What is chakra, at its core?
It's spiritual energy.
Though everything in the Naruto world is different on the surface, all of it shares a common spiritual thread. That's why the Sage of Six Paths said what he said: "Chakra is not a weapon for conflict—it is the bridge of mutual understanding between people."
He also insisted, again and again, that what he had created was not ninjutsu but ninshū.
Because the Sage truly understood chakra's nature. He saw what the God Tree incident had done to the world. And so he taught chakra to humanity—not as a tool for war, but as a means to forge genuine spiritual connections between people, to truly understand one another, and to bring lasting peace.
The Sage of Six Paths was a man of both wisdom and compassion. In the thousand years that followed, the shinobi world produced countless heroes. But only one person ever reached the same depth of understanding.
Naruto.
Yes—Naruto, the loud, bumbling, perpetually underestimated knucklehead. He grasped what chakra actually was through lived experience alone. That was why he could draw in so many of the strongest shinobi in the entire shinobi world. Everyone else was practicing ninjutsu—techniques. Naruto was practicing ninshū. The gap between those two things is the gap between a skilled tradesman and a scientific visionary.
Hashirama Senju had approached the edge of that understanding. He just never quite crossed it. Madara Uchiha had wandered lost his entire life—perhaps he realized his mistakes at the end, but by then it was too late to start over. And Kaguya Otsutsuki, who arguably had more right than anyone to realize the Sage's vision—she was simply too stuck in her own patterns. She never once considered using chakra to build understanding. Only to dominate everything that refused to submit.
Slap. Slap.
Both palms hit her own cheeks. Hard. Her little almond-shaped face turned red.
Maya's wandering thoughts snapped back from deep space.
She touched her tingling face and muttered to herself, "I need to stop doing that. I need to stop doing that. Am I developing some kind of childhood attention disorder? Smart people don't zone out like that—I definitely caught a condition. That's the only explanation. It's not because I'm an airhead. Absolutely not."
Right. Back to the matter at hand.
The reason this worked in the Naruto world was precisely this shared spiritual substrate. Every living thing in that world could, through that invisible thread of connection, allow their chakra to resonate with another being's—to sense the frequency of another's physical form.
And since chakra is produced by combining physical energy with spiritual energy, it has the capacity to directly interface with physical reality. Through chakra, a shinobi could shift their own bodily frequency with relative ease and complete the transformation.
But this was the Marvel world.
Everything here still had its own unique frequency. But none of it was connected by chakra. And even if some Marvel power happened to resemble chakra, it still wouldn't work—the two systems had no common thread, no resonance point to build from.
In the Naruto world, Maya could have used her understanding of the Transformation Technique to reverse-engineer the other two of the Three Body Techniques as well:
Clone Technique: Perceive your own chakra frequency, then shape a portion of chakra into that same frequency and hold the structure in place.
Substitution Technique: Shift your own bodily frequency to match an object's; simultaneously shift the object's frequency to match yours; then use chakra to trigger the exchange.
These descriptions weren't perfectly rigorous—the conventional understanding of clones and substitution probably differed in the details. But Maya was confident she could use these principles as a foundation to develop her own versions.
In the Marvel world, however, none of this translated. Without chakra resonance, she couldn't sense another object's frequency. Without that, the whole chain collapsed. She couldn't even get started.
For now, using her exceptional mind, her precise chakra control, and her heightened sensory perception, Maya had already achieved something significant: she could sense the frequency of her own body.
If she pushed hard enough, she could theoretically attempt to shift her own frequency toward some arbitrary target—with roughly a one-in-10^48 chance of actually transforming into it. The far more likely outcome: she would reduce herself to something resembling a small pile of unpleasant biological matter. Worse than Naruto's performance at his own graduation exam. Potentially damaging her body. Potentially damaging her soul.
This is extremely inconvenient, she thought. The technique I assumed was the simplest one is turning out to be the most complicated.
She let her thoughts drift—and then jerked upright.
"Wait. Wait."
Something clicked. She replayed the thought.
Pile of biological matter. No—Naruto. Naruto's graduation exam.
Maya sat bolt upright, eyes wide.
"That's it!"
She spoke out loud without meaning to: "Naruto's transformation failed—his technique was a pixelated mess—because he hadn't found the target's correct frequency. So what does that mean?"
It wasn't the fact that a mistaken frequency shift apparently wouldn't injure her that had sparked the realization. It was something more fundamental.
She had been operating under a massive assumption.
She had been thinking of frequency as if it were a scalar value—a single number on a single axis. Like sound: ultrasound above 20,000 Hz, infrasound below 20 Hz. Clean. Quantifiable. One-dimensional.
But that wasn't right.
Bodily frequency wasn't a number. It was a metaphor—an intuitive shorthand for something that was genuinely multi-dimensional. A kind of experiential, soul-level fingerprint. Maya's understanding of herself in relation to the universe.
If you tried to say "humans vibrate between 20 Hz and 0 Hz, and rocks between 200 and 400 Hz" — that was completely wrong. That framing was one-dimensional. Real frequency worked in n dimensions. Every person, every stone, every object had a unique signature that couldn't be represented as a point on a number line—it had to be represented as a position in space.
Think of it this way.
Jennifer has her own frequency. Call it Mars. Maya's frequency is Earth. Someone standing on Mercury could look out and immediately distinguish the two—different orbits, different positions, different trajectories.
If Maya's frequency shifted, it would be like Earth slowly drifting toward Mars—entering a binary orbit. Someone on Mercury with poor eyesight might start confusing the two. A sharp-eyed observer could still tell them apart by comparing size.
That was Phase A.
Now imagine Earth kept drifting until it matched Mars in size exactly. The two bodies intertwine, orbit each other, identical in scale. Even a sharp observer can no longer tell them apart.
That was Phase B.
And if Earth not only matched Mars in size but also in internal composition—same materials, same density, same spectral signature—then even with instruments measuring the light spectrum, there would be no distinguishing them. The observer on Mercury would know intellectually that one of them is a fake, but could not prove it.
That was Phase B—Advanced.
Now take one final step: Earth's frequency completely overlaps Mars's position in space. Not just similar—identical in location. The person on Mercury would not even think to question it. There is no fake. That is Mars.
That was Phase C.