For the next few weeks after refining my chakra control, my days settled into a strict routine.
I woke up before sunrise. Even though my body was only six years old, my mind carried the habits of a grown man. Sleeping late felt like wasting time.
Training began while the sky was still dark.
Refining my chakra had only been the first brick in a much larger construction.
In this world, most people treated jutsu like miracles. They spoke about chakra as if it were some mysterious spiritual force that responded to feelings.
The Uchiha clan especially loved that idea.
They told children that emotions guided chakra, that passion and instinct would lead them to power.
To me, that sounded like terrible engineering.
Chakra was not a miracle.
It was infrastructure.
Imagine trying to deliver water to a city. If the pipes are broken, the water floods the streets instead of reaching houses. The water itself isn't the problem. The system carrying it is.
Chakra worked the same way.
If the body wasn't properly built to handle it, power became useless.
During the first week of training, I spent hours reading the scrolls I had collected from the clan library.
They explained the chakra network inside the human body.
Three hundred and sixty-one pressure points called tenketsu acted like small valves. Between them ran invisible channels carrying chakra throughout the body.
If chakra were water, then the tenketsu were the taps controlling where that water flowed.
Every jutsu depended on those taps.
Energy was pulled from the stomach area, pushed through those channels, then shaped using hand seals.
The theory only took a few hours to understand.
Practicing it was far more painful.
My training quickly developed into a daily cycle.
Every afternoon I practiced basic academy techniques for hours.
Transformation Technique.
Clone Technique.
Again and again.
I called my method Spam and Deplete.
The name sounded stupid, but it described the process perfectly.
I kept performing jutsu until my chakra ran completely dry.
Most students stopped when they felt tired.
I stopped when my body literally refused to continue.
Sometimes that took two hours.
Sometimes three.
After that, I would sit cross-legged and meditate for about thirty minutes.
That was when the real learning happened.
When chakra returned to my body, I could feel how it flowed through the network. Some pathways felt smooth.
Others felt like clogged pipes.
Pain became a useful signal.
If lifting a weight hurts, it means your muscles are being pushed.
If pushing chakra hurts, it means the pathways are under pressure.
Pain was simply information.
After nearly two weeks of repeating this process every day, something interesting became clear.
Hand seals were not mystical gestures.
They were control switches.
Imagine turning the steering wheel of a car. The car moves because the wheel redirects its direction.
Hand seals did the same thing.
The Snake seal compressed chakra inward.
The Tiger seal pushed it forward faster.
They were not magic symbols.
They were instructions.
But during my experiments, I noticed something strange.
A delay.
Every time I formed a hand seal, there was a tiny gap before the chakra actually responded.
Less than a second.
But it was always there.
In modern terms, it was like pressing a button on a computer and waiting for the program to react.
That delay had a name.
Latency.
And latency meant inefficiency.
If that delay disappeared, jutsu could be used instantly.
No preparation.
No waiting.
One evening after training, while lying on the floor trying to recover from chakra exhaustion, I remembered a famous example.
The technique created by Minato Namikaze.
The Rasengan.
It used no hand seals at all.
Instead of using switches to control chakra, it relied on direct control.
Trying something like that now would probably explode in my hands.
But understanding latency was the first step toward removing it.