During the last six months, Fugaku had also pushed his physical conditioning and taijutsu far harder than before.
That came almost entirely from his real body.
Clones could study, memorize, practice seals, refine chakra control, and repeat techniques.
They could not build his muscles for him.
Fugaku had always understood that taijutsu and the Eight Inner Gates were badly underrated, including by the previous him.
His memories from another world made that impossible to ignore.
After all, he knew about a certain ridiculous father and son.
And one of them had eventually managed to threaten Madara Uchiha himself.
For a while, at least.
More importantly, Fugaku was almost certain there was no secret bloodline behind it.
No hidden Kekkei Genkai.
No divine inheritance.
Just will, time, and a frankly unreasonable amount of physical training.
That made the entire subject much more interesting.
The more Fugaku thought about it, the more the logic made sense.
This world was not Earth.
Bodies here constantly circulated chakra through an internal pathway system.
That changed the limits of physical conditioning enormously.
Overtraining injuries still existed, obviously, but the threshold was much higher, recovery was far better, and chakra itself constantly supported the body.
So if someone was willing to spend years strengthening every muscle, tendon, joint, organ, and chakra pathway to increasingly absurd levels, there was far more room to keep progressing than there would have been in his previous world.
And the stronger the body became, the more strain it could survive from opening the Inner Gates.
Simple.
Brutal.
Effective.
So why did almost nobody pursue it seriously?
Because most people did not understand where that road could lead.
The Eight Gates themselves were not some lost secret.
Any competent medical ninja had to know they existed as major restriction points in the chakra pathway system.
The Byakugan could see them.
Experienced shinobi knew that opening one or two gates could temporarily increase physical output.
But that was usually as far as the idea went.
Something a talented veteran might learn later in life.
A dangerous burst technique.
Not a complete path to power.
Might Duy had apparently reached a very different conclusion.
Probably by accident.
His talent for mainstream ninjutsu and genjutsu had been poor enough that he was forced to keep looking elsewhere.
Not because he lacked chakra.
Neither Duy, Guy, nor later Lee were literally chakra-less.
Their problem was using it efficiently in the conventional external ways shinobi valued most.
Ninjutsu.
Genjutsu.
Complex elemental transformations.
Internally was another matter.
Actively created chakra could still reinforce muscle.
Increase speed.
Strengthen strikes.
Protect the body.
And eventually, if the body became strong enough, survive the progressively more violent release of its own internal limiters.
Duy had simply taken that principle much farther than everyone else.
Then spent practically every waking hour proving it.
Fugaku had no intention of abandoning ninjutsu, genjutsu, sealing, medicine, or anything else the way Duy effectively had.
He did not need to.
Shadow Clones gave him the luxury of dividing his time.
So while his clones studied everything else, Fugaku's real body trained.
Running.
Sprinting.
Striking.
Kicking.
Climbing.
Balance.
Reaction drills.
Endurance.
Chakra-reinforced movement.
Anything that could make the body harder, faster, and more capable of carrying greater internal strain.
No mystical secret.
Just work.
As much as his remaining chakra and recovery allowed.
His taijutsu improved quickly too.
Fugaku had never been a dedicated hand-to-hand specialist, but he was hardly inexperienced in close combat.
Years of weapons training had already given him footwork, timing, balance, distance control, and coordination.
Then there was the Sharingan.
Once Fugaku started sparring seriously with several Uchiha who specialized more heavily in taijutsu, copying the useful parts of their movement came almost embarrassingly easily.
His future son Sasuke had done much the same thing after he encountered Rock Lee.
Watch.
Understand.
Copy.
Then refine it for your own body.
Unlike ninjutsu, taijutsu rarely demanded some specialized chakra nature or complicated formula.
Most of it was biomechanics, timing, conditioning, and repetition.
And Fugaku already possessed the standard chakra reinforcement any competent jōnin used.
Chakra into the legs for acceleration.
Body Flicker.
Chakra into the arms to increase striking force.
Reinforcement through different parts of the body to absorb impact.
Nothing exotic.
Just fundamentals pushed harder.
Most conventional hand-to-hand styles were loosely grouped under the term Strong Fist anyway.
Damage the opponent from the outside.
Break bones.
Tear muscle.
Destroy the body through impact.
The Hyūga's Gentle Fist was the famous exception, attacking the chakra pathway system and internal organs directly.
Without the Byakugan, however, there was little point in Fugaku pursuing it.
Recently, something else had begun changing.
He could feel his own body better.
Not merely muscles and chakra circulation.
The Gates themselves.
Faintly.
Especially during the hardest periods of training, when his entire chakra system was under pressure.
It felt as though his body had finally become strong enough to tolerate a greater internal load.
Fugaku had researched everything the clan possessed on the Eight Gates.
The conclusion was frustratingly simple.
With sufficient conditioning, the first Gate could eventually be opened.
Then the next.
No miraculous shortcut was described.
That did not mean one did not exist.
Or that Duy had not discovered details nobody else bothered recording.
Fugaku wanted to know.
Which was why he intended to meet him today.
Once he finished his Plasma Release training, Fugaku cleaned himself up and left the private training area.
He crossed the patriarch's estate and entered the wider Uchiha compound.
There was no reason for anyone to find what he was about to do suspicious. New chapters come out on g.com first.
Might Duy was, in the eyes of almost everyone in Konoha, just an eternal genin.
A strange man with terrible career prospects who survived by taking whatever low-level assignments came his way.
Taijutsu itself was hardly treated as some hidden road to greatness either.
Useful, certainly.
Necessary.
But conventional wisdom still held that any shinobi who wanted to reach the highest levels eventually needed something more.
Usually ninjutsu.
So nobody was going to wonder why Fugaku Uchiha happened to speak with Might Duy.
Especially under today's circumstances.
Duy's current odd job happened to overlap with an assignment being handled by the three junior officers of Fugaku's own Investigation team.
That gave him the perfect excuse.
Fugaku was simply going to drop by and surprise his subordinates on his day off.
Nothing unusual about a captain checking how his people were doing.
And if he happened to meet Might Duy there?
Pure coincidence.
Fugaku smiled faintly as he walked.
His junior officers did get fewer days off than he and the senior officer.
Rank had its privileges.
Today, apparently, one of those privileges was using their assignment as cover to investigate the most underestimated genin in Konoha.
Fugaku already knew what Duy's greatest "talent" probably was.
Willpower.
That absurd, almost self-destructive drive to keep pushing long after any normal person would have stopped.
Conveniently, Fugaku possessed plenty of that himself now.
What he wanted to know was whether Duy had discovered anything else along the way.
Perhaps even some natural instinct for how the body and chakra should work together.
The highest levels of the Eight Gates had existed before.
Madara's own words confirmed that much.
But they had clearly been extraordinarily rare.
So rare that knowledge of them had probably survived only among a handful of old monsters like Madara.
Fugaku suspected the last serious users might even have belonged mostly to the era before the hidden villages.
That would make sense.
Once the village system appeared, ninjutsu development exploded.
Academies.
Libraries.
Research departments.
Clan techniques being systematized and exchanged.
For any talented shinobi, there were suddenly much easier and more prestigious roads to strength than spending ten years doing suicidal amounts of physical conditioning.
Duy had somehow wandered back onto the forgotten road.
And he had been walking it longer than Fugaku.
The man was roughly six years older and already infamous throughout Konoha for performing ridiculous physical exercises wherever people could see him.
Most found it embarrassing.
Fugaku found it interesting.
Even if Duy could not explain anything useful, simply sparring with him would be valuable.
Fugaku could watch every movement through the Sharingan.
Foot placement.
Weight transfer.
Muscle tension.
Breathing.
The precise instant chakra reinforced a limb.
The way his chakra network pulsed under extreme physical output.
The Sharingan could not directly see the chakra pathway system the way the Byakugan could, but it could still perceive chakra flow well enough to notice changes in concentration and movement.
And if Duy had already begun approaching the Gates in some unusual way...
Fugaku intended to notice.
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