At noon, the seven of them sat in a circle eating rice balls and sharing what they had discovered that morning.
"The Genjutsu Stone Tablet's rebound intensity can be adjusted," Torai said, taking a bite of his rice ball. "But the higher the intensity, the more the consumption increases exponentially. I can only withstand the third setting for five minutes."
Hizashi rubbed his aching eyes. "The circuits inside the Metal Ball have thirty-seven basic patterns, but their combinations produce tens of thousands of possibilities. Memorizing them isn't the problem. The problem is analyzing them in real time as they change at high speed—that drains far too much Mental Strength."
Inoichi gave a wry smile. "The patterns I 'write' on the scroll aren't nearly precise enough. Once my Mental Strength breaks through the barrier, my control drops sharply."
"The bottleneck in multithreaded processing is attention allocation," Shikaku said, looking unusually exhausted. "It's not that I lack Mental Strength overall. I just can't control that many targets precisely at the same time."
Kushina summed it up. "So the real problem is that these five dimensions-precision, strength, capacity, resilience, and recovery speed-all affect one another. Improving one often causes a temporary decline in the others."
Minato added, "And different bloodline limits have different priorities. We need a method that allows both targeted improvement and balanced development."
Shinji quietly listened to everyone's feedback, his mind rapidly processing the information. His project management experience from his previous life came into play. The problems had been exposed; what they needed now was a systematic solution.
"I have an idea." He set down his water flask. "Since the five dimensions affect one another, let's design a cyclical tempering method."
He drew a pentagon in the sand, labeling its five vertices: strength, precision, capacity, resilience, and recovery. "Rather