After the year's evaluation, when Iruka took Naruto aside and asked whether he wanted to be transferred to an upper-level class, he answered 'yes' without a second's hesitation. Instead of being in the top of his class, as he was now, he would probably have to return to being in the bottom-most rung again. But Naruto didn't mind. He knew that with patience and hard-work, his teachers would guide him once more.
"I'm glad it worked out," was Iruka's last remark to Naruto, though he didn't quite understand what the chūnin meant.
That winter, Naruto spent even more time in the Archives than before, determined to get an early start on his studies. And finally when springtime came and the Academy opened again, he found himself standing before yet another class of strange faces that looked back at him with sullen eyes. Steeling himself with a blank look, he prepared himself for yet another year of insufferable snickering and taunting.
However, to his surprise, his new classmates were slightly different. They were older than him, being nine or ten years old, and he found that to some extent, they had grown out of the ignorant cruelty of their childhood. They were at the age when they began to think for themselves instead of blindly following what their parents told them to. But at the same time, nobody approached him. Naruto wasn't an outsider, but he wasn't one of them. He was just...something that sat beside them in their classroom and sparred with them outside.
Well, that was fine with Naruto. He'd gotten along just fine without any friends in his first class, and the newfound peace in his current class was more than enough for him. He had his teachers in the Archives. They taught him and kept him company. And even more than that, they were his friends, and Naruto didn't have to hide anything from them.
Naruto had two secrets that he'd never told anyone else: The first was that he felt two types of chakra running through his body. Of course he couldn't see any of it, but if he had to describe them in terms of how they felt, he'd say the first one felt yellow, and that the second felt red.
He had never tried directly using the second chakra; he'd found out early on that so long as he focused on his yellow chakra, he could easily direct it to gather wherever he wanted. The red chakra was much wilder and much more stubborn, and sometimes disrupted his chakra, making his ninjutsu fail. After some deliberation and several headaches, he had put aside his red chakra, focusing instead on controlling his yellow chakra.
The second secret was that when he nudged his red chakra, a curious black seal appeared on his abdomen. It looked similar to the symbol on the shoulders of the ninja uniform, with squiggly lines coming out like the rays of a sun, but there wasn't much more Naruto could decipher about it. After all, in the Academy, they hadn't learned anything beyond the bare bones of fūinjutsu, let alone anything about putting seals on a person.
The implications of there being a seal on his body were initially chilling; why was it there, who had put it there, and what was it sealing? Was it perhaps the source of his red chakra? To his disappointment, there was nothing useful on the subject of advanced fūinjutsu in the Archives, and when he tried to reason it out in his mind, all it did was give him a headache.
Thinking about it rationally, Naruto would have expected himself to do everything that he could to figure out the seal. And yet, strangely enough, he felt no compulsion to do so. On the contrary, he found the topic of the seal even slipping from his mind, sometimes to the point that he had to stop and think about what he was looking for in the Archives. It was a strange thing. But aside from the occasional headache, it didn't seem to affect him in any tangibly negative manner – nor was there anyone he could've asked about it in the first place.
In the end, after several weeks of frustration, he put it aside for good and stopped thinking about it at all.
And so, the months passed. Every morning, Naruto woke up early and, after his routine sets of pushups and pull-ups, as recommended by a body-training scroll, he practiced building up chakra by walking up the walls of his apartment. He also began to spend his mornings meditating and concentrating on feeling the flow of his chakra running through his body.
It was hard to believe that there had once been a time when he didn't know what chakra was: It was the spirit of his very self circulating throughout his body.
In the afternoons, Naruto attended the Academy and learned about chakra and hand seals, mastering basic techniques. He studied how to set traps, how to disguise his own presence, and how to eliminate as much sound as possible from his movements.
He learned how to detonate explosive tags remotely with chakra, and could release himself from all basic genjutsu. He was smaller than everyone else in his class so he didn't win quite as easily as he had before, but he made sure none of his losses were in vain. Instead, he learned how to weave in and out to confuse your opponent, and how to use his opponents' movements and body weight against them.
And in the evenings, Naruto hurried to meet his teachers and friends in the Archive Library. In return for his loyalty, they granted to him their secrets, teaching him the lore of how jutsu worked, of how one used hand seals to manipulate how much chakra one used to fuel a technique. He learned that while the Academy taught them the traditional way to use seals and jutsu, a true master of ninjutsu could perform a complex jutsu with just a single hand seal.
Naruto had become such a frequent visitor at the Archives, that eventually, the chūnin had stopped paying such close attention to him. He didn't want to lose their trust, but sometimes when he thought it was safe, he slipped out of the Academy section and went into the higher level jutsu shelves.
It was there that he discovered that a technique called the Kage Bunshin (Shadow clone technique) existed, which's usefulness far outstripped that of the simpler version they learned in the Academy. Determined to master it, he slipped it back with him into the Academy section. Then, he quickly read through the instructions, hiding it behind a scroll about the applications of water jutsu in agriculture.
Reading through it, it became readily apparent as to the reason why they didn't teach it at the Academy: Unlike the illusionary clones, the shadow clones took up substantially more chakra – it was an amount that the typical person couldn't afford to expend.
However, in his experimentations with his different types of chakra, Naruto had come to realize that his chakra reserves far exceeded that of any ordinary ninja's levels. And so, with extensive practice in the forest, he was eventually able to successfully summon several shadow clones.
Furthering his studies, he also began to read about chakra theory. He read about chakra affinity, and from a test with special chakra paper, learned that he had affinity for the wind element. From then on, following the rather cryptic diagrams provided in the scrolls, he began to experiment with molding his yellow chakra, observing how its properties changed depending on how he manipulated it.
When Naruto first succeeded in changing the form of his chakra into being as sharp and thin as possible, and then released it, he found himself being blasted off of his feet as a strong gust of wind exploded in the area around him. Though it was exhausting, it was also exhilarating, and Naruto resolved to add elemental manipulation to his daily exercises, determined to master it.
In this manner, three years slowly passed.
When Naruto was ten, he graduated from the Academy at the top of his class and was put into Team 7 with two other genins: A girl named Mayu Kamizuki and a boy named Rai Hagane.
Mayu, a small forgettable girl with brown pig-tails, was timid and seemed entirely too afraid of Naruto to talk in his presence. Instead, she hid behind their other teammate Rai, a tan dark-haired boy whose face was somewhat marred by a scar that ran strikingly across his left cheek. Neither seemed altogether pleased about being in the same group as the village pariah.
Their jōnin teacher was the renowned shinobi 'Copy Ninja Kakashi.'
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