"Chirp... chirp..."
"Tweet... tweet tweet tweet..."
With the first rays of morning sunlight, the chirping of birds drifted in through the window and reached Chiba's ears as he slept with his eyes closed.
Then, guided by his biological clock, Chiba slowly opened his eyes.
I stayed up a little too late yesterday...
After opening his eyes, Chiba quickly woke up and slowly sat up. But before long, a faint drowsiness washed over him.
Clearly, he had gone to bed a little late yesterday and still had not fully woken up.
Last night, after discovering that fusion pattern integrated into Sealing Jutsu and used as a foundational formula to combine and structure various Sealing Jutsu Formulas, Chiba had begun practicing it.
Fortunately, that fusion pattern was only a first-level fusion pattern and required the fusion of only two pattern characters. After trying it a few times, Chiba also figured out why this first-level fusion pattern, which was not recorded in the Third Hokage's Curse Mark Jutsu scroll, had appeared.
The appearance of this first-level fusion pattern could be considered one of Chiba's mistakes. He had mixed up one of the two pattern characters and fused them using a combination method absent from the Third Hokage's Curse Mark Jutsu. After all, the Third Hokage's Curse Mark Jutsu scroll merely contained examples; it did not include every possible combination. They were simply exercises the Third Hokage believed would allow one to master Curse Mark Jutsu more quickly.
A combination not listed there did not mean it was necessarily ineffective.
After finding the combination for that first-level fusion pattern and practicing it several times to confirm that he could fuse it successfully one hundred percent of the time, Chiba did not begin researching how to incorporate it into Sealing Jutsu. Instead, he continued practicing