At the edge of Konoha lay Training Ground 44, also known as the outskirts of the Forest of Death. With its rugged terrain, dense vegetation, crisscrossing rivers, and few visitors, it was an ideal place for intense, secret training.
Ling stood in the middle of a rushing river, the chakra beneath his feet anchoring him firmly to a slippery rock. His eyes were closed in concentration. Around him, clear river water flowed as though alive, sometimes forming Water Blades as thin as cicada wings that sliced through the air with piercing whistles, sometimes gathering into thick, resilient, diamond-shaped Water Shields that spun without pause, and sometimes dispersing into a fine mist that refracted the sunlight into hazy rainbows.
He was training, but this was more than simple shape transformation. His mind was intensely focused, constantly replaying the complex spatial runes and energy-node configurations of the Flying Thunder God Formula he had memorized in the Scroll of Seals reading room.
[No, the energy nodes aren't stable enough.] Tobirama's cold voice pointed out the slightest errors with the precision of a finely calibrated instrument. [The instant the spatial mark oscillates, maintaining the water's shape suffers a delay of one ten-thousandth of a second. Normally, that wouldn't matter. But during a Flying Thunder God teleportation at extreme speed, that brief instability could cause the formula to fail-or even disrupt space itself.]
Ling's brow furrowed slightly. The water around him instantly stilled, then surged again as he tried to adjust the frequency and precision of his chakra output. His "pure water" constitution gave him unparalleled control over water, but combining that control with the Flying Thunder God, which involved the laws of space, was far harder than he had imagined.
This was not merely a matter of forming a Flying Thunder God Kunai from