visitor: Elder Chiyo.
Since the war's end, Chiyo had become a figure of weathered granite—worn by grief, yet sharp enough to cut. She moved through the bay with the squad leader, her eyes dissecting the quality of every repair. When she reached the inner workshop, she stopped.
Most children would have been gawking at the combat-ready puppets standing in the racks. But Sayo was sitting on the floor, staring unblinkingly at a pile of utterly ruined, corrosive-damaged scraps. He held a tiny gear toward the light, his brow furrowed as he analyzed the wear on its teeth.
Chiyo watched him in silence.
She saw him dab a drop of oil on a jammed bearing and test its rotation with a rhythmic, clinical patience. She saw him look at a metal plate etched with a failed Chakra circuit and shake his head with the disapproval of a senior inspector.
Sayo sensed her gaze. He didn't flinch or show the usual terror children felt toward the village elders. He looked up, his black eyes meeting hers with a calm, analytical appraisal, before shifting into a polite bow.
"Whose child is this?" Chiyo asked.
"Squad-leader Sharyu's son, Sayo," the squad leader replied quickly. "He's fragile, so Sharyu keeps him close. He's a quiet boy—just likes to tinker with the scraps."
Chiyo remembered the boy—the child of a distant relative who had died in childbirth. She stepped closer, her shadow falling over Sayo's workbench. "You like these things?"
Sayo nodded, his voice level. "When they are put together correctly, they follow rules. They are... regular."
"Regular?" A spark of genuine interest flickered in Chiyo's eyes. "And what, in your mind, is a puppet?"
Sayo paused, translating his past-life knowledge of automation into the language of this world. "An extension," he said slowly. "Using fixed logic to extend a person's will and strength to where the body cannot reach."
Chiyo was visibly stunned. The definition touched upon the very philosophy of the Puppet Brigade. It wasn't the answer of a child, but of a visionary. She looked into his calm pupils, then at the polished gears in his hands. The village was starving for brilliance.
From the folds of her robe, she produced an old, weathered scroll made of sun-bleached animal hide.
"Take this," she said, holding it out.
Sayo accepted it with both hands. The scroll felt heavy with the weight of tradition.
"It is the foundational introductory scroll of the Puppet Arts," Chiyo explained. "It contains the structural principles of basic frames, talisman etching, and the fundamentals of control strings. You may not have the Chakra to use them yet, but if you truly wish to understand the 'rules,' memorize this."
It was a priceless gift. For a child in Suna, this was the equivalent of being handed a royal decree. Chiyo was investing in a future she might not live to see.
Sayo bowed solemnly, his fingers gripping the aged leather. "Thank you, Granny Chiyo."
The weeks that followed were a blur of intense data acquisition. Sayo spent his mornings at the Academy, enduring the mundane physical trials. But his evenings were spent in the workshop, devouring Chiyo's scroll.
His photographic memory served as a high-speed scanner. He couldn't perform the techniques yet, but he was building a massive digital library of structural diagrams and energy-circuit patterns. He cross-referenced everything with his STEM knowledge, finding efficiencies the traditionalists had overlooked.
And on his way home, he would "detour" past the hidden temple.
Bunpuku became his tutor in the abstract. Sayo would present the complex talisman patterns from the puppet scroll that he couldn't decipher. Many puppet-control cores relied on fundamental sealing logic. Bunpuku would explain the spiritual flow, while Shukaku would heckle from the shadows, mocking the "weak" human designs.
Sayo absorbed it all—the monk's wisdom, the demon's critiques, and the elder's technical secrets. He was a plant in the desert, his roots stretching deep into the forgotten lore of the world, waiting for the moment he had enough power to finally bloom.
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