The First Puppet: "Spider"

Shaye's two years at the academy and nearly frenzied self-study had given him an astonishing reserve of theoretical knowledge, but his body remained his greatest shackle. Extracting chakra was like drawing water from an almost dry well; each day, he gained only a negligible trace.

Yet in his hands, that trace of chakra shone in a different light.

He had long since memorized Elder Chiyo's foundational Puppet Technique scroll from cover to cover. Its most difficult core was the condensation and control of Chakra Threads. This required finely releasing chakra from the fingertips, condensing it into invisible threads, and maintaining their stability and resilience in order to control puppets from afar.

For most beginners, this was an insurmountable hurdle. Releasing chakra externally was difficult enough, and maintaining its form required extraordinary control. Many apprentices needed months or even years just to barely form a single unstable thread.

But for Shaye, this was precisely his absolute domain!

The freakish chakra control honed by extreme conditions displayed terrifying results at this moment. With barely any effort, on his first attempt, he precisely guided the faint trace of chakra within him to his fingertips. With a slight thought, an invisible Chakra Thread, incomparably clear to his senses, shot out like silk and steadily connected to a small wooden block several meters away.

He curled his fingers slightly, and the wooden block moved with them as though it were an extension of his limbs. The Chakra Thread was tough and stable, consumed almost no chakra, and flawlessly carried out his every command.

"Just as I thought..." Shaye watched the moving block, understanding gleaming in his dark eyes. "For puppet control, the 'quality' of chakra—control precision—is far more important than its 'quantity.'" This discovery greatly boosted his confidence.

He had mastered the core technique. Next came true creation!

He had long since ceased to be satisfied with making individual parts. What he truly desired was a complete creation that could move. Combining everything he had learned—puppet structure, basic runes, the restrictive principles of Sealing Technique, and the mechanical transmission and biomimicry knowledge from his previous life—a concept gradually took shape in his mind.

He wanted to create a scouting puppet. Given his pitifully low chakra reserves, it had to be small, light, consume very little energy, and possess high mobility and concealment.

He recalled the various small robots he had seen in his previous life, as well as the efficient movement patterns found in nature. In the end, he settled on the perfect biomimetic model—a spider.

Eight legs provided excellent stability and obstacle-crossing ability. Its low profile made it easy to hide, while arthropod movement patterns were relatively efficient in their energy use.

The blueprint rapidly took shape in his mind. Rather than using precious chakra-conducting metal, he used only the most ordinary wooden scraps from the Maintenance Unit along with a small number of metal parts. For the energy core, he designed an extremely tiny core carved from discarded chakra-metal fragments with basic energy-gathering runes. It was inefficient, but its advantage was that it could be activated with only the tiniest amount of chakra, then slowly absorb faint free energy from the natural environment to maintain minimal standby operation. This inspiration partly came from what Bunpuku had mentioned about natural energy and Shukaku's complaints.

For the control system, he abandoned complex multi-thread control, which his current chakra reserves could not support anyway. Instead, he adopted a more ingenious method: one Chakra Thread connected to the main core, sending simple pulse commands. Inside the puppet, the most basic mechanical structures—levers, catches, and tiny springs—would convert those pulses into specific movements such as "forward," "turn," and "stop." This was equivalent to preloading part of the "intelligence" into the mechanical structure, greatly reducing the consumption and difficulty of real-time control.

Over the following days, Shaye spent all his free time in the corner of the Maintenance Unit and at his little desk. Using a small saw, file, and carving needle, he polished and assembled everything bit by bit. His fingers were often cut by the tools, but he did not care. He would barely treat the wounds with the Healing Technique he had only just learned and was still terribly unfamiliar with, then immediately return to work.

His father, Shaliu, watched silently. Sometimes, at crucial moments, he handed him a more suitable tool or pointed out an issue with how a structure bore force, but he never interfered with the actual construction. As he watched the tiny eight-legged mechanical prototype of wood and metal gradually come to life in his son's hands, his eyes filled with unbelievable astonishment.

Finally, one evening as the sun set, Shaye completed the final assembly.

A palm-sized "Spider" rested quietly in his hand. Its eight legs were made of slender wooden rods and tiny joints, while its body was a rough round wooden box. It looked incredibly crude, even somewhat ugly.

Shaye took a deep breath and focused. From his fingertip, an invisible yet resilient Chakra Thread precisely connected to the receiving point on the "Spider's" back. He carefully injected a faint trace of chakra, activating the crude energy core.

Buzz...

A glow so faint it was nearly invisible flickered across the runes on the core. From within the "Spider's" body came the tiny clicking sound of mechanisms turning.

Shaye held his breath and sent a simple command through the Chakra Thread: "Forward."

The next second, the wooden "Spider's" eight legs began moving in a slightly stiff yet exceptionally steady rhythm. It crawled from his palm onto the table, nimbly climbed over a pen, then slipped through the gap beneath a book. Its movements perfectly imitated those of a real spider. It was slow, but astonishingly steady.

It worked!

Shaye's heart pounded with excitement. He tried controlling it to turn, stop, and even raise one front leg to touch a small paper ball... Every one of those simple commands was perfectly carried out by the little creation.

Though it had no offensive power, and its scouting ability was limited to "seeing wherever it could reach," while its range was strictly constrained by the length of the Chakra Thread, for a seven-year-old child with only a trace of chakra, this was undoubtedly a milestone miracle.

He had successfully used the most insignificant energy and the crudest materials, combining the knowledge of two worlds to grant "life" to an inanimate object!

Shaye watched the little "Spider" tirelessly crawling across the tabletop, his eyes shining brighter than ever. This was more than a puppet. It was the beginning of his dream, proof to this cruel world that even with a frail body, wisdom and creativity could still carve out a path to power!

He named it—"Spider."

(End of Chapter)