Serina watched Temari's video seven times.
Not because the footage of the dam releasing floodwater was especially stunning-she had seen the flood crest in Red Sand Canyon three years ago. When that muddy yellow wall of water crashed down from the sluice gates, the whole dam let out a muffled roar. What she kept revisiting was the sound.
In the video, Temari stood on the observation platform, the wind snapping the ties of her Forehead Protector and tearing the roar of the spillway to pieces. But even through the screen, that repeating seven-beat rhythm was audible. It wasn't that Serina had keen ears. That tune had already seeped into the very bones of the Shinobi World—it was in the culverts of the Land of Waves, in Sunagakure's spillways, in the hoofbeats of the Land of Iron, even hidden in the nonsense lyrics children made up at Konoha Kindergarten.
After the seventh viewing, she laid the terminal facedown on the table and pulled the cartoon Ninja Dog spiral notebook from the very bottom of her medical bag. On the last page of her translation, she had previously written "70% complete." Now she picked up a ballpoint pen, crossed out "70," and changed it to "85%."
The remaining 15% really did require a trip to the West Coast to calibrate it against natural water sounds. But before that, there was something she still hadn't done.
She turned to the first few pages of the notebook and stared for a long time at the opening line of the Breath-Guiding Art she had translated. Then she picked up a red pen and added a tiny annotation beside the musical notes:
"The breathing point here is the same length as the trailing 'na' in Jiraiya's notes. Possibly a basic frequency unit common to both worlds.-To