…
A month passed.
The first week came and went with Hideki still in the hospital and no word from Kaito, which meant no missions, which meant Murakami had his days entirely to himself.
He used them.
The first three days of skin refining were harder than he'd expected. Not painful, but demanding in a way that required his full concentration from the moment he sat down to the moment he stopped.
Separating the vital energy from his chakra, compressing it precisely and sustaining the pressure at exactly the right threshold without crossing into damage.
Each session left him mentally wrung out in a way that physical training never had.
He made mistakes too.
Pushed slightly too hard on the second day and felt the sharp warning flare beneath the skin of his forearm that told him he'd crossed the line.
He backed off immediately, waited for the pain to settle, and started again more carefully.
By the fourth day, something shifted.
The process didn't become easy but it became slightly less hard, which in practical terms meant he could sustain the sessions longer before the concentration began to fray.
He took that as progress.
The Grade Four meat made a difference he hadn't anticipated.
The first time he'd done internal pressure work, one session had emptied his cold storage and sent him to a restaurant for thirteen bowls of noodles before the hunger settled.
Now, with Ryouta delivering a peak Grade Four specimen every week and his cold storage stocked with processed cuts, organs, and bone broth, the recovery was different.
The hunger was still significant, but the weakness that had followed the first sessions was gone.
His body had material to work with and it used it efficiently, he felt his body reconstruction and recovery completing faster and more cleanly than it had on ordinary food.
At nights, before sleep, he created three mental clones.
Three was his limit, he'd tested four once and woken up on the floor with a headache that lasted until noon.
Three was sustainable, the kind of sustainable that meant waking up every morning feeling like something had been gently wrung out of him overnight.
But when he released them each morning and the accumulated experience flooded back, hundreds of iterations on the Mountain Embracing Technique's cascade, Shockwave Jutsu, and Phantom Step.
He trained with Sakumo's team in the late mornings.
That had become a routine without anyone formally agreeing to it, he would arrive at Training Ground 17 and they would already be there.
The sessions were competitive in the way that good training was competitive, each of them pushing the others without it becoming a point-scoring exercise.
Ren had started adjusting his approach specifically to counter the staff's reach, which meant Murakami had to find new angles.
Mio had stopped using the same wire placement twice. Sakumo was getting faster.
All of it was useful.
By the end of the first week, Hideki was discharged.
He walked out of the hospital on his own, found Murakami and Sora waiting outside, and without a word dropped into position and performed twenty push-ups on the pavement in front of them.
No grunting.
He stood back up, brushed his hands off, and looked at Murakami with an expression that communicated everything he intended it to communicate.
Murakami nodded once.
Sora slow-clapped twice before Hideki told him to stop.
They still hadn't heard from Kaito.
Sora began asking around by the middle of the first week. Hideki started checking the mission assignment board daily by the end of it, less because he expected to find something and more because it gave him somewhere to direct the restlessness.
By the start of the second week both of them carried a faint, low-level worry that they managed in their respective ways; Sora through information gathering, Hideki through complaints directed at no one in particular.
Murakami wasn't concerned.
Kaito would surface when he had something to surface for. Until then, the absence was simply time, and time was not something he had difficulty finding uses for.
The second week brought something else.
By its end, the first green thread had changed.
He noticed it during his morning session, the familiar filament beneath the skin of his forearm now shone with a different quality.
Brighter, the light of it carrying a warmth that reached into the surrounding area of his skin the way sunlight reached through water.
It still looked like a thread, but it felt like something that had finished becoming what it was.
He pressed his thumb into the skin above it.
The resistance was noticeably different from a month ago. Not like steel, nothing dramatic like that, but the skin that met his thumb was firmer in a way that spoke of structural change rather than surface change.
Like the difference between green wood and seasoned wood. He'd made that comparison once before and it still fit.
By the middle of the third week, a second thread appeared.
He felt it form during a morning session by the familiar itch beneath the skin, and when he turned his attention inward, there it was.
Thinner than the first and less defined, like the way a new shoot looked against an established branch.
But it was present and already pulsing in its own quiet rhythm.
With the second thread came changes he hadn't expected to arrive so quickly.
His awareness of his own body sharpened in the way a familiar room looked different when the lighting improved. He could feel his own body more clearly. The texture of his skin against his clothes. His own heartbeat, precise rather than simply beating.
His skin held differently under impact. During a session with Ren at Training Ground 17 two days after the second thread appeared, a strike that would have left a bruise the week before left nothing.
Not because it hadn't landed, but because whatever the refining process was doing to the structural integrity of his skin had quietly moved the threshold for what constituted meaningful damage.
Chakra circulation was easier. Not in a dramatic, immediately obvious way, more like a road that had been repaved. The same route, covered faster, with less resistance.
His stamina recovery after training sessions shortened by a margin he could actually measure.
Then Kaito suddenly appeared and called them in for an escort mission to the capital.
The mission took five days.
Three going, one night in an inn in the capital while the escort's business concluded, one day and night on the road back.
It was quite straightforward with no ambush, complications, or moments that tested anything he hadn't already tested.
A clean mission by any reasonable measure, however, he lost five days of refinement.
He came home, ate, slept, and the next morning began again.
He pushed himself into going through five sessions instead of three, making up the deficit with the controlled aggression of someone who had a schedule and intended to keep it.
By the end of the month, the second thread reached completion.
He sat on his balcony in the early morning with his eyes closed observing both threads shining with that full, settled warmth beneath his skin.
He turned the question that had been sitting in the back of his mind for the past several days.
How much force could his physical body exert now?
It was not a rhetorical question but a practical one.
He had two completed threads out of whatever limit this level of body refining had. The foundation was barely started but the changes he'd already noticed suggested the returns were not linear.
Each thread didn't simply add one unit of improvement to a running total. The threads were interacting with each other, the two together producing effects that the first alone hadn't.
Which meant the question of what he'd be capable of at nine threads was genuinely interesting and worth looking forward to.
As for why he looked forward to nine threads as the completion, well, that was the universally acknowledged limit, no?
He was still considering it when he felt Sora's presence approaching the house.
He recognized the chakra signature as soon as it entered his sensory range, a passive effect of the Awakening Star's perception sharpening under consistent use.
Familiar signatures now arrived ahead of their owners the way familiar voices did in a crowded room.
He stood, crossed to the door, and opened it before Sora could knock.
Sora stopped mid-reach, hand suspended in the air, and stared at him.
"...How do you always do that?" he asked.
"Do what?" Murakami said.
Sora sighed and lowered his hand with the resigned expression of someone who had asked this question before and received the same non-answer.
"Kaito-sensei is calling for us," he said. "Hokage building."
Murakami looked at his face.
Sora's expression was careful in the way it got when something had a weight to it that he hadn't fully worked out yet. Not fear but something more considered than that.
Murakami narrowed his eyes slightly. Whatever this mission was, it definitely wasn't an escort to the capital.
"Wait," he said, and stepped back inside.
He changed out of his morning clothes and into his black fitted ninja attire that covered everything from the neck down, leaving only his eyes visible as he pulled the hood over his face.
He checked his weapon pouches. Confirmed the storage seals on his staff were active then stepped back outside and pulled the door shut behind him.
Sora was waiting at the gate. He gave him a once-over, the way he always did when Murakami came out in that outfit.
He'd seen it before. It never quite got old.
"Let's go," Murakami said.
Sora nodded and they moved