Path of Creation (Naruto) (Patreon)

Rock Lee got robbed of his rightful place as the protagonist of Naruto, and no one could convince me otherwise. He was the physical manifestation of the themes the manga was supposed to convey -- that hard work, more than anything else, is what made champions. That was Rock Lee. The man lacked the crucial ability to mold chakra, that thing that was necessary to be a ninja, and through sheer grit he became one anyway. That was inspiring. That was like becoming a mathematician without knowing what addition was.

“Ah! You’re here!” Rock Lee greeted me with a warm smile as I stepped onto the academy training ground. It was open for students in the second year and above because we were trusted enough to not slit our own throats with a kunai. He waved at me, and as he did so, I saw the bloody bandages wrapped around his knuckles and, even if I didn’t, I would have seen the blood on the post he had been punching.

“Said I would be,” I replied easily, finding myself amped up as I approached what I knew was going to be a butt load of pain. Of pushing myself to the point I would have to be carried back to my apartment. I wasn’t a naturally motivated person. My natural state was a procrastinator that always pushed things off to the very last possible minute. However, more than all the metaknowledge of Madara, the moon people, Danzo gluing his hands to the idiot ball -- Rock Lee was the one that lit a flame under my ass. “What are we doin’ today?” I asked, looking around the field.

We weren’t the only ones using it. I saw a young Tenten throwing some shuriken at a board, and a number of unfamiliar faces kicking and punching posts. All of them were clanless kids, just like me. Because, simply put, if you had a clan then you wouldn’t be wasting your time here.

“Yosh! We’ll start with a thousand push ups! A thousand squats! And one hundred laps around the village!” Lee declared, fire burning in his eyes. By that, he meant we would try to. What typically ended up happening that we went to a point that we physically couldn’t do another push up, so we moved on to squats, then at some point we would die doing laps. After being brought back from the dead, we’d spar. Lee didn’t waste any time and dropped to the ground and started doing push ups like his life depended on it.

A second later, I was alongside him. It didn’t take that long before I started to feel a familiar burn in my muscles, but I was able to ignore it as long as Lee was able to. And more than anything else, that’s why I was friends with the guy. He just didn’t quit and it inspired you to go the extra mile. If I could prevent him from getting the bowl haircut and the jumpsuit, all the better.

I could see the other kids glancing our way. There were many things about my second life that I was less than a fan of. The biggest being no video games. But, a close second was how utterly insufferable children were. Coincidentally, a silver lining of being a six-year-old again was the fact that I could suplex the shit out of them. I saw them trade ugly smiles, and in a mocking attempt at pretending to whisper, one of them said, “Look at the cripples.” He pointed with a snicker.

Lee missed a beat and only kept pace because I didn’t. In the end, Lee was an actual seven year old. I wasn’t.

Raising a hand, I flipped the kid off, doing a one-armed pushup as I did so. “Here’s something to gander at, you troglodyte. God damn genetic dead end. You couldn’t be more of an NPC if it was written on your big ass forehead.” I told him, doing a pushup with every word. I saw him go red in the face and I wasn’t lying about the last bit -- brown hair, brown eyes, a forgettable face… I didn’t even know his name, and I shared a classroom with the kid.

Now. Was it morally questionable to bully a small child?

Yeah, probably.

Was that going to stop me?

No chance.

The kid and his cronies puffed themselves up, glaring at us. Lee kept his head down, taking their words to heart. Because they weren’t wrong. Not really. However, I noticed a distinct lack of a bite to back up the bark since they weren’t approaching. They were exchanging looks to see who had the balls to pick a fight and, after a few moments, the answer was obvious. They looked away, talking smack under their breath, and that was all they could do.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Punks. Keep my name out your mouths before I smack it out,” I told them with a dismissive huff before returning to my pushups without missing a beat. I hated kids in my last life and I hated them a lot more now. Snot nose little punks that hadn’t developed empathy or a filter, yet they didn’t understand the concept of consequences for their actions. Such as the golden rules of ‘talk shit, get hit’ or ‘Fuck around and find out.’ I lamented the day that I would grow old enough that it would no longer be socially acceptable for me to RKO a child.

“Sukuna…” Lee muttered under his breath, his bottom lip wobbling the faintest bit. “You’re not-”

“I am,” I interjected, cutting him off before he could begin. By the standards of this world, I was born a cripple. So crippled that the medical professionals at the hospital genuinely had no idea how I was alive. “I can’t mold chakra. Just like you. So, if you’re a cripple then so am I.”

It wasn’t a one for one, though. Lee couldn’t mold chakra beyond the faintest bit. He could water walk, tree climb, and do the leaf exercise -- but he couldn’t do jutsu or genjutsu. My situation was a little different, but in the broad strokes, it was similar.

I was born without a chakra system -- the secondary circulatory system that charka was meant to flow through. I didn’t have it. I had chakra, a fair amount of it as I had been told, but it was free roaming inside of my body. As a result, I couldn’t mold it with handsigns, thus making jutsu and genjutsu impossible for me… more than that, I couldn’t do the leaf exercise either. I tried tree walking and even water walking to the same result.

On paper, I was more of a cripple than Lee was.

If it wasn’t for two things, I probably wouldn’t have bothered with the academy at all. I would have resigned myself to becoming a mob character that would probably be killed off to show how strong and dangerous a villain is. Probably during the sand invasion, or when Pein nuked Konoha. The first and most important thing was my name.

Sukuna Ryomen. A name I knew from my past life from Jujutsu Kaisen. The King of Curses. Now, as far as I could tell, I was a knock off version -- I didn’t have the tattoos, or the four arms. I did have the pink hair and the four eyes -- one normal pair, and a smaller pair lodged in my cheekbones. As far as I could tell, I didn’t have his innate technique, whatever the hell it was. But, given that I was a pretty blatant expy in addition to being an SI, I felt that it was solid to say that I had something.

And, whatever that something was, it would be revealed and until that day came, I might as well not shoot myself in the foot and put in the work early.

The second thing was a close, close, close second. It was pretty simple.

I could still use my chakra. I could expel my chakra, almost like an aura, and so far I hadn’t managed to actually accomplish anything with it, but it was proof that I could do something with it. Not to mention, while I couldn’t mold it internally, I still got the general boosts that ninjas got when it came to physical exercise. As a six year old, I could probably outrun Usain Bolt backward even if he got a head start.

Lee seemed less than convinced. “But you’re… you skipped ahead a year. You’re not like me,” Lee protested weakly, pausing his pushups.

That had been an accident. I fully intended to stay in pace with the year of the clan kids, mostly because they were the main characters of the show, but… It was shockingly difficult to pretend to be a kid. Like, fuck me, six year olds couldn’t hold a coherent conversation to save their lives. I did the schoolwork easily enough, and given that some of the subjects were like ninja history, I was a lot more eager to study. The first year wasn’t much in the way of practical skills and, upon seeing that I never got anything less than a hundred on a test, they moved me up a year.

“If I don’t figure out something for my chakra, they’ll kick me out of the academy altogether,” I nipped that line of thinking in the bud. Lee could get through with overwhelming amounts of skill in taijutsu, but he could also run on walls and water. I couldn’t. At some point, the administrators would look at what I could do against what I couldn’t do, and label me a liability.

That was completely fair. It was one thing to have others cover your weaknesses and another thing entirely to be a liability. A fight in a lake? I wouldn’t be able to join. Someone hops up on a wall? Unless I managed the jump to reach them, they were out of punching distance and I had no long range options. In those situations, I would be deadweight and something like that in a ninja battle would get someone killed.

I heard Lee sniff, shaking his head to get rid of budding tears. “Yosh! If you’re not going to give up, then neither will I! AhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHHHH!” He began to yell, blasting through the set of pushups as fast as he possibly could, practically becoming a blur before there was an after image of him starting and ending a push up.

I just smiled to myself, adopting the same punishing pace.

We got to around eight hundred before our arms gave out.

…

Chakra is broken up into two parts -- yin and yang. Spiritual and physical. I’m pretty sure there was a whole lot of symbolism I was missing out on from my last life, but in this one, it had a lot more practical effects. There wasn’t a simple way to quantify how much chakra one had, but generally speaking it followed a flow chart of Civilian, Clan, Freak of Nature. Ninja clans, on average, had more chakra than some random schmuck. It made perfect sense -- for generations, they cultivated and utilized chakra, they probably married someone from the same walk of life. Ergo, their kid would have significantly more chakra than someone who was born of two civilians.

Freaks of nature could come from anywhere. Clans, civilians -- didn’t matter. However, they didn’t necessarily have to be born that way. Simply put, you could grow your chakra reserves in one of two ways -- spiritual enlightenment for Yin, and physical conditioning for Yang.

As a rule of thumb, it was a lot harder to train Yin chakra. There were a few ways to do it -- study philosophy, write poetry, have life experiences, etc. The easiest way was to perform Genjutsu, but that wasn’t on the table for me. In the end, I lucked out and my rebirth gave me a surplus of Yin chakra to the point my reserves were two parts yin, one part yang.

Yang chakra could be cultivated through physical exertion, which made it easier to get, but only barely. You would gain some if you worked on the regular, pumped some iron, and got physically fit. But, your reserves wouldn’t grow a significant amount that way. No, in a way, yang chakra was almost more difficult to gain simply because…

“I’m dying. I’m dying. God, fucking kill me,” I rasped out, my entire body devoid of a single drop of strength. I wasn’t even running anymore. I was on the ground crawling forward, my path marked with the damp soil from the sweat pouring off me. The burning sensation in my arms was gone, replaced with a blissful numbness. No matter how many times I felt it, I could never get used to this sensation.

It was shockingly difficult to train yourself to the point of collapse. Your body put a metric shit ton of roadblocks to prevent you from doing so, not to mention every single survival instinct you had to outright ignore. It took a true mouth-breathing moron to push themselves to this point, one with the instincts of a particularly suicidal lemming, and one who refused to learn from his mistakes because it wasn’t enough to do it once. Or twice. Or even a dozen times.

It sucked. The recovery sucked more -- every muscle screaming in agony, the stiffness in your limbs, the deep ache in your bones… and as soon as you were healed up after a rest day, you went back to it. Again. And again. And again. And again.

“W-We cannot die yet! We’re so close to the finish line!” Lee rasped, only a little ahead of me. I wouldn’t have been able to bring myself to actually follow through with what I knew I needed to do to increase my reserves. I was born with above-average reserves, as I had been told, but that just saved me a few steps on a long road ahead. I would never be able to match someone like Naruto pound for pound, but that arbitrary ‘kage’ amount of chakra was my end goal. Which meant training and learning in excessive amounts.

“W-water. Someone give me some water…!” I rasped, feeling like I sweated out every drop of moisture in my body. I was about to shrivel up into a dried-out husk underneath the evening sun, the great big ball of fire unrelentingly bombarding us with heat of a hot summer’s day.

“Don’t give up, Sukuna!” Lee said, and in an awe-inspiring display of sheer grit, I saw him push himself up onto two legs. They wobbled like they belonged to a newborn fawn, but all the same, he managed to take a single step forward. I was gonna cry. “Come on! You can do it!”

I couldn’t. Honestly, with how much this entire thing sucked, I wouldn’t mind becoming a paraplegic just so I never had to take another step in my life. But, I couldn’t just ignore the look in his eye. He fully expected me to rise to my feet and walk across the finish line. And I’d be damned before I let him down.

With a grunt of effort, I managed to put myself on two feet, but it felt like my legs belonged to someone else. Lee and I ended up leaning on one another in a precarious balance, taking step after stumbling step. Each one taking us closer to the ling in the ground that marked the lap. I’d like to say that we stepped over it, but it was more of a fall. Still crossed it, even if it was face first.

We both landed in a heap, simply enjoying the sweet sensation of air entering our lungs. “We still have about a hundred laps,” I felt compelled to point out.

“We’ll add them to tomorrow’s total,” Lee boldly declared.

“At the rate we’re goin’, we’ll be stuck doin’ a million of ‘em in a day,” I said, forcing myself into a sitting position. Looking around us, I saw the trees of Konoha’s forests. Crazy to think that the first hokage just made a forest, practically from thin air. That’s the kind of bullshit I wanted to be able to pull off.

Everything in this world cost something. Could be something tangible like money or metaphorical like influence, but that was an ironclad rule in a world that treated the laws of reality like a polite suggestion. I wanted to obtain power. I wanted to pull off insane feats that would have been outright impossible in my last life. I wanted to stand shoulder to shoulder and toe to toe with the greatest legends this world had ever produced and I wanted to stand above them.

The cost was becoming a child soldier and a mercenary. I would be tasked with killing for the sake of the village with the expectation that I would die for it if needed.

That was a price I was willing to pay.

“Sukuna… do you really think you’ll get kicked out of the academy?” Lee suddenly asked me, and I suppose he had been stewing on that for a bit. He looked up to the sky above, a frown tugging at his lips while his hands were curled into small fists.

I took in a breath and let it out in the form of a sigh. “I have until the end of the school year. First two years are just conditioning and academics, but the third year is where stuff like shinobi tactics start. I might be able to skate by with high enough taijutsu and test scores, but I won’t hold my breath.” There were civilian schools in the village, but it was generally encouraged for parents to send their kids to the ninja academy.

Little things like tax breaks and such. Normally, the kids would spend a year or two there, learning more or less what they would in a normal classroom. From there, the parent could transfer them to a normal school, or the teachers could have a rather frank conversation with the parents about their kid’s future, or the lack thereof if they continued the path of a shinobi. I had to admit, it was a pretty solid way of getting the average citizen used to ninjas.

It turned ninjas from ‘One of those mercenary killers that would slit your throat for a paycheck’ to ‘I knew a couple of those idiots back in the day.’

Lee looked at me, visibly panicked, so I waved him off. “I’ll think of something. Could try my hand at becoming a fuinjutsu master,” I offered off-handedly. It would be a tough sell since that elective didn’t even start until the fifth year at the academy. However, I couldn’t say it would be fine because I was banking on the fact that I was an expy self insert and it would be lame as shit if I got hit with a nerf stick. “I-”

“Oi!” I was interrupted by a sudden voice, and I looked over to the source to see it was a couple of kids. I recognized most of them, but my gaze was drawn to the one at the center, the one that spoke, due to one thing in particular. The headband that he wore on his forehead, marked with a steel plate with an engraved emblem for Konoha -- a ninja. A genin. “Heard you were making fun of my little brother.”

Said little brother was shooting me a nasty look while flipping me from behind his older brother. He was joined by the few friends who had been talking smack. Out of the corner of one of my lower eyes, I saw Lee stiffen, realizing that we were in for a beating. Simply put -- we were spent, and even if we weren’t if the two of us could take a genin in a fight, then I would need to leave the village because it’s clearly fucked.

So, might as well have fun with it. “I see big ass foreheads run in the family, cockbreath,” I said, getting up. Good thing was that most of my body was numb, so I wouldn’t really feel the ass beating. My pride would be taking the worst of it because I would be getting my ass kicked by a twelve-year-old. I guess I would just have to console myself with the fact he was technically speaking twice my age.

“...Eh?” The punk grunted, his eyes instantly narrowing, “What was that you punk? You got something to say?!” He growled, striding forward with hunched shoulders. “I was gonna let you off with some slaps, you four eyed freak, but if you’re going to run your mouth, I’m going to wire it shut for you.”

“Then you’d get a spanking from your mum since she’s a pretty big fan of my mouth,” I replied. The thing about talking shit -- nothing you said really had to make sense. It was just bullshit. What it did have to do was piss the other guy off, and I had to say, it worked like a charm. If pissing people off was an Olympic sport, I’d be bringing home the gold. “Maybe after this, I’ll give her a kid that she won’t be disappointed with.”

Genin were the lowest ranked ninja of the four ranks in the village. Most ended up in the genin corp, basically a hodgepodge pool of people with middling talent and some skill. The manga didn’t really go into it, I don’t think, but that’s where a good seventy percent of all the academy graduates went. Maybe a handful of them would manage to climb the ranks up to chunin, but most would live and die as genin. Or retire, I guess. Genin teams that got a jonin teacher were in the minority.

So, I gave it decent odds that I was about to get my ass kicked by a scrub of a genin, but even the weakest genin should be able to batter me black and blue.

The kid -- a larger version of his brother with an even more forgettable face -- moved forward like a speeding bullet. Ninjas were fast, I thought distantly before I found every breath in my lungs leaving in a huff when he punched me in the stomach hard enough that I lifted off the ground. I was practically folded around his fist. I mean, it was pretty fucked up he was punching a six-year-old, but I also enjoyed being the consequences for other people's dumb decisions, so I had no right throwing stones.

He let me fall to the ground and I ended up puking up my lunch. Didn’t taste as good the second time around, I decided, controlling my breathing. Lee called out my name, sounding panicked. I waved him off. In the end, I fucked around and found out. This was on me.

I had no regrets. No- actually, if I knew I was going to get my ass beat, I’d have beat the kid up while I had the chance to make it worth it.

The kid slammed a foot on the back of my head, forcing my face into the dirt. “Learn your lesson yet?” He asked, grinding a foot on the back of my head. That was a little annoying. “I heard about you, you know. A little freak of nature born without parents.” Seriously, how comically evil do you have to be to make fun of someone for being an orphan? This was why I hated children. “Everyone said that you should be dead. If you don’t take it back, I’ll make sure that you do.”

A failed bloodline limit. Or whatever it was called. Technically, they were more common than you would think. After all, what were the odds that a random mutation in your dna would let you see for miles around and through walls? For every byakugan or sharingan, there was some poor kid born blind. My eyes and lack of a chakra network were pretty strong indicators of a failed bloodline forming. And maybe I was kidding myself if I thought anything different.

“Chakra enhancement sure is something, huh?” I muttered into the dirt. Yang chakra was what allowed for the incredible feats of strength that ninja were capable of. To my knowledge, the average ninja cruising speed was sixty miles an hour with their sprinting being something like a cool hundred and fifty. Beyond that, you had people like Naruto who moved at FTL speeds if you believed the powerwankers.

The genin thought that I was speaking to him, so he removed his foot. Reaching down and grabbing me by my pink hair, he lifted me up, “What was that-”

As he lifted me up, I threw some dirt in his eye. Tried to, at least. Seems like he wasn’t enough of a scrub to fall for a trick like that. It was reassuring, if nothing else. He held up a hand, protecting his vision before he clocked me in the mouth with it. Immediately, I tasted blood on my tongue as I rolled to the side. Spitting the taste of it out, I watched him carefully.

There was a hint of confusion in his eyes given that I wasn’t crying or anything. Clan kids were cut from a different cloth -- you had people like Hinata and Neji fighting literally since they could walk. Ahh… poor Neji. The man saw through the matrix and got gaslit by Naruto into believing the lie. That you didn’t have to be a genius to be great.

I liked Naruto. I did. But, when it came down to it, he broke the themes his series was based on. It was tough to say that you were a self made man when you were being taught by legends, the son of legends, with a chakra battery the size of a mountain in your gut bailing you out any time your life was in danger.

But, that was neither here nor there. Actually, that might be a concussion.

“Fine. You asked for this,” the punk said, his brother and his cronies cheering him on while Lee watched on, uncertain if he should jump in or not. The genin made a hand sign before his arms multiplied- ah, the henge. He kinda looked like a shitty version of Tien from Dragonball, just with hair, I thought as he suddenly grew an extra set of arms. They emerged from the shoulder, making it difficult to tell which set of arms were real.

I had seen other academy kids practicing the henge. He was actually pretty good with it.

I put my hands up, watching him calmly as he raced forward, a fist racing for my face- I blocked another punch to my gut and I felt the illusionary fist pass through my face. It felt… weird, I thought, flying back a good half dozen feet with a fist-shaped bruise on my forearms. It had been luck that I managed to block the punch. It had been fifty-fifty odds. The illusionary fist almost felt like… I don’t know. Like paint, if I had to call it something. Except it wasn’t wet?

That was chakra, I realized. It was my first time feeling it like this.

The genin wasn’t content to leave me to my thoughts and he pressed the attack. Two arms lashed out, one going for my head and the other for my liver. I protected my head, and this time I lost the gamble and I felt his fist crash into my side. I felt the chakra arm go through me again, and I was able to analyze the sensation more. I’m sure I could identify the trick on how to see through the henge, but I literally had no idea how I would go about doing that.

He pressed on, delivering an uppercut that I managed to block with my hands, knocking me into the air before he followed it up with a bicycle kick. In my last life, he would have been a star in something like UFC, I thought, hitting the ground with a thump and rolling to my feet.

Now, it might just be the concussion talking, but a thought struck me.

I didn’t have Sukuna’s innate technique. I tried -- cleave and dismantle, and whatever Fuga was supposed to be. However, one line from the show stood out to me.

‘The ability to realize one’s innate domain without using a barrier is akin to an artist painting a masterpiece not on canvas, but open air.’

“Seriously. I think I just might be an idiot,” I muttered, finding myself smiling with bloodied teeth. The genin paused his attack, sensing a change in me. I couldn’t manipulate charka within my body. That was a big deal. All jutsu -- both ninjutsu and genjutsu, required internal manipulation to be used. But I never tried to manipulate it outside of my body. As I spoke, I felt myself being awashed with the sensation of what I felt when his henged fist passed through me. Like I was submerged in a liquid without actually getting wet.

Then, with a hand, I painted.

I wasn’t much of an artist when it came right down to it. I was perfectly in line with what you could expect from a six-year-old, sadly enough. But, I didn’t need to be good.

The genin had good instincts because he went in for the kill, not letting me realize what I was trying to do. Or, at least he tried to. He shot forward, but I had an easier time reading his movements after seeing it three times. I clenched a fist, knowing that I could never beat him in a contest of speed, so I didn’t bother. I ate a punch to the face for the sake of retaliation.

My chakra splashed over empty air as if it were a canvas, coating my fist in a chaotic messy white smudge outlined in black negative space. As he delivered the punch, I countered, slamming my fist against his elbow. My fist struck with the impact of a wet noodle. The white and black ink struck with the force of a bomb going off, snapping his arm at the elbow, and instantly he dropped to the ground screaming.

I stumbled back a step, feeling some of my baby teeth floating free in a sea of blood on my tongue. I spat it out while the genin was on his knees, holding his arm that was bent the wrong way. There was a hollow aching feeling in my gut, and that told me that little smudge was near my limit. All the same, I couldn’t help but to smile. “You know, you really helped me out,” I told him, and I saw his eyes narrow into pinpricks as I strode forward to him. “So, take this as a thank you.”

With that, I grabbed him by the head and RKO’d him, his face bouncing off the ground and he seemed to enter the blissful realm of unconsciousness.

I was right next to him a second later, but even as my vision darkened and with the taste of blood heavy on my tongue, I couldn’t help but laugh.

Totally worth it.

…

This is my first return to Naruto as a setting in about a decade. Naruto wasn’t the first setting I wrote in, but it was the second. And looking back at it… It’s a genuine marvel to see how far I’ve come. Not because I’m particularly good, but I was astoundingly shit at writing and it was only my own ignorance at how terrible I was that let me stick with it. I’m talking about mob attacking child Naruto due to the Civilian Council controlling Konoha levels of bad.

As for crossover elements, I wouldn’t label this as a crossover with Jujutsu Kaisen. I had the MC look like him for two reasons -- Easy character art, and for him to be led to the ‘paint with chakra’ solution that would have come out of left field otherwise. So, the MC doesn’t have any innate techniques or cursed energy.

What he does have is what I’m tentatively calling Artist Release -- the ability to paint the world with his chakra to manifest attacks and objects. Painting something with Yang chakra leads to a physical attack being dealt, while painting with Yin charka leads to a mental attack. Painting with natured chakras lets him paint with colors -- Paint with red, you get fire, blue water, green wind, etc.

Seems like a fun power to play with, and it’s not something thats immediately busted but has plenty of room to become busted.

As for the plot -- overall, I’m not feeling a rehash of canon, so I think I would break from the rails as fast as possible. I have a couple of ideas that I’m playing around with on how to best do that, but I can say that I’m leaning towards more of a village vs village conflict rather than fighting god across dimensions.

I think it has the potential to be a longish story -- 40-60 chapters, give or take. Hit all the important moments and focus on the character beats and wrap things up nicely.

If you have any thoughts, let me know.