As for developing Ice Burst.
Now that he had a rough idea of the effect, he needed to work inward from that concept.
First, how could he achieve that effect?
How could he create such an effect?
Water Release and Wind Release were clearly unsuitable—one was liquid, the other gaseous.
So only Ice Release could achieve this effect.
But another question arose: how could he make Ice Release freeze while exploding like fireworks?
At that thought, Ning Xue stopped training. He took out his notebook, flipped to a blank page, and began writing and drawing.
Putting the distant future aside, how could he make it explode?
Ning Xue drew a rough sketch of the final effect in his notebook.
As he stared at the sketch, inspiration suddenly struck him.
Whether fireworks or bombs, both had gunpowder at their core—their center.
Perhaps he could first try creating a core... no, a seed.
Ning Xue drew a circle beside the final-effect diagram, then added a fuse.
Before he knew it, he had drawn a grenade.
Beside it, he wrote: gunpowder, casing, shrapnel.
Then he drew a seed beside that.
And labeled it: break shell, bloom.
Ning Xue stared at the grenade and seed sketches in his notebook.
His finger unconsciously tapped the words "shrapnel" and "bloom" as the two images in his mind collided and merged.
"The key is the eruption within," Ning Xue murmured. Then he redrew a circle on the other side and labeled it seed.
"What if I replaced the grenade's gunpowder with a highly compressed, extremely unstable ice-nature chakra core?"
He filled the seed with dense dots, representing Ice Release chakra condensed to its absolute limit.
"It must be extremely unstable, like a spring compressed beyond its limit. Once released, it will unleash tremendous force."
"Then what about