"You knew?"
Sasuke's smug expression cracked immediately.
"S-shut up." He reached out. "Give it back if you don't want it."
He was watching me. He noticed what I was researching and went home and pulled a scroll for me.
And now he's trying to snatch it back because I called him out on it.
I pocketed the scroll before he could get within grabbing distance.
"No take-backs." I looked at him directly. "Seriously, Sasuke. This helps me more than you know."
"Hmph." He crossed his arms and looked away. "I just acknowledged your reason for getting stronger. That's all it was. Don't read into it."
Right. The speech from earlier. Never wanting to watch the people you care about fall in front of you.
That one had clearly landed somewhere it wasn't supposed to. Hard to be unaffected by that line when you were Uchiha Sasuke, last survivor of his entire clan.
I'll file that away.
"No matter how strong you get," he added, chin up, eyes somewhere past my shoulder, "I'm going to surpass you."
"Sure."
He looked back at me, apparently annoyed that I hadn't argued.
I just smiled.
Iruka-sensei, watching the whole exchange from ten feet away, had the expression of a man whose faith in humanity had just been briefly restored.
School let out.
I left first.
Behind me, I could hear Ino burst into tears the moment she hit the hallway.
I didn't look back.
Home.
I set the scroll on the table, sat down across from it, and stared at it for a moment.
Weeks of planning. Multiple approaches. Contingencies.
And then Sasuke just handed it to me because I gave a good speech.
Noted for future reference.
"System — simplify."
[Simplification in progress: Spiritual Energy Cultivation Method → Simplified → Meditation.]
[Simplification complete.]
I stared at the result.
"...Meditation."
Sitting quietly. That was it. That was the whole thing.
I cross-legged on the floor and tried it anyway.
The effect was immediate. My head got clearer. The background noise of thoughts that was always running — plans, stats, contingencies — settled into something quieter and more focused. It was a genuinely different feeling from chakra work, which was physical at its core. This came from somewhere else entirely.
Huh. Okay. That actually works.
I pulled up my status.
[Host: Saiki][Ninjutsu: 41 | Taijutsu: 37 | Genjutsu: 0][Chakra Cultivation (LV 50) | Shuriken (LV 43) | Hand Seals (LV 44) | Taijutsu (LV 48) | Spiritual Energy Cultivation (LV 1)][Skills: Chakra Burst Jutsu]
Level one. Ground floor.
Long way to go.
But the door was open now. That was what mattered.
Somewhere in the Hokage Tower, an old man was having a very different evening.
Hiruzen Sarutobi had been Third Hokage long enough to develop a very specific kind of headache — the one that arrived whenever something happened that he should have already known about.
He was having that headache now.
The Anbu report had been thorough. The speech about cherished people. The Chakra Burst Jutsu. Sasuke handing over a clan scroll to a civilian kid because he'd been moved by it. All of it.
The Will of Fire, Hiruzen thought. That's exactly what it is.
He'd seen that quality maybe three times in his career. Minato had it. A few others.
He placed the crystal ball on his desk and ran through the hand seals.
"Telescope Jutsu."
The image appeared.
A kid sitting cross-legged on the floor of a small apartment. Eyes closed. Completely still.
Hiruzen leaned forward slightly.
He's meditating.
Not training taijutsu. Not running drills. Not doing whatever most Academy students did after a day like today, which was probably eat and collapse.
He was sitting in perfect stillness, working on the thing he'd only gotten his hands on hours ago.
Hiruzen leaned back in his chair.
He was going to need to have a conversation with Danzo about this. The man had terrible timing in most respects, but in this particular case—
If it weren't for him pointing it out, I might have missed this entirely.
He watched the kid sit there, not moving, for another long moment.
Just like Minato.
No. Maybe something different entirely.