Black Belt WIP
In Kagemaru's ninja school the body is seen as a weak and soft thing which requires constant polishing until it reaches its ultimate hardness. In the school there are many specialities of martial artists but all of them focus on the very same concept of conquering the body's softness:
* sumo wrestlers turn themselves into huge unbreakable walls and the earth trembles when they step on it;
* warriors polish their muscles until their whole body is hard as rock and you'd break your finger trying to poke their muscles;
* spies are quite the opposite of warriors and wrestlers: they are tiny and you could poke them all you want, you could twist, stretch, fold, push, pull or do anything to their bodies and they'd take absolutely no damage from it.
Each way is very difficult and the masters carefully consider for every new pupil which of these directions the boy should take. The philosophy behind all of these ways is the same, conquering the body's softness. But the ways of training are fundamentally different.
However, the black belt is equally possible to obtain at the end of all of these three roads. By making himself the ideal wrestler, warrior or spy, the young man takes the annual tests until he's considered worthy of wearing the black belt, the sign of the highest rank for a student.