18

It has been a few years since Naruto started his academy, and to say that his days were busy would be an understatement.

Ever since Hiroki helped Naruto unlock his chakra, he had been slave-driving him by piling up training regimes upon training regimes.

One of the benefits of the way Hiroki and Ashura helped Naruto unlock his chakra was the immense healing factor that came with his bloodline.

Initially, due to Naruto being an Uzumaki, he had a certain level of regeneration, but pile up on it the status of being Kurama's jinchuriki, furthermore, the Yang half, along with being Ashura's reincarnation, Naruto had one of the fastest rates of healing in the whole Elemental Nation's history.

This was taken as an opportunity by Hiroki to push Naruto's body to the limit to increase his Taijutsu levels as well as his chakra reserves.

Naruto was a genius in his own right. Inheriting the genes of two of the most feared Konoha ninja, the Yellow Flash and the Red Reaper, Naruto's battle instincts were already high, which were further polished under Hiroki's guidance.

There were only a handful of days where Naruto skipped his evening practice, where he would enter his mindscape and fight with random ninjas that Hiroki conjured up from either Madara's memories, or Minato's memories.

In total, the two shinobi had battled against thousands of ninjas, and along with the heap of knowledge Hiroki currently held, along with the Library of Heaven's Path, the shades of shinobi he conjured up were always improving and changing, not letting Naruto relax even a single bit.

Furthermore, Naruto had also inherited the Uzumaki trait of having a genetic predisposition to the Sealing Arts.

Starting off, Hiroki had a lot of problems with Naruto acquiring materials for fuinjutsu, but then an idea struck.

Why not have Naruto develop inside his mindscape.

This revelation came after Hiroki understood that the sealing arts were focused on the mental aspects of a shinobi, and training them with the right mental focus was the way to go.

This resulted in Naruto getting a lot of practice with fuinjutsu inside his head, while in the real world, he could focus on Taijutsu and building his chakra reserves.

Over the course of the past four years, naruto's surveillance had reduced considerably.

After the Uchiha massacre, Root ninjas decided to focus more on Sasuke as their primary stalking target, while occasionally checking in on the predictable life of Naruto Uzumaki.

After all, naruto's schedule hadn't changed a bit in the past years.

Go to the academy, meet with his friends, Shikamaru, Choji, Shino, Kiba, Hinata, and Ino, then come home, occasionally scream into the pillow about how unfair the teachers were being by giving him bad marks on his tests, look depressed before going out to train in the forest.

His training usually included just kicking and practicing katas of Hiroki's style, which when seen from the outside, didn't look that impressive.

But all of that when paired with the mental battle training that naruto did inside his head, his skills skyrocketed immensely.

Hiroki remembered a research paper from his past life that stated that there was a significant carryover from visualization training of a skill into muscle memory, which turned out to be true even in the new world, and that was something he milked to the bone.

The fuinjutsu seals progressed steadily, which allowed Naruto to sneakily place body restriction seals on his body, which promoted his training several folds.

Similarly, the modified charka suppression seal that Hiroki and Naruto developed allowed naruto to put a strain on his charka coils, which made it difficult for naruto to control his chakra.

This served a similar purpose to the body restriction seal, as when the modified chakra suppression seal was removed, Naruto would have much better control over his ever-growing chakra.

According to the fate of this world, the Uchiha clan was massacred by Itachi, and Sasuke turned into a full avenger of his clan, shutting out the whole world to become stronger. But from what Naruto observed, the trauma from Itachi and the revenge and anger clouded his mind, making the once genius fall to the ranks of mere civilians, all without him realizing. This meant his once-prosperous progress had suddenly reduced by a large margin, which made Naruto pity him.

And now here he was, Naruto sitting on the iconic swing, acting depressed that he didn't pass the exam because he got zero marks throughout the four years in his theory when Mizuki arrived with wicked intentions hidden beneath a mask of smiles of pity.

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