Book One: The Rise of the Blue-Haired Devil.

      I absorbed knowledge from books, reading them at an incredible speed. It took me less than two hours to finish all the volumes, and I began to digest the information.       The first book explained the path of the ninja and their basic abilities. The first few pages told the story of the first shinobi. It was Rikudo Sennin. There wasn't as much information about him as I would have liked. Rikudo became the first jinchuriki. Another interesting word in my arsenal. Jinchuriki are people with tailed beasts sealed in them. The book claimed that there was originally one single beast, Jubi. He had ten tails and his strength was unrivalled. The monster crushed everything it saw. He was the true embodiment of a natural disaster. That's when he appeared. The first ninja to stand up to Jubey and give him a fight. He failed to destroy the monster, but the ten-tailed was weakened, which the sage took advantage of. Using one of his strongest techniques, he sealed the monster inside him. After that, the ninja began to spread chakra around the world. Almost nothing is known about the death of this great man, but one fact was still mentioned in the book. Before his death, the sage divided the power of the ten-tailed into nine parts, creating nine tailed biju, each with huge reserves of chakra. The book gave a clear definition of tailed or biju - they are clots of chakra filled with hatred and anger. There are many inconsistencies in this story, as I noted for myself.       Firstly, I wondered, what is sealing? I poked around in other books and found some interesting information. I found what I needed. To seal means to create a space inside something or someone. From what I understood from the rest of the explanations, this is all advanced ninja level. Several symbols are applied to an object or person that create a space inside the object where anything can be hidden. To put it crudely, a jinchuriki is a prison for ponytails.       Secondly, where did the ten-tailed one come from? It can't just appear out of nothing. Since tails are chakra blobs, it would seem that Jubi was made up of chakra as well. I had only two assumptions: the first was that there was some source of chakra on this world, on this planet, that kept the flora and fauna from dying off. In my world, the World Runes did the job. The second assumption was based on the exclusion of the first theory. The essence was the following: if tailed creatures do not create life on the planet and did not exist on it originally, it means that someone settled them on this planet. There was too much guesswork in the hypothesis, so I decided to shelve it for when I could get more information about those historical events.       Thirdly, I had very strong doubts about the definition of tailed beasts. Throughout history, I could clearly see that the Sage of the Six Paths or Rikudo Sennin was a fairly intelligent man, so the biju simply couldn't be evil a priori, otherwise he wouldn't have released them into the world, but simply sealed them into humans. Again, there are two possibilities: either the story of the first ninja has serious flaws in itself and a bunch of pitfalls, or the biju aren't the epitome of hate after all.       There are a few questions about the story of the first ninja as well. Since Rikudo was able to fight the Ten-Tailed, does that mean he also possessed chakra? How else would he have been able to first confront such a beast and then seal it? So the question of whether Rikudo had the ability to use chakra before the battle with Jubi just falls away, as far as I'm concerned. But this all forms a new question: where did he get that power from? He's the first, which means he somehow got that power or was born with it. All in all, I decided to leave that question until better times.       The second thing I didn't understand was why would the Sage of the Six Paths share his ability with the world? No, I quite seriously don't understand. Did he think he was only giving power to good people? That's ridiculous. There are always two sides to every deed. You can be a hero and a saviour on one side and a murderer and a maniac on the other. It's all a matter of chance. The world is hard to divide into good and evil, because they are two parts of a whole. They complement each other.       And lastly, the legacy of Rikudo Sennin. Now I'm not talking about the chakra and deeds that influenced the entire history of this world, but his successors. He had to have at least one successor. This was very important, for if then the powers of the heir or heirs paled against the power and majesty of the Sage of the Six Paths, then now they no longer did. Ninjas with distant bloodlines to the first ninja on Earth would stand out for the moment in terms of their strength. When I go through my training course, I should take a closer look at the strong ninjas of this time. If I can study their blood and chakra, it will probably give me a chance to shed some light on these matters. Next, I read about chakra and its potential.       It turns out that you don't have to do anything special to awaken your chakra focus. One simply needs to sit in a comfortable pose and begin to meditate. The book described what I should feel when I start to feel the chakra. It turned out that I would feel warmth. At first it would be in the abdominal area, and then I could spread it throughout my body, concentrating on that sensation. Surprisingly, it was very important for every ninja to be able to have good chakra control. Control was increased through constant meditation and two special exercises. They aimed to enable the ninja to concentrate the flows of chakra in one place, as well as to control its power. The first exercise required several pieces of paper. They were attached to different parts of the ninja's body with the help of chakra. The shinobi had to move them around his body using chakra. The second exercise allowed the ninja to walk on vertical surfaces. It was very entertaining. I had no idea that this was even possible, but the textbook said that if you learn how to properly feed chakra into your legs, you can move around trees, walls, and other vertical surfaces without the use of your hands. Over time, the control allows one to cover oneself with a protective layer of chakra.       This allows the shinobi to not be afraid of certain techniques, and chakra increases the ninja's speed and strength. In addition, when a shinobi reaches a high enough level of chakra control and has the necessary knowledge of human anatomy, he will be able to use medical techniques. Such knowledge allows him to heal himself and allies from serious wounds right during battle. This interested me a great deal. Self healing during combat would be quite useful. It's a shame that the book didn't pay much attention to this aspect. There was a lot of information about human anatomy, but not about techniques. Then there was general knowledge about the three main paths of ninja: ninjutsu, genjutsu, and taijutsu. I decided to quickly run through these summaries, since the other three books carried all of these titles, which made me reasonably assume that they would have more detailed information about it. I wasn't wrong.       When I got to the second book, which was about ninjutsu, I got the same information as in the first, but in a more revealing way. As it turns out, ordinary chakra can be transformed into elemental chakra. Normally, ninja have a predisposition to one of the basic chakra elements, but there are exceptions. There are five basic elements: water, fire, air, lightning, and earth. Each of them has an advantage over one and a weakness over the other: water is stronger than fire, but weaker than earth; fire is stronger than air, but weaker than water; air is stronger than lightning, but weaker than fire; lightning is stronger than stone, but weaker than air; stone is stronger than water, but weaker than lightning. This is the balance of the elements. Anyone can develop control over all five with due diligence, even if they do not have a predisposition to all the elements. However, there are special people in the ninja world who, as a result of their genes, have gained the ability to combine two elements into one. Such people possess an enhanced genome.       The enhanced genome cannot be obtained through training, as I realised, but it was still worth testing in the future. A prime example of an enhanced genome is the element of wood, which was awakened in the son of the head of the Senju clan. Wood is a combination of the element of water and earth. Wood has been shown not to have the weaknesses of any of the elements that make up it. You know, I've learnt a lot of things while living in my world, but the enhanced genome is just something incredible. If the textbook is to be believed, an opponent possessing it will beat you in ninjutsu anyway. That was really disappointing to read. I wanted to believe that I possessed something like that. After the theoretical information came the practical information. To know your chakra element, you had to have special elemental sheets that were made of chakra-sensitive wood. Of course, I didn't have them. Next came the practical part, telling about the development of a particular element. I decided that this information was irrelevant for now, so I moved on to the third book, devoted to such a ninja path as taijutsu.       Taijutsu is close combat. The book provided information on the different types of close combat and the stances used in them. As I realised, all of these styles were basic, as the blows in them were primitive and predictable, but I still decided to learn them later, so that I could use some of the stances from them in my own style, which I planned to create for myself. The last book was about genjutsu.       Illusion techniques were not popular among ninja, but every experienced shinobi knew how to get out of simple illusions. In fact, I found genjutsu techniques to be very useful when you want to avoid a battle or quickly defeat an opponent.       The book was very difficult to understand, but I pulled out a few important pieces of information on how to create such techniques. First, you had to decide how you were going to cast genjutsu. I decided that I would learn all kinds of illusions over time, because such techniques allowed me to sneak into different cities without being seen. This would be very useful in a war. Secondly, to immerse your opponent in genjutsu, you must form a skeleton of illusion, that is, build a realistic chain of events that the opponent will believe in until the end. The images of people and objects will already be drawn by the person's imagination from memory. Illusions did not require a lot of chakra, because their main source is most often the opponent's chakra. Why didn't ninjas like to learn genjutsu techniques? It's very simple. To form the skeleton of an illusion, you had to do a lot of work with your subconscious mind. It all started with the ninja having to learn how to get into his inner world, and then how to control it. Only after you learnt the full essence of genjutsu techniques on yourself could you put them on your opponent.       The main idea of illusion is to get into a person's subconscious, change it to fit some realistic events, and then drag him into this world without him even realising it. Getting out of an illusion is hard enough if you're fighting one-on-one. First you have to realise that you are in genjutsu, and then stop the chakra flows inside your body for a few seconds, so that all five senses of a person can switch off at least for a moment. This required good chakra control. It was many times easier if you were not fighting alone. Then in order to get out of the illusion, you would only need the help of a partner who would have to inject a drop of his chakra into you.       When I was done with reading all the books, I decided to awaken my chakra focus. I tried to lie down, thinking it would be more comfortable, but the hard and cold stone surface was only uncomfortable, so I quickly assumed a sitting position. My legs were uncomfortably floppy, hanging off the bed, making it hard for me to concentrate. I tucked them under me, adopting a lotus pose. I finally found a comfortable position while closing my eyes. I concentrated and after twenty minutes I began to feel a small light of warmth inside my belly. I concentrated on this feeling and then the warmth slowly and gradually spread throughout my body. I became very curious. I directed the flow of heat into my hand with more intensity, when the heat reached my hand I felt it gradually disappear. I opened my eyes and saw that my hand was covered with a dim blue glow, which stopped after a few seconds. I wanted to repeat the experience, but the iron door leading to my room creaked open. One of the ninja instructors came to get me. I was surprised, because it wasn't time for the economics and politics class yet. I could tell by the position of the sun. I was about twenty or thirty minutes early, but for all my desire to continue studying chakra, I went to the new class.       When I got to the classroom where the class was to be held, no one was there yet. I decided not to stand out from the crowd of kids, so I sat at the last desk. The desks were designed for two people, and with the number of people there, I realised that I would have to share my seat with someone. Two minutes later the rest of the slaves started to be brought in. After about twenty minutes, almost every seat in the classroom was taken. I was glad that I would be sitting alone after all. A man I knew had already entered the room. His name was Rico. He was the Baron's servant who had defended the girl's honour on the day I had last seen Izuna. Behind the man came the girl I had helped that morning. She circled all the children with her gaze, stopping only at me. It was like I was the one she was looking for all along. When she saw that the seat next to me was vacant, she quickly took it, doing so as if she had a million other competitors. After that, Rico started the lesson....