The Red Shark - Chapter 0012

Chapter 12 — The Scroll’s Trial

Out in the corridor, I looked down at what he’d given me: one roll of paper with a broken red seal. It weighed almost nothing, and I held it with both hands anyway.

I needed somewhere to work. The training field was out. It was open on every side, and between my brothers’ curiosity and the mothers’ worrying, I wouldn’t get ten minutes alone there. So I slipped out through a side gate and headed for the woods along the edge of the clan’s land.

The path wound between rocky outcrops and low, stubborn bushes rooted in the salty soil. Farther in, the trees grew close together. Father called that strip of forest a defensive barrier that happened to look nice, and he was only half joking. The fog was thicker under the branches, and the birdsong overhead came down muffled.

After a short walk I came to a clearing with an oak in the middle, so wide that three grown men standing shoulder to shoulder wouldn’t have spanned its trunk. Its bark was deeply furrowed, and its roots ran across the ground in every direction. The trees around it stood close enough to hide the clearing from the compound. It was still clan land, but nobody would see me there.

I sat down with my back against a rock, ignored the damp soaking into my tunic and unrolled the scroll across my knees.

The title was plain: Chakra Adhesion: Climbing and Surface Control. The handwriting was Father’s, neat and square, and diagrams filled the margins.

The first section covered what I already knew from the lake: chakra as a blend of physical and spiritual energy, shaped by focus and will. Then it got to the point. To climb, you formed a suction helix on the sole of each foot, a spiral of chakra turning inward that drew you against the surface instead of pushing you away. The diagrams showed arrows curling in from the tenketsu of the foot toward the center of the sole. It was the propeller from the lake exercise, turned around and put under my feet.

Below that, underlined twice, was a warning:

Teach this only to students with genin-level reserves and control. Untrained attempts may result in falls, chakra exhaustion or serious injury. Supervise all first attempts.

I read it twice. Genin level. I was four. Most children my age couldn’t even feel their chakra, let alone shape it into something that could hold a body against gravity. I looked around the empty clearing. So much for supervision.

But Father wasn’t careless, not about this. He had stood at the lake and watched what my chakra could do, and he knew how deep my reserves ran compared to my brothers’. Between his blood and my mother’s, which was Uzumaki if I was right about her, I recovered faster than any of them. He had chosen this scroll because it was hard. That was enough to quiet the doubt, and I kept reading.

The technical part was dense, and I loved every line of it. The helix pulsed with each step instead of flowing in a steady stream. It opened when the foot came down and closed completely when the foot lifted, so that nothing lingered to unbalance the next step. Bark made it harder. Grooves, knots and damp patches changed under every footfall, and the helix had to change with them. Too rigid, and it would crush the bark. Too loose, and gravity won.

Then there was the body. Standing straight out from a vertical trunk, you hung your whole weight on the soles of your feet, a few square centimeters of contact. The stomach had to hold the torso in line, the hips tilted to spread the load, and the arms served as counterweights. The scroll listed the usual failures: one foot gripping while the other slid, too much force bursting the bark into splinters, reserves running dry halfway up.

My old habits turned it into numbers without my asking. The chakra a climb cost went up with your weight and the height, and down with your efficiency, and a beginner’s efficiency was terrible. Fog would make it worse, because moisture got into the helix and thinned it. Even a heartbeat out of rhythm could break the flow.

In the margin, in a quicker hand, Father had added a note:

Study every fall. Correct the helix. Climb again.

It took me more than two hours to get through it all, checking each diagram against the text until I could almost feel the spiral tugging at my soles. By then the sun had climbed and burned off some of the fog, and the forest had gone soft and green around me. On paper the theory was solid, and it kept leading me to new questions. Would stone need a different calibration from bark? Could the helix be reversed one day, suction turned into push, so that a person could stand on water?

That could wait. I rolled up the scroll, tucked it inside my tunic and walked to the oak.

First attempt. I sent chakra to my feet, pictured the helix turning inward and set my right foot on the trunk. It slid straight off, and the bark rasped across my sole.

Second attempt. More chakra. This time my foot stuck hard, much too hard, and when I shifted my weight to bring the other foot up, the bark cracked under me. A piece broke away and I went over backward. I landed flat on my back in the grass and lay there for a moment, waiting for my lungs to remember what they were for.

“Balance,” I told the sky.

Third attempt. One step, and it held for three seconds. Two steps, and my body tipped out until I was horizontal, my stomach locked to keep me straight and my whole weight hanging from two small patches of sole. Three steps. The bark held. Then the next pulse came a fraction late, and I slipped and came down with my arms flailing.

After that, the hours turned into a loop. Climb, slip, fall, get up. One step, two, a moment where everything felt right, then the slide. The angle didn’t forgive anything. The damp made the bark slick, and the helix needed constant adjusting to compensate. If I leaned on my heels, I tipped backward. If I didn’t trust my toes, my feet slid out from under me.

Sweat ran into my eyes and stung. Bruises came up on my arms where I caught myself, and the scrapes from the bark burned every time I wiped my face. My reserves drained and refilled, drained and refilled. They came back quickly, and I spent them as fast as they came.

At some point I sat down against the trunk with the scroll open on my knees. Its paper was smudged with dirt from my fingers now.

“What am I doing wrong?” I asked it.

The flow might have been uneven, or my reserves too thin for the angle. The scroll made it all sound methodical, a sequence to follow, but on the trunk it was chaos. The chakra needed a hundred small corrections. What the climb wanted was a rhythm that shifted with every groove in the bark and every movement of my hips. Body, chakra and bark had to agree at the same instant, and the moment one of them didn’t, gravity had me.

By evening I was exhausted, my vision blurred with sweat. On one of the last attempts, though, something finally worked. Three steps, then a pause to breathe, with the helix pulsing exactly right and the bark firm under my feet. Then the fall.

Three steps and a breath was more than I’d had that morning.

I sat at the foot of the oak while the light went and the fog came back in, going over it. Maybe the helix needed to be tighter. Maybe I needed to think less. The forest was dark before I had an answer.