4 First time travel

Another week passed while Yuta's trying his best to get the hang of his chakra. It's been two and a half weeks since he came in to this world. The initial worry on everyone's faces after Nine-Tails attack finally subsided, there is no more changes in the number of the children this days in the orphanage, and life seems comes to its normal peace and quiet. 

Yuta as always, continuing his routine of meditating mostly in bed with briefly going outside sometimes. The children and caretakers start to just ignore him most of the time and Yuta can't be any happier about this. Constant nagging of Chitose on him to make him more active and being often approached by other children trying to drag him in to games outside started to getting on his nerves. 

And now, as annoyance of the other people is diminished, Yuta finally start to feel something. 

'I finally start to feel something warm inside of me and that should be my chakra. At least I'd like to think it is chakra and not my slowly growing hallucinations because of me constantly trying to meditate and feel it for over more than a hundred hour total at this point.' 

'I still not able to control it though, but at least there some progress finally. Learning to control it should not be as hard as finding it. I even started to think that I will not be able to feel my own charka without outside help, but waiting for the academy for getting help with it would be a huge waste of time, and now it's finally accomplished.' 

'By spending so much time constantly doing one task with no results almost made me lose my mind. I need to switch to some other things at least for a while to deal with all the stress that it gave me. And I have just the right thing to do for that! I will use time travel for the first time.' 

'I still don't know how much soul energy it will take and how long it will be regenerating, so it's critical to test it at least once while I'm in a relatively safe environment. I need to understand how this ability actually works!' 

With that in mind Yuta concentrated on his Time control ability and instinctively activated it with desired result is to travel 3 days back in time. With that the world in his vision is blurred and he felt disoriented for a few seconds. 

When Yuta's vision returned to normal, he found himself on his bed as if nothing happened. But as the start's seeing the big room he is in, he finds out that its exactly in the state as it was 3 days ago, occasional chatters between some children and how they act is exactly the same as back then. It gives Yuta the feeling of déjà vu and creeps as it feels weird to see something that already happened before. 

'It works just the way I thought it would. Well, the vision distortion and a few seconds of disorientation are unexpected, but the result is exactly as I wanted when activated time travel.' 

'But what is this feeling of emptiness. This feeling is hard to explain, as if something important is missing and it's very unpleasant. My soul energy is depleted it seems, but why is this feeling so strong? As if it not just spent some energy but depleted it entirely!' 

'Well, that was unexpected, looks like time travel consumes all the soul energy and not just some of it. That means that I will not be able to time travel again after I already did, I have to be careful in the future when I use it. Let's hope it regenerates fast.' 

'With that out of the way, now it's time to finally master my own chakra to be able to do some chakra exercises.' 

With these thoughts Yuta once again starts to meditate to be able to control his chakra. And this time the progress comes quickly and with each passing hour of effort the chakra in Yuta's body starts to move more and more easily according to Yuta's will. 

A few more days later Yuta becomes confident enough in his chakra control. Now he feels it clearly without the need to concentrate on it, and he can move it through his body with some effort. 

'Now that I can feel and control my chakra it's time for me to try the leaf concentration exercise. According to it I need to stick the leaf to my forehead and concentrate my chakra on it in a way that it will not fall. But I probably have to do that without anyone's noticing me. Civilian orphans shouldn't know about this exercise after all.' 

'The feeling of emptiness that has resulted from depleting soul energy decreased very little, with that speed it will take around 2-3 weeks to fully regenerate it I suppose. I tried to use my time travel recently to do another test and it didn't work, it feels like I need my soul energy fully restored to do any time travel at all, no matter the distance of that I wish to travel.' 

'As it is now my Time control ability seems very weak and not practical, but I'm confident that as soon as my spiritual energy starts to grow, the power of Time control will become much more than it is now, so I'm not really worried about it. It's safe to say that it is already a good life saving ability as it is now, and I have not even started to train yet!' 

'And as soon as I will able to travel back in time further than the time it takes to regenerate the soul energy that travel spends, the loophole will become possible when I will be able to constantly travel back again and again.' 

'That will not only gives me time to train and learn anything that is available and not involving physical training. It will also allow me to do something risky like stealing techniques or information or spying, and when I memorize the acquired information then I can just travel back in time with that knowledge!' 

'But time travel will not make me invincible yet and I need to be careful, after all if someone kills me faster than I'm able to activate time travel I will be finished. And then there is Hiruzen with his jutsu that attacks and seals the soul of its target, and maybe there some other users with stuff like that in the village, who knows.' 

'Direct attack on my soul will be very dangerous. While time travel can be very broken and OP, it still has some weaknesses. And the biggest weakness of it is me and my abilities to use it to its full extent. For now, my Time control is like a big and sharp exquisite sword that I can barely even lift.' 

With that in mind Yuta start's practicing the leaf concentration exercise by grabbing a leaf and trying to concentrate his chakra on it while sticking it to his hand instead of his forehead, in ways that no one will see it. 

After just an hour Yuta managed to get it right so leaf didn't fall and started practicing the exercise. 

For the next whole month Yuta was diligently practicing. At the beginning he used to spend his chakra reserve in just ten minutes of practice, and the leaf used to fall all the time. When his reserves are depleted, he just rests for a while and starts again. And the more he practices the easier it becomes. 

… 

'Now that I practiced for a month straight it becomes easy. My chakra reserves are also growing, it feels like its many times bigger now than in the beginning of practice. It seems that my chakra reserve was extremely low before the practice, but I don't have anything to compare to.' 

'Now my chakra can last for me practicing the exercise for 2 hours, but the hard part of the exercise now is to concentrate and not lose focus, and also there is a chakra wastage during it if I concentrate to much chakra, and the leaf falls if it's too little. Finding the right amount and maintaining it is more difficult than it seems.' 

'After my reserve is depleted, I can fully restore it by resting for around 4 hours or by sleeping for 2 hours.' 

'Also, I feel that now I'm able to time travel to 4 days to the past instead of 3. While it feels like my chakra reserve increased by at least 5 times, my spiritual energy seems to grow not that much. So, my bigger reserve is the result of improving my physical energy and not so much spiritual energy. My physical energy seems to grow a lot just by depleting and restoring my chakra. And that also means I will lose most of my grown reserves if I time travel past this point.' 

'My soul energy seems also fully restored, and it took the whole month instead of 2-3 weeks as I previously thought.' 

For the next few days as Yuta continues to practice the leaf concentration exercise, Chitose start's reprimanding him more and more to make Yuta more active and go outside to play. She seems hell-bent this time on making Yuta to be more active and not staying inside all the time. 

Chitose believes that Yuta's behavior is the result of him losing his mother and grieving, and she tries to snap him out of it rather forcefully and rudely this time. 

Seeing that there's no way around it this time and she will not leave him be, Yuta makes use of the situation and act's like he made up his mind on becoming a ninja to 'protect the village' and asks about academy and stuff. Chitose seemed happy about the new development of Yuta's behavior and told him everything he wanted to know. 

With that Yuta finds out that minimal age to enter the shinobi academy is 5 years, and he also needs to be physically fit. After that dialogue Yuta starts to go outside every day to run laps around orphanage playground for two hours every day. 

The staff at the orphanage now sees Yuta as a promising boy who put aside his mourning for his lost mother and decided to become a strong shinobi to protect the village and works hard for it. 

At first it was hard to last that long, and he used to exhaust himself after 10 minutes of running at a slow pace but only after two weeks he was already able to run for an hour straight, and after another month running for 2 hours at normal pace is no longer a difficult task for him. 

But Yuta is not eager to increase the physical training and spends the rest of the time on concentration exercise or just resting and thinking on his future plans. 

… 

'It's been 4 month since I'm here. There are still 8 more months until I reach the minimum age to enter the academy, and even after that there are a couple more months before the next enrolment so its 10 month before I will enter the academy. Leaf concentration exercise is no longer that useful to me and it's boring, so I need to find something else to do.' 

'I can try to do tree walking exercise, but I need to find a place where no one will see me do it. Here in the orphanage, there is no such place. Maybe I can talk my way out of the orphanage so I can go outside for a walk?' 

'Besides that, there is nothing much I can do. Maybe I can figure out how to sense other people's chakra and train sensory abilities? But I don't know how it should work, I'm afraid that this will turns out just like that time when I meditate for weeks to get the hang of my own chakra, and the thoughts of doing something like that once again is giving me a headache.' 

 ---

[AN: I read some other fanfics of Naruto, and there authors often use the term of 'unlocking chakra', and this is strange to me. In my understanding there is nothing to 'unlock' about chakra, the problem is to sense and control it. Then when you start controlling it and spend it, your body starts to regenerate it and the whole thing is like muscles, the more you use it – the more it grows.

The problem in sensing chakra is like you sense your resting arm or leg for example, its there and you kind of can sense it, but it's hard, and if you can't sense it you can't move it. With that if other ninja start to press his chakra in to your body, you start feeling it clearly, as if someone start moving your own arm for you so you can sense it easier. That is exactly what happens in the academy when teachers help students to sense and control their chakra.

Thanks to the Carlllos, zeraf and diablo_soso for the power stones!]