Ling felt like an iron billet thrown into a forge. Tobirama Senju was the one wielding the hammer, striking again and again without mercy. This so-called "rehabilitation training" was nothing but torture in ever-changing forms. The old bastard had somehow gotten his hands on a pile of bizarre fragments of sealing jutsu formulas and forced Ling to dismantle and reconstruct them in his mind. His soul had yet to recover properly, and already he had to wrestle with these incomprehensible scrawls. His temples throbbed all day, and he saw double whenever he looked at someone.
"Focus." Tobirama's voice was cold as ice, always crashing down just as Ling's concentration was about to collapse. "The Sacred Lord's corruption won't give you a chance to let your mind wander. One mistake is all it takes."
Ling clenched his back teeth and swallowed the curses rising to his lips. He knew the old bastard was right. Every time he closed his eyes, that icy sensation in the depths of his consciousness and Sasuke's Sharingan, glimpsed fleetingly in the darkness, burned in his mind like brands. Fear? A little. But more than that, there was the ferocity of someone backed into a corner, mixed with anger and a refusal to give in. He couldn't fall here. At the very least, he couldn't go down so pathetically.
He began throwing himself into that "forge" willingly. Beyond the "homework" Tobirama assigned, he pushed himself harder, trying to draw on that faint thread of vitality from the leyline to nourish his nearly depleted senjutsu seed. The process was like digging a well in a dried-up riverbed: grueling, with backlash occasionally making his vision go black. Yet after several attempts, he found that his perception of natural energy seemed just a little sharper. It was like someone long