Fire Release: Fire Dragon Flame Bullet, a high-ranking B-rank Fire Release Ninjutsu. After the Third Hokage had shown Hanyu the technique's immense power and explained the jutsu, its Hand Seals, and the flow of chakra as it was performed, he turned around and left with a flourish.
After witnessing a new jutsu, the Water Release ninja Hanyu Yu immediately decided to transition into a dual Water and Fire Release ninja.
He focused his chakra as the Third Hokage had taught him, formed the Hand Seals, and performed the jutsu. Then...
He failed.
Well, that was only to be expected. To use Fire Release Ninjutsu, he first had to produce enough fire-nature chakra in his body. Without that prerequisite, could he really expect to learn Fire Release just by forming Hand Seals? There was no way he'd succeed.
After several futile attempts, Hanyu finally realized he had to start with the basics. He pinched the Chakra Paper between his fingers, conjured images of heat, flames, and explosions in his mind, then sent chakra surging toward his fingertips.
He was trying to change his chakra into fire-nature chakra, but only after trying it himself did he realize that changing chakra's nature wasn't so simple.
At first, he had only been trying because he was curious and excited about the new jutsu. But then Hanyu got completely caught up in it... It was like playing a video game. Some people would give up as soon as they got stuck, either quitting for good or deciding to try again another time. But others just had to beat that level before they could stop. If they didn't succeed, they simply couldn't sleep.
With each attempt and failure, Hanyu dug himself deeper into a rut... Impatience was clearly a bad mindset, but people caught up in it often didn't realize it.
From that perspective, the Third Hokage hadn't come to help him train. He had come to disrupt his training.
As time slipped into the evening, Hanyu's training still hadn't stopped. He downed several secret pills in quick succession, and their effects kept replenishing his chakra.
Well, if he didn't succeed, he had no intention of going back to his home... He would stay here all night.
Still, effort brought rewards. Even clumsy effort could earn a meager reward. By the early hours of the morning, flames finally flickered at Hanyu's fingertips.
The faint flames stood out all the more in the night.
Early the next morning, Sanshao learned that Hanyu hadn't returned all night and hurried to the training ground. There, she found him lying on the ground like a corpse.
On a cold, quiet morning, a disheveled young man lay on the chilly ground in an empty training field. The sight looked troubling, to say the least.
"Hanyu, are you all right?" Seeing him like that, Sanshao hurried over and crouched beside him. Then she heard a faint snore.
Hearing someone call his name, Hanyu quickly woke up. When he opened his eyes and saw Sanshao's worried expression, he immediately got to his feet. "Teacher Sanshao, there's a huge problem. No... I'm fine, but I've got a huge problem."
"..."
Sanshao was speechless. He was being a little incoherent. "I know. Sarutobi taught you some other jutsu, didn't he? I've already given him a stern warning. He won't dare do that again."
No teacher liked people who randomly taught their students all sorts of irrelevant things—not even the Hokage.
"The Third Hokage did teach me a Fire Release jutsu, but although my problem started with that jutsu, the jutsu itself isn't the problem... It's hard to explain. I'll just show you." What had happened to Hanyu was difficult to put into words, so he decided to demonstrate it instead.
"Ox-Snake-Rabbit-Rat-Pig-Rooster. These are the Hand Seals for Water Dragon Bullet."
"Ram-Horse-Serpent-Dragon-Rat-Ox-Tiger. These are the Hand Seals for the Fire Release: Fire Dragon Flame Bullet the Hokage taught me yesterday."
Hanyu was only forming the Hand Seals, not drawing on his chakra, but now he was about to perform the jutsu.
"Ram-Horse-Serpent-Dragon-Rat (Fire Release Seal)-Ox (Fire Release Seal, Water Release Seal)-Snake-Rabbit-Rat-Pig-Rooster (Water Release Seal)-Tiger (Fire Release Seal)."
As he finished the sequence, abundant moisture and a burst of hot air gathered on either side of Hanyu's body. The swirling currents of Water Release and the fiery whirlwinds converged, then erupted at once.
Water Release: Water Dragon Bullet and Fire Release: Fire Dragon Flame Bullet—he released them simultaneously.
The two jutsu, whose natures were at odds, shot toward the open air more than ten meters away and collided. Billowing steam instantly shrouded the entire training ground.
"What... is this?" Sanshao stared at the scene before her in disbelief. It defied all common sense.
"I guess... it's a pretty serious problem, right?" Hanyu said.
It wasn't simply that he had released two jutsu at the same time. First, he had combined the Hand Seals for Fire Release and Water Release, using one seal in common: the Ox Seal, which was used for both Water Dragon Bullet and Fire Dragon Flame Bullet. So instead of the thirteen seals the two jutsu normally required, he had performed them with just twelve.
More importantly, he had used chakra-based jutsu of two different natures at the same time...
As long as a ninja wasn't using clones to distribute their chakra, they could only perform one nature transformation at a time and release one type of ninjutsu, no matter how many chakra natures they could use in total. Even with combination jutsu, they had to perform one jutsu first, then the other.
In another case, using Hanyu as an example, if he used the Water Clone Technique and then had his water clone use Fire Release, that still wouldn't break the rule... The process of a clone performing a jutsu went like this: first, the original transformed his chakra into Water Release and created a water clone. The water clone then had the properties of a human body and served as a vessel. Next, the original transferred some of his non-elemental chakra to the clone. Finally, the clone used that chakra, transformed it into fire-nature chakra, and performed Fire Release.
Producing chakra with multiple natures in the body at the same time wasn't impossible, but wouldn't that mean...
"Kekkei Genkai?" Sanshao immediately guessed, then rejected the idea. "No, if it were a Kekkei Genkai, what you just released wouldn't have been Fire Release and Water Release. It would have been Boil Release."
Water Release and Fire Release were inferior to Boil Release in both the intensity of their chakra natures and the damage they inflicted after being used. Yet what Hanyu was doing now was, in a sense, even rarer and more incredible than Boil Release.
Setting aside whether water-nature and fire-nature chakra could be produced at the same time, even if they couldn't, why hadn't they combined into Boil Release when they were produced together?
Water-nature chakra → Water Release; fire-nature chakra → Fire Release; water-nature chakra + fire-nature chakra → Boil Release; Fire Release + Water Release ≠ Boil Release. If the two types of chakra hadn't combined inside his body, then of course Boil Release wouldn't appear after he performed Water Release and Fire Release.
"Can you use this way of forming Hand Seals with jutsu of the same nature, too?" Setting aside the issue of chakra nature transformation for now, Sanshao asked.
"Yeah. In fact, since jutsu of the same nature share more Hand Seals, it's even more convenient." Hanyu had already tested it the previous night, after accidentally discovering that he could do this.
His way of forming Hand Seals was hard to understand. For example, if three jutsu used the seals Dragon-Snake-Horse, Snake-Horse-Ram, and Horse-Ram-Monkey, they would normally require nine seals in total. But using Hanyu's method, he could perform them with just five: "Dragon-Snake-Horse-Ram-Monkey."
That meant his Hand Seal efficiency was almost twice the normal rate, and that efficiency could directly translate into combat power.
"How can you do that?" Sanshao murmured to herself. She couldn't understand how Hanyu was capable of it.
It was beyond the common sense of a ninja.
Faced with her question, Hanyu gave her an answer he'd picked up somewhere else. It meant nothing and sounded incredibly irritating, but it could shut other people up:
"Who knows? I just kept practicing, and then I could do it."
Hanyu didn't know why he could do things like this, but he knew that just as the First Hokage had Wood Release, the Second had Flying Thunder God, the Uchiha had the Sharingan, and the Hatake had their swordsmanship, he had found his own...
place as a ninja.
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