Ren

The swing, it turned out, was a plank of waterlogged wood hanging off two fraying ropes, and by the time I'd elbowed through the fog to find the thing, it was occupied, the occupant was roughly twice my size, and the queue for it ran on a seniority system in which I held the rank of nobody.

I stood there in the mist a second, watching a six-year-old fling himself back and forth on a plank like it was the greatest privilege the world had to offer, and thought: yeah, okay. Fair. When the entire village is gray sludge of depression with a side of boiled nothing, a swing probably is the greatest privilege the world has to offer before this place turns them into cold-hearted monsters.

I went back inside. Filed it under LATER, in the drawer that by then could've used a second drawer.

That was day one. 

I'm now somewhere around day four.

Let me tell you what four days in a Kiri orphanage gets you, because it's a short list and I have a lot of complaints.

You get a routine. 

A bell wakes you before the light does — though "light" is generous, since the mist strangles the sun into a sort of permanent overcast 6 a.m. regardless of the actual hour, its actually pretty confusing. 

You get gruel. 

You do chores: hauling water, scrubbing the long tables, stacking firewood that's always damp and never enough. You get an hour in the yard where the older kids "play". Then more chores. Then gruel again, if you didn't screw up badly enough to lose it. Then a cold pallet, and the bell, and the whole thing again.

Isn’t life wonderful?

Nobody explains anything. 

Nobody comforts anybody. 

The matron — there's only one I've seen regularly, plus a couple of grim women who run the kitchen and the ledger — operates on the principle that information is a resource and you have not earned any. You learn the rules by breaking them and getting looked at, and getting looked at, I'd worked out on day one, was the thing you did not want.

I had not, in four days, been looked at. I was deeply proud of this. It was, honestly, my greatest accomplishment of the new life so far, and that includes not crying about my dead family more than twice.

Day three was when Kuroki found my corner.

I was in it — the fog pocket by the yard's back fence, thickest soup in the whole compound, where I'd worked out you could do roughly forty squats before anyone wondered where the new kid went. 

I was on squat thirty-one, thighs on fire, farming my beloved stats, or trying to because it's not working when a voice behind me said, flat as a slammed door:

"The hell are you doing."

I did not jump, which I count as a personal victory because this fucking place is a jumpscare factory, you never see anybody coming. I just lowered out of the squat, turned around, and there was Kuroki looking at me like I'd been caught doing something genuinely deranged.

"Exercising," I said.

"Why?"

"Because I'm weak and I'd rather not be."

He chewed on that. "Nobody exercises," he said finally. "You wait for the academy to make you, if they take you. Or you don't get taken and it doesn't matter."

"And if I want to make sure they take me?"

That got a look. A longer one. “That’s dumb.”

I shrugged and squatted back down, because the +1s don't farm themselves. "I’m dumb," I said, mid-squat. "Problem solved."

He didn't leave. He leaned on the fence instead, arms crossed, watching me grind like he had nothing better to do. And here it was when I learned that Kuroki was a creature who hoarded information and spent it only when bored because he started, unprompted, to talk about playground gossip.

"You see the big one at breakfast," he said. "Front bench. Doesn't look up."

"The fridge." I nodded.

Kuroki's mouth twitched. "Daichi. He's nine. He's been assessed once already and they passed him over — too slow, too clumsy the instructor said. So he stayed." A beat. "He decided if the village wasn't gonna make him somebody, he'd be somebody here." 

In this shithole, that’s like hearing a kid say he wants to become an accountant, you know he’s broken by trauma.

He nodded at the yard, the benches, the whole grim little kingdom. "He runs the food. Runs the swing. Runs who sits where. You don't cross Daichi, because Daichi's got nothing to lose and four years on you."

I stopped squatting. "And you?"

"I stay out of his way and I keep my eyes open." He shrugged, like that was the entire philosophy of his life, which I suspected it was.

"What happens to the ones they pass over and don't stay?"

The question landed wrong. I knew it the second it left my mouth, because Kuroki's face did a small shutting-down thing, the gremlin lights going behind a curtain, and for a second he looked older than nine and a lot more tired.

"They go," he said. "Somewhere. Work, the docks, the — somewhere. You don't see 'em again." Flat. And maybe a bit concerned. "Point is you want taken. Taken's the good outcome. Everybody here's chasing the good outcome, and the good outcome is they hand you a knife and teach you to bleed for the Mist." He pushed off the fence. "That's Kiri. Best you can hope for is they decide you're worth sharpening, or a some rich merchant to adopt you."

And then, across the yard, on cue, like the universe wanted to underline the lecture: Daichi.

He'd walked up behind a smaller kid at the swing, said nothing, and just stood there, a fridge-shaped silence, until the kid scrambled off the plank and bolted without a word. Daichi sat. Began to swing. Didn't look at anyone.

Interesting…

To me it was a thesis, again: in this place, worth keeping and able to make others fear you were the only two currencies, and if the village wouldn't grant you the first, you carved out the second by hand.

I looked at Daichi on his stolen swing. I looked at Kuroki, already drifting off, eyes open. I needed to get something that would make me get noticed.

Something that was hard to kill. In several different ways.

Versatile.

Good for combat.

The decision I'd make the next night was already forming right there in the fog, watching a nine-year-old own a plank through sheer refusal to be nobody. I just didn't have the word for it yet.

I finished my squats. 

Here is the thing the routine gave me that mattered, though. The thing I'd actually been using these four days for.

It gave me time with the system.

See, I'd figured something out by the end of day one, and spent days two through four confirming it, because I am nothing if not a man who needs to read the patch notes before he commits to a build.

The thing I figured out was this: the system wasn't going to do a single thing for me on its own.

No quests. No glowing arrows. No helpful little tutorial fairy going click here, sweetie. It just sat there in the corner of my eye, patient and blue and useless, a power tool with no manual, exactly like I'd called it on day one. 

If I wanted it to do anything, I had to make it.

So I'd been poking it. Constantly. Every spare second between chores, lying on my pallet pretending to sleep, crouched in the corner of the yard where the fog was thickest and nobody could see a five-year-old apparently staring at nothing and occasionally whispering "okay but what does THAT do."

And I'd found the bar.

╔══════════════════════════════

 EXPERIENCE

   0 / 100

╚══════════════════════════════

Experience. XP. 

The single most beautiful concept ever invented by a species that mostly invents weapons. I'd stared at that 0 / 100 and I was in love.

Then I'd set about figuring out how to make the zero go up.

This took embarrassingly long, and the answer, when I finally cracked it, made me feel both very stupid and very vindicated. Because I'd tried everything. I tried wanting it really hard. (Nothing.) 

I tried meditating, which I don't know how to do, so I just sat there with my eyes closed feeling like an idiot. (Nothing.) 

I tried picking a fight with the system, demanding XP as my birthright as a reincarnated isekai protagonist. (Nothing, and also a little embarrassing in retrospect.)

What finally moved the number was push-ups. Not the squads, which feels like it is kind of deliberate, but whatever.

I'd been lying on my pallet on the night of day two, frustrated, and out of pure spite I'd flipped over and started doing push-ups, the way you do when you're angry and have no one to punch. Tiny, pathetic, five-year-old push-ups. My noodle arms gave out at four. And as the fourth one collapsed me face-first into the pallet, the corner of my eye went:

║  +1 XP                                            ║

I lay there with my face in the straw and whispered, "...No."

Then I did six more push-ups, on pure adrenaline, arms screaming, and watched it tick:

║  +1 XP                                            ║

║  +1 XP                                            ║

Not every push-up. Not a flat rate. It came when the thing was hard — when I pushed past what was comfortable, when the muscle actually burned, when the rep was one I'd had to fight for. Easy reps gave nothing. The fourth, fifth, sixth — the ones where I genuinely thought I can't and did it anyway — those paid.

Effort. The system paid out for effort. Specifically the kind that costs you something. The kind right at the edge of what you can do.

Which, when you think about it, is the most insultingly honest mechanic imaginable. No XP for showing up. No XP for the easy stuff. The universe had reincarnated me into a hardcore difficulty server with no casual mode, and the only currency was suffering, paid in increments of one.

"I hate it here," I informed the system, doing another push-up. "+1 XP," it replied, which was the most validating relationship I'd had in two lifetimes.

So that was days two through four: I became, in secret, the most disciplined five-year-old in the Land of Water.

In the yard, while other kids swung on the privilege-plank, I found my fog corner and did push-ups, squats, the held-arm-out thing that burns way faster than it has any right to. During water-hauling chores I carried the buckets a little too full on purpose, just to feel the burn, just to farm that sweet sweet +1. At night, push-ups until the arms quit, then a weird angry plank until the whole core gave out.

It hurt. It hurt constantly. This body was a wet match and I was sandpapering it for XP.

And in four days I had gotten the bar from 0 to —

╔══════════════════════════════

 EXPERIENCE

   71 / 100

╚══════════════════════════════

Seventy-one.

Seventy-one experience points, for four days of grinding a child's body into paste, sneaking it in around chores, ignoring muscles that had filed multiple formal complaints.

I did the math, because I always do the math, and the math made me want to lie face-down in the fog forever.

Seventy-one points in four days. Call it roughly twenty a day, on a brutal hidden regimen I could barely sustain in a starving body. One hundred to hit the next character level. So: five days, give or take, per level, if I could keep this pace, which I couldn't, because I was five and made of breadsticks and the gruel provided approximately enough calories to power a hamster.

Five days a level. At the start. When the bar's only a hundred.

I had a very bad feeling the bar did not stay at a hundred.

But — and here's where I made myself stop spiraling — I didn't actually care about the rate yet. Not really. Because I'd been hoarding that XP for a reason, building toward the only number that mattered, the one the whole machine was clearly built around.

The level.

Because every level, the system had told me back on day one, in that blunt way of its, gave me one Class Point. And a Class Point was the key that turned the whole stupid lock.

I checked the sheet again. I checked it roughly forty times a day. I am not proud.

╔══════════════════════════════

  CHARACTER SHEET

 Name:    Ren

 Class:   [ NONE ]

 Level:   1

 Class Points: 1

 Age:     5

 ──────────────────────────

 ATTRIBUTES

   Strength:   3

   Agility:    4

   Stamina:    4

   Intellect:  11

   Chakra:     1

 ──────────────────────────

 Health:  40 / 40

 ※ Chakra Aptitude: ANALYZING...

╚══════════════════════════════

Class Points: 1.

I'd been sitting on that one point for four days like a dragon on a single, sad coin. One point. Enough to take one class to level one. Enough to actually, finally, start.

And I hadn't spent it. Because I'm me, and "cannot be un-chosen" is still a sentence I respect, and I wanted to do this on purpose. With a plan. Theorycrafted.

Four days of push-ups had bought me the right to make the most important decision of the new life with a clear head and a sore everything.

It was time to pick a class.

But first — because the brain does this, the brain helps by panicking on a completely different topic the moment you're about to do something productive — first I want to tell you about the thing that was actually keeping me up at night. 

And it wasn't the grind.

It was that I had no idea when I was.

Look. I know this world. I want to be clear about that, because it's relevant and also it's the one flex I have. I watched the whole show. The whole show. All of it, the good arcs and the ones we don't talk about, the movies, the filler where they fight mecha naruto. I read the manga. I have, in a past life, gotten into an actual argument about whether a certain snake-themed pedophile's whole thing with a certain clan was adequately addressed by the narrative. (It was not.)

So when I say I'm in Kirigakure — the Village Hidden in the Mist, Land of Water, the bloody one — I'm not guessing. I clocked it day one off the fog and the architecture and the cheerful institutional disregard for child welfare.

The problem is that knowing where I am tells me nothing about when, and when is the part that decides whether I live.

Here's why. The show I knew started at a specific point and went forward. Everything I have — every name, every event, every "oh no, this is about to happen" — is anchored to that timeline. If I know where on the timeline I am, I'm basically holding a winning lottery ticket. I'd know what's coming. I'd know who matters. I'd know which disasters to be three countries away from.

And I have no anchor.

I'd gone looking, in my quiet way. Listened. Eavesdropped on the grim kitchen women, on the older kids, on the matron's clipped little status reports. And on day three I'd finally heard someone mention the Mizukage — the village's leader, the big boss, the one name that should've slotted me right onto the map.

I'd actually held my breath.

And then they'd said the name, and it was a name I had never heard in my life.

Not Yagura. The little kid that’s not actually a kid — I knew that name, I'd have recognized that in a heartbeat. Not Mei, the lava-and-acid lady with the marriage anxiety who runs the place later. Not anyone I could place.

Just a name. A total stranger. A Mizukage who, as far as my entire encyclopedic knowledge of this franchise was concerned, did not exist.

Which left me with exactly two possibilities, and I genuinely could not tell you which one scared me more.

Possibility one: I'm so far before the show that none of my knowledge applies yet. Decades early. The events I know are a generation or three away. 

Possibility two: this isn't exactly that world. Close — chakra, hidden villages, the fog, the brutality — but off by a few degrees. A version. A "what if." Which would mean my precious knowledge isn't a map at all. It's a map of a different city that happens to have streets with the same names, and following it confidently is the kind of thing that walks you off a pier.

Either way, the takeaway was the same, and it was a takeaway that sat in my chest like swallowed ice:

I was not the genius reincarnator with the cheat-sheet of the future. I was just a guy who knew a lot of trivia about a place that resembled this one. The future was as dark to me as the fog outside the window.

Which meant I couldn't coast. Couldn't wait for a famous event and position myself cleverly around it. Couldn't count on a single thing I knew.

All I could count on was the grind, the system, and the choice I was about to make.

"Cool," I whispered to the dark, on the night of day four, lying on my pallet with my arms aching and my one Class Point burning a hole in my metaphysical pocket. "No pressure. Pick the right class with zero information in a world that might not even be the one you studied. Easy. Love this for me."

Then, because I'd been putting it off and the putting-off was its own kind of cowardice, I pulled up the class menu.

I'd already narrowed it, those four days. Of course I had. Theorycrafting is the one thing I'm genuinely good at, and I'd been running builds in my head while hauling water like some kind of cursed monk in your average yokai tale.

Mage was out. Glass cannon in a world of people who close distance faster than thought, and worse, it ran entirely on chakra — and my Chakra stat was a heartbreaking 1. A Mage with one Chakra is a guy who shows up to a gunfight and can fire exactly once before he has to go home and lie down. No.

Warlock was out on principle, the principle being I refuse to deal with actual demons, in a game is fine, but in real life? Hell no.

Death Knight and Demon Hunter were locked, which made the decision easy by making it for me.

Warrior, Rogue, Hunter — the no-chakra-needed crowd — were tempting precisely because my Chakra was garbage. A class that didn't care about my worst stat? Genuinely appealing. Rogue especially: stealth, vanish, not-being-seen, the single most valuable skill set in a village that murders its children for practice. I came back to Rogue maybe nine times.

But.

Here's the thing I kept circling back to, the thing that — four days, a hundred push-ups, one bad revelation about the timeline later — finally won.

I didn't know what was coming. I'd just established that, painfully. No map. No anchor. No idea whether I'd need to fight, flee, hide, heal, or fake my way through the next ten years.

And when you don't know what problem you're going to face, you don't pick the specialist. You pick the generalist. You pick the answer that's a B+ at everything instead of an A+ at one thing and an F at the rest. Because the specialist is amazing right up until the world decides to fuck him, and then he's dead, and the generalist is the guy who shrugs and says "yeah, I can do that too."

There was exactly one class on that list that was a B+ at everything.

I pulled it up.

╔══════════════════════════════

  🌿  DRUID

 A shapeshifter and keeper of the wild, trading forms as the moment demands — claw, bark, beak, or healing rain.

 Note: Druids require chakra to hold their forms and call on nature. Without it, the shapes will not come.

╚══════════════════════════════

Druid.

The class that tanks. The class that heals. The class that throws damage from range and tears throats out up close. The class that turns into a cat and sneaks which means it has stealth as well, or a bird and flies, or a seal — and I was in the Land of Water, surrounded by actual ocean, so a seal form was actually pretty good. 

A B+ at everything. The Swiss Army knife of a world that hadn't told me which blade I'd need.

The Note worried me — requires chakra to hold their forms — and my chakra was one single solitary point. But every form, every spell, every option a Druid had was one more answer in a world full of questions I couldn't see coming.

I needed strength and versatility.

After all, when you don't know the question, you hedge.

I want to be honest: it wasn't only strategy. There was also a part of me, a big dumb gleeful part, that simply wanted to turn into a bear. I'd be lying if I pretended the bear or big cat wasn't a factor. The bear and big cat were a factor.

But the strategy was real, and the strategy was sound, and for once the thing I wanted and the thing that was smart pointed the same direction.

I took a breath. 

I selected Druid.

║  Apply 1 Class Point to 🌿 DRUID?                 ║

║  This will set DRUID to Level 1.                  ║

║  A chosen class cannot be un-chosen.              ║

I looked at it for a long moment. Four days of grinding push-ups around chores. One bad night learning the future was a locked door. A whole list of classes I'd theorycrafted into the ground.

This was it. The first real choice of the new life, made on purpose, with a clear head and a sore everything.

"Yeah," I said.

I confirmed.

The world did a thing.

Not a big thing. 

Not lightning, not a chorus of angels, nothing that would've gotten me looked at. It was internal — a sensation like a key turning in a lock somewhere inside my stomach, a warmth spreading out from it, faint but real, the first warm thing I'd felt in this body that didn't come from a gruel bowl.

And the system, which had spent four days being a useless blue rock, lit up.

╔══════════════════════════════

 CLASS ACQUIRED — 🌿 DRUID LV 1

 Welcome to the path of the wild.

 New ability unlocked.

 Class Points remaining: 0

╚══════════════════════════════

I'm not going to lie about my reaction. My reaction was a single, full-body shiver of pure nerd joy, sitting cross-legged on a freezing pallet in a murder village, grinning like an absolute lunatic into the dark.

I had a class. I was a Druid. I had a new ability unlocked — the most beautiful four words in any language, the phrase that justified ten thousand hours of a life I couldn't remember the name of.

"Show me," I breathed. "Show me the ability, show me show me show me—"

╔══════════════════════════════

  ✶  WRATH

 Hurl a bolt of nature's fury — solar and lunar

 energy bound into a single searing missile.

 A ranged attack. The Druid's first reach.

 Cost: Chakra

 Damage: scales with Intellect.

╚══════════════════════════════

Wrath.

The Balance druid's bread-and-butter nuke. The little "boomkin" laser. The spell you spam ten thousand times leveling because it's the only one you've got. In the game it was nothing special — the most basic ranged attack a Druid owned, the training-wheels button.

Here, in this god forsaken place, it was a gun.

I could've kissed the panel. I didn't, because it's made of light and I was the only one capable of seeing it, and I'd just look insane, but the impulse was there.

"Okay," I said, doing a little contained wiggle of triumph. "Okay, we're cooking, we're absolutely cooking, this is—"

And then I made the mistake of asking the follow-up question. The one I should've known better than to ask while I was happy.

"Wait — so how do I level this? The Druid level. Do I just keep doing push-ups, or—"

And unfortunately, the system, helpfully, explained.

I have rarely regretted a question more.

╔══════════════════════════════

  ⓘ  ON LEVELING

 Experience raises your CHARACTER LEVEL.

 Each Character Level grants 1 Class Point.

 Class Points are spent to raise a CLASS LEVEL.

 Spend them where you choose. Each point raises

 one class by one level.

 A class may be raised to Level 10.

 At Level 10, a class unlocks SPECIALIZATIONS.

╚══════════════════════════════

Okay. Fine. So far so good. This part I basically knew. XP makes me level, leveling gives me points, points buy class levels, classes cap at ten and then unlock specs. Clean. Elegant. I love a clean system.

I poked the word SPECIALIZATIONS, the way you poke a sleeping dog you assume is friendly.

╔══════════════════════════════

  ⓘ  ON SPECIALIZATIONS

 At Level 10, a class branches into separate

 specialization paths. Each is a discipline of

 its own.

 🌿 DRUID specializations:

   • BALANCE     — caster. The fury of stars.

   • FERAL       — claw and tooth. The hunter.

   • GUARDIAN    — the bear. The wall.

   • RESTORATION — the mender. Life itself.

 Each specialization levels SEPARATELY, paid in

 Class Points, beginning again at Level 10.

╚══════════════════════════════

I read that.

Then I read it again.

Then a cold, slow, creeping understanding came up through me like floodwater up a basement stair, and I felt my big dumb grin fall right off my face and shatter quietly on the floor.

"...Each specialization levels separately."

Let me walk you through what my poor, eleven-Intellect brain did next, because this is the part where I, the great theorycrafter, the guy who reads the patch notes, finally understood exactly how badly the universe had me.

I'd been so happy about classes aren't exclusive. I can be ALL of them, I'd cackled, day one. Collect them like stickers. The most overpowered kid in the world.

But "all of them" had quietly grown...

To "master" a single class wasn’t just leveling to max level. It was ten levels to unlock the specs — and then each spec was its own separate climb from Level 10. Druid alone had four. Four specializations. So a complete Druid… it was 10 levels for basic druid, plus four separate spec grinds stacked on top each one capping at level 90 if this system operates under the latest level cap. And every single level of every single one of those came out of the same pool — my Class Points — which came from my Character Level — which came from XP — for a total of…  330 levels, just for Druid.

And that was one class.

There were thirteen.

I sat very still and did the math, because not doing the math wasn't an option, the math does itself in my head whether I invite it or not.

Thirteen classes. Ten base levels each: a hundred and thirty Class Points, just for the bases. Just to unlock all the specs. And then the specs — call it three or four per class, being generous to my own despair, each its own grind from one — that's, what, forty-plus separate specialization ladders, each one a fresh climb, all funded from the one trickle of points I bleed out of a starving body one excruciating rep at a time.

Thousands of levels. Thousands of Class Points. Which means — and here the math stopped being abstract and turned into a physical sensation, a kind of vertigo — which means an amount of grinding that does not fit inside a human lifetime.

"Oh," I said, very softly, to the cold dark room. "Oh no."

The dream — be everything, collect them all, make Madara my eventual bitch — the dream wasn't hard. Hard I could do. Hard I'd been farming, one push-up at a time.

The dream was impossible. Mathematically. Structurally. The income was linear — one point per level, levels getting more expensive as they went, in a body that could barely sustain the grind to begin with. And the cost wasn't linear, it multiplied, every class fracturing into specs, every spec its own fresh zero-to-cap, the whole thing fanning out into a number so big it laughed at the concept of a single life.

And that’s not even considering the linear difficulty increase that is to get more levels, each level becomes more difficult than the last, meaning the higher I get, the more difficult this race would become.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I want to record, for posterity, that I did not handle this gracefully.

I lay back on the pallet and stared at the gray timber ceiling and the fat trembling beads of condensation that never fell, and I went through the whole arc. Denial first — no, I'll find a shortcut, there's always a shortcut, an XP exploit, a— No. The system paid for genuine effort and nothing else; it was practically built to be unexploitable, the smug honest bastard.

Then bargaining — okay but I don't need ALL the specs, just the good ones, just the— Still hundreds. Still a lifetime and some change.

Then a brief, dignified period of just lying there feeling sorry for myself, which I will not describe except to say there may have been a quiet "this is bullshit" and possibly a single self-pitying sniff.

And then — because I'm me, because despair is a place I visit and cannot stand to live in, because the math that had just crushed me was the same math I could now use — I sat up.

Because here's the flip side. The thing the despair had hidden.

If "everything" was impossible, then "everything" was off the table, and the second "everything" is off the table, the actual question gets small. And clear. And answerable.

Not: how do I get all thirteen classes and all forty specs. That question has no answer and the answer is "you can't."

But: I have a trickle of points. A painfully slow, hard-won trickle. Where do I spend them to survive a village that wants me dead, in a future I can't see, with no idea what's coming?

That question had an answer. And I'd already, accidentally, answered it an hour ago.

Druid.

Because the entire reason "be everything" had been seductive was versatility — being able to answer any question the world threw at me. And I couldn't get that by collecting thirteen classes anymore. But I could get a huge chunk of it from one, if I picked the one class that was already four classes wearing a trenchcoat.

Balance: my ranged caster. Feral: my stealth-and-stab. Guardian: my tank, my wall, my bear. Restoration: my healing, so I never had to rely on a village that would never heal me for free.

One class. Four roles. Tank, heal, melee, ranged — the entire holy trinity plus stealth, all under one banner, all leveled from one pool, all thematically coherent so I'd never be spread thin across thirteen disconnected grinds.

I hadn't picked Druid by luck. Drunk on bear-joy, sure, but the instinct under the joy had been exactly right, and the math that just crushed the big dream had quietly confirmed the small one. The smart move and the move I'd already made were the same move.

"Few and deep," I said to the ceiling, trying the words out. "Not wide and shallow. You can't have all of it. So you go deep on the one that's secretly all of it anyway."

It wasn't make Madara my bitch kind of plan. But it was a plan.

It was smaller and grayer and a lot more like every grind I'd ever actually finished in the old life: pick a main, learn it cold, get good. The dream of being a god, downgraded to the realistic ambition of being extremely hard to kill, in several different ways.

You know what? I could work with extremely hard to kill. In this word, extremely hard to kill was the only kind of dream worth having.

"Okay," I said. The magic word. I have a plan now and I'm not just saying it. "Druid. All in. Bear eventually. Got it."

I had a class. I had a plan. I had one ability and zero points and a body made of breadsticks. But I had a dream!

I had, in other words, a Level 1 character and a very long road, which is exactly where every character I'd ever loved had started.

I grinned again. "Let's see what Wrath does."

This was, in hindsight, a stupid thing to attempt at night, inside, in a room with five empty pallets and thin walls, in a village where being looked at could get you culled.

But I'd just had a whole emotional journey and unlocked my first ability and I am, fundamentally, a person who cannot leave a button unpressed. So. Stupid. Doing it anyway.

I crept to my fog corner — the spot by the cracked shutter where the mist pooled thickest, where even if some light flared nobody outside could see it through the soup. I crouched. I called up Wrath in my mind, and the system obligingly told me how, not in words exactly, more like a sudden knowing, the way you suddenly know how to move a finger you've never thought about moving.

I reached for my chakra.

This part I have to describe carefully, because it was the first time I'd ever done it and it was weird. There was a thing inside me — small, faint, a candle-flame in a cave, but there, coiled somewhere below my navel. My chakra. All one point of it. It felt like a held breath, like the half-second before a sneeze, like potential energy with nowhere to go.

I took that one flickering point and I shoved it toward my hand, the way the knowing told me to, and I pictured the bolt — solar and lunar fury, a searing missile, nature's wrath — and I pointed two stubby fingers at the wall and I willed it out.

Something happened.

A spark of pale greenish-gold light coughed into being at my fingertips, about the size and ferocity of a dying firefly, traveled a heroic four inches, and went pfft against the gray timber wall with all the destructive power of a thrown grape.

There was a tiny scorch mark. Maybe. If you squinted. In good light, which there wasn't.

I stared at it.

The "searing missile of nature's fury" had just delivered, to a wooden wall, roughly the impact of a stern flick.

║  Wrath cast.                                      ║

║  Chakra insufficient for full effect.             ║

║  +1 XP                                            ║

"Chakra insufficient for full effect," I read aloud, deadpan, in the dark. "You don't say."

I'd had one point of chakra. I'd spent all of it. The most powerful first strike in my arsenal, the gun I'd been so smug about, ran on a fuel tank that held exactly one drop, and one drop got me a firefly fart.

And here's the thing — I laughed. 

The great reincarnated genius, the Druid of Kirigakure, the future master of four roles and a bear, had just discharged his entire spiritual energy reserve to lightly inconvenience a rotten plank.

"Okay," I wheezed. "Okay, that's — that's humbling. That's good for me, probably. Builds character. I have so much character now."

But — and this is the part that stopped the laughing, that turned the whole stupid night around — something else happened the instant I'd burned that one point of chakra. The instant I'd actually exerted it, spent it, pushed it out of me in a way I'd never done before.

The line that had been spinning since the very first morning. The one that wouldn't resolve at rest. The one the system had told me, on day one, needed exertion.

It finally moved.

╔══════════════════════════════

 ※ Chakra Aptitude — RESOLVED.

╚══════════════════════════════

I went very still.

Four days. Four days of ANALYZING, of that little word pulsing at the bottom of my sheet like a held breath, refusing to tell me the one thing it knew about me that I didn't. And all it had needed was for me to actually use the stuff. To spend my one sad point on a firefly. Exertion. The system measured you while you bled, never while you rested, and I'd finally bled a little.

I almost didn't want to look. The Chakra stat was one. Whatever this said, it wasn't going to say chosen one. Best case it confirmed I was a spiritual pauper and we could all move on.

I looked.

╔══════════════════════════════

 ※ CHAKRA APTITUDE

 Raw Reserve:    F  (very low)

 Control:        A  (exceptional)

 Affinity:       attuned to the living world

                 (favored: nature, growth, water)

 Note: Reserve grows with use. Control is rare.

╚══════════════════════════════

Oh.

Oh, now that's interesting.

Let me translate, because the system's clinical little letters were doing a lot of work and I needed a second to feel all of it.

Raw Reserve: F, very low. Yeah. No surprise. My tank was the size of a thimble. That's the firefly. That's why the gun shot a grape. Confirmed: I had almost no chakra, which meant for a good while my big flashy ranged attack was going to be more of a polite statement than a missile.

But.

Control: A. Exceptional. And the note — Control is rare.

In the show, raw power and fine control were two completely different things, and control was the one nobody could shortcut. Plenty of monsters had oceans of chakra and the finesse of a dropped piano. The truly dangerous ones, the medics, the genjutsu masters, the ones who did impossible delicate things — they had control. You could grow a reserve. Control, you mostly either had or spent a lifetime grinding for, and I'd apparently shown up with an A in it, sitting right there next to my F in raw fuel.

I could work with this.

Look, I'm not an idiot. F-rank reserve is still F-rank. Exceptional control of almost no chakra is like being a Formula 1 driver with a go-kart's engine; the skill's real but the car's still a go-kart.

The grind was still impossible-shaped.  But now I had a clearer picture of what to expect.