So that meant the limitations of its physical form made it unsuitable for direct conversion.
"Then what about Earth Release? Earth is solid too."
[Great Sage: The basic chakra attributes differ, and the underlying operating principles are fundamentally different.]
One differed in its internal attributes, the other in its external form.
Lei Dou nodded. That was more or less what he had expected.
Although Ice Release looked like a tangible substance, somewhat like Earth Release, its ability to draw away heat probably fell within the scope of Wind Release!
Lei Dou smiled, a plan taking shape in his mind.
Cold!
That was the true soul of Ice Release!
With that in mind, Lei Dou had a pretty interesting idea.
"Great Sage, try calculating this: instead of directly creating large chunks of ice, what if I use Ice Release to freeze the moisture in the air into fine particles of ice and snow, then use their low temperature to attack effectively?"
"If I use this loose ice-and-snow form to convert fluid-based jutsu like Water Release, could it work?"
[Great Sage: Analysis in progress...] [...]
Analysis?
Not calculation this time?
Apparently, the Analysis skill could assess not only existing jutsu, but also the feasibility of theoretical jutsu concepts.
That was fantastic. Using Analysis to verify a theory first would save him plenty of detours and make developing new jutsu much easier.
[Analysis complete.] [Great Sage: The theory is feasible. Conversion is possible.]
It really could work!
After all, Ice Release in its hard, solid form left little room for flexible, varied jutsu attacks.
Ice was solid, after all. The usual methods were simply smashing enemies with it or ramming it into them.
Even Haku in the original story had only condensed water vapor into ice senbon to strike pressure points or assassinate enemies.
Clearly, chunks of frozen ice alone had limited development potential. There were too few ways to use them.
Cold!
That was the true primary source of Ice Release's power.
Now that he had found the main direction for its development, all that remained was to develop a complete jutsu system.
Ideally, it would be an all-purpose jutsu that combined offense and defense while remaining flexible and versatile.
Otherwise, calculating the development of every single jutsu would take hours.
Just establishing an Ice Release system would cost Lei Dou considerable time and energy.
Offense and defense in one!
That concept suddenly brought to mind a man from another world—or rather, from the future: Lei Dou!
Gaara!
The sand that guy controlled was incredibly convenient for both offense and defense, able to defend automatically and attack actively.
And the ways he used sand to hurt enemies were simple and brutal.
They mainly came down to two physical methods: compression and penetration.
Magnet Release controlled a kind of magnetic force, making grains of sand attract one another and increasing their density. As that force grew stronger, the crushing pressure multiplied as well.
For penetration, the sand was compressed and reinforced to a high density, becoming weapons like bullets or spears that pierced enemies in the simplest, most direct way.
Then what if he replaced the sand with ice and snow?
Ice could be extremely sharp too. Shaping ice and snow into ice arrows, blades, Ice Shuriken, and similar weapons presented no technical obstacles.
Sand could crush things physically, but besides physical damage, ice and snow could also unleash terrifying magical damage through their cold.
The moment an enemy's body touched Lei Dou's ice and snow, the cold would seep straight into their marrow. Once living tissue encountered extreme low temperatures...
Its cells would die no slower than they would from fire release burns, and the injuries might be even harder to heal.
Increasing his chakra output would also lower the temperature further.
Temperatures of a few dozen degrees below zero were already hard to bear. At a hundred or two hundred below zero, that cold would truly be lethal.
After all, even the legendary absolute zero was only minus 273.15 degrees.
"Great Sage, can you calculate a new jutsu model based on the idea I just described?"
[Great Sage: Analysis in progress...] [Analysis progress...] [10%...] [20%...] [...] [Analysis complete.] [Great Sage: The logic is sound. Calculation can begin.]
"Then start calculating! I want to control all this ice and snow and make it my absolute defense and Strongest Spear..."
[Calculation started.] [Estimated time: 12 hours.]
Twelve hours? A little long, but worth the wait!
Although his current progress was hardly crawling along, Lei Dou felt he could give it another push and send his efficiency soaring.
Seven passive skill slots were neatly arranged on the translucent panel floating before him.
The first few slots were already filled with basic abilities such as [Chakra Refinement], [Advanced Taijutsu], and [Basic Visual Genjutsu].
The fourth and fifth slots in the middle were both equipped with skills related to [Water Breathing].
Lei Dou lowered his gaze and decisively filled the remaining sixth and seventh slots with [Ice Release: Freezing Moment].
A crisp system notification instantly sounded in his mind: [Skill running at full speed].
Lei Dou took a deep breath and began waiting patiently.
To his surprise, the operating cycle of [Ice Release: Freezing Moment] was much longer than he had imagined.
He waited a full three minutes before the progress bar finally crawled through a complete cycle.
That meant one cycle every three minutes, or at most twenty per hour. The efficiency was honestly pretty lousy.
Fortunately, Lei Dou had cleverly doubled up on the slots. With both running together, he could squeeze out forty completed cycles an hour.
After each cycle, his proficiency in both [Ice Release] and [Freezing Moment] surged.
As his [Ice Release] level increased, Great Sage's enormous calculation time visibly shrank.
Naturally, the power of [Freezing Moment] itself rose along with it, becoming increasingly monstrous.
The only headache was the chakra consumption, which poured out of him like running water.
But that was hardly a dead end. If necessary, he could simply stick two [Ice Release] passives in his skill slots.
That would let him exploit the bug that made [Ice Release] cost nothing.
Even if its chakra requirements reached astronomical figures, Lei Dou could calmly say it was no problem.
While the system calculated away, Lei Dou stayed busy too, taking the opportunity to refresh his skill status.
He wanted to polish the effects of [Ice Release: Freezing Moment] to absolute perfection.
With a thought from Lei Dou, [Ice Release: Freezing Moment] abruptly activated, instantly freezing the air within a ten-meter radius around him.
A biting chill spread through the room. Even the light seemed frozen as crystalline snowflakes formed out of thin air and drifted slowly downward.
As the routines in his skill slots kept running, the absolute-zero domain under Lei Dou's control expanded wildly outward.
Since his zero-cost cheat mode was active anyway, Lei Dou simply sat cross-legged and trained from daytime until late at night, when the moon shone bright among scattered stars.
Over five full hours, Lei Dou refreshed his skill status through seven rounds, steadily raising the limits his body could withstand.
The originally lengthy [Great Sage] calculation countdown had also been reduced to just seven hours.
Glancing at the progress bar, which had only two hours left, Lei Dou stretched and decided not to sit around waiting anymore.
It was late, after all. Tomorrow was the crucial day of genin team assignments, and he needed to rest properly so he could get up early.
After those five hours of relentless idle training, Lei Dou's freezing radius had extended a terrifying thirty-six meters out.
Not only was its range greater, but its power had more than tripled, as though it could freeze and crack even the air itself.
Its freezing speed had also undergone a qualitative leap. What had once been a sluggish process now took only five or six seconds to turn everything in his domain into ice sculptures.
Lei Dou could even control his chakra precisely enough to instantly freeze specific targets within the domain.
Even slightly larger objects now took only about three seconds to freeze, practically making it instant crowd control.
For now, however, that instant freeze only affected the surface. Fully saturating an object's core with cold still required about ten seconds of continuous output.
After returning home, Lei Dou did not hesitate for even a second. He ignored the remaining hour of calculation time.
He pulled the blanket over himself and went straight to sleep. Nothing mattered more than sleep.
Early the next morning, as the first ray of sunlight slipped through a gap in the curtains and fell across his face, Lei Dou opened his eyes right on time.
The [Ice Release] jutsu he had left running yesterday had finished calculating in his sleep and now sat quietly in his list.
Lei Dou rubbed his sleepy eyes and casually opened the new skill's details.
[Ice Release: Snow World]
The name sounded rather impressive, with a grand ring to it.
After reading the effect descriptions carefully, he found they were almost exactly in line with Lei Dou's original framework.
[Ice Release: Snow World: Can be activated instantly without any hand seals, but requires Freezing Moment as its foundation. Chakra consumption doubles while maintained.] [Skill effect: Creates an absolute ice-and-snow home field within the domain of Freezing Moment, allowing control of ice and snow in all their forms for offense and defense.] [Shape transformation: Ice and snow can be shaped at the host's will into ice crystals, massive blocks of ice, or any imagined form.] [Unlimited creation: As long as sufficient chakra is available, ice and snow can be created out of thin air without limit within the jutsu's range.] [Extreme cold impact: Any enemy or object that touches the ice and snow will instantly suffer the corrosive effects of cold and be completely frozen in an extremely short time.]
After reading that long, dazzling description, Lei Dou nodded in satisfaction, the corners of his mouth lifting slightly.
It matched his tactical concept perfectly, but the chakra consumption would probably be like opening the floodgates.
Even [Freezing Moment] alone had drained chakra like running water. With Lei Dou's current mana pool, he could only sustain it for half an hour without using any other jutsu.
Now [Snow World] would double that drain on top of it. It was practically a chakra black hole.
If he wanted to use [Ice Release] as a routine combat option in the future, he would have to keep the zero-cost passives firmly locked into his skill slots.
Otherwise, with that rate of mana burn, Lei Dou would probably collapse from exhaustion before even finishing a warm-up fight.
He decisively replaced his seventh passive slot with [Ice Release: Snow World].
Although he could not achieve perfect zero consumption for now, switching to two [Ice Release] passives during an actual fight would be no trouble.
He strolled over to the Ninja Academy, where a boisterous atmosphere greeted him.
For once, Naruto had actually arrived early. The moment he spotted Lei Dou, he excitedly waved his arms and shouted.
"Lei Dou! Lei Dou! Over here!"
Lei Dou merely gave the blond, spiky-haired boy a polite nod, then turned and naturally sat down in the empty seat beside Ino.
Shikamaru, seated in front, could not help hunching his shoulders. He turned and stared at Lei Dou strangely. "Hey, why does it feel like you bring your own air conditioning whenever you show up?"
"Does it?" Lei Dou raised an eyebrow, wondering whether the cold from [Ice Release] had leaked out.
It shouldn't have. My control was pretty much perfect.
Beside them, Choji was stuffing a handful of potato chips into his mouth. "Nope! I don't feel anything. Crunch, crunch."
Shikamaru scratched his pineapple-shaped hair, looking doubtful. "Then maybe I'm still half asleep and imagining things."
They had only been apart for one night, yet Shikamaru's keen instincts told him that Lei Dou seemed to have transformed again. That unfathomable feeling around him had grown even stronger.
Suddenly, a thought flashed through Lei Dou's mind. Today was the day of that famous scene from the original story-Naruto and Sasuke's "kiss of the century"!
He wondered whether he would still get to witness such sensational gossip firsthand.
He glanced at Naruto, who was still grinning foolishly at him, then turned toward Sasuke, sitting in a distant corner with his gloomy, cool-guy expression.
Strangely, why did Sasuke keep sneaking glances at him out of the corner of his eye?
Had the Uchiha Clan's second young master taken the wrong medicine?
Just before their gazes met, Sasuke hurriedly pulled his head back and pretended to admire the scenery, like a young girl caught red-handed.
Lei Dou was utterly baffled. What on earth was this tsundere up to?
In truth, Sasuke was having a hard time too. Before, Lei Dou had simply been popular and able to chat with everyone.
But ever since Lei Dou's strength had skyrocketed and his bearing had changed dramatically, the entire class seemed to have inexplicably begun revolving around him.
Over the past few days, even Kiba Inuzuka, who spent all day playing with his dog, and the tight-lipped Shino Aburame had liked going over to talk to Lei Dou.
The guy's popularity was practically riding a rocket.
"Congratulations, everyone! Starting today, you are genin capable of standing on your own!"
Iruka-sensei walked up to the podium with a folder tucked under his arm, interrupting the whispers below.
Looking at the roomful of children who had successfully graduated, Iruka's eyes filled with the pride of an old father.
"I'll keep this brief. Next, I'll announce the team assignments. When your name is called, stay where you are and wait for your Elite Jonin instructor!"
"Team 7!"
Lei Dou instinctively glanced at Naruto. Sure enough, the main event always came first.
"Sasuke Uchiha!"
"Naruto Uzumaki!"
"What?! I have to be on the same team as this poser?"
Naruto sprang onto his desk, pointing at Sasuke and shouting.
A vein throbbed on Iruka's forehead, and the chalkboard eraser creaked in his grip. "Naruto! Sit down! These are Lord Hokage's arrangements! You don't get to pick and choose!"