Asahi's declaration, 'For the Academy', had an unexpected effect.
Emi-san, rather than dismissing him or treating it as a childish fantasy, took it with surprising seriousness. She had been watching him for months, observing a boy who moved like a scared ghost, counting rations and measuring escape routes. Seeing that same boy set a proactive goal—one that required joining the world he'd been hiding from—was a shock.
The next day, Emi-san pulled him aside after breakfast, while the dining hall still smelled of cooked rice, bancha tea, and the faint pine scent of cleaning soap.
"Asahi-kun," she said, her voice practical, but her eyes studying him with newfound intensity. "If you're going to take this seriously, you can't do it eating leftovers alone. Your body won't handle it. And you can't train in those shoes."
She handed him a pair of used but well-kept sneakers. They were worn blue, faintly smelling of leather and soap, but with thick, firm rubber soles. And most strikingly: an extra hard-boiled egg, still warm, next to his bowl of rice.
Asahi looked at the egg, then at the shoes. His first instinct was to recoil.
"Why?" he asked, his voice rougher than intended, unable to hide his suspicion. It was a reflex rooted more in habit than in real fear.
Emi-san sighed, a sound oddly maternal. Then she ruffled his hair.
Asahi felt the brief warmth of her hand, a gesture he (to his horror) no longer fully dodged.
"Because it's the first time I've seen you look forward, instead of just… surviving. You've been looking over your shoulder since you arrived. Now you're looking toward a goal. Goals are good. Now eat the egg—your muscles need protein."
'Protein,' Asahi thought. 'She knows about protein.' His paranoia, an old loyal friend, whispered at the back of his mind. 'What is this orphanage?'
But the whisper was weaker this time. It was drowned out by the smell of soap on the shoes and the warmth of the egg in his hand. Accepting them felt like disarming himself. Terrifying. But he did it. And it felt strangely… supportive. Deeply disorienting.
With his new motivation ('Kaizen') and the right equipment (shoes without holes), Asahi reevaluated his regimen. He had base strength (planks, squats). He had agility and balance (parkour, beams). He had flexibility (agonizing stretches).
But he lacked the most important—and most boring—pillar of athletic performance.
'Cardio.'
He realized this when he tried to climb the shed wall five times in a row. The first two were easy. The third, his shoulders burned. The fourth, his fingers slipped. By the fifth attempt, his forearms were on fire, his arms felt like molten lead, useless. He dropped to the ground, hitting the dirt with his fist, gasping like a fish out of water, sweat stinging his eyes.
His mind knew how to move—but the engine wouldn't respond.
'My strength is useless if I get tired in thirty seconds. A real ninja,' he recalled from canon, 'could run for days. Fighting Kakuzu took hours. My current fight would last less than an anime opening. I'd be a background extra killed before the camera even pans.'
So Asahi started running.
And running, he discovered, was hell.
His first attempt was pathetic. He left the orphanage at dawn, feeling the cold, damp morning air on his skin, a silence covering Konoha like a blanket. He ran through the empty streets, the only sound the erratic echo of his new shoes hitting the stones.
By three minutes, the cold air felt like ice in his lungs, struggling to escape his chest. By five, a sharp pain stabbed his side—the infamous stitch. By seven, he stopped, bent over, coughing violently, tasting metallic, salty iron in his mouth.
'This… is… horrible,' he gasped, leaning on a lamppost. The cold metal shocked his sweaty skin. 'People pay to do this? In marathons? My old life was full of lunatics. Absolute masochists.'
The sheer, ridiculous randomness of reincarnation hit him. 'Throwing a soul into a fantasy world and not even giving me the basic cheat code. Just useless knowledge and trauma.' The injustice made him straighten, chest still burning.
'I can't beat him in "talent." Impossible. So I'll beat him in "discipline." I have to build an engine fueled by sheer stubbornness. If he's a nuclear reactor, I'll be a damn steam engine. Slow, noisy, coal-fed, but unstoppable.'
Here, his knowledge of real life finally proved useful in a non-paranoid way.
'I'm not running properly,' he analyzed while walking to catch his breath, his misty exhale fogging the air. 'I'm running in panic. I feel the thud-thud-thud of my heels hitting the ground. I'm wasting energy.'
He remembered reading articles on running technique. 'Inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth. Keep a steady rhythm. Land on the midfoot, roll forward. Use arms like pendulums, not chicken wings.'
He started again. Agonizingly slow this time. A jog.
The pre-dawn world was beautiful, if he hadn't been so focused on not dying. The eastern sky was pale purple and orange. He saw the quick shh-shh-shh of morning Genin teams' sandals blur by, already on their D-Rank missions. The smell of fresh bread and yeast floated from bakeries. He saw an ANBU (recognizable by the spiral tattoo on his arm and the casually worn dog mask while buying milk) yawn. The ordinary scene felt stranger than any threat.
'This world starts early.'
That first day, he barely ran fifteen intermittent minutes. But he did it.
And he did it again the next day, waking to a world of pain where every leg muscle protested.
And the next day.
Thus began the next two years of Asahi's life: a monotonous, exhausting routine. Seven hundred thirty days. Time blurred in a cycle of pain and gain.
. . .
4:30 AM.
Wake. Cold wooden floor under feet. Run. (In sticky summer humidity; in crunchy winter, exhaling clouds of vapor). Return. First sunlight hitting rooftops. Stretch. Pleasant soreness of worked muscles. Breakfast (with the extra egg Emi-san now left silently). Orphanage chores (performed with perfect Danzo-esque ergonomics, turning them into stealth exercises to avoid noise). Free time. Training (Mon/Wed/Fri: Strength. Tue/Thu: Agility/Parkour. Sat: Endurance/Technique). Dinner. Light stretching. Sleep. Repeat.
No time for paranoia. No time to analyze fake smiles (which, to his astonishment, turned out to be real).
'I can run thirty minutes straight' became 'I can run an hour'. 'I can do twenty perfect push-ups' became 'I can do fifty', then 'I can do ten with claps'. 'I can jump onto the shed roof' became 'I can jump onto the main orphanage roof and back in under a minute'.
The other children grew used to him. He was no longer the 'scared, weird kid'. He was the 'obsessive, weird kid'. Kenji sometimes tried joining his planks. Collapsed in ten seconds laughing.
"You're a weirdo, Asahi," he'd say, out of breath. But the insult no longer stung. There was a new tone in his voice. Not fear—it was… awe.
Asahi became strong. Not supernaturally, but functionally strong. His body, though still small, became dense, an efficient machine of lean tendons and muscles. His mind became equally tough. He forged a mantra from his past-life readings.
'Pain is just information,' he told himself, at kilometer five of his morning run. Now he ran along Konoha's outer walls, fresh morning wind whistling in his ears, the green valley stretching below him. 'I don't like information, so I ignore it.'
One day, during a run, he passed the Uchiha complex.
Two-years-ago Asahi would have felt a cold sweat. His heart would have raced. He would have crossed the street, ducked into an alley. That impulse remained, a ghostly echo of his old self.
But current Asahi crushed it. He forced himself to look.
It was… normal. A nice, large neighborhood, the smell of sencha tea and polished wood drifting from houses. He saw Uchiha kids playing ball, their sharp, clear screams. He saw Itachi Uchiha, the prodigy he'd heard of even at the orphanage, walking with his younger brother, Sasuke, piggyback. He heard Sasuke's sharp laughter.
For the first time, he didn't see narrative resources. He saw people.
Current Asahi just quickened his pace, focusing on the rhythmic sound of his own breathing (nose-inhale… mouth-exhale…) and the thumping of his feet.
'Elite,' he thought. 'Born at the top of the mountain. They have a name. They have a dojutsu. A path set for them. I'm nobody. A nameless orphan.'
A strange sense of freedom washed over him.
'That means I don't have a fate tying me down. I can build my own.' He gritted his teeth and ran faster.
'I'll crawl to the top if I must. And I'll build my own mountain.'
That afternoon, when he returned to the orphanage, the afternoon sun warmed his back. He was sweaty, dust from the road sticking to his legs, feeling the electric buzz of satisfying exhaustion. Emi-san waited at the door under the porch, drying her hands on her apron.
She held a piece of paper.
"Asahi-kun," she said, and for the first time, Asahi noticed she was smiling with true, open pride. Not the tired smile of a caretaker, nor the gentle encouragement smile. A recognition smile.
'She sees me,' Asahi realized. 'She doesn't see the scared kid. She sees the result of my hard work.'
"The applications for next year at the Academy opened this morning. I went and signed you up."
Asahi froze, breath still fast. He looked at Emi-san's extended hand, then at the paper. For a moment, he didn't take it. Then he reached out.
He took the paper. A simple registration form, with his name (Asahi) written at the top. Required age: eight. He would turn eight in two months.
After two years of chasing an abstract goal, it suddenly felt heavy and real in his hand.
'The prologue is over,' he thought, folding the paper.
The Academy.
'Round one,' he thought, looking at the Hokage Tower in the distance, silhouetted against the orange sky. 'Let the game begin.'