Turns out, enhancing your brain with chakra... kind of works.
No, scratch that—it absolutely works.
I’d only managed to hold the enhancement for around two hours on the first try with my measly reserves before running out of chakra and that had drained almost everything for it. It left me light-headed and sleepy by the end.
Photographic memory. Logical clarity. Insane comprehension. It was like someone cranked up the brightness and contrast in my head. Everything made sense. Everything clicked.
I remembered medical scrolls I skimmed months ago. I re-ran conversations in perfect clarity, noticing things I didn’t before. Patterns. Implications. Subtext.
Honestly... it was a little scary.
Even if the chakra didn’t last, the knowledge did. It was something like, if I mugged up something while in smart mode, the dumb me would still remember it.
Or, if the smart mode me found the solution of a problem, the dumb mode me would still know the solution, you get the drill, right?
But that was the catch. It wasn’t permanent intelligence—just a temporary powerup. Like popping a buff and going full high-IQ mode until the chakra ran out. After that, I was back to the good old Inaba Shinkurou.
Well, maybe slightly above average now.
So, I started planning around it.
If two hours of brain-enhancement could give me that much... what if I used it to study better? Refine the technique better? Think of a version that lasted longer?
So that’s what I did.
I woke up the next day, skipped classes for today, and sat cross-legged in the exact same spot under the tree in my courtyard.
Chakra. Focus. Brain.
Boom. Smart mode, activated.
Then I opened the scrolls again—specifically, the ones on neurology.
I didn’t just read it anymore, I memorized and understood every little thing about it.
In just four weeks, I covered the entire brain department of the Senju medical library. Everything they had—written by centuries or millennia of medical specialists, refined by war medics, polished by contributors like Tobirama Senju himself—I read it all.
No, I memorized it all.
And then went further.
There were inconsistencies. Gaps. Things nobody had dared to explore because they lacked chakra control fine enough to test their theories without causing brain damage.
My chakra control was a scalpel. No—more precise than a scalpel. It was the one thing where I was at God tier level.
I started making notes. Corrections. Modifications. Theories.
Layer by layer, I built an entirely new model of how chakra interacted with brain tissue, cognition, synaptic transmission, cerebral chakra flow patterns...
By the end of the month, I wasn’t just learning neurology.
If anyone ever did a deep dive on brain-based chakra manipulation in the future, they’d probably stumble upon a few footnotes with my name on them.
It was all just the start, all of this was just the prelude to my real goal.
See, the first brain enhancement was just... raw. Crude. I didn’t know what I was doing, so I brute-forced it with my half-baked neurology knowledge along with chakra control and good intentions.
Now I knew the structure of the brain. Every section, every flow zone, every point where chakra could stimulate memory formation, attention span, neural acceleration, and creative logic.
I rebuilt the entire enhancement pattern from scratch.
It only needed 60% of the chakra of the previous one... and lasted nearly three hours.
That was the first improvement.
After using that version, I realized how flawed even this model was.
So I rebuilt it again.
Use new enhancement → become even smarter → find flaws in the version created by the less smart me→ rebuild → become smarter again → repeat.
Every day I got a bit faster, a bit more perceptive, a bit more aware.
What was previously unthinkable became "reasonable."
What was previously genius-level became "acceptable."
And what once made me feel dumb?
I didn’t tell anyone about this. Not even Tsunade.
I just kept reading. Updating diagrams. Scribbling in my own notes. Modifying scrolls in secret.
Even when she teased me for acting smug lately, I brushed it off. Because, well... I was acting smug. I had the right to be.
I wasn’t the idiot trying to memorize diagrams and failing anymore.
Now I made diagrams better than the originals.
Even chakra flow mapping techniques that Tsunade’s scrolls described as "too difficult to use in practice"—I could break down and reconstruct them in my head, then draw a more stable version with a couple of tweaks.
I started experimenting with fractional chakra layering.
Dynamic enhancement zones.
Neurological chakra compression fields.
It was like looking under the hood of the human mind and learning how to hotwire it for peak performance.
This wasn’t just peak tier chakra control anymore. It was also peak tier chakra application.
I wasn’t training to get smarter.
I made myself smarter, literally.
After three more iterations, I finally settled on a model.
I could now enhance my brain for five full hours a day on the same chakra budget I used to spend for two.
And the benefits were no longer just intelligence.
My reflexes sharpened.
My instincts got quicker.
I could feel myself planning faster in battle, thinking five or six moves ahead even in basic drills.
I could even predict the future to some extent.
I was finally starting to feel like a prodigy.
But I knew the truth.
I was still the same Inaba—average in everything except chakra control.
It’s just... now I’d turned that one cheat into something ridiculous.
I had just learnt of how to use my cheat properly now.
If there were prodigies who were born at the top of the mountain, I was the guy who started in the valley and climbed with bare hands and a top tier rope.
Now I was near the peak.
The only thing stopping me now... was my body.
Because here’s the truth I couldn’t ignore anymore:
Physically, I was as average as shinobi come.
Sure, I could run fast, punch boulders, throw kunai straight through wooden posts.
But that was all chakra reinforcement.
My actual strength? Average.
...Let’s not even talk about that.
Compared to clan kids, I was basically running on a weak battery pack.
It was time to change that.
My mind was supercharged.
Now it was time to upgrade the body and my chakra amount too.