[Hōzuki Keneō]

If there was one thing Ken had managed to learn about himself in the past year of him being allowed to live alone without any oversight, it was that he was actually quite capable of keeping a clean ship, so to say. His living room was always nice and tidy in case some uninvited guest showed up. His bedroom was equally spotless, though he made less of an effort there as it was less of a communal space as much as it was just for himself whenever he was tired. Meanwhile, his pantry was always ordered in a way that indicated clearly to him which food was freshest and which needed to be cooked before it reached its expiration date whenever he opened the door.

It was the sort of thing that just made sure he would not run the risk of food poisoning, as such a thing would severely hinder his ability to make the most out of his day. If he was attached to his toilet all day, it made it very difficult for him to go out and train or take part in a mission, meaning it wasn't so much the kind of thing he did solely to ensure that he looked after his own health but rather something he did so he would not fall behind on his training. But his daily and weekly cleaning and ordering activities did not end there, as he also had a hedge that required tending to once a week, fish that needed feeding in a pond that needed cleaning as well as a few bonsai trees that needed trimming.

[Hōzuki Keneō]

In all honesty, it wasn't even that much of an issue to clean his own home as it meant that those who looked at it from the outside were given the idea that Ken was taking care of himself exceedingly well, which kept the number of visitors to a minimum. Which was honestly exactly the way he liked it. While he wasn't a social recluse, he did care greatly about the free time he had and how he got to spend it, which was somewhat difficult when there was another person in the room that needed attention. Realizing how he made that sound in his head, Ken shook the thought and continued his musings and pondering. Because quite recently, he and his clams had cleaned up an entire beach together, and not just what was in sight.

They had gone above and beyond to clean out what was sitting on top of the beach, as well as a large amount of what had ended up getting blown into the waters and sank to the bottom. With him cleaning the beach and his clams dragging junk out of the water for him to then add to the pile, they had done what he believed could only be described as a job well done and exceeding expectations. And while he would receive no praise for it as all of that junk would likely be right back there after a few weeks of warm and sunny weather, at least he knew that if he hadn't done his job right, there would be whole piles of junk just stacking up on land and clumping together in the waters, thus posing a health risk to both the citizens in the area as well as to the wildlife that called the place home.

[Hōzuki Keneō]

So to say that Ken was someone who enjoyed cleaning, that would not be entirely accurate. Rather if the point were switched to whether or not he could see the value in keeping things nice and tidy, that was where he could find a point of agreement. And quite frankly, it was for that reason that he was not entirely against taking on a mission that he would normally have considered to be beneath his level of skill, as well as his skillset. His abilities were best utilized by doing what a shinobi was supposed to be doing, which was going around protecting cargo, keeping an eye on the village gates, going out to find missing children from questionable locations or checking the border for potential interlopers or escapees.

That was honestly what he felt comfortable with, as he was by far the most happy when he got to do what he had signed up for when he enrolled into the academy. That, and he had a growing list of people he would be letting down if he wouldn't make the most out of his career as a shinobi, a list including both the living and the dead. But for just this once, Ken was fine with lending himself to something he considered to be a fairly admirable task, albeit one which he imagined should have been passed down to janitors rather than actual shinobi. Cleaning the academy building did seem like it was a janitorial task after all, though he imagined that maybe the person that usually handled it might have fallen ill or something.

[Hōzuki Keneō]

Whatever the case, he had already signed off on the mission, so he would be seeing it through all the way to the end. And luckily for him, he had the techniques required to clean a space, even though that was not exactly what they had originally been developed for. But part of being a ninja included being able to think on the fly and come up with more unorthodox uses for that which they had learned. There was nothing worse than a static shinobi that was incapable of adapting to what unfurled right in front of them, as not being able to adjust and adapt essentially meant that one was set up for dying. And in many ways, that was what he had assumed had happened to Taiso, a shinobi that refused to learn offensive techniques.

Wanting to bring laughter and joy to the world was one thing, but only being able to protect yourself to a certain degree was a liability. One which Ken had hoped he would have been able to see at some point, though now he no longer needed to. Ninjutsu was, after all, wasted on the dead. But Ken was not going to make that mistake. He was going to keep advancing himself as a shinobi by improving upon the fundamentals before improving upon the improvements. That was the only way he knew how to make himself useful the most, as well as it being the way he enjoyed to spend his time. He wasn't raised on games and playing outdoors, he had been raised to become a shinobi, or as Taiso had called it: a willing tool for the village.

[Hōzuki Keneō]

While Ken did not consider himself a tool, he did realise that his clan's abilities mixed with his own aptitude for learning, developing and adapting had made him into a weapon. The kind of weapon that if honed properly would be capable of killing just about anyone it was set loose upon. But that was not all that he wanted to people. He wanted to work hard and become strong so that he could help people, whether that was by keeping drugs off of the streets, ensuring said streets remained clean, by fending off and killing hostile threats if the situation called for it or any combination of the aforementioned. But right now, the goal was something a bit different.

As he arrived at the Academy building, the young Hozuki took a look around the place, only to find that it had hardly changed during the short time in which he had been away since graduating. During the time he had spent away, he had already managed to complete over ten missions, with the majority of those being C ranks, which was something he was quite proud of. And even though he had not been out of the Academy for all that long, he believed that up until this point, he had been doing right by the version of him that was working hard as a student trying to become a full fledged shinobi of the mist. But now he was back, and he actually had a job that needed to be done.

[Hōzuki Keneō]

Going up to one of the classrooms, it wasn't all that hard to tell why they needed someone to clean the place, even though it remained unclear to him why a shinobi had to be the one to do it. But at the end of the day, this was something he was going to be getting paid for, and it would be considered as another completed D rank mission for on his sheet, all things he could live with. As it were, he still had no idea how many missions he would need to complete in order to be considered viable for the Chuunin exams, which had a date and location he was still unsure of at this point in time. But just because it was all guesswork at this point did not mean that he had the luxury of just sitting down and waiting for it to become clear.

No, he would need to keep pushing himself by continuing his training regiment, which he had recently upscaled by a considerable margin. That, and he needed to keep taking on and completing missions to get into the exams. So it was time to make a plan as to how he was going to go about cleaning the place, which would start with a little bit of recon to get an idea of exactly what he would need to clean up and what was already in a proper enough state to just leave as it was. In one of the rooms, there were still various shuriken and kunai lodged into target dummies, practice swords just seemingly dropped into a corner after the exercise was over while in another room, the text books were just laying wherever they had been left once class was over.

[Hōzuki Keneō]

Getting an impression as to the current state of things, as well as remembering the state of what things had been before due to having lived it, he decided upon the first room to start on. Though he would not be doing all of this by himself, while at the same time doing all of it by himself. Through the application of water clones, Ken managed to make his way through a room relatively quickly as each of them possessed the same thought processes as the original. And since thinking was more or less his thing, it didn't take long for one of them to adjust to what one of the other was doing, rather than just filling out a redundant position and doing work that was honestly already seen to, or would be seen to in the next few seconds.

Knowing quite well what the interior was like when he was still a student here, he knew where to put most of the books without accidentally putting multiple books into the same desk. He knew where to put the training projectiles and swords, and he had plenty of access to water when it came time to mop the floors and take care of cleaning the windows properly. Making for a rather stellar team of what was essentially just the same person copied several times over, the thrown projectiles were placed back in their racks, the wooden swords were put back into a tall basket with the handles pointed up and the floor was taken care of by means of broom. And with that, the practice room was handled in a jiffy.

[Hōzuki Keneō]

That was, aside from the fact that it still needed to be taken care of by a wet mop so the leftover dirt that remained after taking care of it with a broom, as there was always some of it pushing through the bristles. By causing one of the water clones to pop, a fair quantity of water fell onto the floors, allowing Ken and the remaining clones to start handling the floor with a couple of mops. While some of them did the work here, one of the clones that did not have a mop on their own went into the room next door as he had nothing he could do where he was. This was the place where the text books had to be ordened up properly and put into their corresponding space.

Since it was impossible to tell exactly which book belonged to which slot, the only thing he could really do was to open up all of the spaces to see which books were already stored away there. From that point on, he could tell by the covers which book had already been put in and which were still needing to be added. Again, it was impossible to know which belonged to which person, though the fact that these were all text books and required no writing inside of the covers meant that it could be argued that it did not matter which belonged to whom. Sure, one of the covers might have been a bit more ragged than the other, though they were all there by the end of the sorting session.

[Hōzuki Keneō]

Closing all of the drawers after he had made sure that they were all where they needed to be, it seemed that Ken and his clones had managed to catch up with this particular one, which could only mean that they had finalized their mopping duties in the practice room they had been assigned to. Believing this particular clone had done his job, Ken dispelled it, allowing it to break back down into water so that it could be used to clean the floor of the study. And so it was that yet another space was thuroughly cleaned after all of the chairs had been put on top of the tables, making it ready for the next day of studying for the next generation of shinobi.

Continuing to make his rounds through the hallways after establishing which rooms had already been plenty clean and which had already been cleaned by his own hand, the final thing he did was to clean all of the windows and mirrors. While it wasn't exactly needed, he felt like it was odd to do everything but leave the glasswork. It simply wasn't how he was raised, and it wasn't how he would be doing things in his own home either, so it made no sense for him to start cutting corners while technically being on the job. Therefore he wouldn't. Spending little over two hours to get every assigned room cleaned and doing slightly more than had been requested, Ken locked up behind him.

[Hōzuki Keneō]

Dispelling the remaining clones only after he had gotten outside and wouldn't risk flooding the hallway and having to go at it with a mop and bucket a second time, the boy slowly began making his way back home. For however much it was worth, he hoped that the next batch of aspiring shinobi would not turn out the way Taiso had, which was dead over some meaningless mission that should never have been handled by a single Genin. It was honestly a shame that very few would ever really know the story of the Genin, like how he had planned to make the world into a place where people could laugh and smile together instead of always being at odds.

But just as Ken had told him at the time when he first presented his ideals to him, it was the kind of goal that could never be made a reality. The sheer amount of different cultures and interests having to be served across the continent and beyond meant that finding a true middle ground was something that was next to impossble to make happen. That, and there would always be age-old grudges held between members of one clan or another, or simply fueds between two or more villages that demanded blood. And if there was one thing Ken had grown accustomed to, it was the idea of an 'eye for an eye' still being very much a thing of the present and not of the past.

[Hōzuki Keneō]

By the time he got back home, one of the first things he would see once he got into the living room was the mask his teammate had worn. Albeit a distorted version of what it once was with the damage done to it at the time of his death causing the smile to become crooked and shattered, very little had been done to it aside from cleaning off the blood, dirt and grime. It was still a living room and a place where he ate, so he didn't want that sort of thing tracked into his otherwise spotless home. Regardless, the broken masked served as a reminder that the person who had killed its owner was still out there, and that Ken could not afford to let up on his training.

Even when the mission was something as silly as doing the work of a janitor while in fact being a trained shinobi, he needed to seize every opportunity as it came to him to prove that he was ready for the Chuunin exams. And if he was to ever be assigned to a mission that involved finding and bringing the killer to justice, it meant that he would need to rank himself up as fast as he possibly could. No one in their right mind would assign a Genin to a mission that, by all intents and purposes would end up being classified as a B rank, what with how another Genin had already ended up dying. So with that thought in mind, Ken went into the kitchen to get himself something to eat before he'd hit the showers and call it a day.