Chapter 13: Control

Suddenly waking up in your bed after some hard training is not the most pleasant thing to experience, but alas I had to get up and go eat breakfast.

Shikamaru got up, washed his face, had breakfast with his family, and headed out to continue his training, he had already been warned about chakra exhaustion, it was what happened to him yesterday, and he did not want to experience it again, it was the weakest he had ever felt since he entered his new body and it had scared him, it was yet another thing that gave him even more determination to become as strong as possible.

The first thing he had to do was physical training, he did his usual 5 laps around the training field, then his 100 push-ups, squats, sit-ups, and his Taijutsu katas, the next thing would be his chakra control.

I grabbed a couple of leaves before sitting down in a lotus position, what I had to do was increase the speed of my chakra from 5 minutes to near-instantaneous, I needed to be able to use full force in less than a second or I was sure I would lose against ninja's chunin or above.

For now, I had to get used to pushing my chakra as fast as I could, the only problem was that by the time my chakra reached my hands it would get too weak and I had to gather more.

But after another hour I managed to get better at it again.

This was all that I did for two whole weeks, and I managed to increase my chakra control speed to less than 5 seconds, all I had to do was concentrate a bit and I could manage to get a good portion of my chakra to my hand, and this was only after two weeks, I still had a lot of time.

Now the next thing that I needed to do was figure out how to make a leaf stick to my hand, I could do it by creating a suction force with my chakra, and with that, I could pull the leaf towards my hand, but I figured that that wasn't the exact way to do it, so I tried pushing chakra out of my hand and once it left my hand I controlled it to cover the leaf and with this, I managed to stick the leaf to my hand.

Now I just had to hold it there for an hour and I could start training with weapons.

It turns out that pushing out chakra of your hand and coating a leaf with it took way too much chakra. I needed to control the chakra outside of my body, which was extremely difficult, just after a minute of holding the leaf I was already exhausted.

I thought back to how they did it in the anime but my memory of the anime was slightly blurry since it has been years since I had seen Naruto, but I could vaguely remember that you had to coat your hand with chakra and make the leaf stick to your hand.

I also realized that I was an idiot, you had to coat your hand with chakra, not the whole leaf, I don't know why it took so long for me to figure that out, so next I tried to coat my hand instead of the leaf and lo and behold I managed to stick it to my hand for 30 minutes, which was a drastic improvement from the previous 1 minute.

But I was already fairly low on chakra reserves from my first try but still with the amount I had leftover I managed to hold it for 30 minutes, now if I waited a bit and regained some chakra I could go for the full hour.

And what better way to spend your time than training? I started running for the second time today, and this time while being low on chakra, which subsequently made it a lot harder, before I could easily run more than 10 rounds around the training field but now? I managed to do 3 before falling on my butt panting out of exhaustion. Looks like chakra does have a passive effect on your physical capabilities.

I could feel that my chakra had come back to around 50 percent which should be enough to hold a leaf for an hour, but I wanted to try something else first, namely, the tree-climbing exercise, in theory, it was pretty much the same as the leaf sticking exercise, except now you had to apply it to your feet and make yourself stick to a tree or wall, this would most likely use a lot more chakra than the leaf sticking exercise but I could do the leaf sticking exercise some other time, for now, I wanted to try tree climbing.

First I coated the soles of my feet with chakra, then I put one of my feet on the trunk of a tree, first I needed to know how much chakra I had to use to stick myself to the tree, then I needed to know how to keep control of one of my feet while I coated the other one with chakra as well.

I figured out the amount needed to stick to the tree on the first try and managed to stick myself to the tree with one foot, now I only needed to stick my other leg to it and I would have considered myself done for the day, of course, things never go according to plan and I lost control of my right foot while I was focusing on my left one, and I fell on my butt for the second time today.

I kept on trying and eventually I managed to make it up the tree by three steps, unfortunately that is exactly when my father decided to show up, and I decided to pull the best card possible, the cute card.

My father looked at me, slouched, sighed, looked back up, and started speaking, "Shikamaru. Care to explain why you are on a tree?"

I had to act cute perfectly or this wouldn't work, and fooling my father is probably next to impossible, but I have to try.

"Oh, hey dad! Why am I on the tree you say? W-well, I figured if I could stick a leaf to my hand with chakra why couldn't I stick myself to a tree? And I guess it worked." While I said this I made sure to put a finger on my chin and cocked my head sideways to make myself look clueless.

And it worked like a charm, or at least I think it did since my father just sighed and waved his hand at me to come down.

"What you just did is the second chakra training exercise, usually you'd only learn it once you reach the rank of genin but I guess it's fine if you learn it, I never truly got why the Hokage made it so that the academy students couldn't access chakra training techniques but can't really change things like that, not like I'm not allowed to teach it to you."

He looked me up and down and sat down on the ground, "Come here and sit down." once I sat down in front of him he started explaining the next bit of training that I will be doing, "Since you managed to walk on the tree using only chakra you can probably already hold a leaf with your chakra for an hour, so from tomorrow onwards you will start training Bukijutsu with your mother, I will also give you permission to enter the Nara library, you will need to memorize the Nara medical encyclopedia and you will need to learn how to make the pills that the Akimichi use, from then on you can choose wether you want to study pill making or choose some other study, you will have to choose at least one, I will also start sparring with you, other than that you will continue doing chakra training exercises, and we will keep doing our nightly meditation, other than that I will also start playing shogi with you every single day, oh and also, I will be teaching you the summoning technique so that you can summon your raccoons, this will be your daily training schedule, but for today we won't be doing anything other than meditating."

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So we're almost at 15k words, one more chapter and we will get it, the true hard training will start now, and I will be able to put some plans that I have into play, things will probably get a bit dark from now on but probably not for the next 5 chapters, idk haven't planned things out yet but I am planning a couple dark things so expect that, but for now it will mostly be training and I may not even make it dark this early on, nothings been decided yet, but anyway thx for reading!