Naruto: Tango with Death

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"Sukaina, I invite you to my birthday!"

I blinked several times as I heard what my blond friend just told me. After a moment, I replied, "Okay?"

Naruto grinned and added, "And you have to come! Everyone is! You can't say no this time, I already told my mom you were coming!"

"Are you using social pressure to make me accept? I don't know if I should hit you or praise you…"

"Come on, just say yes." Shikamaru, who was nearby, urged me.

I rolled my eyes and snatched my invitation out of Naruto's hand as I replied, "Fine, I'll come."

Checking the invitation, it said it would be on the 10th of October, and it was Naruto's 8th birthday. That was the day after tomorrow. Great, now I have to find a gift for him.

Telling the group exactly that, I left early. I then ended spending close to an hour in the market place as I searched for a present. Finally, I managed to find something I believe he would like, it was a pair of chopsticks which doubled as deadly needles.

Wait, that was something I wanted, not him. So after much reluctance I set them aside and instead bought a Bonsai, I remembered him talking about his plants. Before coming back to the earlier shop and buying the deadly chopsticks.

Having bought the gift, I got my stuff back home before moving to the border of the village.

Which reminds me, I have yet again been misled by what I thought to be true from my meta knowledge, but actually wasn't. As it turns out, you can't just go to the training grounds and train there.

They were always watched, and more often than not used. And if I wanted to use one, not only would I have to reserve it in advance, I would even have to pay. And only a few were rentable.

So instead of going through all this bother, I moved to the edge of the village, near the forest. This was where I spent most of my time training. Not very rule friendly, but at least I would have space, and for free.

Once I arrived at my usual training spot, which couldn't really be missed since I had damaged the area quite a bit with my training, I quickly set everything as I began my training.

Like always, I started by a bout of physical and spiritual training, through a method I had made up myself using the academy's as a reference.

I started with an intense physical training, I wished I could use weights but buying actual weights was more of a bother than anything because I would need to change them everytime I became stronger, and I'm an orphan. In other words, poor.

My idea was to create my own weights through the use of seals, but unfortunately even after two years of me annoying my Seals teacher every class, he still hadn't agreed to teach me. The old man was a talented Fuin Master, but he wasn't the cool old grandpa, he was the stick-to-the-rules strict old man.

By the time he agreed, I'm afraid I would have already finished creating my ultimate training method that would allow me to transcend mortality and become immortal…

Anyway, the Academy's physical exercises were really much more efficient than I could ever guess. They worked on nearly every muscle of the body, and the movements actually worked as lesser handsigns.

One of the most important parts of Ninjutsu were the handsigns, which had for function to mould the user's chakra to use a particular Jutsu. Although it was possible to use a jutsu without those, as I was doing with my Senbonsakura or the Rasengan, most of the time people used them.

And I called the exercises of the Academy lesser handsigns because they actually accelerated the rate at which my chakra would travel through my body to heal and strengthen it. Of course, there was a cost to this, the exercises were much more strenuous than normal ones, which was why not every Academy Student turned into beasts of power right out of the academy.

However, I had the mind of an adult, and was already accustomed to hard work from both of my lives. So I stuck to those exercises, and even tried to improve them on my own.

But I unfortunately wasn't very successful with the physical exercises, at improving them I mean. However, the same could not be said for what followed.

Once I felt my body crossing its limit, I finally stopped but did not follow my body's wishes to just slump to the ground and sleep for a week straight.

Instead, I quickly sat cross legged, while my muscles were still hot and active, in the most comfortable position for my body, before closing my eyes and focusing on my chakra.

With my sheer will alone, I moved nearly the entirety of my chakra to my center of mass, leaving barely enough in the rest of my body to not suffer from chakra deficiency.

In normal times, although the majority of a person's chakra would lay near their belly, slightly less than half of it would still be spread throughout the body.

So as I pulled nearly all of my chakra in one place, I felt my already aching body scream at me to let go of the lump of chakra, but I was used to the feeling already, so I didn't bow to my body's demands.

Once I gathered chakra, I released the breath I had been holding, causing a part of my chakra to suddenly expend outward. As the wave of vital energy spread outwards, it passed through every muscle of my body in a uniform way, before reaching my skin.

As the first wave of chakra reached half the way to my skin, a second wave had been launched as I breathed once more, and when the first wave reached my skin and the second was halfway through, a third wave was launched.

Finally, when I took a fourth breath, the second wave of chakra collided with the first one which had remained on my skin, resulting in a clash that sent an even more powerful wave of energy back at my center of mass.

The new burst of energy sent shivers through my body as I felt my muscles fibres, my bones and even my very cells hungrily feed on this energy as it settled back into the rest of my chakra.

Were I to have a normal body, this would actually be an incredibly destructive method of training, but thanks to the incredible energy know as Chakra, it did not destroy my body, but rebuilt it, stronger, and faster than normal.

Still, all the glory couldn't be handed over to my Chakra as a very precise control over chakra was needed to pull this off without injuring oneself, and so using this asked me to be in a state of deep concentration on an extended period, which helped strengthen my mind.

This training method was something I had created myself by taking the exercises of the academy and my own knowledge as reference, and it wasn't even the finished version.

Actually, although I am a bit ashamed to admit it, I had managed to create this working training method by accident.

What I was actually trying to do with this was to push my chakra to every inch of my skin at the same time and absorb the Natural Energy of the world into this film of chakra, before sending it back into my body.

Natural Energy was an energy even stronger than Chakra that was used to enter Sage Mode, but it was also extremely dangerous as it could turn an untrained person into a statue if not handled well.

Now, looking back, I was maybe a little too impatient as that could have resulted into a terrible death, but thankfully all went well in the end as I didn't turn into a stone statue, and I even created an extremely efficient technique.

Of course, even with all that, I was still actively searching for a way other than Toad Oil, which I did not have access to, to attract Natural Energy to my skin when the waves of Chakra were there, and absorb it.

After all, Sage Mode could make its user ten times, a hundred times or even stronger for a short period of time, so if I managed to assimilate it in my normal form, I could turn into a beast of power. After all, Sage Mode's biggest weakness was it's limited duration, but if Natural Energy is integrated into my very cells, then it would become a permanent thing.

Besides, this would most certainly make Sage Mode much easier to attain, but again, I hadn't managed to finish the technique.

Yet.