Golden Body Mode granted him an enormous amount of Chakra, while Absolute Control gave him the ability to manipulate it with precision. The two combined perfectly in this engineering-like training.
When the eastern horizon began to show its first hint of pale dawn, Naruto stopped.
He stood at the cave entrance and looked over the results of his night's work.
A domed rock cavern roughly five hundred meters in diameter lay fully revealed before him.
The ceiling was high enough that he could not touch it even if he jumped. The ground had been repeatedly leveled by giant Chakra hands; it was not mirror-smooth, but it was flat and solid enough.
Several rock protrusions had been deliberately left on the walls, ready to be used later for hanging ninja tools or inscribing Sealing Formulas.
Next came the Perception Isolation Barrier.
He chose a core node in the center of the newly excavated cavern, then created two clones and positioned them at the cave entrance and the ceiling.
The three barrier seals were completed simultaneously within seconds.
Now, like the fifty-meter-wide training ground outside, the cavern was firmly shrouded by a Perception Isolation Barrier.
From now on, no matter what techniques he practiced inside, no one outside would be able to detect even the slightest trace of it.
After walking out from behind the waterfall, Naruto noticed that the rocks he had excavated had already piled into a small mountain.
Originally, he had planned to stack them near the river, but now that he looked at them, there were simply too many. They sprawled in a glaring mass beneath the moonlight. Forget ninja—even ordinary villagers passing by would find it suspicious.
Leaving them alone was definitely not an option. If someone discovered them, it would be the same as directly telling Konoha that someone had carried out a massive project here.
And Naruto still did not know any Earth Release Ninjutsu, so he had no way to fuse the rocks back into the mountain or sink them underground.
"Then I can only destroy them all."
Naruto muttered to himself.
He raised his right hand, and a clear blue Rasengan rapidly formed in his palm. Then he walked over to the nearest boulder and pressed the Rasengan against it.
The instant the high-speed spinning Chakra sphere touched the rock, chunks of its surface were ground away as though someone had scooped out spoonfuls of ice cream. The fragments were pulverized into fine powder by the rotating Chakra, then instantly vaporized by the heat generated through friction.
A massive boulder over ten meters tall was shaved from top to bottom by the Rasengan in less than half a minute, without even a grain of sand left behind.
After destroying several large rocks in succession, Naruto lowered his head and looked at the spinning Rasengan in his hand. A thought suddenly surfaced in his mind.
What if he threw the Rasengan?
The Rasengan's greatest weakness had always been that it had to make close-range contact to cause damage. If it could be turned into a long-range attack, its combat flexibility would immediately rise by an entire level.
Without hesitation, he put the idea into practice.
Naruto condensed another Rasengan. This time, instead of holding it in his palm and pressing it forward, he made a throwing motion and hurled the rapidly spinning Chakra sphere fiercely toward the pool.
The instant the Rasengan left his hand, it continued flying normally through the air for seven or eight meters. Naruto nearly thought he had succeeded.
But just as he was about to memorize the feeling, the blue Chakra sphere slowed like an electric spinning top that had been unplugged. Its edges began to blur, Chakra scattered in every direction, and at around twelve or thirteen meters, it completely collapsed into a cloud of blue mist. It landed on the pool, stirring only a negligible ripple.
"As expected, it doesn't work."
Naruto withdrew his hand, neither disappointed nor surprised.
The Rasengan's core structure was an irregular mass of rapidly rotating Chakra. Without external control, it could only remain stable for a few seconds.
To turn the Rasengan into a long-range attack, he either had to incorporate Chakra Nature Transformation and restructure it, or directly use a Chakra cloak as an extension connected to it.
The latter was the principle behind the giant Chakra hands holding Rasengan in Golden Body Mode.
Come to think of it, when he had watched Boruto: Naruto Next Generations in his previous life, Boruto's Rasengan could be thrown and flown directly without adding Nature Transformation, and it could even turn invisible.
It seemed to be related to Boruto accidentally incorporating a trace of Lightning-Nature Chakra while practicing the Rasengan, but Naruto's Chakra currently only had the wind attribute.
Mastering Nature Transformation was another crucial foundation. It would prepare him for the future Rasenshuriken and lay the groundwork for learning other composite Ninjutsu.
Once the Chunin Ninja Exams were over, he would find an opportunity to ask Kakashi about the specific training methods for Chakra Nature Transformation, especially how to get started with attributes beyond wind.
Kakashi was Konoha's recognized expert in this field. As the Sharingan wielder who had copied over a thousand Ninjutsu, his understanding of the five attributes and his switching techniques were, in some respects, even more comprehensive than the Third Hokage's.
With that thought, Naruto raised his right hand again and honestly continued clearing the remaining rocks with the Rasengan in close combat.
The Rasengan gave off a low hum as it spun at high speed, blending with the roar of the waterfall. In the darkest hour before dawn, it sounded like a tightly paced work chant.
One massive rock after another was ground into dust beneath the Rasengan's cutting force, leaving behind not even a trace of lime.
Naruto knew better than anyone how sharp the ninja world's attention to detail could be.
He had failed because of details in his previous life. In this life, he would not make the same mistake again.
By the time the last rock fragment was ground into powder by the Rasengan and scattered into the pool, a slender gray-white strip of light had appeared at the horizon.
Naruto brushed off dust that did not exist on his hands, preparing to dismiss the Golden Body Mode he had maintained throughout the night.
"Hahahaha... I sensed spatial fluctuations!"
An excited shout, shrill enough to crack, came from the direction of the cavern.
A Golden Body Clone sprang up from the ground. His golden Chakra cloak swayed from how abruptly he had risen, and he nearly tripped over himself.
After steadying himself, he threw both clenched fists into the air and shouted toward the waterfall, startling all the other clones who were still sitting with their eyes closed in contemplation.
Then several more clones leaped up one after another. Their overlapping shouts could not be drowned out even by the waterfall's thunderous roar.
"I can inscribe Chakra into the formula now!"
"I can sense the Chakra I inscribed! I can detect its position, distance, and approximate direction—all of it!"
Naruto's eyes lit up.
Without any hesitation, he formed a release seal with both hands.
"Shadow Clone Technique, release."
"Poof, poof, poof, poof..."
In an instant, forty Golden Body Clones transformed into clouds of golden Chakra smoke at the same moment.
Immediately afterward, more than forty sets of training memories surged into Naruto's mind like a flood breaking through a dam: the Flying Thunder God Formula Diagram, the positioning and calculation of spatial coordinates, the sensation of inscribing Chakra, and the initial perception of spatial fluctuations.
Each memory carried insights and details from a different perspective, converging and colliding at the same time.
Naruto stood still with his eyes closed, Absolute Control activating in an instant.
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