Chereads / A God at the Shinobi World / Chapter 5 - Planning for the future (part 1)

Chapter 5 - Planning for the future (part 1)

My previous life was quite complicated.

I was a hacker.

Not one of the good ones, more like a criminal call actually. I was a sinister digital terrorist who didn't care much about the world and just wanted profit and nothing else. I was scum and I admitted it. I was 23 years old before being completely obliterated by one of the assassins hired to kill me by my enemies and competitors. A headshot was an indulgence I appreciated as I wouldn't be able to withstand torture.

I was such a weak person.

Currently, I basically had the greatest potential for growth I could hope for in my wildest dreams. I was rich, beautiful, and free to quickly grow in power, whether as a ninja or as a god. Unfortunately potential was potential and not raw power. I could use some of the skills, but that was it. I didn't dominate everything and my child body wasn't able to withstand physical struggles with the experts of this world. Danzo, Orochimaru, Hiruzen, Obito, Nagato, Madara, Kaguya, Momoshiki, Ishiki, and every other alien that might invade this world in the future... I needed to get stronger soon.

But then I wake up in the body of a cute 4-year-old child with a net worth of tens of millions of Ryos in a world where Ryos won't save his life. With that in mind, I needed to start planning now what to do and what not to do. How to get stronger? How to increase my influence? How to develop my divinity?

The first idea I had was to create a mental palace like the ones that appeared in the Sherlock Holmes television series to protect my mind from blond intruders with perverted expressions. Believe it or not, such a technique was a very real and possible thing to do, even in my former world, and it was a very useful exercise in general... But what was a mental palace? It's a kind of imaginary construction in your mind that is based on a real location. If you can mentally see your room, you can build a memory palace to help you learn a new language, for example. In the mental palace, "stations" are places like a bedroom or living room, and the space between them is called "journey". When building the memory palace, you will leave objects, words and phrases at these stations and then retrieve them later when you visit the palace.

The memory palace technique is based on the fact that we are extremely good at remembering places we know. So, this palace works for any known place that you can easily visualize. It could be the interior of your home or perhaps the commute you take to school or work every day. This familiar place will be your guide to storing and remembering any kind of information.

The origin of the memory palace technique dates back to ancient Greece. In the past, having to memorize data was not optional because the information was not easily accessible.

Until the 19th century, paper was expensive, especially for the quantities needed to make a book. Also, many people could not read and write, so the ability and need to memorize and remember information was critical. All of this led to the development and improvement of memorization strategies, such as the mental palace.

The technique is said to have been developed in ancient Greece. The poet Simonides was reportedly hired to recite a poem praising a group of nobles at a banquet. After this presentation, Simonides would have left the hall and soon after the building collapsed, giving a tragic fate to the participants of that banquet.

It would have been Simonides who identified everyone who was in the place, accessing in his memory the names of those present based on their location at the table. This is believed to have been the embryo for the development of the mental palace technique.

I was supposed to pick a known location and draw a floor plan. It can be my home, school, company, among others. It can be any location, as long as you know it well enough to draw a floor plan and remember it in detail later. Next I must form a linear path through the floor plan. Do this before numbering your stations. Memory palaces work best when you don't cross your own path or lead to a dead end. Don't push every possible station into your first palace. Include obvious locations such as a bathroom, bedroom, living room, kitchen, as well as an entry point. It is recommended that you list these stations from top to bottom in linear order. This step is useful for testing purposes for your mental palace. Finally, I will review my palace: at this point, you should have:

•A drawn floor plan;

• A linear path drawn on the floor plan that does not intersect

• A starting and exit point from the mental castle;

•Numbered and identified stations.

Occlumency was asomething relatively different and difficult to explain. If only with the help of what was said in the movies and in the Harry Potter books, "Occlumency was the magic of closing the mind against legilimence. It was ancient and existed since medieval times. This could prevent legilimens from accessing or influencing someone's thoughts and feelings. A wizard or witch who practiced this art was known as an occlument." According to Snape's explanation, occlumency began when the wizard emptied his mind and let go of mundane emotions. Anger, sadness, pleasure...all these emotions would be easily exploited by a master legilimens if one didn't control them, almost like the eastern enlightened state, occlumency could be achieved first like this. But so far there have been no further explanations.

With that said, my current goal was to imagine a place of my own unrelated to something I know. Following the path of dozens of Harry Potter fics and occlumency I would creatively enhance my mental palace (the most creative I can be, actually) and establish a floating island that looked like what I imagine Asgard to be. So I'm going to outline a wide road, simulating the rainbow bridge, and then imagine the physical structures and people who will be my defenders of the mind. By then I had abandoned any pretense of a twenty-first-century mental palace. All I imagined was a place I could use to satisfy my basic protection needs and the perks I imagine having after completing such a project in my own mind.