Anyways the old man did as he had said and fixed whatever was going on with Naruto by the end of the day but it oddly felt like my friend was now more limited than before. Don’t get me wrong his chakra felt the same as normal and he was perfectly fine physically but I somehow got the impression that he had weights on for some reason. He was even able to pull off the clone jutsu without a hitch now. Not that this was really surprising considering his chakra control was good enough that even I was fine with it.-
“Look Kenzo I can make clones now too! So does this mean i can learn that nature transformation stuff you did!?” The blonde asked excitedly while showing off his clones.
I shook my head “Those two things aren’t even remotely comparable so don’t go getting a big head. As a reward though I will teach you something that I’m sure you’ll get some use out of even after you get out of the academy.” I said with a smirk.
I then pulled out a shuriken and attached a thin thread of chakra to it before throwing the shuriken at a tree. With a slight flick of my finger though the shuriken swerved around the tree and stuck into another behind it.
“This is chakra thread manipulation and using it you can do things like what I just showed you and more, interested?” I asked know full well that he definitely would be.
“I can play so many pranks with something like this!” he said with an excited looked that made me sort of want to hit him.-
Only Naruto would take something with so many practical uses and demote it into a tool for pranking people.
“Regardless of what you plan to use it for you still need to learn how first. Lets go step by step here since if I give you a vague explanation you’ll be stuck for a stupid amount of time on it. First you need to send chakra to one of your fingers like this.” I said showing him my glowing pointer finger.
He focused and after a few tries copied what I was doing though considerably worse since he was unfamiliar with this use of chakra unlike me.
“Good now carefully push it outwards like this while trying to make it as thin as you can.” I explained while showing him my own chakra narrowing like a cone and extending out to create a short but very thick thread.
This step was considerably harder for him as he was unable to get it even after an hour of trying. I told him to practice some more later until he could create a thread like I did and even gave some advice how to make it easier like how a stable and even flow of chakra makes it simpler to create a thread. He swore that he’d get it figured out before I left again and I believed him as once he was motivated the sky was the limit for him.-
I treated him to a meal at Yakiniku BBQ since I wasn’t really feeling ramen at the moment and we ate a lot of meat that I had grilled since Naruto sucked at cooking. Not that I could blame him since he never had any interest in actually learning how to cook more than ramen cups and campfire roasted meat, a shinobi staple. It was actually a required topic to learn at the academy how to catch, clean and cook pretty much any sort of edible animal.-
My own preference was typically geared towards foraging plants than hunting but I wasn’t above killing off the sick or old animals to feed myself. I tried to leave the young ones alone though as I didn’t like being the reason they never reached old age. Probably hypocritical I know but that was just the way I saw it. Anyways after eating Naruto headed home and I checked my parents home before heading to my little tree fort in the forest of death when I saw they weren’t back yet.-
The next day I visited the local gambling establishments and got promptly kicked out of them after going on a hot winning streak earning thirty million ryo by betting ten million right at the start. These places had thought that I sucked at gambling like my sensei and thus could earn some easy money off me, they were wrong. Blackjack and five card draw were my go to games and I lost much less than I won which eventually led the places to kick me out as that was bad for their wallets.-
Still I got my money and left with a smile while the gambling house banned me for life. Left with a few hours to kill until Naruto got out of class I headed over to the hospital to lend a hand there since my sensei had given me the go ahead to use my training without her in the village. It was honestly not all that busy beyond the standard civilian presence for flu, broken bones, cuts, scrapes and bruises. I busied myself treating these small injuries and illnesses for a few hours before meeting up with Naruto to continue teaching him how to create chakra threads.-
By the time we were set to go eat dinner he had made good progress as he had gotten the control of his chakra to his finger stable and was only struggling to create a thread from it. We ate at a stir fry place this time that specialized in seafood rice with vegetables and egg. They had their own signature rice sauce that had a nice sweet and spicy thing going on but not like sugary sweet but more like fruit sweet. Naruto wasn’t a huge fan of it but that was fine since everyone had their own preferences for flavors.-
He tended to prefer strong meat flavors and smooth umami ones while I liked spicy and sweet flavors with an added herbal kick if possible. My sensei on the other hand enjoyed a mix of both meaty and sweet flavors with a little sourness from her alcoholic side. Like i said everyone was perfectly entitled to their own preferences in this regard. One thing i appreciated about Naruto was that despite being quite outgoing he wasn’t the sort to try and push his own opinions on you for something like this. Morals and stuff like that was a different matter but otherwise he respected your opinion on things.-
I got another two days before my sensei was pretty much done with being in the village as some of the political parties here were starting to bother her for one reason or another. As the last person in the village with the name Senju as well as being both the grand daughter of the first Hokage and the thirds disciple she held a lot of sway that they wanted to use to their advantage. So just like that I said my goodbyes once again and we headed out alongside Jiraiya “coincidentally”.