( 28- Year 8 AK )
Right after we met with the Hokage, we left the office and scattered. Shin wanted to get a headstart on possible ventures in Iwa his family could get a profit out of, Hana and the Haimaru brothers simply missed the kennels, and sensei was going to search for a friendly spar.
Whoever accepted was in for a lot of pain, no doubt. With a side dish of helpful suggestions that managed to sound extremely patronizing without Guy meaning it one bit.
Those were the reasons everyone gave. What I know for sure my teammates did, was find a bed and sleep for twelve hours straight. How do I know? Because I found myself the nearest park, recovered my sleeping bag and unrolled it on the grass.
I slept in the sunshine, over my sleeping bag, with my arms crossed behind my head. I probably was the image of relaxing, when I simply shut down, unable to stay awake a moment longer, and feeling the strain of the travel.
I had weathered it better than my teammates, but only because Shin was drunk, meaning that he probably had been struggling to keep his chakra flowing evenly from day one. And we simply put more time in our physical conditioning than Hana, who had to spend a lot of time in learning all the nuances to become a vet, not only a med nin.
And she insisted to become proficient in doton ninjutsu too. Along with that, the Inuzuka learned her family techniques, and working with her ninkens, took the bulk of the scouting job. So she always had a lot on her plate.
Even if she managed to somewhat keep up with the trick we discovered with muscle regeneration. None in my team was a pushover.
It made me think about how I could enhance my body in other ways. More limbs were out of the equation, they would mess up my balance and I would need to create a taijutsu style from scratch.
But Orochimaru was proof that one could do a lot of things to his own body. Even Konan from Akatsuki, the woman was able to become a cloud of slips of paper, for god's sake. But maybe eyes better equipped to see in the pitch darkness? Even if a tail would be cool in some way, mostly because it would freak out everyone.
I awoke in the middle of the afternoon, feeling stiff for the weight of the travel. I stretched myself and sealed my stuff away once more.
I reached a cheap hotel and checked in for the following week. It wasn't like I was going to leave any of my stuff around, I liked having all of my belongings on me, but a bathroom was nothing to scoff at. Not after the week I had passed.
I took a hard look at my clothes, which smelled by the way, and while they were not in tatters, I hadn't done them any favors during my training. I sighed. Shopping it is.
My most prized possession, and the only one that I couldn't replace, were the weights that Guy sensei had gifted us. They were inscribed with seals, exactly like the ones Lee's would one day wear.
I had two sets that circled my legs, and I moved them one day under the knee, one day above. Two smaller sets on my forearms, and a plaque that I brought on my back. It was a narrow thing that fitted in the upper half of my back, allowing me almost complete freedom of movement.
The following morning I had started a set of exercises at 4:00 am sharp, already in the training ground eleven. It wouldn't do to be late after all. If there was something that my team did not lack, it was endurance and the ability to quickly recover.
Training ground 11 had an abundance of water: from a waterfall that rumbled on a rocky cliff, a river broke into small streams that resolved themselves into ponds, puddles, and even a marsh, with its distinctive reeds, and sedges. The rest of the wet terrain was instead an actual swamp, with tall trees hiding the sky from view.
It can't be said that the higher-ups don't wish their ninjas to be anything but ready to fight everywhere. I drily noted. I sat down on a pond in what I esteemed was the rough center of the training ground.
The delicate control I was exercising on my chakra made the surface of the water as solid as stone. I started breathing slowly, the water rippling from time to time when my concentration faded. At first I simply thought about what I was hopefully going to learn.
Once I had the single Kage Bunshin down, if my chakra could handle it, I would try to figure out the multiple Kage bunshin part. But that wasn't really what I needed right away.
I knew that I had a normal-sized chakra pool, so I wouldn't be spamming more than a single clone anytime soon. What I knew from the manga was that every clone you created started with the half chakra of the original.
There was however a minimal requirement to create a Kage Bunshin, and that meant that one needed to have at least double that requirement in his chakra pool.
Sure, I could for a brief time open the gates to use more chakra than normal, but I didn't know what kind of effect it would have. After all the bunshin was made of pure chakra, so It didn't have eight gates.
It had to have chakra coils since otherwise, it wouldn't have been able to perform jutsus, but opening and closing the gates was not something one could do like a jutsu. It was more like knowing to move only a single muscle on the side of the nose.
I knew that the Kage Bunshin was far less complex than what such a scary jutsu deserved to be, since... well Naruto was an idiot. If he could figure it out at twelve from a scroll, I would bloody be able to do the same.
After what the position of the sun told me had been 4 hours, I was still alone. However, I had seen far too many movies of cranky mysterious masters of their art that assigned strange tasks to their students.
Being left to wait was far from the worst that could have happened. Besides, it was unlikely that the Sandaime himself would come, he probably had ordered some of the lower-ranked shinobi to come and give me a hand.
However, I truly hoped that I was going to be taught the Kage Bunshin. It was substantially different from the mental based. It probably carried within itself a far more heavy Yin component, maybe the ratio would even be closer to 50%.
But I wanted to try my Suiton: Rasengan. So whichever method they offered me to try it out without dying would be more than welcome.
Rooting myself at the moment, I let go of my future considerations and placed a hand on the surface of the water, pouring a silver of my chakra in the liquid.
I lifted my hand slightly, my fingertips still connected to the water below.
Tiny droplets of water rose in the air, floating aimlessly at the height of my shoulder. I could feel each one of them.
Because of that wisp of chakra in each of them, they were not simply connected to me, but my chakra was the droplets.
Following a gut instinct, I had them circle me, thinning and joining one with another, they formed a thread, invisible if not for a light sheen, less thick than ninja wire, and far more useful than it.
It spun in a circle around me, and it kept expanding, taking the necessary water from the damp environment, it soon reached a thirty meters radius.
The feel of it was a cross between trailing my fingers over the surfaces it met and what I imagined would a sonar feel if I had one in my head.
I let myself fall into the lull I found myself in during the travel from the border to Konoha. It had a marvelous effect: my attention was equally shared among regulating my breathing, the feedback from my line of water, the control I had to exercise to keep myself sitting on the pond, and the slow-flowing of the chakra in my gut.
I wasn't doing anything with it, it simply was twirling around my body with a steady rhythm. It was running through my veins along with my blood, and my body was in a perfectly balanced enhanced state.
Usually, when someone uses chakra to strengthen oneself, it tends to pool unevenly in the limbs, snapping like a coil upon impact.
Sure, the joints are always equally reinforced, it was stupid to throw a chakra enhanced punch only to dislocate your knees. Every hit made leverage somewhere after all.
I froze, going over my last thoughts with a confused frown marring my features. I had thought something that could be... my chakra flowed with my blood.
Suiton user always had one difficulty above all. Taking water out of thin air required either vast amounts of chakra or an outstanding control. I had some of the latter, but why put myself through such a struggle? The human body was 60% water.
A male adult had roughly five liters if blood running through his veins. A liter could be shed without risking death. And that was for civilians, a ninja, with enhanced regenerative abilities, without even talking about how I could use medical chakra to increase the blood production, would last much longer. Hell, even a blood pill.
It was a disgusting, but fascinating new perspective. Under this point of view, once I killed an enemy I could find a way to extract water from his body.
It couldn't be done before the death since their chakra would naturally oppose mine. Unless I synched myself with them like I do when I heal someone else. I thoughtfully considered.
I wonder if this is how Orochimaru got started. I distractedly commented. I lacked his natural sadism and obsession with red eyes, but the ability to think truly horrific things were there.
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