"I don't know. Maybe it'll be useful, but that's if I can get it down before the two weeks are up." I snort. "You want to know what the guy told me to do when I said I wasn't getting it?"
"What?" Hinata asks quietly.
"He told me to meditate."
...
She blinks, but instead of getting outraged like me she becomes thoughtful. "Meditation might help, if you're having trouble manipulating your chakra. It's what I did when I was learning the Gentle Fist."
I groan. "What, you too? Meditation's never done anything for me. I don't think I've got the head for it." It was one of the only subjects that I couldn't force myself to push through back in the Academy, no matter how much I yelled at myself for it. It just never clicked with me. By the end of the five years everyone had gotten the hang of it but me, even Kiba and Ino and all the other crazies. Or they said they did, anyway.
It was never anything but an hour of soul-destroying boredom for me. The dull heat of the sun beating against my skin, the smell of grass and trees that I could be climbing instead of sitting down and poking my fingers together like a dope, and the sound of the wind whispering between my classmates and me. No zen, no super control over my chakra, nothing.
"Well," Hinata murmurs. "The Academy's version isn't what I used."
I cock an eyebrow at the Hyuuga kunoichi, propping my elbow on the counter and resting my head on my hand. "There's more than one?"
"Of course," she says empathetically. "My clan has its own method, involving the Gentle Fist, which allows the person meditating to immerse themselves at a level that's impossible to reach with traditional meditation without years of practice."
I blink. "Really? Would it work on me?"
"I think so. Your tenketsu aren't any different than mine."
"Huh." I take a look through the gap in the entrance flaps, and see the moon on a steady rise. At this rate, I'm not going to be getting much more than six hours of sleep before team training tomorrow. "Wanna give it a shot?"
Hinata takes a look outside herself, fiddling with the hem of her beige jacket, before nodding. "If you want to."
"You won't get into trouble with your dad or anything?" I ask, tearing my gaze away from Ayame and the broth she's pouring into a pair of bowls.
"No, I… don't think he'll mind." Ayame arrives with our orders before I can say anything else, and she busies herself with her bowl, leaving me to my thoughts on her father and her special Hyuuga meditation. And the ramen. Mostly the ramen.
About half an hour and another bowl later we trek back through the thinning streets of the market district to the training grounds. She leads me through the tunnel and into the middle of the clearing, then turns around and activates her Byakugan with a hand seal and a small pulse of chakra.
"Sit down," she says, and I settle myself on the dirt. "Rest your hands on your knees, palms up."
"This feels a lot like the Academy position," I remark, though I do set my arms in the proper place.
"They're very similar," she agrees, circling around me. I feel a slim finger press against my back and straighten up. "The difference is in the application of the Gentle Fist."
"How does that work, anyway?" I ask. "How is jamming my tenketsu shut going to put me in a state of tranquility?"
"I'll only be closing the tenketsu connected to your senses. You'll be put in a state of consciousness without perception that will allow you to focus all of your attention on your chakra, to the point that you'll be able to detect your Yin and Yang energies if you achieve the right focus."
"Wow," I say, impressed. "Why doesn't everyone do it that way?"
She stops in front of me, apparently satisfied with my posture, and fidgets with her hands. "Well, only a Hyuuga can initiate it, because closing the tenketsu connected to the five senses without damaging them is almost impossible without the Byakugan."
"Have you, uh, done this before?" I ask, swallowing a sudden lump in my throat. Hinata fidgets harder.
"I know all of the points…"
Whatever. It's better than that stupid kunai. "Just don't blind me, alright?"
"I won't." She says firmly.
"Alright, I trust you." I flash her a grin, then close my eyes and brace myself. "Hit me."
I hear her shuffle forward, smell her sweat and the scent of lilacs as she leans over me, and feel the silk touch of her hand against my neck. Then each of her five fingers dig into my skin and I feel the icy pinprick of foreign chakra knifing through my tenketsu, followed by all of my senses shutting down at once, leaving me stranded in a black void.
For a single moment nothing happens, and a small sliver of panic takes hold in my head. Then my senses come rushing back to me as quick as they left, assaulting me with the smells of a forest and the feel of grass beneath me and the sound of tree branches rustling above me. I open my eyes and find myself in an entirely different forest, the sun shining in the sky. I twist, looking around, taking in in and struggling to fit a memory to the somehow familiar place.
Then the world falls away beneath me.
I howl in alarm as I feel the earth I'm sitting on disappear, and see everything else do the same. The trees and the grass and the sun all melt away, and in their place I find myself surrounded by wind.
It takes me a few seconds of floating on nothing before I peek out of the ball I've curled myself in. Nothing but wind as far as the eye can see. I look up, then down, and see the same. I kick my legs out, but the wind shifts to accommodate me and keep me floating in the same spot. I try swinging my arms around, and then just sort of flail my appendages around for a while, before settling back into a cross-legged position.
"This must be what she was talking about, I guess," I mutter. Better get to work. I raise my right hand, urging my chakra to run up my arm and pool in my palm.
Nothing happens. There's no flutter in my stomach, no tingle along my arm, nothing. Instead, a strand of wind whispering around my ear swoops down and gathers in the palm of my hand. I stare.
"What the hell?" I've never manipulated wind outside my body before. It always starts in my stomach. How…
I let the strand go and focus on my throat, and channeling chakra up from my stomach to form a loop in there. Instead, a wisp of wind forces its way through my pursed lips and down into my throat, where it begins to spin. I expel it a with a harsh exhale and look around again, considering the void.
"Is this what she meant by immersion?" I ask the wind. Am I sitting in the core of my chakra right now?
I reach out again and urge a blade to form in my hands, because why not? It's super meditation. Who says it has limits? The current swirling around my left thigh breaks off and condenses in my hand obligingly, but when it goes to become a blade it stalls. As if it's not sure what to do. My eyebrows furrow, and I reach for my weapons pouch with my free hand. It still exists in this void, to my relief, and I quickly set to channeling wind around the kunai I pull from it.
"Take the shape," I order under my breath.
The wind complies.
I turn the kunai around in my grip, eyeing it in something like shock. I almost can't believe that it had worked just like that, but I can feel it shifting along the surface of the throwing knife, hugging the edge tight. That's it, huh? As long as I know what I want it to do, it can do it in here. I bring the kunai up to my other hand, running it along my index finger, and feel the compressed stream of wind press against my skin. But when I take the kunai away, my skin is unmarred.
...
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