2 The Coins

The second day began early. Ryo had memories that his grandmother would only wake up after nine in the morning, and with that in mind, the boy got up as early as he could. Checking the time, he realized it was already six in the morning, so he rushed to the back of his house, where there was a small patio with some large toys resembling a playground. But that wasn't what mattered to him; he wanted to train! He wanted to feel the chakra in his body and learn to control it.

'Let's take it easy. To feel the chakra, I'll have to meditate a bit.'

He sat on the grass, closing his eyes slowly. Ryo breathed in slowly, concentrating on his inner self, trying to feel the energy. It took a few minutes until he actually felt something. It was strange; he felt an energy lower in his stomach, and then he made that energy flow through his entire body, causing a small aura to appear over his body with a slightly bluish tone.

" Ouch! That hurt. "

He let out a slight scream, then fell backward, feeling his chakra reserves quickly depleting when he tried to make it spread throughout his body.

'Okay, mental note: don't do that again until I have more chakra.'

After a few minutes lying there looking at the sky, Ryo felt that his chakra had already returned to almost halfway. He imagined that because he didn't have much chakra, he could recover quickly. He couldn't compare his chakra to anyone else's yet, nor did he know how much was a lot or a little.

'I have to strengthen my body.'

Saying that, he started running around the backyard of his house. After a few laps, which was possibly three hundred meters run in uninterrupted circles, he sat down, a little out of breath but impressed with what he had just done.

'Are ninja bodies in this world naturally more resistant? No wonder everyone in the anime does everything so easily. Even this little body can run a lot without really getting tired. Could it be because of the chakra inside? It must be.'

Ryo continued training until it was time for his grandmother to wake up. He hadn't kept track of the time because he was focused on training, doing all the exercises he knew by heart from the other world, functional exercises with some improvised weights. And in the middle of a series of squats, Ryo heard his grandmother's voice.

" Ryo? What are you doing, boy? Oh, it's that time already, huh? "

That sentence hit Ryo's mind like a snap as he looked at his grandmother and smiled at her.

" Grandma, I want to join the ninja academy. I know I didn't say it before, but I'm determined! "

Sora, hearing this, gave the little Ryo a comforting smile while she thought, looking at him.

'He's exactly like his father was. Look at him!'

Then she spoke with a calm tone.

" Alright, come with me, little one; I'll show you something. "

With that, he walked with her back into their house, and in the room she used, she removed a rug from the floor, revealing a trapdoor underneath. "Come with me." She said, picking up a candle and descending. Following her down a flight of stairs, he saw at the bottom of the small underground room an altar with some golden things on top.

"What's that? Coins?"

Sora could notice his confused face and spoke.

" These are some coins left by your parents. Our family wasn't originally merchants but ninjas who turned to become merchants latter on. "

She walked over to the altar while opening a drawer and took out a scroll from inside and handed it to Ryo.

" Here is the first part of our family's art, Ryo. "

Then she took a coin and handed it to the little boy, who felt a small prick on his finger, from where a drop of red blood came out.

" Ouch... Grandma, what's this? "

As he spoke with the coin in his hand and the drop of blood falling onto it, he could see the drop disappearing, slowly absorbed by the coin. Ryo looked at the blood disappearing.

'What does this mean? Did a coin absorb my blood? Is it some kind of contract or summoning?'

As this thought crossed his mind, his grandmother's voice echoed in the room once again.

" Our family is a little special. I didn't know if you would follow the ninja path or not, so our art might have been lost forever after our generation, but I'm happy with your choice. What you have in your hand is a coin, just like the ones you could buy something with, but it's more special, made of a material that has been lost over time. "

She picked up a handful of the other coins as she spoke to him.

" The art of the golden coin. Golden coins that helped the ninjas of the past, a ninjutsu that has been passed down from generation to generation, and now it's your turn to learn it. The academy starts in two months, right? Try to control the coin until then, little Ryo. "

He stared at her and at the coin, then Sora left the little one alone in the candle-lit basement. 'Alright, I didn't expect something like this. Naruto didn't mention any of this, but then again, Ryo might have really died somehow after running away a few more times, and the art of the golden coin was never passed down.'

He looked at the closed scroll while pondering all this. Sitting on the floor, he opened the scroll. It was a simple scroll, perhaps only the first part of the art. The scroll contained inscriptions and drawings of chakra control formats and how to control the coin.

'It's an incredibly flexible art! How did this disappear?'

In the scroll that Ryo read, it was explained that with the coin absorbing the user's blood, they could control it to the point of making it levitate, expand in size, spin at high speed, and it even had elemental chakra applications. Of course, Ryo was reading a summary of what could be done with them at a more advanced stage. Reading the basics of the scroll, he could see that he could at most use the coin like a shuriken, but it was more precise as he could perform some maneuvers in the air and even bring it back to him.

'Let's start this already, beginning with the family chakra control. It's not so simple, but there's room for more advanced stages too.'

Sitting on the floor, he closed his eyes to meditate, but now he had the coin with him. Placing it on his forehead, the young man began to circulate the chakra in his body through the coin, as if he were storing chakra in it. And indeed, he had to train by putting chakra in the coin; this would make the energy placed in the coin circulate through it and improve the coin's affinity with the user.

The training lasted for about thirty minutes until the coin fell from Ryo's forehead due to chakra exhaustion.

' I can train for thirty minutes like this, and I've already felt the effects of the chakra increase, even though it's something very small, it's still an increase.'

The week passed quickly, with Ryo training his physical strength in the morning and training chakra with the golden coin in the afternoon. After the first few days, he was able to train with the coin three times a day for thirty minutes each, with one-hour intervals to recover chakra.

At the end of the first week, Ryo was sitting at the table with the coin in front of him, calmly performing a sequence of hand seals, and then pointing to the coin, which began to tremble on the table. After a few seconds like this, the coin levitated in the air, staying there for a few seconds. Ryo smiled at this.

'After a week, I can already make the coin float, but moving it quickly will take more time, and even more to really attack with the coin.'

Ryo didn't have a teacher for this, and even his grandmother didn't know how to use the art since she wasn't a ninja. But Ryo had some advantages to train, and that was his focus on becoming stronger.

With the training going well, the boy had to worry about more than just this training, as if he didn't pay attention, he might end up not being able to enter the academy for real. With a loud sound in front of him, a stack of books was placed there, making the table creak with the weight. His grandmother looked at him smiling as she left the books there.

"Alright... If I don't study, there's no way to pass the exams and become a real ninja...'

So, Ryo's first battle would begin not against an extremely strong ninja or a degenerate bandit, but against the books to study!