"You have no idea how scary you looked just now!!"
A little later, Karin complained to Wu Yu, still shaken. "I've never seen such a cold expression on your face—and your chakra turned—"
"Was it really that bad?" Wu Yu asked, amused, reaching to pull aside her collar. "Let me see how the wound is doing."
Karin pushed him away and said very seriously, "I'm not joking! It really was scary! Wu Yu, what on earth happened?"
Wu Yu thought for a moment, then told her about his attempt to imitate Jugo's Sage Transformation.
As Karin listened, her mouth slowly fell open. Dumbfounded, she said, "That's actually possible? Letting that much nature energy into your body doesn't kill you, and you can even—is that the true nature of cursed seal power?
"No wonder it feels like senjutsu chakra, yet always seems a little off!"
This was a perverse path!
Perverse-path senjutsu chakra!
Even with Karin's seemingly bottomless stamina and vitality, there was a limit to how much chakra she could extract within her chakra pathways over a given period.
That meant she could only use the maximum amount of her own chakra those pathways could hold to balance a fixed quantity of nature energy.
If she drew in more nature energy, she would still have plenty of stamina to convert into chakra—but she only had so many pathways, of a limited width. Unless she consumed the chakra she had already extracted, there was no room for more.
That was why, no matter how proficient someone became at Sage Mode, they could only extract one batch and use it before making another. They had to empty their pathways of that balanced senjutsu chakra before extracting chakra again, gathering nature energy again, balancing it again, and synthesizing fresh senjutsu chakra.
Even though