Had Heaven Not Given Birth to Me, Jiraiya, the Sage Path Would Have Been Dark as Night for All Eternity!

By evenly blending one's own spiritual energy and cellular energy with the natural energy dispersed throughout the world in a 1:1:1 ratio, one could form an entirely new kind of energy within the body. This energy was known as "sage chakra."

The state in which one could use sage chakra was called Sage Mode.

Under Sage Mode, a shinobi's vitality, offensive and defensive capabilities, and sensory abilities would all be comprehensively enhanced. The power of ninjutsu, taijutsu, and genjutsu performed with sage chakra would also be significantly strengthened.

Simply put, activating Sage Mode would directly raise the user's strength by an entire level.

With Jiraiya's current strength, coupled with the boost from Sage Mode, he would likely be qualified to contend for the title of the strongest person in the Shinobi World.

Of course, following the principle that the stronger a technique was, the more restrictions its cultivation carried, Sage Mode was naturally extremely difficult to master.

And the hardest part was obtaining the method to cultivate Sage Mode.

Looking across the thousands of years of Shinobi World history, only two humans before Jiraiya had been clearly recorded as capable of using Sage Mode.

Otsutsuki Hagoromo, the Sage of Six Paths, and Senju Hashirama, the First Hokage.

Yet neither of them had passed down the method for cultivating Sage Mode.

Thus, only three places in the world possessed Sage Mode: the so-called Three Great Sage Regions—Mount Myōboku, Ryūchi Cave, and Shikkotsu Forest.

These places were themselves extremely difficult to find, so ninety-nine percent of shinobi had already been eliminated at the stage of obtaining the cultivation method.

The second obstacle in cultivating Sage Mode was sensing the natural energy drifting between heaven and earth.

Promising cultivators would receive auxiliary tools such as toad oil. This stage was not especially difficult,