The fishing boat rocked in the waves for an entire day as it crossed the sea.
The old fisherman charged triple the fare, yet only dared stop beside a reef three li from the former site of the Land of Whirlpools. His face was as pale as a waterlogged sea fish. Pointing at the outline of a desolate island flickering through the sea fog, he spoke in a trembling voice. "Young man, this is as far as I can take you! Up ahead is the haunted land of Uzushio. Generations of us seafarers have passed down the story: no boat that goes in ever comes out. It's full of man-eating seals. I don't dare go any farther."
Rinto wore a black cloak washed pale with age, clutching a waterproof bundle wrapped in three layers of oilcloth against his chest. Inside were his experimental records, his core drafts, and half a tube of the Two-Tails' chakra sample—more important than his life. He glanced at the deserted island in the mist. The pointed top of a broken tower pierced the sea fog. The wind carried a salty, fishy smell, mixed with the faintest trace of cold chakra left by sealing jutsu, still not entirely dispersed after decades.
Without wasting words, he flicked a few bearer banknotes from his fingertips and tossed them over. He slung the bundle onto his back and leaped off the boat. Stepping across the slippery rocks of the reef, he crossed the waist-deep shallows in a few bounds and set foot on the beach of the Land of Whirlpools. Behind him, the fishing boat turned around and fled like mad, as though it had seen a ghost. In moments, the shadow of its sail vanished among the waves on the horizon.
Rinto paid it no mind. He would rather nobody came. The more dangerous a place was, the quieter it was, and the fewer people dared come interrupt his work engraving designs.
He had barely taken two steps forward when pale purple patterns suddenly lit up in the sand beneath his feet. Cold chakra instantly wound up around his ankles, and the sand seemed to come alive, burrowing toward the gaps between his bones. It was a border alert seal left behind by the Land of Whirlpools. Even after decades, it could still trigger with precision. An ordinary ninja who stepped on it would have their chakra drained in an instant and be sealed into the beach as a living corpse.
But Rinto did not even stop walking. An engraving knife appeared in the hand hanging at his side. With two casual flicks of his fingers through the sand, he altered the two most critical anchor points in the pattern. The seal, just about to erupt, instantly went silent. Its glowing patterns dimmed as he casually converted it into a sensory warning node. From now on, whenever another living creature stepped here, the disturbance would immediately reach his senses.
What was a deadly gateway to hell for others was, in his eyes, merely a somewhat old-fashioned chakra anchor structure. Ultimately, sealing jutsu was no different from the ninja tool configurations he had spent over a decade engraving. Both used anchor points to fix the rules governing chakra flow. The only difference was that one was engraved on iron and crystal jade, while the other was engraved on the ground, on paper, or even in human flesh.
He walked deeper into the island. The farther he went, the denser the ruins became, and the deadlier the traps. Sealing arrays lay everywhere among the shattered walls. Some had long since been eroded by the sea wind, leaving only mottled patterns; others still gathered power in the shadows, hidden in cracks between stones or behind broken walls. Triggering one carelessly could mean paralysis and drained chakra at best, or being torn apart by a spatial seal at worst, without even a bone fragment left behind.
Rinto did not walk quickly, but his steps were steady. A glance across the broken walls and ground was enough to pick out a seal's core anchor points. He casually dismantled anything useless and modified anything useful into part of his own warning network. As he walked, he converted all the alert seals the Land of Whirlpools had laid throughout the ruins into his own, effectively turning the island's entire perimeter into his defensive line.
Only after walking for most of the day did he stop among a cluster of half-collapsed stone buildings.
This was the former site of the Land of Whirlpools' sealing research institute. Most of the surface buildings had collapsed, and rubble and wildly overgrown sea vines buried the entrance, yet the underground laboratory's structure was actually intact. Layers upon layers of Whirlpool Sealing patterns covered its heavy basalt door. Even after decades, chakra still flowed steadily through them, keeping out the sea wind, moisture, and wild creatures. Several decaying skeletons lay scattered at the entrance. Judging by their condition, they had been dead for at least a dozen years—clearly treasure hunters who had broken in before, only to meet their end at this stone door.
Rinto stood staring at the sealing patterns on the door for a full ten minutes, his eyes growing brighter. The nested anchor logic of this defensive seal was exquisite. More than a dozen smaller seals interlocked to form an airtight defensive array. Touch one part, and the whole thing would react. Forcing it open would only trigger a self-destruct seal, sealing both the intruder and the stone door into another dimension.
Any other Jonin would have turned and fled after one look, but Rinto only felt his palms itch. He neither forced his way in nor dismantled it through brute force. Taking out his engraving knife, he worked along the stone wall bordering the door, adding more than a dozen micron-scale anchor points to the original seal's extended patterns and gradually modifying its recognition logic. In less than half an hour, the previously immovable door gave a series of dull clicks and slowly slid inward. Without even triggering the defensive barrier inside, it quietly revealed the stone steps leading underground.
The underground laboratory suited him even better than he had expected. More than ten meters below ground, it was dry and spacious, with thick rock walls capable of withstanding a Dust Release shock wave. Many stone tables and benches once used by the Land of Whirlpools' ninja remained inside, along with several perfectly intact storage cabinets fitted with sealing locks. Vents ran up to the surface through cracks in the stone, allowing air to circulate without leaking the slightest chakra fluctuation. Even if he detonated an entire pack of explosive tags inside, those outside might not hear a thing.
"Finally found somewhere I can settle down in peace." Rinto let out a breath and carefully placed the waterproof bundle on the innermost stone bench. First, he took out his experimental records, core drafts, and tailed beast sample, laying them on oiled paper for fear the coastal damp might damage the pages.
For the next two days, he went nowhere and did only two things: tidy the laboratory and secure its defenses.
First, he cleared out all the rubble and rotten wood, scrubbed the stone tables clean, and arranged them into fixed workbenches. He sorted his materials, engraving knives, and consumables into categories. At last, he no longer had to make do with rough rocks and broken planks. Then, within a five-li radius centered on the laboratory, he laid down a full ten defensive layers, combining the Land of Whirlpools' original lethal seals with his own Explosion Release traps, Lightning Release paralysis arrays, and sensory anchor points. Forget ordinary Jonin-even someone at Kage Level would suffer before getting through. Long before they reached the laboratory door, word of the disturbance would already have reached him.
Only once the defenses were finished could he finally settle down and tackle the tough problems at hand.
His first task was optimizing the Dust Release configuration. The Dust Release he had unleashed in the Forest of Death had succeeded, but it consumed too much chakra, and its area control was crude. The slightest lapse could strip away things he did not want destroyed. During these two days of dismantling seals, he had studied countless examples of the Land of Whirlpools' nested anchor logic. Whirlpool Sealing excelled at arranging vast numbers of anchor points in an extremely small space without mutual interference, precisely controlling every trace of chakra flow.
Previously, he had always feared that densely packed anchors would interfere with one another, so he had left considerable redundancy. Now that he had seen how they did it, everything clicked. Staying up all night, he completely scrapped and redrew Dust Release's core deconstruction and recombination anchors, converting them into an Uzushio-style nested structure. Chakra efficiency doubled outright, the configuration's volume shrank by two-thirds, and control precision improved by two orders of magnitude.
Early the next morning, he took the newly engraved miniature Dust Release crystal jade to the laboratory entrance and tested it on a reef rock the size of a millstone outside. A tiny white light, as fine as a needle, lit up at his fingertip and pierced precisely into the rock. There was no earthshaking commotion. The hard basalt silently vanished into nothingness, leaving only a smooth, even hollow. Not even the tips of the weeds around its edge were harmed.
It worked.
Holding the tiny piece of crystal jade, Rinto's eyes shone alarmingly bright. Previously, Dust Release could only serve as an area attack. Now, he could control its stripping precision down to the millimeter, and even embed it in rings or kunai as a readily usable killing move. Even an ordinary Chunin could unleash it, provided they had enough chakra.
After optimizing Dust Release, he threw himself completely into the ruins. Every day, he shouldered his pack, took his engraving knife, water, and dry flatbread, and headed deeper into the ruins to dismantle seals and search for surviving texts.
Every outing yielded treasure. One day, he unearthed half an introductory text on the Land of Whirlpools' sealing jutsu in a collapsed noble residence. Its explanation of fundamental anchor logic filled in several details he had never fully understood. The next day, he found several advanced sealing designs in a secret chamber beneath a broken tower. Their dynamic anchor concepts coincided almost perfectly with his dynamic reconstruction. He even dug up an entire crate of perfectly preserved conductive crystal jade in a bombed-out warehouse, purer than what he had paid a fortune for at a black-market auction.
The more he read, the more excited he became; the more he dismantled, the more engrossed he grew. Previously, his work on dynamic reconstruction had always run up against "how to make fixed anchors accommodate changing chakra." Yet decades ago, the Land of Whirlpools' sealing jutsu had already mastered "meeting change with change"-using moving anchors to lock down moving chakra. The rotating anchors in the Eight Trigrams Seal, for example, could automatically adjust their tightness to match fluctuations in tailed beast chakra. There was no need to weld the structure into place beforehand.
The problem of stability in multi-nature fusion, which had stalled him for so long, found an effortless answer in these yellowed fragments.
And so he went out by day to dismantle seals and find reference material, returning to the laboratory at night to revise designs and optimize configurations. His days passed quietly, without a single person disturbing him. He even had the illusion that this was more reassuring than his time in Orochimaru's Research and Development Department in Konoha. At least here, nobody would suddenly pound on his door, eye his research materials, or force him to conduct experiments he did not want to do. He could stay up as long as he liked and engrave whatever he wanted.
Until he encountered that formidable obstacle in the palace ruins at the island's center.
It was the Land of Whirlpools' former central sealing archive. The palace aboveground had long since been blasted into rubble. Only the underground entrance remained, blocked by a massive sealed door over ten meters tall. Dense Whirlpool Sealing patterns covered the door, with dozens of seals nested in interlocking layers. Even after decades, they still radiated a heart-pounding chakra pressure. More than a dozen skeletons lay scattered before it, some still wearing ninja protective gear. Clearly, ninja from various places had broken in over the years, only to die before this door.
Staring at the patterns on the door, Rinto even softened his breathing. This was the most exquisite, most complex anchor structure he had ever seen in his life, more difficult than every seal he had dismantled before combined. One change would affect everything. Misaltering even a single micron-scale anchor would trigger the entire seal's self-destruct mechanism, hurling everything within several hundred meters into another dimension.
Anyone else would have been frightened off long ago, but Rinto only felt his blood heat up. The synchronized nesting of multiple structures and dynamic adjustment logic within this seal were precisely what he lacked most right now. If he could thoroughly understand this logic, never mind three-nature kekkei tōta-he would even dare try his hand at kekkei mōra fusing four natures.
He did not rush to begin. First, he circled the sealed door three full times, firmly committing every pattern and anchor point to memory. On the way back to the laboratory, he could not even spare a thought for altering the seals along the route. His mind was filled with the patterns on the door. The moment he entered, he rushed to the stone bench and spent the entire night drawing designs, breaking the whole sealing structure down into fragments and simulating countless paths to unlocking it. Only after confirming that no step would trigger its self-destruction did he return to the sealed door with his engraving knife and drawings.
Cracking this door took him three full days and nights.
He sat on the cold stone floor, biting into tooth-jarringly hard flatbread when hungry and drinking the cold water he had brought when thirsty. His eyes remained fixed on the door's patterns, his engraving knife never resting as he modified the anchors bit by bit. After unraveling one nested layer, he stopped to work through it repeatedly for hours, making absolutely certain before touching the next. Three times during the process, the sealing patterns suddenly blazed with dazzling red light and the chakra instantly ran wild. Each time, relying on his extraordinary control over the anchors, he forcibly suppressed the rampaging chakra and kept the seal from exploding.
On the evening of the third day, sunset shone through gaps in the ruins and fell on the sealed door. As he finished altering the final core anchor, the towering door gave a dull rumble. Stone chips rained down, and the heavy doors slowly opened to either side, revealing the sealing archive that had lain shut for decades.
There was no gold or jewelry inside, no ninja tools or weapons. There were only rows of dust-covered stone shelves holding volumes of sealing texts wrapped in oilcloth, along with numerous crystal jade bottles containing sealed special chakra. On the central stone bench sat a paulownia-wood box secured by eight layers of seals. Inside was the Land of Whirlpools' core text, the Complete Record of Uzushio Sealing Jutsu. Although only half remained, it recorded the underlying logic of nearly all the Land of Whirlpools' advanced seals, from the basic Five Elements Seal to the Eight Trigrams Seal and Adamantine Sealing Chains that could bind tailed beasts. It even included stabilization seals for senjutsu chakra and solidified configurations for kekkei genkai.
Holding the yellowed half-volume with its brittle pages, Rinto's hands trembled slightly. Among the Five Great Nations, this would be a treasure capable of starting a war across the Shinobi World. To him, however, it was a key that could directly open the door to chakra's true nature.
Clutching the text, he practically ran back to the underground laboratory, too preoccupied with its contents to bother looking at the half-dismantled seals he passed. Back in the laboratory, he lit three chakra lamps in one go, illuminating the stone table as brightly as daylight. Bent over it, he turned the pages one by one, growing so engrossed that he never noticed the sky outside the window change from dark to light.
Previously, his research had always been confined to "configurations using ninja tool carriers"-thinking about how to engrave patterns on inanimate objects such as iron and crystal jade, allowing chakra to undergo living changes within a fixed carrier. But the Land of Whirlpools' sealing jutsu opened an entirely new door for him: chakra configurations could be engraved not only on inanimate objects, but directly into chakra, or even into the human body.
For instance, could he discard ninja tool carriers altogether and use chakra to construct temporary anchor structures directly in the air, instantly completing nature deconstruction and fusion, unleashing Dust Release with a thought? No hand seals, no pre-engraved carrier-more freely controllable than even an innate kekkei genkai.
Then there was the problem of solidifying senjutsu chakra, which he had never dared explore deeply. The text actually contained a dedicated chapter explaining how to use sealing anchors to lock down violent senjutsu chakra and prevent it from harming the caster. If this worked, he could incorporate senjutsu chakra into this dynamic reconstruction system as well.
The more he thought, the more excited he became. His previous five-nature switching, kekkei genkai fusion, and kekkei tōta had all remained at the level of "using chakra well." Now, however, he had reached the threshold of "rewriting chakra's rules."
Just as he picked up his charcoal pencil and was about to sketch the framework of a new configuration on scrap paper, the sensory anchors at the island's outermost edge suddenly began vibrating one after another. These were not the faint tremors caused by wild animals. They carried chakra fluctuations-deliberate intrusions. Not one group, but several, stepping into his outer defenses almost simultaneously.
The pencil in Rinto's hand stopped. His brows instantly knotted, and the excitement in his eyes subsided, leaving only irrepressible irritation.
Damn it. These persistent bastards actually followed me to this godforsaken place.
He put down the pencil, stood, and walked to the stone door. Resting his fingertips lightly against the wall, he instantly spread out the entire island's sensory network. He could not sense the boats sitting offshore, but every movement on the island entered his mind without exception:
To the northwest was Kabuto's chakra, which he knew all too well. Leading more than a dozen Sound Ninja, Kabuto was dismantling seals in the ruins as he worked deeper inside. His understanding of sealing jutsu was considerable, and he dismantled them quickly, making the fastest progress of all the teams;
To the east were Konoha's people, Anbu and Root mixed together, more than twenty in total, working together to clear the traps along their route. Yet the two sides were clearly at odds. Even from far away, their mutual wariness was palpable. A Root ninja had just stepped into a seal Rinto had modified, and his cursing was faintly audible from hundreds of meters away;
There were also two scattered chakra signatures. One carried Iwagakure's distinctive heavy earth nature and hid behind broken walls, using the commotion from Konoha and the Sound Ninja to sneak deeper in. The other carried Kirigakure's water-nature aura and lurked in the shadows of the ruins, spreading even its chakra extremely thin, clearly hoping to reap the rewards of others' fighting.
They were all here for him.
Of course they were. During the three days he had spent cracking the central sealing archive, the chakra fluctuations from the raging seals could be detected from far away. How could these people, who had pursued him for nearly two months, let that opportunity slip?
But Rinto was not particularly nervous, only annoyed. The ruins of the Land of Whirlpools were already an enormous trap. Add his ten defensive layers, and whether these people could even reach the vicinity of his laboratory alive was an open question. Even if they did break through, he had already mastered Dust Release. Why would he fear these flies?
He turned and returned to the stone bench, paying no further attention to the activity outside. Casually closing the heavy stone door again, he left only a narrow sensory gap. Those outside could intrude or die as they pleased. As long as they did not knock on his door or delay his research, he considered even another glance at them a waste of time.
He picked up the charcoal pencil again and drew the first stroke on the blank scrap paper. His mind was filled with the anchor logic he had just read in the text. Even the explosions and screams outside were like mosquitoes buzzing by his ears, going in one ear and out the other.
As for those intruders? He would deal with them if they actually reached the laboratory door. If they truly had no sense and dared interrupt his drawing, he would not mind giving them a proper taste of Dust Release combined with Uzushio Sealing Jutsu.