The Secret of the Hand Seals (Part 1)

"Sister Konan, you're amazing." Ye Wuji watched as Konan effortlessly transformed the paper in her hands into various animals and flowers. He spoke from the heart as he watched from the side. This was the truth; if Ye Wuji had possessed this skill in his past life, he could have made a decent living selling origami flowers. This was his assessment of Konan's ability. In fact, if she were to show off this talent to girls on Earth, it would be a top-tier flirting technique.

Although Konan used her ability to create origami, there was still technique involved. Without her Kekkei Genkai, one would have to work hard to learn it. Ye Wuji had been practicing for the past few days, but apart from paper cranes, he could only fold a rose. Even with Konan guiding his hands, it took him two days to learn how to fold that rose.

Once he mastered it, Ye Wuji thought that if he could ever return home, this skill alone would be enough to make a fortune. This was the reason for his patience, though, of course, there was also the desire to show off in front of a girl.

"Wuji, you're quite impressive too. Look at your brothers Yahiko and Nagato; they can't seem to learn it at all." Konan had been very happy these past few days. After all, it was nice to have someone appreciate what she made. Yahiko and Nagato didn't care for these things, but Konan always liked to fold things in her spare time. Now that a child liked them, Konan had folded a great many things over the last two days, and the outside of the entire house was covered in her creations. There were weather dolls, various flowers, and, most of all, paper cranes.

It had been four days since that battle. After leaving the battlefield, Ye Wuji and the trio had found this house to hide in and recover from their injuries.

It was only after seeing Konan folding paper by chance that Ye Wuji remembered she was a master of the craft. After all, as long as she willed it, the paper would automatically change into the shape she desired. Furthermore, although Ye Wuji hadn't been injured that day, his mental focus had been pushed to the limit, so he took these few days to rest. Mostly, he didn't want to reveal his non-childlike behavior in front of these three.

So, for these few days, Ye Wuji pestered Konan to teach him origami, which made Yahiko and Nagato green with envy. But if you asked them to suck up to Konan like Ye Wuji did, they couldn't bring themselves to do it. They did have their own methods, however: every day during training, they would bully Ye Wuji under the guise of "not letting playfulness ruin one's ambition," claiming they needed to strengthen his training. Despite Ye Wuji's desperate resistance, it was useless, and he ended up beaten black and blue every day.

Fortunately, he could have Konan heal him every day, so Ye Wuji was in a state of "pain and pleasure." This only fueled Yahiko and Nagato's jealousy, leading them to beat him even harder, creating a vicious cycle.

A week passed like this (all time here was the same as on Earth), and Ye Wuji discovered a major problem. He had noticed a hint of it when he was with Minato, but because time was tight, he hadn't paid much attention. Now, spending these days with Konan and the others, Ye Wuji realized that while he could speak the language of the Naruto World, he couldn't read its script.

This was a huge headache. One had to know that most of the knowledge in the Naruto World was recorded in writing, and even the Scroll of Sealing of each nation was written in Japanese. If he couldn't read, even if the Scroll of Sealing were in his hands right now, it would be useless.

Because of this, Ye Wuji stopped focusing on training with Nagato and Yahiko for the next few days. Although he was still bullied, his strength was steadily improving.

After discovering his illiteracy, Ye Wuji immediately asked Konan to teach him how to read, abandoning his training entirely. Fortunately, Japanese wasn't too complex to learn, and since he could already speak it—he just couldn't write it—he learned quite quickly.

However, this delayed his plans to leave. Ye Wuji wouldn't leave until he had learned to read. Another week passed, and he finally finished learning the script. As for more advanced knowledge, he would have to rely on self-study.

In this way, Ye Wuji spent about half a month with the trio. During this time, he finally discovered that one of his chakra affinities was Water.

Because during this period, he had learned two ninjutsu from Yahiko: the Water Clone Technique and the Water Style: Water Wave Technique.

Ye Wuji managed to perform the Water Clone Technique. Although he failed to release the Water Wave Technique, being able to perform the Water Clone was enough to make him ecstatic. After all, this was a ninjutsu he had successfully released, and his long-standing curiosity about ninjutsu was confirmed at that moment.

Looking at the water clone in front of him, Ye Wuji felt a strange connection between them. Based on this connection, he could control the clone, and it seemed to have a mind of its own. However, his current water clone looked similar to the one produced by the basic Clone Technique.

The difference between this and the basic Clone Technique was that with the latter, one had to pre-program the clone's actions for it to move, much like a pre-set script. The Water Clone, however, could make its own judgments about its surroundings, as if it were a person, though it was extremely fragile and only possessed one-tenth of the original's strength.

From this perspective, it seemed the Shadow Clone Technique of Konoha was superior to the Water Clone. No wonder the Shadow Clone was in Konoha's Scroll of Sealing. However, he also learned from Yahiko that the Water Clone could only be used where there was water. Ye Wuji didn't care about this; based on his knowledge from Earth, air contained many water molecules. If one were powerful enough, they could use it without a water source, just like the Second Hokage, who could use large-scale water ninjutsu even in the desert. In this regard, the Second Hokage's water style might have surpassed those of Kirigakure.

In his conversations with Yahiko, Ye Wuji learned a lot about the application of chakra and things he hadn't known before. For instance, regarding hand seals: although every village had its own unique ninjutsu, there were constant wars. Whenever a war broke out, one could surely learn the hand seals of those unique techniques if one was willing to observe. Yet, it seemed that wasn't the case in the Naruto World. At the very least, other villages didn't seem to know Konoha's Shadow Clone Technique. If one paid attention to the characters in the series, one would notice that apart from Konoha ninja, other villages—even Kage-level ones—didn't use this technique. They used their own: Kirigakure used Water Clones, the Kazekage used Sand Clones, and the Tsuchikage used Earth Clones.

As one of Konoha's signature techniques, which had achieved great success in various wars, it was impossible for other nations not to have researched the Shadow Clone Technique. But the results remained the same; even if they had similar techniques, Konoha's was the most powerful. Just as Konoha had people who could use Water or Earth Clones, they were never as good as those from Kirigakure or Iwagakure.

Furthermore, the hand seals for clones varied between nations. Take the Rain Village where Ye Wuji was currently staying. As a village that could rival Kirigakure in water-style ninjutsu, although it wasn't as strong, the Rain Village was not inferior to Kirigakure when it came to water style alone. The reason the Rain Village was so weak now was simply that its high-level ninja had all died, causing it to become a battlefield for the major nations.

Ye Wuji hadn't known about this before. Even though he had finished watching the entire series in his past life, he hadn't been clear on these details. After all, on screen, whether it was Shadow Clones or Water Clones, they were just fodder that disappeared in an instant. It didn't seem like a battle of ninjutsu, but a battle of numbers. Only in this realistic Naruto World were there so many differences, and these differences represented the strength of a ninja.

It was only now that Ye Wuji understood this secret, which wasn't really a secret among high-level ninja: the hand seals for releasing ninjutsu could be stolen. After all, the Naruto World had many abilities, such as the Sharingan's replication and various detection ninjutsu; hand seals could hardly be kept secret.

As for how to release ninjutsu, as mentioned before, one had to refine the chakra within the body and then perform hand seals. So, while hand seals were important, the most crucial part was the refinement of chakra, which was derived from a person's physical and mental energy.

This was the most important point Yahiko had made: refining chakra depended on the ratio of physical to mental energy. The key to ninjutsu was this chakra ratio, a product of countless experiments by ninja throughout history. No one knew exactly how long ninja had existed in this world, but it had been at least a thousand years. This was also according to Yahiko.

In Ye Wuji's impression, the history of the Naruto World seemed very short, from the First Shinobi World War to the final Fourth, spanning at most a few decades. This could be seen from the experiences of Uchiha Madara and Kakuzu.

But in this realistic world, it wasn't like that. The First Shinobi World War lasted the longest, as no one knew when it started; it was only known that the Five Great Nations were established when it ended. There was an interval of at least thirty years between the First and Second Shinobi World Wars. These were things he learned while chatting with Konan and the others, and there had been at least twenty years of peace in between.

Ye Wuji had originally wanted to ask who the current Hokage of Konoha was—whether it was the Second Hokage, Senju Tobirama—but considering that people in the Rain Village wouldn't necessarily know the name of Konoha's Hokage, he gave up. The development of this world was severely distorted; it had modern conveniences and radio equipment—they even had computers—yet the speed of information transmission still relied on ninja, ninja beasts, or carrier pigeons. This was something Ye Wuji found deeply confusing.

Naruto drank milk every day, they had electric lights, and most importantly, it seemed that most homes in Konoha had air conditioning and refrigerators. Oh, and they had movies, which meant they had movie stars. Yet, there were no long-distance telephones. The world's utilization of computers was almost on par with the Earth he came from, and in some aspects, it might even be superior—after all, Ye Wuji had only been an ordinary person and didn't know about his own country's top-secret technology.

Look at the Konoha hospital: all kinds of medical facilities, laboratories, high-tech instruments, and the test tubes Orochimaru used for his experiments.

This was clearly a high-tech society, yet look at the transportation: most people used horse-drawn carriages or walked. Even during the Fourth Shinobi World War, when the Daimyo were relocated, they did so on foot.

In his past life, Ye Wuji couldn't understand why, and he still didn't know now. These questions were hard to ask others, and in his eyes, Konan and the others didn't necessarily know more than he did.

Fine, these questions would have answers later; I won't talk about them now. Let's return to the differences in ninjutsu mentioned earlier.