The Next Level

When Chojusen returned home aboard airline Chokogo, he went to the courtyard and began to open his gates. With his SSS tier body, he wondered how far he could go with the technique. He opened the first gate, the Gate of Opening, and immediately felt his muscles fill with power; right off the bat his physical power increased by five times.

However, as he felt his muscles increase in power he also felt them start to disintegrate. If he did nothing to heal these wounds, he could probably only use the first gate for an hour. But with Yang Rebirth, his muscles broke down and reform at the same rate. Chojusen could feel that every moment he was in this state his base power was rising at an alarming rate.

Chojusen stayed like this for a couple minutes until he found that the first gate no longer destroyed his muscles. At this moment the system issued a prompt to Chojusen but he was too busy messing about with his other gates.

Now, he moved on to the Gate of Healing, which was also located in the brain. Once opened, Chojusen felt his body swell with even more power; his muscles also started to destroy and reform themselves, albeit, at a much faster rate.

To fully adapt his body to the second gate, Chojusen spent half an hour bearing through the pain of constant muscle destruction. If Guy knew that Chojusen was training his body to constantly have his gates unlocked, he might faint. After the second gate was the Gate of Life, which was located in the spinal cord.

This gate increased the blood flow in Chojusen's body, so much so that his body began to glow red from the blood pressure. At this point Chojusen's energy, even with his unreasonable control, began to leak from his body. It was only a little bit, but the small amount of energy that escaped from his body caused the ground to shatter around him. Chojusen spent an hour in this state before no longer having side effects; by now his physical power had increased by a factor of twelve.

The fourth gate, the Gate of Pain, was also located on the spinal cord and upon activation, Chojusen felt all the muscles on his body tear at the same time; the gate was truly living up to the Pain in its name. When Chojusen finished integrating his body with the third gate, the red-hued skin from blood pressure and his energy leaking had been eliminated, but upon activation of this gate they returned even stronger than before.

It took Chojusen two and a half hours to finish entering a permanent opened state with the Gate of Pain. At this point his body was tired even with the constant use of Yang Rebirth, but he pushed himself through to the next level. In a rare moment of compassion from the system, Chojusen couldn't believe his ears when the system say [Are you ok? No one is rushing you through these gates.]

"What is going on? You are worried about me? Is it only after all this time that we find out the system is actually a tsundere?"

[I shouldn't have said anything...]

Chojusen ignored the system and returned to torturing his body. The torture itself was not enjoyable, but the feeling afterwards, when he moved around in his body after permanently opening a gate was a bit addictive to Chojusen.

Chojusen opened the fifth gate, the Gate of Limit, in about three hours, the sixth gate, the Gate of View, in another four hours, and the last two gates would have to wait for another time as Chojusen now had to go to the Hokage Tower to start missions.

On his way from his house to the Hokage Tower, Chojusen asked the system what the message he ignored earlier was. The system replied with a prompt.

[Back when you were opening the first gate, you passed the level of SSS Kage, here is the full message. Host has transcended the limits of the limiter; consequently, the limiter has been destroyed.]

"Oh? Pull up my Status." Chojusen was excited to see what level was above SSS Rank.

[Status~

Name: Chojusen Akimichi

Level: Demi-Immortal

Race: Mostly Human, Part Fiendgod

Age: 11 Years

Power: 27.5 Billion

Speed: 28.0 Billion

Energy: 1.6 Billion

Shop Points: 999]

"Wow, Demi-Immortal is the next level. I guess full immortal is after that, huh?"

[Right.]

"So does that mean, my life span is longer now?"

[Yeah, but not by much; maybe a couple hundred more years. Once you get to the Immortal level, it will really start to go crazy.]

Chojusen arrived at the Hokage Tower, he entered Minato's office and told Minato to give Guy and Lee a bracelet each. He explained to Minato that the bracelets had a Gravity Seals on them, and that Lee could use the gravity seal even with his non-existent levels of chakra.

When he returned to the lobby he found Ino already there. They talked for a couple minutes and Chojusen got his first taste of romance during their little exchange. Chojusen entered the lobby to find Ino sitting in one of the chairs, he said "Morning."

"Good morning Chojusen, are you excited for our first mission." She had a smug expression plastered on her face.

"Not really. I heard from Sasuke's brother that Genins only do boring missions that seem more like chores than ninja missions."

Hearing this, Ino stood up from her chair and walked over to Chojusen. She got very close to him, only stopping when their faces were about half a foot apart, and said "Well, do you want something to be excited about?"

Chojusen was amused by her exaggerated movements, but he played along. He said "Oh, and what would that be?"

Ino's face blazed red for the slightest bit of time, before she gave Chojusen a quick peck on the cheek. She then jumped back little a startled cat and said "That was thanks for your help yesterday."

Ino had told her mom about her crush on Chojusen and received some "helpful" advice which is what led up to this moment. Her mom told her to be bold and strike at her crush with decisiveness; quite the overdramatic way of telling her to be more assertive, but hey it worked, didn't it?

Chojusen was stuck frozen in time. His heart, which was trained to be constantly pumping blood with his sixth gate open, actually started beating faster and harder. He didn't know what this new emotion he was experiencing was, but he thoroughly enjoyed it.

Chojusen and Ino had their little moment ruined by Lee walking in on them,

yelling "What?!" he turned to Chojusen and with eyes pulsing out visible envy, he said "Chojusen… I wish you luck. Hopefully one day I can have your success with the ladies..."

The weird atmosphere returned to normal after Guy entered the room and gathered his team to enter Minato's office. As expected they received humiliating simple missions. Chojusen still didn't know why ninja were being asked to look for lost cats or do field work at a farm. It was only a couple weeks after their first D Rank mission, that Chojusen's team were assigned a C Rank mission to escort some merchants to the Land of Lightning.

On this mission, the team ran into some bandits. Chojusen was inclined to wipe them out with the swipe of his hands, but Guy stopped him. He said "Chojusen, you need to let them get through this experience."

"What? Why? You or I could both kill all these bandits before they could even react. Why should we endanger our teammates, when we could just kill them all now?"

"They need this experience or they will never be real ninja. This is a cruel, cruel world and even if you care about them, holding them back like you are doing right now will only cause them to grow weak. Sure, we may be strong, but we can't always be there for them. They need to learn how to take care of themselves."

Chojusen reluctantly agreed and let Lee and Ino fight off the bandits. They were shaking when they finished since it was their first time killing others. Ino even ran to Chojusen and started crying into his chest. She said "I… I killed them. Am I a murderer?"

"No, don't say that. This is what being a ninja is like. Those guys we killed deserved it, they were bandits after all. If you didn't stop them here, they might have killed and robbed others."

As Chojusen was comforting Ino, Guy was comforting Lee. Lee being a guy made it easier for him to stomach the fact that he had killed someone.

After team nine completed their mission and returned to the village, Guy made it up to his poor students by buying them some food. It wasn't exactly a fair trade off — killing someone for the first time in exchange for food — but at least it was some sort of consolation.