The first thing Ryō noticed when consciousness returned was the weight.It wasn't just physical though his body felt like it had been crushed under a boulder it was a heavy, suffocating awareness of his own fragility. His ribs ached with every shallow breath, his right arm screamed if he tried to move it more than an inch, and there was a hot, swollen throb in his left leg that told him walking would be an ugly, slow affair.
He had no idea how long he'd been out. The dim light filtering through the small cracks in the shed's wall told him it was either early morning or late afternoon. The thin blanket over his body stiff with dried sweat and a faint coppery smell of blood clung to him uncomfortably. His mind was sluggish, but as he blinked away the haze, memories hit him like cold water.
The training pit. The last test. The risk.The boulder drop simulation. The burst of strength that had pushed his body beyond any limit it had known before and the way everything had gone wrong in an instant.
He groaned, but no sound left his throat. His body refused to waste the effort.Good. That was better. No noise meant no chance of anyone in the village overhearing.
Konoha didn't know. No one knew.
That secrecy was the only reason he'd dragged himself here instead of to the hospital. Even if someone had found him lying broken in the outskirts training ground, he would've fought to send them away. The moment he drew official attention, people would start asking questions about his training, about the techniques he was working on, about why a civilian-born kid was putting himself through high-level shinobi conditioning without joining the Academy.
That wasn't a conversation he was ready to have.
He needed to recover. Quietly. Alone. And faster than anyone would think possible.
His first priority was checking damage.He eased his breathing into a slow, shallow rhythm, shifting only enough to test muscle responses. Right arm compromised but functional at the shoulder; the pain came from the forearm and wrist, possibly a fracture. Left leg swelling around the shin and knee, deep bruise or ligament strain. Ribs sharp stabs on inhale meant at least one cracked. Internal bleeding? Hard to tell without coughing blood, but nothing felt unstable enough to be immediately lethal.
Not great. But survivable.
He reached to his side and found the small pouch he'd stashed days earlier a mix of scavenged bandages, some crude splints, and the bitter-smelling herbal paste he'd been experimenting with. It wasn't proper medic-nin work, but it was better than nothing.
The next hour was slow, painful work.Binding the ribs tightly enough to restrict movement without crushing them. Wrapping the forearm and fixing it against his torso. Elevating the leg on a bundle of rags to keep swelling down. Every adjustment left him sweating and gasping, but by the end, the worst of the pain was a dull roar instead of sharp agony.
He lay back, breathing shallowly, staring at the cracked ceiling.
Recovery wasn't just about lying still.Every fighter knew that the body was only half the battle the other half lived in the mind. And if his body couldn't move much, then his mind would have to take the lead.
He closed his eyes and replayed the moment before the accident. The stance. The timing. The feeling of every muscle chain firing in sequence. That perfect, almost terrifying instant when his body's output had exceeded anything he'd reached before just before it all collapsed.
What caused the failure?Was it muscle fatigue?Joint instability?Or was the problem in his chakra control, the way he'd been trying to channel energy into his legs for that explosive leap?
He thought about the Eight Gates specifically, the first and second, the gates of Opening and Healing. He wasn't trying to open them yet, but he was mimicking certain muscle activation patterns that were used when the gates were active. Could it be that his current physiology couldn't sustain even partial replication without advanced chakra conditioning?
No… it wasn't just that. It was the stacking of multiple techniques Rock Lee–style explosive bursts with Taijutsu chain movements borrowed from other shinobi styles that had pushed him over. His MMA instincts told him the analogy was like attempting a flying knee from a Muay Thai clinch while also engaging full wrestling lift power… at the same time. The strain wasn't linear it was exponential.
If he wanted to combine these techniques, he'd need to build in failsafes.Micro-adjustments in posture to spread the load. Gradual integration instead of pure brute force. And possibly… chakra reinforcement not for speed or strength, but for structural stability.
That thought stuck in his mind like a seed finding fertile ground.
The next days blurred together into a rhythm of careful survival.Wake before dawn, sip water from the clay jug he'd hidden here, eat whatever dried rations he'd stocked up, then spend the rest of the day alternating between stillness and light mental exercises. When the pain dulled enough, he began isometric muscle engagement tensing without movement to keep the neural pathways alive without stressing injuries.
At night, when Konoha was quiet, he would pull himself to the edge of the shed and look out at the moonlight on the trees. He never saw anyone pass by. No one was watching.
Good.
The only voices were in his head his old MMA coach's barked instructions, the memory of grueling training camps, and his own measured self-analysis. Every movement, every injury, every limitation became data to be filed away for later use.
A week in, he could stand.Barely.
His ribs still hurt like hell, his forearm was weak, and his left leg refused to carry full weight, but he could at least move enough to fetch fresh water from a nearby stream at night. Each trip was a test of stealth no limping in sightlines, no sound above a whisper.
The isolation was wearing at him, but it was necessary. If anyone in Konoha noticed, they'd start watching him. And if they started watching, they'd start interfering.
By the end of the second week, the pain had retreated enough for him to begin extremely slow kata movements. No strikes yet just footwork, body shifting, balance drills. The frustration of moving at a snail's pace burned in his gut, but he forced himself to keep it controlled.
His mind worked constantly.He mapped out a training plan for once he could move freely again.He theorized about chakra-stabilization microtechniques.He imagined building a "shock-absorption" method into his stance transitions to avoid catastrophic joint collapse.
The breakthrough wasn't in muscle or bone it was in pattern integration. A way to think about physical combat in the Naruto world as an ever-changing flow between raw power, reinforced stability, and adaptive recovery.
When he finally took his first full-power step again, over a month since the injury, there was no one there to see it. No applause. No witness. Just the quiet creak of the shed's floorboards and the steady thump of his own heartbeat.
He smiled faintly.No one knew. And that was exactly how he wanted it.
Because when he was ready, they wouldn't see him coming not as some reckless kid, not as an Academy hopeful but as a fully forged weapon they never saw being made.