Miki's Advice

"I'm so frustrated, Miki. It's been more than a week and a half, and I still don't have any idea about how to do water transformation," I sat at the park, complaining to Miki, who was looking at me like I was speaking a foreign language.

"I am going to be 100% honest with you, Shiran, when I say that I have absolutely no clue what you're talking about right now."

I looked at Miki and just sighed. My problem felt suffocating up to this point of talking with Miki about it. Sure, I knew that she wouldn't know what I was talking about; I just needed someone I could vent and complain to and get some of it off my chest.

"I know, Miki. I just needed to tell my frustrations to someone who would listen. Maybe I'm just going about this the wrong way."

Miki nodded sagely. "I'd say so. If I were you, I wouldn't let it bother me. Sometimes you just have to go with the flow, and your brain will think of the right thing eventually."

I looked at Miki while she was saying this. "That was pretty profound coming from someone like you, Miki."

The room grew frosty instantly, and it felt like I was being stared down by some apex predator. "And what EXACTLY is that supposed to mean, Shiran?" Miki asked with a sweetness so fake that I swear I saw a couple of her teeth fall out.

"What? Did I say something wrong? You're not exactly the philosophical type, are you?" I smirked while I teased Miki for her personality.

Her ice-blue eyes bore holes into my bright purple ones until she relented, huffed, and turned away while mumbling about how rude of a comment that was.

I sighed and made to get up. "Alright, Miki, you gave me a couple of things to work through tonight, so I'm gonna go. What do you say about going over to Shin's house tomorrow?"

"Sounds good to me. I'll stop by your house around 2:00 tomorrow afternoon. Bye, Shiran!"

I waved my hand over my shoulder as I disappeared, thinking about where to go and meditate to try to have a breakthrough with this nature transformation training.

'I could go over to the Uzume River and meditate. There's usually no one over there at this point in time.' I pondered over the area before nodding my head and taking a sharp right turn to head over to the river that runs along the outskirts of the village.

----

'So this is the Uzumaki Clan Heir, huh? He definitely has the chakra to back that title up, that's for sure. He's got to have chunin-level chakra already, and he's not even in the academy yet.' a head popped out of the river after seemingly materializing from the water itself.

Shiran had been walking along the riverbank without looking out for too much considering he was still in the safety of the village.

'I wonder why the Mizukage hasn't sent anyone else here to try to capture the promising kids I've found to bring back to Kirigakure. Sure, they're surrounded by whirlpools, but there are other ways to get in besides brute-forcing our way in. Oh well, maybe he has something big planned, and he's waiting for the best time to strike this village. It's best if I just continue to monitor him while staying undercover as a civilian ninja.'

The head turned back into water while watching Shiran disappear behind a tree that bent over the river like some kind of awning.

----

I sat down beside the river and let my hand rest in the running water, thinking about how to train my water transformation.

'Go with the flow, huh? What could that even entail at this point? Maybe just letting my chakra flow through my body without any restrictions?'

As I unleashed my chakra within my body, I kept my hand in the water, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. I felt a deep connection to the water, but I have no way to reproduce the feeling it's giving me.

Thirty minutes into the exercise, my brows furrowed. 'Nothing is happening. Every time I feel like I get close to a breakthrough and I try to grab onto it, it just floats away, right outside of my grasp again.'

I slapped the surface of the water and got up when suddenly I felt a tiny piece of the puzzle click into place. When I slapped the water, it became hard enough to repel my hand from entering too far under the surface. Perhaps water chakra is not just about flowing softly and flowing around obstacles but also about being hard at times when needed. Maybe the key here is flexibility and versatility.

I smiled as I started to undress and enter into the water. Immediately I felt the connection with the water once again grow stronger. I closed my eyes while I focused on my chakra and began to cycle it through the meridians in my body. As my chakra flowed through my body, I let a little of my chakra leak out into the water.

Before long, I was sitting in a river that was full of my chakra. While I was cycling my chakra, I tried to open myself completely up to the feeling of the water rushing against and around me, without even realizing it, I had spent close to 5 hours feeling the water and absorbing myself in it.

'I feel like I've made great progress today. Maybe in the next couple of days, I'll truly be able to understand the essence of water-natured chakra.' I sent out one final pulse of my chakra through the water and felt a foreign chakra in the water just outside of the area where I was letting my chakra loose.

Immediately my guard went up, and I opened my M E, looking in the direction that I felt the weird chakra come from and feeling nothing, I frowned a little. 'Surely if someone was around me, I would be able to sense them with my M E, which means that they're either not here anymore, or I'm feeling things, and my gut is telling me it's the former rather than the latter.'

(A/N: It's worth noting that teenage Karin was able to sense roughly 10 km with her M E, and since Shiran is still new to this ability, he can only sense around half a km to this point)

'Either way, it's not worth risking staying here any longer. Let's get dressed and head home.'

Throwing on my clothes and shaking the water on my head off, I flickered back in the direction of my home compound.

----

Sitting in the water for an entire five hours was starting to wear Ryuugetsu thin. It wouldn't have been a huge ask to do this for a short period, but after five consecutive hours, it was getting tiring and Ryuugetsu was getting a little careless.

All of a sudden, a pulse of chakra flew through the water at crazy speeds, and almost instantaneously the boy went on guard. Ryuugetsu knew he'd be caught if he didn't immediately run away. The reason for that is because he knew about the Uzumaki's special M E, which could sense anything in the vicinity. The only problem was he couldn't get out of the water for fear of being seen, so he decided to use the current of the river and swim as far out as he could manage in as short a time as possible.

'Jeez, that little brat is something else, to be able to send his chakra through the water, sense foreign chakra in the water, and then react almost instantly to it. He's going to end up a monster if his water affinity is as high as it seems.' The watery figure shook its head under the water and floated a little farther away before getting out and flickering back towards the village, making sure to take a different path from the village.

'We have to make sure to capture this brat when the time comes. At the very least, we could use him to extort the Uzumaki clan into giving us things in exchange for his life.' Ryuugetsu showed a retched smile at the thought of screwing over Uzushiogakure and in particular the Uzumaki clan.