# Chapter 7: Training
"We should get together like this again sometime soon, alright?"
That was how Rock Lee said goodbye to the blond and the chestnut-haired girl, earning himself a happy nod from both of them. Tenten, for one, had warmed to him considerably over the course of a single dinner — he could tell by the faint smile resting at the corners of her rosy lips. In a few years, she was going to grow into a genuinely beautiful young woman. Especially since they'd be an official Genin team together soon enough, assuming canon stayed on course.
As for Naruto…
Naruto Uzumaki was Naruto Uzumaki.
Making friends with him was as easy as getting lost in a forest with no preparation whatsoever. One, two — treat him to ramen, say a couple of kind words, and suddenly you're brothers for life. Not that Lee had any intention of using the kid. Manipulating someone younger than you was a disgrace for a master of the martial arts, or someone aspiring to become one, like Rock.
That said, having the Jinchuriki of the strongest Biju as an ally was obviously not going to be useless.
An hour or two after that pleasant dinner, Lee arrived at one of Konoha's training grounds — arriving at exactly the right moment, when no one else was around. An open field dotted with trees, with the occasional broken shuriken scattered here and there across the grass, nothing more. The comfortable evening had settled into its full depth, the mighty sun still barely clinging to the horizon, offering a last generous measure of its precious light for practically nothing in return. Taking in the wonderful atmosphere of this other world, Rock felt his resolve harden even further — a determination to protect something this beautiful.
So many things had happened to him in a single day. But had anyone given him a choice? The thick-browed boy — a former self-taught karateka — couldn't pause his life like a video game to sort through everything that had occurred. Still, he'd tried not to make mistakes, tried to carry himself as if nothing earth-shattering had happened at all.
And yet…
*I've been transported into a universe where actual shinobi run across trees and water using an unusual energy called chakra. I received a system of unknown origin that cranks up the difficulty but offers decent rewards in exchange. I discovered I have a perpetually-mission-busy father, despite having been an orphan before. I got into a sparring match with a member of the moderately prominent Inuzuka clan at the academy. I met Naruto Uzumaki himself — the main character of the anime I grew up watching — and somehow even managed to improve my relationship with the proud and standoffish Tenten. All of that. In one single day.*
Even for someone as naturally calm as Lee, he was beginning to feel the full weight of the madness he'd been living at a sprint for the past twenty-four hours. He was close to grabbing his own head with both hands.
"Alright… Anyone with a will of steel can handle any pathetic little breakdown. Ha." He muttered it to himself under his breath with a self-encouraging laugh, then called up the holographic interface out loud, watching the familiar rows of letters and numbers and percentages arrange themselves before him.
*[Name: Rock Lee]*
*[Shinobi Rank: Academy Student]*
*[Health: 100%]*
*[Stamina: 100%]*
*[Chakra: 100%]*
*[Taijutsu Rank: C]*
*[Ninjutsu Rank: —]*
*[Genjutsu Rank: —]*
*[Inventory]*
*[Hell's Training List: 3]*
*Three exercises, huh. Interesting. What have the arrogant all-powerful beings cooked up for their amusement this time? Classic squats, but with enhanced gravity and a massive boulder strapped to my back? Pfft… I really hope not. I'm not exactly confident I'll survive something like that when I nearly checked out from push-ups alone…*
He was appealing to their mercy, and he knew it — while being completely aware that no one was going to show him any.
Yeah, good luck with that, as they say.
*[Hell's Training List]*
*[Complete twenty squats with a stone on your back.]*
*[Reward: Bronze Chest]*
*[Endure five full-strength hits from your holographic clone.]*
*[Reward: Bronze Chest]*
*[Complete thirty pull-ups.]*
*[Reward: Bronze Chest]*
"Damn it," Lee said.
It was worth mentioning that the system had more than one tier of reward chest, clearly designed to push its user to keep developing. There were bronze, silver, gold, and platinum chests. For now, Lee was only being offered bronze — silver wasn't even in the conversation yet — but he wasn't particularly upset about it. There was a simple, logical truth worth understanding:
The better the chest, the harder the exercise. That much was obvious.
The system hadn't stated this outright, but was Rock an idiot? He'd never had trouble grasping the situation in front of him. Proof of that was the fact that he hadn't completely lost his mind despite dying by wardrobe yesterday and washing up in an entirely different world.
*Forget it, Lee. That's not what you should be focusing on right now. First a warm-up, then Rankyaku, and the hell's exercises can wait for some downtime. It's important to keep order in your life — otherwise you'll end up as lost as a hiker on an unfamiliar mountain in the dark.*
He straightened his back and narrowed his round eyes with quiet, serious resolve.
Lee moved to the wooden training dummy standing in the middle of the grounds among the other training equipment — it was noticeably taller and more solidly built than Rock himself. Long arms branched out from its body at various angles, but the scattered shuriken and kunai that had been left jammed into it by careless owners completely killed the mood for striking it.
He looked down at his calloused hands — worn to that state by the original Rock's sheer stubbornness — and decided he was done hesitating. He began pulling out the bladed weapons one by one, feeling the burning cold of metal saturated with murderous intent.
*Chunin rank or above, definitely,* he thought, sizing up whoever had left the weapons behind. It was just a feeling, some internal instinct, but he trusted it.
Rock got to work on his so-called warm-up — squats, push-ups, core work — and then spent a hundred strikes driving his fists and feet into the wooden dummy, each impact sending a crushing pain through his limbs and straight into his chest.
He had to admit: in his past life, he'd never taken things to this level of masochism. But his current situation was catastrophically different from anything before, and far too much was riding on him now — pressing down on him, relentless and without mercy.
"Ha-a… It really isn't easy, being someone who can't use Ninjutsu or Genjutsu. Suffering feels like it should be optional, but as always — it isn't. Ha-a…"
He muttered it to himself, while turning the question over in his mind: why, exactly? Why couldn't he use any techniques based on releasing chakra outside his body? He'd already tested himself and confirmed that chakra circulated through his channels well enough — it moved freely, sped up without issue in both passive and active modes.
But beyond that, the situation was enough to make anyone sigh in dejection.
His control was unnaturally, almost absurdly, zero. His tenketsu weren't passing chakra through properly either. There was no worse position to be in. So when he tried to form seals for basic Ninjutsu or Genjutsu, nothing came out. Nothing at all. Attempt after attempt, failure after failure — so what was the point?
Still, it wasn't as grim as it looked at first glance. You just had to think it through and strain your brain a little — look at everything through the wider lens of potential. In the anime and probably the manga too, the original Rock had easily climbed all kinds of surfaces without using his hands, including water, which was anything but a stable flat surface. That kind of technique didn't require releasing chakra from the body at all, which was almost certainly why it worked for him. He'd put it to the test another time.
*I don't need the Rasengan anyway. Why would I, when I've got the Eight Gates and the system's combat styles — like the powerful Rankyaku? What matters is not stopping. Keep pushing. Keep training.*
He was as unyielding as ever, as immovable as a mountain that rises above everything else, when it came to fulfilling his dream of becoming a Taijutsu master.
Lee threw himself back into his warm-up, setting every stray thought aside, having made one thing absolutely clear to himself: without dedicated physical training and the hell's exercises, he was never going to conquer the horizons of this extraordinary, dangerous world of shinobi.