An hour later, after he had finished going through nearly a hundred scrolls on the Uzumaki Clan's Sealing Jutsu, Jiraiya had gone completely numb.
He even felt an absurd sense that the treasures he had cherished all his life seemed no different, in this boy's eyes, from cheap novels on sale at a roadside stall.
"Hey... kid... are you done reading?"
"Mm, I'm done." Ling Xuan nodded. He closed his eyes as countless complex Sealing Jutsu formulas were rapidly deconstructed, reassembled, and optimized in his mind.
[Data entry complete: Uzumaki Clan Sealing Jutsu system.]
[Core theory: Based on Yin-Yang Release, precisely shaping chakra and constructing energy circuits to form stable fields of rules capable of affecting matter, energy, and even souls.]
[Key techniques: Adamantine Sealing Chains, Four Symbols Seal, Eight Trigrams Seal, Contract Seal, Dead Demon Consuming Seal (fragment)...]
[Analysis: This system is highly extensible and compatible. It can be combined with chakra of any nature to produce techniques with different effects. However, it places extreme demands on the user's chakra reserves and mental strength.]
Ling Xuan opened his eyes and looked at Jiraiya, asking him a question.
"Lord Jiraiya, I saw in a scroll about the Contract Seal that the Uzumaki Clan once tried to create a symbiotic contract that could bind a summoning beast's soul to a ninja's. But they failed because they couldn't solve the problem of spiritual rejection. The scroll mentioned that they lacked a catalyst capable of harmonizing the mental fluctuations of two different souls."
"Do you think that if we used a small amount of purified Natural Energy as the catalyst and injected it into the core of the contract formula, we might be able to complete that abandoned technique?"
"..."
Jiraiya felt as if an invisible hand had seized his throat. He couldn't