When you are reincarnated into a well-known fictional universe and attend a school designed to make you a badass, chakra using, child soldier of mass destruction loyal to your village, you never consider something. With your memories, you will probably have enough life experience to see through the somewhat creepy and occasionally downright crude manipulations and can focus on important things. Like how to kick ass, take names, and chew bubblegum.

Then reality will set in and you start to notice things.

Like how half of the fucking academy curriculum is fucking bullshit. At least to me, anyway. Considering the basic maths and science courses only barely taught anything new, the only classes I really paid attention to for the first two years were language, since before I came here, I didn't know Japanese (or the local equivalent that sounds and looks like Japanese), and history. I did learn these, in fact, I had a solid foundation that stayed even when I finished getting my memories back.

As for Shinobi skills… I had to fight hard to learn them, but I can totally see why people like Sakura, without any help or supplementary materials, seemed unsuited for the life a shinobi. The academy taught the basics, they taught them well, especially if you knew where to look for help, but the basic three, Transformation, Clone, and Replacement, were difficult if you were a civilian. Hell, I still couldn’t get a good transformation down. I was always was a bit too blurry and indistinct when I tried to copy someone. Clones were a bit easier, though I had a habit of making them with slightly more pronounced expressions and body language, something I had to fix before they were considered passable.

And the replacement technique… trying to wrap my head around that piece of Jutsu magic was painful. I could finally do it with practice and was still practicing it religiously… sometimes literally (the Log is God, trust the Log) but I got a look at the scrolls for its theory once. I swear, if nothing else, that put me off trying to mess with space-time Ninjutsu for some time. Though I did take the time to learn the full thirteen hand seals version that it originally was composed of, before the more practical five seal academy version… among a few other things considering its breakdown.

I also now understood the reason why the rookie nine were almost all clan members. It turns out that families that constantly use chakra have children who can use chakra a more easily, with reserves just that much larger. Apply this over a larger time scale, and you get the clan kids who can kick a civilian adult's ass halfway to hell before attending the academy. Beyond that, they seem naturally tougher and stronger if a bit more specialized.

Anyway… back to the present.

I looked around the main floor of the Konoha Library. This floor and everything above ground for two more stories were civilian. To access it you had to undergo a basic background test, give three different references for the Anbu to talk too, and sign an agreement to stay under surveillance for three months without being allowed to leave Konoha.

Just Hidden Village Protocol,

For most of the library’s civilian side, it was basic books on reading and writing, there were things on mythology, old histories, and records of great events. There were shelves of mathematics and sciences, most of them rather basic, a few shelves full of trade skill manuals and schema for tools and stuff like charts and forges. An entire half a floor was legal records and information concerning Konoha Law. Along the back wall was a rather meager fiction section. The Shinobi, however, had their own sections. On the first floor underground, an extra ten feet of reinforced material separating it from the civilian area was the academy section of the library, watched by a pair of bored looking chunin (and if the books of protocol were correct, a pair of ANBU hidden somewhere as well).

I walked down the stairs, keeping my pace slow and nodded to the chunin on duty, holding out a permission scroll to them. Permission scrolls were the academy students best friend, they were written weekly, and had to be requested from your teachers. They were needed to use either the training grounds or access the library archives. As a student, I couldn’t remove anything from the area, but I was free to take notes for later reference.

Most of it was just textbooks, and scrolls: dozens of each one lined up. There were condensed courses on math, history, science, languages, cultures, first-aid, weapon maintenance, physical health, observation skills, and the basics of the academy three. All geared for academy students, all geared for ninja life. Along the back wall were the optional books, things to help aspiring students to find specialties. Aside from the two guards, there were a dozen students from the academy, most of them working on the basics, or catching up on classwork.

I meandered along the stacks towards the back corner. The further away from the desk, you were, the more esoteric the books became. There weren’t any justu scrolls here, those were farther down, on the genin to jonin floors, but there were a few books that caught my interest, and I had been reading through them when I had the time.

“Fuinjutsu Fundamentals, the basics of sealing… Arts of Deception: The Shinobi’s Guide… Chakra Control: Imbuing Tools… Ah, There, Shurikenjutsu volume 8: Altering trajectory and Impacts.”

All but Deception, which was a good sized scroll, were books the size of a Young A novel and were covered in some level of dust. The fuinjutsu book had been checked out a lot, if the wear and tear on it meant anything, but didn’t seem very well taken care of. I had originally flipped through it for a moment and could see why. It was written as the driest most numbing boring thing ever. The kanji was small and filled every page, there were barely legible diagrams of parts of seals, and most of it was long droning pages about each sigil and how they reacted to chakra. It was also the only book on fuinjutsu on the shelf, so I was reading it anyway.

Chakra control was far more like a field manual, but read more like a college textbook. Each section clearly explained something, but it was outdated by at least thirty years. The main reason I chose it was that it had more detailed manipulation theory than the current academic texts, even if it was out of date.

I pulled up at a desk in clear view of the chunin, and opened a small notebook, and pulled out a pen. I opened the Fuinjutsu book and the Chakra Control books first, flipping through them to where I last left off. In each book were the joker playing cards from one of the decks of cards I always had on hand, marking where I had stopped reading. In the Fuinjutsu book, I was looking at the diagrams of imbuing chakra into the paper and ink to prepare them for sealing, and in the Control book, I was on a chapter about channeling chakra through weapons to strengthen and reinforce them. I had come across these months ago, but I only recently started realizing the similarity between the techniques.

For the fuinjutsu paper, the process described taught how to make personal chakra paper and revolved around matching the chakra signature of the scroll or seal tag to your own signature, to increase chakra resonance. Chakra resonance was a big deal in sealing, the better the resonance, the more efficient any seals were, the less chakra needed to charge them, and the greater effect it would have, properly resonance sealing scroll could fit almost a third more mass than generalized sealing scrolls. Explosive tags burned a bit hotter, barriers lasted a bit longer.

For the Control concept, it was used to apply chakra to weapon use. The primary use was to strengthen a weapon to survive stress. For instance, reinforcing a kunai to hold up better against a sword. Mastery of chakra reinforcement was supposed to allow almost anything to function as a weapon, at least for a short time. Things like sticks, bottles, and bits of paper, but the list of examples go on and on. The weaker the base material, the weaker the reinforcement, but organic materials had a better ‘flow’ allowing chakra to reinforce deeper. For instance, using this a person with, say, an oak staff could use it to block swords or axes, because the chakra would imbue deeper into the wood, holding the entire thing together and forcing the blades to work harder to cut into it.

Eventually, a sword would cut through, but it would take far longer than otherwise.

For metals, instead of imbuing the material, due to metals unliving nature, you had to coat the weapon, forming a thin layer to deflect damage from the weapon. The exception to this was the so-called ‘Chakra Metals’ which were a set of higher density alloys that are forged with chakra being forced into the metal. I had suspicions that tungsten was one of the main metals used in some of the alloys, but no real proof. Chakra metals do let the metal act more like an organic material, however, letting the chakra flow into the weapon to reinforce it.

Both of these were fairly common techniques, but given my habits, I had a few ideas on how this could be used, but working out the theory was taking time, though it did help me develop a few tricks using the academy henge...

Oh well, I still have almost two years of class left to go.

Time enough to study and figure out how to use this.