The shadow clone wore casual clothes and slippers, its hair still slightly damp, with a lazy expression on its face. It looked exactly like an ordinary Genin who had just finished the housework, taken out the trash, and was ready to go back to sleep.
It slowly walked downstairs, passed the garbage bin below the apartment building, and threw the trash inside.
Throughout the entire process, ANBU's eyes remained firmly locked on the shadow clone.
After throwing out the trash, the shadow clone stretched, yawned, then slowly went back upstairs, returned to the room, turned off the lights, and crawled into bed. Within two minutes, it was breathing evenly.
If the ANBU members went near the window to listen, they would hear the faintly nasal rhythm unique to a sleeping teenage boy.
Naruto's shadow clone had precisely simulated it with Absolute Control. Every interval between breaths and every rise and fall of its chest was identical to the original body's.
At the instant the trash bag landed at the bottom of the bin, Naruto's real body silently transformed back.
He lay on his side amid a pile of wastepaper and expired milk cartons in the garbage bin, holding his breath and suppressing his Chakra fluctuations to nearly zero.
After waiting roughly thirty seconds and confirming there was no unusual movement, Naruto silently climbed out of the garbage bin. Keeping close to the shadows beneath the apartment building, he followed the drainage ditch and left the area like a shadow merging into the night.
In the end, he chose the massive waterfall at the end of the river.
Although no one went near the Trap Training Ground, the very fact that the words "No Entry" were so conspicuous made it more likely to attract curious brats or adventurous Genin sneaking in to explore.
On top of that, the sheer number of traps in that area was outrageous. Clearing them all would take time.
The Chunin Ninja Exams were just around the corner, and he did not have that kind of time.
The waterfall area, on the other hand, perfectly met all his needs.
First, it was far enough from the village center, with no homes or farmland nearby.
Second, the roar of the waterfall was deafening. Even standing beside the pool, one had to shout to be heard. This natural white noise could perfectly cover any sounds that might be produced during training.
Third, the waterfall was surrounded by dense virgin coniferous forest. The canopy was thick enough that the ground was almost impossible to see from above, making conventional aerial reconnaissance unlikely to spot anyone hiding beneath the waterfall.
For all those reasons, Naruto chose this place.
Passing through Konoha's streets under cover of night, Naruto avoided the main roads with streetlights as much as possible and followed the riverside path upstream.
The night wind blew over the river, carrying the fishy smell of water plants and the dampness of dew.
The closer he got to the waterfall, the louder the water became, gradually changing from a soft murmur into a deep roar.
When he finally reached the end of the river and looked down from the cliff, moonlight shone on the mist thrown up by the waterfall, forming a faint milky-white arch bridge in the black gorge.
Naruto took a deep breath and leaped.
His toes lightly touched a jutting rock halfway down the cliff. Borrowing the force to change direction, he drifted down to the pool beneath the waterfall like a leaf carried by the wind.
The spray rushed into his face with piercing coldness, while the thunderous water made his eardrums buzz.
Naruto looked around.
Around the pool was a circular clearing carved out by the waterfall over countless years. The ground was smooth rock and fine pebbles, while dense coniferous forest surrounded the clearing.
Moonlight poured down from the top of the waterfall and shattered into countless dancing silver reflections over the pool.
This place was practically a perfect training ground.
Near the right side of the pool, beneath an indented rock wall, Naruto found a naturally formed half-open stone cave. It was not large, but it had just enough room for one person to sit cross-legged with some space to spare. The entrance was shrouded in mist from the waterfall, making it impossible to see what was inside from outside.
He stopped at the cave entrance and formed hand seals.
"Shadow Clone Technique."
Bang bang bang bang!
Four shadow clones appeared before him.
The four Naruto clones exchanged glances. Without any unnecessary communication, they dashed in four separate directions and stopped roughly fifty meters from the cave at the east, south, west, and north points.
Then they began forming hand seals at the same time.
The seals for the Perception Isolation Barrier were not particularly complicated. They were far simpler than a major Sealing Technique like the Four Symbols Seal, which required more than a dozen hand signs. Its subtlety lay in the need for the Chakra frequencies of multiple casters to synchronize with precise accuracy.
That posed no difficulty at all for clones sharing synchronized awareness.
As the four final hand signs froze in place at the same instant, the air gave a faint tremor.
Four translucent Chakra barriers rose simultaneously from the positions of the four shadow clones, extending toward the center and joining overhead. In the end, they formed a hemispherical barrier roughly fifty meters in diameter.
The barrier was extremely thin, almost completely transparent under the moonlight. Only from certain angles could one see its outline, like air distorted by heat haze.
Naruto's real body stood at the cave entrance in the center of the barrier and reached out to touch its wall with one finger.
A faint resistance met his fingertip, like a highly elastic rubber membrane.
He nodded.
This barrier could isolate all Chakra fluctuations and sensory detection within it. The outside world would not be able to sense any movement inside.
However, its physical defense was very weak. Forget ninjutsu—even a Genin could break it by pushing hard enough.
This was not a barrier for combat. It was specifically designed to conceal one's presence.
And that was exactly what he needed most right now.
Without further delay, Naruto immediately began the core task of his planned training while there was still time: the Flying Raijin Technique.
He stepped onto a relatively flat rock beside the pool and pressed his hands together.
"Shadow Clone Technique!"
This time, the smoke was several times greater in both volume and density than before.
When the smoke cleared, more than thirty Naruto stood neatly across the clearing by the pool. Their golden hair was soaked by the waterfall's spray, but every pair of eyes shone as brightly as lit lamps.
"Everyone, time is tight."
Naruto's real body looked at the more than thirty identical faces before him. "Let's begin!"
"Yeah!" ×30
The thirty shadow clones answered in unison, then quickly scattered and each found a spot in the clearing to sit cross-legged.
The instant they closed their eyes, the Flying Raijin Technique's formula diagram, spatial coordinate calculation formulas, key points of spatial perception, and every insight Minato Namikaze had explained aloud were all retrieved in their minds, where they began analyzing them word by word and sentence by sentence.
More than thirty people trained in the same technique at once, and each shadow clone approached it from a slightly different angle. Some began with the structure of the formula, some reverse-engineered the pathways of Chakra flow, some frantically simulated the mapping relationships between spatial coordinates in their minds, while others repeatedly pondered that extremely abstract explanation of spatial perception.
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