One Year Later

Time flew, and a year soon slipped away between Ruri's bouts of frenzied training.

In the woods behind Hokage Rock in Konoha, at the same old spot, a boy with waist-length black hair and pure white eyes was furiously attacking the Copper Man fixed beside the stream.

"Gentle Fist: Eight Trigrams One Hundred Twenty-Eight Palms!"

"Two Palms!" "Four Palms!" "Eight Palms!" "Sixteen Palms!" "Thirty-Two Palms!" "Eight Trigrams Sixty-Four Palms!" "One Hundred Twenty-Eight Palms!"

The boy's Gentle Fist strikes grew faster and faster. Both palms flew, raining a furious barrage of blows onto the Copper Man.

When he unleashed the final sixty-four strikes in an instant, an ordinary person's eyes could no longer make out how many times he had struck. All they would see was a blur pouring down on the Copper Man like a torrential rain.

Had anyone been watching, a close look at the Copper Man would have revealed that the markings for the human body's sixty-four vital chakra points had long since been battered beyond recognition by the boy's Gentle Fist.

It was hard to imagine what blows of such force would do to a human body.

After finishing the Eight Trigrams One Hundred Twenty-Eight Palms, the boy looked at the Copper Man he had battered out of shape and sighed softly. "Looks like I'll have to replace the Copper Man again!"

He did not rest after speaking. Without pausing, he extended his right hand, curled it into a tiger claw, and thrust his palm toward a tree several dozen meters away.

"Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm!"

With the boy's quiet shout, an invisible blast of chakra shot out of his right palm.

With a crack, the blast punched through a tree trunk as thick as an adult's calf several dozen meters away, and the tree promptly toppled.

"Tch, it's still too weak. When will I be able to unleash an ultimate taijutsu like Kaguya Ōtsutsuki's Eighty Gods Vacuum Attack?" the boy said as he looked at the fallen tree he had punched through.

Had a member of the Hyuga Clan been standing nearby, their jaw would surely have dropped to the ground in shock.

Whether it was Gentle Fist, Eight Trigrams One Hundred Twenty-Eight Palms, or Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm, these were all top-tier taijutsu that only the clan's elite jonin could master. Yet a little brat of five or six was using them. How incredible was that?

A year had rushed by. Although Ruri had grown only a few centimeters taller than the previous year, his improvement in strength was plain for all to see. He had progressed by leaps and bounds.

Throughout that year, Ruri had painstakingly practiced every ninjutsu. Thanks to the Ring on his hand, he had more time to train inside it than outside: three days within the Ring amounted to only one day in the real world.

That was why Ruri's strength had grown so quickly. Over the course of the year, he had learned many ninjutsu, and he had not forgotten to develop the Flame-Flame Fruit within his body, either. He had already created several new moves.

Through his own relentless training and the Ring's help, Ruri's chakra reserves had now reached chunin level.

Ruri had also replaced his former Gentle Fist Art: Eight Trigrams Sixty-Four Palms with Gentle Fist: Eight Trigrams One Hundred Twenty-Eight Palms. It followed the same moves as Eight Trigrams Sixty-Four Palms, but after the first round of attacks, he immediately delivered another sixty-four palm strikes to the same sixty-four vital chakra points, blocking the flow of chakra through his opponent's body.

Eight Trigrams One Hundred Twenty-Eight Palms was an orally transmitted Hyuga Style ninjutsu, usually passed down only within the Hyuga Main Family. Although it was a complete taijutsu sequence, each successive stage increased the speed and power of ordinary Gentle Fist attacks.

Although Ruri's chakra reserves had not yet reached jonin level, the actual speed and power of his Gentle Fist strikes were now on par with those of Hyuga Hiashi and Hizashi Hyuga.

And Ruri's progress over that year went far beyond that. He walked straight toward a tree in the woods so large that even two people could not encircle its trunk with their arms. A pale blue sphere appeared in his hand.

Looking at the trunk, Ruri slowly pressed the pale blue sphere in his hand against it.

The tree cracked and toppled. That was right-this was the signature ninjutsu of the Shinobi World's current Fourth Hokage, Naruto Uzumaki's father, the Yellow Flash, Minato Namikaze: the Rasengan.

In the original story, Naruto had used this ninjutsu with great proficiency, and it had looked incredibly powerful. Naruto Uzumaki had also developed many different forms of the Rasengan.

Jiraiya had explained the Rasengan's training method and principles very clearly in the original story. Now that Ruri was in this anime world, learning it had naturally been easy, without the slightest difficulty.

Ruri had learned this ninjutsu because it required no hand seals, making it ideally suited to a ninja like him who fought at high speed.

Anyone who had watched Naruto would probably associate the Fourth Hokage, Minato Namikaze, with Flying Thunder God and the Rasengan.

In fact, Flying Thunder God and the Rasengan were not the only techniques Minato Namikaze knew. His chakra had three nature affinities: lightning, wind, and fire.

He also knew many advanced ninjutsu, as well as Mount Myōboku's Toad Senjutsu. But his fighting style was extremely fast, and forming hand seals was a waste of time for him, so he rarely used other ninjutsu.