A month passed.
Before Mihawk realized it, nearly two months had gone by since the beginning of the school year.
During that time, Nerona Mihawk had gradually become the most withdrawn student in the entire class.
He was arguably even more isolated than Uzumaki Naruto.
Naruto might have been hated and avoided by most of the villagers, but he still tried to join the other children whenever they played together. Once the games ended, he would inevitably find himself alone again, but at least he continued reaching out to them.
Mihawk was completely different.
Among children his age, his appearance was exceptionally striking. His silver hair, crimson eyes, and delicate features made him extremely popular with the girls in his class.
When the school year first began, the number of girls constantly surrounding him was no smaller than the group gathered around Uchiha Sasuke.
In fact, there might have been even more.
A group of girls led by Yamanaka Ino enthusiastically approached him almost every day. For quite some time, the other boys in the class could only watch with envy and jealousy.
That situation continued for several weeks after the start of school.
However, Mihawk always responded with indifference and rarely spoke to any of them.
His undisguised rejection eventually caused most of the girls’ enthusiasm to fade.
At the same time, the increasingly sharp presence surrounding him made them hesitant to approach.
Two months later, only Ino—the unofficial leader among the girls in their class—still dared to walk up and speak to him without showing the slightest fear.
In truth, Mihawk was not completely opposed to building friendships.
He possessed the advantage of knowing how the future would unfold, and he understood better than anyone what positions the members of the Rookie Nine would eventually hold.
The future Seventh Hokage.
The future head of the Uchiha clan.
The future chief strategist of Konoha.
Forming close relationships with them would undoubtedly benefit him in the long run.
However, the moment Ino invited him to play with the others for the first time, that idea disappeared from his mind.
He might possess the body of a six-year-old, but his mind certainly did not belong to one.
Was he really supposed to spend his time playing childish games with them?
From that day onward, Mihawk deliberately maintained a cold expression and rejected every attempt by both boys and girls to approach him.
The decision made his daily life considerably quieter.
Despite having almost no one to speak with, Mihawk did not find the situation uncomfortable.
In his previous life, he had been an extreme shut-in who rarely interacted with other people. There had even been a period lasting more than a year when he had hardly spoken to anyone at all.
He had long since grown accustomed to solitude.
Rather than feeling bored, he was pleased to have more time for sword training and meditation.
Over the course of the past month, Hawkeye’s template had reached an unlock rate of 1.92 percent.
However, the increase from 1.32 percent to 1.92 percent had not caused Mihawk’s swordsmanship to improve as dramatically as before.
During that section of the template, Hawkeye experienced very few battles within the spiritual world. Most of what Mihawk witnessed consisted of repeated sword training, contemplation, and gradual comprehension.
The template recorded only Hawkeye’s experiences related to practicing and fighting with the sword. It did not show the ordinary events of his daily life.
Because of that, even Mihawk did not know the exact reason behind the long period without battles.
Perhaps Hawkeye had already become invincible among the swordsmen on his island.
Perhaps the others his age had begun to fear him.
Or perhaps he had simply lost interest in challenging opponents who were weaker than himself.
Whatever the reason, Mihawk could tell that the next stage of progress would probably not bring any immediate, dramatic improvement.
Hawkeye had entered both a period of growth and a temporary limit.
Only after he matured and set out to sea would his strength begin rising at an astonishing pace.
Mihawk was not in a hurry.
He still had plenty of time.
Even with only 1.92 percent of the template unlocked, the foundation of his swordsmanship had already become exceptionally firm.
What he needed now was time to absorb and consolidate everything he had learned.
When his swordsmanship reached a bottleneck, Mihawk did not allow the remaining time to go to waste.
Instead, he divided his training schedule and began dedicating half of it to physical conditioning.
A swordsman pursuing the highest level of technique did not necessarily require a monstrous body, but his physical strength still needed to surpass that of an ordinary person.
The swordsmanship Mihawk intended to pursue was not the same physically demanding path as Roronoa Zoro’s.
Zoro practiced Three Sword Style, which required an extraordinarily powerful body capable of supporting the use of three swords at once.
Mihawk intended to wield only a single blade.
Because of that, he focused primarily on strengthening his arms, legs, and core.
He used the other half of his training time for frog jumps, push-ups, and pull-ups.
Every day, he also spent two hours running around Konoha.
For the past half month, Mihawk had followed a carefully arranged daily schedule.
He exercised early in the morning.
During the morning and afternoon, he attended the Ninja Academy, where he studied theoretical knowledge and participated in shinobi training.
At noon, he completed his daily system task, entered the spiritual world to experience the newly unlocked fragments of the template, and practiced his swordsmanship.
At night, he ran for two hours.
After returning home and bathing, he sat inside his room to meditate and refine chakra.
More than two months had passed since the system first awakened.
Although Mihawk had yet to experience an actual battle himself, he had assimilated Hawkeye’s combat experience.
Through Hawkeye, he had already experienced numerous victories.
Those experiences allowed Mihawk to understand the confidence that came from overcoming opponents without allowing that confidence to develop into arrogance.
They tempered his state of mind and gradually developed his ability to identify flaws in the movements of others.
Without exaggerating his own ability, Mihawk believed that he could already defeat many of the senior students who were preparing to graduate from the Academy.
Of course, that was under the condition that they did not use ninjutsu.
At present, Mihawk possessed only a solid foundation in swordsmanship.
Until he perceived the Breath of All Things and crossed the threshold into the realm of a master swordsman, he had no reliable method of dealing with elemental ninjutsu.
Even the Great Fireball Jutsu—an ability that rarely seemed to kill anyone in the story he remembered—could pose a fatal threat to his current body.
His present rate of growth could not compare with prodigies such as Hatake Kakashi, who graduated from the Academy at five, became a chūnin at six, and was promoted to jōnin at twelve.
Nor could it compare with Uchiha Itachi, who graduated at seven, became a chūnin at ten, entered the ANBU at eleven, and rose to the rank of captain at thirteen.
Even so, Mihawk was already satisfied with his clear and steady improvement.
As long as he successfully perceived the Breath of All Things before graduating from the Academy, Mihawk believed his achievements would not be vastly inferior to theirs.
He understood exactly how wide the gap was between a swordsman capable of hearing the Breath of All Things and one who could not.
Calling it a difference of a rookie and and a professional would not be an exaggeration.
For now, no one disturbed his peaceful routine, and Mihawk was perfectly content with that.
Sitting in the back row of the classroom, he listened to Iruka’s lecture while holding a kunai beneath his desk and quietly carving a large piece of wood whose bark had already been removed.
A plastic bag hung beneath the table to catch the wood shavings, and it was already nearly full.
The thick piece of timber had gradually been carved into a long, narrow shape.
The rough outline of a wooden sword was beginning to emerge.
Mihawk intended to make himself a bokken.
The Ninja Academy taught theoretical subjects during the morning and practical shinobi training during the afternoon.
Their practical lessons included taijutsu, shurikenjutsu, the Three Basic Techniques, and close-quarters combat using kunai.
After two months of instruction, Mihawk had also learned the fundamentals of throwing shuriken.
His technique was not yet as refined as Sasuke’s, but he was already considered one of the better students in the class.
Thanks to the perception and combat instincts he had assimilated from Hawkeye’s template, his performance in close-quarters combat was even more impressive.
However, Mihawk had no desire to use a kunai as his primary weapon.
He wanted a sword.
The age when samurai dominated battlefields had long since passed. Outside the Land of Iron and the occasional wandering rōnin, there were few traditional samurai left in the shinobi world.
The Ninja Academy naturally had no reason to provide swords for its students.
Using a real blade during practice would also make it far too easy to seriously injure someone.
Iruka would never allow Mihawk to spar with his classmates while carrying a sharpened sword.
If he wanted to practice without placing the other students in danger, his only option was to use a wooden sword.
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