An Unknown Sage Land

While Konoha was busily preparing a team to head to the Land of Swamps and search for Touma, Touma himself was leisurely soaking in a hot spring!

Earlier, to avoid Ibuse's keen sense of smell, he had deliberately run into the swamp himself.

Just as he'd expected, once his scent vanished into the air, Ibuse really couldn't find him.

Ibuse had even bitten apart the boat it was carrying on its back, crushing the Secret Ninja inside beneath its enormous jaws until they were reduced to bloody pulp, but it still hadn't caught Touma's scent.

So, after searching in vain, Ibuse abandoned the wreckage and swam back to its lair.

What Touma hadn't expected was that Ibuse's lair wasn't beneath the swamp at all. Instead, it was inside a natural cavern in the heart of the Land of Swamps.

The cavern's interior was unusually warm and humid. Even the spring water that dripped from the stalactites above had remarkable healing properties.

Curious, Touma skirted around the sleeping Ibuse and ventured farther into the narrower depths of the cavern.

After walking for about ten minutes, he came upon a sealed barrier.

Judging by the strength of the energy on it, the barrier had been in place for at least several hundred years. Its ability to block intruders had all but vanished; even Touma, with his half-baked knowledge of Sealing Jutsu, could spot a flaw and slip through it.

The world beyond the barrier opened Touma's eyes. Lush vegetation stretched as far as he could see, almost blocking out the sunlight filtering down from above.

The plants here were far more vigorous than those outside. Their canopies stood over a hundred meters tall on average. Without being able to use chakra, Touma had to rely on sheer physical strength to climb, and even that took him twenty or thirty minutes.

What surprised him most was that simply breathing the air in this world slowly healed his internal injuries and purged the toxins from his body. The aching in his chakra pathways from overusing chakra was almost completely gone, too.

To put it bluntly, Touma really did feel a sense of greed toward this world.

He had already more or less guessed at its nature: it was a forgotten summoning sage land.

First, it was important to clarify one thing: the summoning sage lands had nothing to do with the Sage of Six Paths. They hadn't appeared after he founded Ninshu, either. They were hidden realms that had been divided off since the planet's birth.

That meant the Shinobi World's summoning sage lands weren't limited to the Three Great Sage Lands—Ryūchi Cave, Mount Myoboku, and Shikkotsu Forest. There were also Flower Fruit Mountain, Hollow City, Sky-Scraping Cliff, Shouzaki Palace, Star-Chaos Sea, and dozens more. Almost every shinobi beast clan that had grown large enough had its own territory and its own Senjutsu inheritance.

However, not every shinobi beast clan's Senjutsu inheritance was suitable for human cultivation. Only the Three Great Sage Lands actively communicated with shinobi from the outside world, refining their Senjutsu so it would be better suited to humans.

Take the Ninja Ape clan of Flower Fruit Mountain, for example. In every generation, the Sarutobi Clan sent promising shinobi there to learn Senjutsu. Yet after all these years, no word had ever emerged that anyone in the clan had mastered Sage Mode.

Either no one had succeeded, or the few who had were too rare and their abilities too impractical in battle for the Sarutobi Clan to feel comfortable announcing it.

No one had mastered the Ninja Cat Clan's Sage Mode in Hollow City, either. The Uchiha weren't the only clan with a Summoning Contract with the Ninja Cat Clan. So many clans had tried and failed that the obvious explanation was simply that the Ninja Cat Clan's Senjutsu was never suited for humans to master.

Of course, some people refused to give up. The Izuno Clan, which had also made a contract with the Ninja Cat Clan, was clever about it. Unable to master Sage Mode, they came up with a watered-down "Cat Demon Mode." It could still enhance sensory ability and Taijutsu, even if it couldn't reach the level of Sage Mode.

And this wasn't the only summoning sage land that had yet to be discovered and exploited. As long as Touma took proper precautions, no one would be able to claim ownership of it.

Having taken Sage Chakra Pills before, Touma could sense the concentration of Natural Energy to some extent. He followed it to the spot where it was most concentrated and found the hot spring. Without a second thought, he swallowed a Sage Chakra Pill and jumped in.

He'd meant to use the Senjutsu chakra provided by the pill to resist the hot spring's corrosive effects. But to his surprise, the Natural Energy in the spring wasn't as volatile as it was outside. It was remarkably gentle.

It flowed slowly through Touma's pores and into his body, leaving an indescribably warm, soothing sensation in its wake. Under the guidance of this Natural Energy, he unknowingly mastered his own version of "Sage Mode."

His "Sage Mode" was quite similar to Senju Hashirama's: a human Sage Mode with a completely black marking across his face.

The ratio of Natural Energy to physical and spiritual energy wasn't 1:1:1, either. Instead, Natural Energy dominated at a ratio of 3:1:1.

At that ratio, Touma could clearly feel his body undergoing a complete transformation. His cells were developing faster, while his vitality and mental strength surged.

After soaking for less than an hour, he grew from 160 centimeters to 170. His muscle mass and bone density also changed by an order of magnitude.

The increase in his cell count indirectly caused his chakra reserves to soar as well. Using Chakra Pills as a measuring unit, his chakra reserves had previously been equivalent to two pills. Now they had multiplied fivefold, reaching the equivalent of ten.

Yet this massive increase hadn't affected his control over chakra. Clearly, the growth had come from within. It wasn't like taking some special drug that squeezed out his potential to grant him chakra from nowhere.

Even the duration of his "Sage Mode" had increased, from three minutes to a full fifteen. That was a substantial enough improvement for his "Sage Mode" to serve a proper tactical purpose.

Once the last traces of toxin had been purged from his body, Touma planned to modify the defensive barrier around this summoning sage land.

Unfortunately, half-baked was still half-baked. He finally paid the price for his recklessness. While modifying the natural space barrier around the sage land, he somehow triggered something he shouldn't have touched—and was instantly transported from the sage land to somewhere else.

Fortunately, he'd been in "Sage Mode" while tinkering with the space barrier. Otherwise, the violent spatial pull would have been enough to tear his body to pieces.

As Touma slowly came to, he smelled the salty tang of the sea in the air and felt grains of sand beneath his neck. He didn't need to ask to know he'd washed up somewhere near the coast. But reality dealt him an even heavier blow: he'd been transported to the islands of the Land of the Sea, in the middle of the ocean.

Even the fastest ship took seven days and seven nights to travel from the islands of the Land of the Sea to the mainland. Worse still, the tiny island where he'd landed was completely uninhabited. To reach an island with a boat, he'd either have to swim or wait for a ship that might pass nearby and stop to resupply.

To get back as quickly as possible, he had no choice but to rely on the Summoning Technique. Fortunately, Orochimaru usually kept a white snake nearby specifically for communication. Touma could use Ryūchi Cave as a transit point to return to the mainland.

Just as he was about to perform the "Reverse Summoning Technique," a gigantic wave suddenly rose and crashed toward Touma on the beach!