The following days passed without much danger (including danger to my psyche, which was still utterly failing to process the acquisition of the “Talk no Jutsu” skill).
In my favored little patch of woods, I built a makiwara.
Yes, the classic wooden post wrapped in rope that you punch repeatedly to practice your strikes and condition your knuckles.
What good was it being this flimsy, barely having any strength in my arms?
Forget becoming a shinobi, I couldn’t even fight back against the neighborhood kids.
And that was deeply humiliating.
Getting punched in the nose by random children—no matter how many rationalizations I came up with—never hurt any less.
I was mentally an adult, yet I was getting my ass kicked by kids!
It didn’t matter that I was stuck in a child’s body, or that the body in question was scrawny mostly due to my own previous efforts to stay out of sight.
So, I decided to fix my punch.
Thankfully, I knew a little bit about the mechanics of throwing one, but I needed to actually train this body to do it properly.
I approached the task with all the dedication and responsibility of a relentlessly upbeat, virtually unkillable Jinchuriki.
Around my fifteenth strike against the makiwara—with my knuckles aching, blood oozing freely from dozens of micro-abrasions, and my “Masochist” skill having leveled up twice—I finally received a more or less expected skill.
[Skill: Iron Fists (Passive) — Level 1] [In the future, you have a chance to break walls with your bare hands, grind stones to dust with your fingers, and shatter barrier techniques with a single punch.
For now, however, your hands are simply slightly harder to injure (especially on the back of the hand), and your punches are slightly stronger and heavier than those of your peers.
Effect: +1 to STR for every level of this skill.
+1 to VIT for every 5 levels of this skill.] Something like that.
However, alongside the physical conditioning, I discovered a couple of other very interesting things.
For instance, I gain experience for kills.
And it doesn’t matter what I kill.
It could be a small animal, a fish, or even a bug!
The problem was that I didn’t actually know how to hunt or fish properly yet.
Therefore, I will take the secret of how I reached Level 3 to my grave.
No one will ever know!
Yep.
Ninety-eight experience points were farmed entirely off mosquitoes.
One point per kill.
It’s a good thing I’m a kid; the System probably wouldn’t have given a teenager even a single fraction of an EXP point for those things.
But seriously, ninety-eight of them!
What did those bloodsuckers even find so appealing about me?
Is the toxic blood of a Jinchuriki really that delicious?
Is it a must-try delicacy, even if you die immediately after drinking it?
There was another major development: my INT stat stopped growing.
The System informed me that for someone with the “Orphan” status, this was the hard cap.
I assumed that if I wanted to raise it further, I’d have to wait until I enrolled in the Academy.
Still, these kinds of hidden limitations were a nasty surprise.
What if stat growth was permanently capped by ninja rank, too?
Say, a Chunin physically cannot exceed three hundred points in any given parameter, and so on.
Given that canon Naruto was a permanent Genin until he skipped straight to Hokage, I was terrified that a rank-based stat cap would get me killed long before I even reached the midpoint of the canon timeline.
Don’t get me wrong, I was happy with my stats for now, but how long would that last?
My INT had already hit a wall before it even reached twenty.
I understood the System’s logic—an uneducated orphan, even a genius one, can’t unlock their talent without actual knowledge, and I had nowhere to get that knowledge right now.
My past life, it seemed, wasn’t being factored into the equation at all.
[Status] Name: Naruto Uzumaki Title: — Level: 3 (EXP: 40/300) HP: 590 / 590 MP: 160 / 160 (Chakra) STR: 28 VIT: 24 INT: 16 WIS: 0 LUK: 0 AGI: 13 CHK: 6 Chakra Control: -250 Unallocated Stat Points: 10 Looking at all my parameters, the thing that scares me the most is my health bar.
I’m turning out way too tanky.
I’m definitely being funneled into a paladin build.
At least the System didn’t slap me with some garbage “Ramen Eater” title, because given my absolute obsession with Teuchi’s cooking lately, that was a very real possibility.
I had earned the rest of those stats with blood and sweat, and I was honestly a little proud of myself.
I finally stopped looking like someone you could knock over with a stiff breeze.
But lately, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was nothing more than the calm before the storm.
Either way, there weren’t many days left to hold out, and maybe my luck would hold.
The most important thing was just to avoid stepping in any major trouble until then.