Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of What Defines Us

Requiem for the Rain

Chakra sensory was a rare and an incredibly valuable ability. When Mana sat down in a meditative position and relaxed her mind, reaching out for it, she felt excited about improving her control over it. It was something unlike any other skill, one could not just been train it until they had it, it had to be born with and even those with the ability within them possessed it to various degrees. Some sensors could have sensed kilometers around themselves, identified specific chakra signatures to people they have met in their lives, other peaked at rather unimpressive ranges, being barely able to sense chakra inside one room at their peak concentration.

There was never anything particularly special about Mana, even areas where she excelled such as genjutsu and prowess of martial arts focused on evasion and counterattacking solely anyone else could just train harder and match, or even walk further than the magician. Chakra sensory was different, it was something that could've made her special, valuable to any team that had her. It was new feeling, feeling of self-worth and belonging. It was an exciting feeling.

Every morning of the week Mana spent just sitting down and accessing the chakra sensory ability until it came up easier and easier. Now she no longer had to worry about a hostile team attacking her or trying to take out her friends, that certain feeling of comfort, if made more bitter by the urgency to master the ability to a useable degree within a week, made training chakra sensory simpler.

Mana had it all along, she has always seen those weird flares, those strange spacial images inside her. She just never quite knew what all of it meant before. To her it was just a flashy visualization of some mind processes, too complicated for her to understand completely. Whenever she tried meditating those same images went first, by now Mana knew that it was the Ego stage of meditation – a visual representation of her own body, beyond laid what Mana used to call the Omnes stage – now known as the chakra sensory part.

The first couple of mornings of the week there was unrest inside her body as the wounds gathered in the Forest of Death were not that quick to heal up, once Mana's chakra level shot back up to full, however, things started looking up and she finally noticed the usual spacial serenity inside of her body. Whenever she tried expanding the horizons of her mental reach outside of that pocket little universe, she entered what she now knew was chakra sensory – the ability to perceive everything else but her own self.

There were so many tests that Mana had to do every morning, testing the reach of the ability, trying to perceive the specifics of the chakra she was seeing. Trying to access the ability more easily. Mana's mother was a good representation of smaller chakra signatures, those somewhat representative of the ordinary villagers, it was useful when knowing what to filter out and exclude, so that the image was clearer and more attention could be given to the larger signatures. Konoha was full of these small signatures after all.

Initially her own father's signature scared her, it was like she was floating completely naked in this dark void, positioned right in front of a large booming star. The size of the thing was beyond anything Mana had seen before, she had sensed something similar before, but that was earlier – when she was using sensory by accident. Now that she sharpened her ability day by day, with many more days, weeks and months of training yet ahead, she was able to make out more about what previously was just a blurry massive ball of light.

With some more touch ups, with a bit of expansion of scales and zooming out, in a way, using her sensory, Mana finally managed getting used to floating in front of this chakra signature mentally. She also started feeling comfortable enough around it to feel up what made it different from others of the same size – the ninja that passed by her home on their day to day activities. Her father's star was less round, oval and squished from the side, almost like an egg in a way. The patterns of maroon colored flames that burst all over her father's star also had their own pattern. One Mana had gotten used to and memorized.