After rolling around on the bed in excitement for a few minutes, President Maya suddenly frowned.
Something's not right.
Her dantian was now storing chakra — and that didn't fit her long-term upgrade plan at all.
Anyone who'd watched all of Naruto knew the deal: if you didn't have a Tailed Beast sealed inside you, you could hardly call yourself a cheat. Naruto's biggest bug was the Nine-Tails — effectively infinite chakra reserves, later merging into Nine-Tails Chakra Mode to become unstoppable. As for Sasuke, no Tailed Beast meant always being on the receiving end of Naruto's affectionate grab moves, endlessly recycled into GIFs. Even Madara, god-tier as he was, still wanted to become a Jinchuriki. His whole endgame was absorbing the Ten-Tails to become the new God of Shinobi.
Bottom line: the ninja system had a critical flaw. Sooner or later — whether for raw power or just for longevity — President Maya had fully intended to become the most adorable Jinchuriki imaginable.
The problem was that now her dantian was storing chakra, so it was clearly impossible to seal a Tailed Beast inside. Oh well — she was flat broke anyway. Influence points had dropped to three digits, nowhere near enough for even a single Silver gacha spin. Tailed Beasts were Diamond-tier items at minimum. Apparently, she'd been thinking too far ahead.
Fine. There were gains and losses. Let's just test this Chakra Ocean for now.
She settled her thoughts and began circulating her chakra according to the Primordial Sutra.
Slowly, a warm current rose from her lower abdomen and spread through her limbs, following the Marvel-adjusted chakra pathways. Her whole body grew pleasantly warm. President Maya's eyes curved into happy crescents.
"Mmm~ ♪ Ah, that feels amazing — like thousands of tiny hands massaging every muscle from the inside out — wait, why did it stop? And why is the chakra in my dantian gone?"
At first, the sensation was blissful. Then Maya realized with creeping dismay that every drop of chakra she'd painstakingly extracted last night had vanished.
She decided to extract chakra again and observe the process this time — no undressing required. Her mutated Super Perception talent let her "watch" the entire generation process with startling clarity. The magnificent inner landscape appeared again, even more vivid than before. She could sense individual mitochondria, the cell nucleus, every organelle in sharp detail.
When her perception tried to push further inside the cell nucleus, it hit a wall. Her attempt to probe her own genetic information was firmly blocked.
Maya refocused. She stopped pushing against that barrier and simply watched the process unfold.
From the cytoplasm, thin wisps of white "smoke" began to rise. Simultaneously, soft green "beams" of spiritual energy projected down from her mind. The two met and merged, producing a dark green substance — or rather, something that wasn't quite a substance at all. It had no form, existing somewhere between present and absent.
The "smoke" was clearly cellular energy. The "beams" were spiritual force. The dark green result was raw, unrefined chakra — with no elemental affinity yet developed.
She also noticed that as chakra formed, the mitochondria and other organelles became noticeably more active. Soon, a wave of hunger hit her. Maya immediately stopped extracting. At this stage, still far from genin-level, her chakra capacity was laughably small — and the Third Hokage's constitution was famously stingy with chakra reserves to begin with.
Seeing her body emit a faint green glow, Maya knew the chakra was beginning to dissipate. She quickly channeled it along the Primordial Sutra's meridian pathway before it could escape.
What she observed next was interesting: after one complete circulation cycle, the chakra gathered in the dantian and stopped moving. More notably, during the circuit, tiny golden specks drifted into the chakra stream. By the time it pooled at the dantian, the green chakra had turned pale gold.
That's where the fried-egg tattoo came from.
Once all the chakra had contracted into the dantian, Maya took stock of the quantity. The amount hadn't increased through the cycle — only the color had changed. She tilted her head.
Did it absorb natural energy during the circulation and become Sage Chakra?
President Maya had a theory to test.
She dug through a box stuffed with various superhero figurines until she found a few kunai. A hundred Influence Points was well spent — she'd traded for five of them from the black market dealer specifically to practice the kunai throw technique.
She leaned against the door and threw the first kunai at the target on the wall using plain physical strength. Thud. Eight rings.
Second throw, infused with regular freshly-extracted chakra. Nine rings.
Third throw, same amount but using the golden dantian chakra. Ten rings — dead center.
Maya knelt on the bed and pulled the target board off the wall. She grabbed a red marker from her pencil case and marked where each kunai had pierced.
The eight-ring hit came out easily with a light tug. The nine-ring hit had punched clean through the board — it took actual chakra-enhanced effort to pull free. The ten-ring was the same.
She grabbed a ruler and measured the penetration depth at each mark.
"Eight rings: 3 cm. Nine rings: 7 cm. Ten rings…" She paused. "Only 8 cm? If the golden chakra is supposed to be Sage Chakra, the gap should be way bigger than that."
She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "So the gold chakra is stronger than regular chakra, but not by a huge margin. This is basically senjutsu chakra, version 0.1."
That means the golden light particles absorbed during the Primordial Sutra cycle really are natural energy — just at a very low ratio, unlike the fixed proportions required in actual Sage Mode.
A pang of disappointment. If only it could cycle more than once and absorb more each time. Some modification this turned out to be — if you're going to mod something, at least go all the way!
The origin of the gold chakra was confirmed. But now another question arose: it couldn't be cycled repeatedly, and if she drew it out of the dantian without using it, it would dissipate just like regular chakra — though the dissipation produced a pleasant warmth throughout her body.
Maya might be a self-taught ninja with no formal training, but she'd devoured enough cultivation webnovels in her past life to recognize what that warmth meant: her body was being tempered and strengthened.
The Primordial Sutra was a cultivation technique at its core — even if it was one of the lowest-tier ones. Physical enhancement was a given.
Maya spent the rest of the weekend on babysitting duty. She hadn't gone to her part-time job at "Authentic Sichuan Spice," the Chinese restaurant down the block run by Mr. Huang. It wasn't that she was training the whole time — mostly she was just looking after her little brother James.
Jennifer had decided she'd gone without a social life for over six months. As long as there wasn't any money, she could manage staying home with the kids. But the moment Maya had mentioned the scholarship on Friday, Jennifer had grabbed the household savings and vanished on Saturday.
Her reasoning: Two kids and I'm already getting crow's feet. I need better skincare. And I'm signing up for that fitness class. The second half of the year's living expenses were covered by Maya's scholarship anyway.
Maya's only response: "Whatever makes you happy." She'd never had any illusions about Jennifer running a thrifty household.
As for Jack Thompson, the nominal head of the family — he simply shrugged and said: "Don't look at me. I bring in the least money here. I have no say."