A week had passed. Only 1 week remained, and I was still not ready. I had rented a small and cheap 50-ryo-a-month 2-room apartment in the village. Shinobis were really rich. One was my bedroom and the other was my exercise room. Although there was not much difference between the two. The Bedroom had nothing else but a sleeping bag, a table, and a chair. Which I had bought to practice making tags.
My days went like this: Wake up, work out a little, eat breakfast at a nearby stall. Read the scroll and tags. And proceed to make one. Waste a few tags over the next few hours. Then work out again before lunch. Repeat efforts till evening, work out again. After that, I went out for a stroll to clear my head. At night, I worked out again to finally finish my Daily Quest. Yes, it took 4 workout sessions to complete the quest despite having more than twice my previous physique. I am a 10-year-old kid, give me a break.
Even after wasting over 35 tags, I was no closer to making one. I needed a new strategy. The stolen money wasn't going to last forever.
All right. So the scroll lied. Or at least it hid half the truth like every other shinobi manual meant for the elite. The instructions on "explosion tag creation" were written in neat, arrogant kanji: Seal → Charge → Ignite. Brevity is for the confident, I guess. What the scroll didn't say was the part the fuinjutsu masters assumed you'd already been taught in a thousand boring academy lectures — the shape, the scale, and the chakra flow.
The first few tags I wasted taught me that much. Folded wrong, the character smudged; written too big, the paper tore; written too small, the chakra slipped off the ink like water on oil. There's an intimacy to fuinjutsu I'd never expected — it's not brute force, it's handwriting with your soul.
I opened the scroll again and read every damn line until the words blurred. Then I wrote notes in the margins: shape → slender crescent; size → one thumb-length; flow → clockwise vortex; pressure → light, almost like tracing a whisper. None of that was in the original. It was what my instincts filled in after thirty failures.
You create characters with chakra ink. Not calligraphy, not scribbles, but characters that breathe. Each character needed three things: the form (exact strokes and proportion), the scale (how large relative to the paper's fibers), and the flow (how the chakra moves along those strokes — direction, speed, and rhythm). And each character had its own meaning and function. Kind of like a computer code. The explosion tag needed 5 characters: the absorption rune, the restriction rune, the storage rune, the ignition rune, and the trigger. All had to be perfectly connected companions.
I picked a paper and set my breath. New strategy, let's go rune by rune. For today's trial, I decided to practice the trigger rune first. I had a pretty good understanding of it, and it was the simplest.
A simple character with a simple function. On getting any kind of chakra to a certain amount, OPEN. This was to ensure that the natural chakra or residual chakra used in ninjutsu won't blow it. After making several of them on paper, one succeeded. I used my own chakra flow to see the switch open and close.
Next came the Absorption and Restriction, which together I named the containment rune. They were too closely connected to be separated.
The scroll illustrated it as a boxy kanji with a spiral inside. The first time I tried it, my hand shook and the chakra pooled at the corners like lazy frogs. The tag puffed and smoked and crumpled. Not ideal.
"Think of it like pouring tea," I told myself. "Slow, from the same height, not a dump truck." So I steadied my shoulder, controlled my diaphragm, and traced the first stroke. The ink absorbed my chakra and shivered. This time I measured the size – exactly one thumb-length across the outer box. Too large and the seal leaks, too small and the containment snaps under pressure. The ink line sang as my brush moved. Stroke by stroke, I felt the paper drink the character.
Now the flow. My hand moved in a clockwise motion around the spiral three times before finishing with a tiny hook at the center. The scroll's phrase — "vortex clockwise, seal inward" — repeated itself in my head like a prayer. I sent the tiniest pulse of chakra along the stroke, letting it ride the ink's path like a bead of mercury.
The paper responded. The rune glowed faint blue where the ink pooled and hummed. It was stable. For the first time, the containment rune didn't stink of failure.
I sent a bit of chakra in to check. It got stored and held, but it was still leaking. Which meant it was time for the Storage Rune. But I was out of Chakra. So I stopped.
The next day, after practicing the three runes once, I started on the storage rune. Maybe it was the fresh morning air, or maybe it was luck, but I succeeded on the first try. The chakra was absorbed and restricted, and its storage for long-term was ensured by the storage rune.
Now for the ignition rune.
The ignition rune required a different discipline. Its strokes were thin and needle-like; the scroll cautioned that the chakra must shear across the ink, not flow with it. In practice, that meant the ignition rune needed counterflow — if containment wanted clockwise, ignition wanted anticlockwise and clockwise with short, harsh pulses to generate friction. It also demanded size precision: three-quarters thumb-length and placed exactly at the containment rune's northeast corner, no exceptions.
My first few attempts were embarrassing. The ink blotted. The rune sputtered and died. One tag even let out a tiny pop that singed my sleeve. I cursed, slapped my hand to stop the chakra, and imagined my old campus life — decimal systems, algorithms, clean logic.
I pressed the final seal and let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding.
"Okay," I said to myself. "Micro pulse, test nudge. Nothing dramatic. We are not creating fireworks today; we are creating a polite complaint."
I placed the finished tag on the floor and sent a micro pulse — the gentlest coaxing wave of chakra, like tapping a sleeping beast on the nose. The tag hummed, and a neat, soft pop unfolded—no smoke, no singe, just the satisfying puff of a candle blown out.
My laugh startled me. The system chimed.
Achievement - Fuinjutsu Apprentice I - Make a Tag or Seal
Reward: 100 SS
This just keeps getting better.
I held the tag like it was a fragile bird. It fit perfectly in my palm. The scroll had said the first tag is never impressive. It's the one that proves you can do it at all. I felt something else, too — a dangerous little confidence. With this tag, I had more than a weapon. I had leverage.
I spent the rest of the day iterating: adjusting the containment's spiral width by a hair, shortening ignition strokes by a fraction, varying the tempo of chakra pulses. Each refinement taught me a new relationship between ink and flow: thicker strokes hold pressure, thinner strokes catalyze release; clockwise traps energy inward while anticlockwise shreds the bond at ignition. The physics of fuinjutsu was practical poetry.
By the time the test came around, I had four perfect tags laid out like obedient soldiers. My hands felt raw but steady. My status had changed more than my hands — the system updated with a warm, almost smug cheer. My accuracy had risen.
STATUS
KUROSAWA REN
Power - Inferior Academy Student
Phisique - 9
Chakra - 72
Specials - None
Skills - Tagcraft I
System Stats - 134
Call - The eye passes.
There was a dangerous thought that crawled across my mind as I packed the tags away: if I could make these, I could sell one. Or trade one. Or use one to get into a workshop, or into the Chunin tests. The world of shinobi had a black market and an official one, and both loved a good tag.
I smiled, small and tired. Tomorrow I'd practice layering two ignition runes for a bigger blast, but tonight I'd sleep knowing I'd made something with my hands and not stolen from the dead.
"Not bad for a beginner," I whispered, tucking the tags into the hidden pocket of my jacket. The world might not notice me yet, but little by little, one precise stroke at a time, I was learning to be noticed on my own terms.