Scrap paper was piled almost to overflowing on the stone table, all of it covered in discarded anchor diagrams. Some had been crossed out halfway through; others had their corners blasted black by chakra. Crumpled paper littered the floor, leaving barely anywhere to step.
The fingers gripping Rinto's charcoal pencil were coated in thick charcoal dust. Old and new wounds overlapped across his knuckles, and a cut torn open during his latest test was still bleeding. He casually wiped it on his trousers, his gaze fixed on the sketch before him.
He had stayed up all night incorporating the adaptive tracking logic he had thoroughly worked out from Martyrdom Sealing in the previous chapter into his Senjutsu Anchor design. The core problem with the earlier fixed anchors was that a rigid structure could not withstand a living energy flow. His new distributed tracking anchors embedded countless miniature closed-loop units along the entire chakra circulation route, moving with the energy and adjusting with the pressure. The logic fit together perfectly. Even he thought it ought to work this time.
He did not dare start with anchors throughout his entire body and tested them in his left arm first-the injuries from the previous backlash had not quite healed. Even if things collapsed, he could cut his losses in time without sacrificing his whole body.
Drawing a deep breath, Rinto closed his eyes and slowly sank his chakra into the pathways of his left arm. Following the new design, miniature tracking anchors formed one after another inside them, linked end to end and neatly arranged along the chakra flow.
With the anchors in place, he began drawing natural energy inside.
The first few seconds were stable. Natural energy entered his pathways through his pores, where the miniature anchors caught it and fused it with his chakra. There was no collapse as before, nor any sign of petrification. Rinto had only just begun to relax when he tried increasing his intake of natural energy slightly.
Everything went haywire in an instant.
The anchors near his shoulder responded half a beat too slowly. Those ahead had already finished fusing the energy, but those behind had yet to catch it. Uncontrolled natural energy instantly shot through his pathways like countless fine needles stabbing into the gaps between his bones. He hurriedly dispersed his chakra, but it was already too late. Pain spasmed through the pathways in his forearm, his entire arm went numb, and the charcoal pencil in his hand clattered to the floor.
"Fuck."
Gritting his teeth, he shook his numb arm, cold sweat breaking out on his forehead from the pain. The problem lay in synchronization. Martyrdom Sealing's anchors were carved into lifeless rock. Their positions were fixed, allowing their linking signals to synchronize precisely. But the anchors inside his pathways moved with his chakra. Even a single millisecond's difference in response time would destroy the entire balance.
He bent down to retrieve the pencil, sat on the stone stool, and stared at the sketch as he gritted his back teeth and revised the linking structure. He added tracking-trigger signal lines between the anchors so that changes in one anchor's energy could be instantly synchronized with the next, reducing response delays to a minimum.
By the time he finished revising the plans, it was noon. He felt inside his clothes. The dry flatbread was long gone; only two wild fruits he had picked earlier remained. He took one out and bit into it, grimacing at the sourness, then chewed twice and swallowed. He could not even be bothered to drink any water. Picking up the revised plans, he began his second test.
With the synchronization logic optimized, the anchors linked together much more smoothly this time. As natural energy entered, every anchor kept pace, steadily fusing senjutsu chakra that circulated through his pathways without falling into disorder or collapsing.
Rinto's eyes brightened a little. He tried guiding the senjutsu chakra toward his fingertips, intending to release the smallest possible senjutsu wind blade to test its effects. But the instant the chakra reached his wrist, it was as though it had struck a wall. It could not move at all.
He froze for a moment, then immediately examined his pathways internally and discovered the problem. To ensure synchronization, he had packed the anchors too densely. The miniature units completely clogged his pathways. The senjutsu chakra they produced was stable enough, but it could not circulate smoothly at all. Forget casting ninjutsu-it could not even move.
"Goddammit."
Furious, he slammed the pencil onto the table, leaned against the back of his chair, and closed his eyes to rub his aching temples. He had fixed one thing only to neglect another. Solving synchronization had created a blockage problem. Dense anchors synchronized well but clogged his pathways; sparse anchors left the pathways clear but could not keep up with synchronization and overloaded easily.
He stared blankly at the ceiling for a long while, turning the question of how to balance density and synchronization over and over in his mind. Martyrdom Sealing's logic was static, carved into motionless rock where the anchors could be placed as densely as desired. But a person's pathways had limited space. He could hardly fill them entirely just to fit the anchors.
After resting for less than ten minutes, he straightened again, took a fresh sheet of scrap paper, and redesigned the anchor structure. This time, he merged neighboring miniature units into clustered anchor groups. Each group would maintain the balance within a short stretch of pathway, reducing the number of anchors to avoid clogging while ensuring synchronization within each group.
It was already growing dark when he finished the plans. He refilled the oil lamp, and its flame flickered, casting his swaying shadow onto the rock wall. He had no attention to spare for whether it was day or night. Taking the new structural diagram, he began his third test.
The clustered anchor groups did indeed solve the blockage problem. Chakra circulated smoothly, and synchronization was better than before. He successfully fused senjutsu chakra and even released a tiny senjutsu wind blade from his fingertip, slicing the scrap paper on the table in two.
"It worked?"
Even Rinto was stunned for a moment. A trace of anticipation had only just risen in him when he tried increasing his natural energy intake to test the upper limit. But the moment he did, the anchor group at his wrist overloaded. A single group had to bear too much energy, and its locking structure collapsed outright. Senjutsu chakra exploded at his fingertips, instantly scorching them into a mass of blisters. The pain made him jerk his hand back.
Great. He had only just solved synchronization and blockage, and now there was a load problem. Each anchor group's capacity was too low. A slight increase in energy was enough to overwhelm it and make it collapse.
Staring at his blistered fingertips, Rinto kicked the stone table's leg in fury, only to grimace at the pain himself. After these past few days of staying up, blood vessels already covered the whites of his eyes. His face was stubbly and smeared with charcoal dust and blood, and his whole being radiated the irritation and exhaustion of someone pushed to the limit.
He sat there, staring blankly at the discarded drafts covering the floor for a long time. From the original fixed anchors to the current distributed anchor clusters, he had revised the structure over a dozen times and run dozens of tests. Every time he solved one problem, another immediately sprang up. No sooner did he put out one fire than another started. The more he changed things, the more tangled they became, until they were not even as good as the original fixed anchors-at least those could stably fuse a small amount of senjutsu chakra. Now, after all these revisions, he could not even achieve stability.
Could my whole approach have been wrong from the start?
Once that thought surfaced, he could not suppress it. He had been certain that distributed tracking anchors were the right approach, but after so many tests, every single one had run into problems. Could this path be impossible after all?
He scratched irritably at his hair and pulled out his old experimental log. He had brought it from Konoha. From his earliest work on Dynamic Reconstruction and Barehanded Jutsu Casting, every record of trial and error and every change in his thinking had gone into it. He flipped through it page by page, hoping to see how he had found his way out of previous dead ends.
Halfway through, the sensory anchors spread across the island suddenly trembled. It was very faint, coming from the coast on the outer edge. There was only one weak chakra presence. It had not breached the barrier, merely stopped outside.
Rinto's brows instantly knotted. Fuck, who is it now? I'm stuck at a bottleneck and irritated as hell, and someone has to come make trouble.
He grabbed the carving knife beside the table and headed out, his chakra already poised to strike. Whoever it was, if they dared disturb his research, he would drive them straight off.
But when he reached the coast, there was not a soul in sight. Only a cloth bundle sat on the beach, with a note beside it in Kabuto's handwriting: "Lord Orochimaru sent me to deliver this. There are research records concerning Senjutsu and some top-grade materials. I hope they will be of help to you."
Rinto's face instantly darkened. Orochimaru again. What he hated most was this sort of relentless pestering. He had driven him off last time, and now he had sent Kabuto with gifts. Did he really think Rinto was someone who could be bought off so easily?
He raised his foot to kick the bundle into the sea, but stopped with it in the air. He was stuck at a bottleneck right now. Orochimaru had spent so many years conducting human experiments and researching chakra and energy. Perhaps he really did have something Rinto had never encountered.
After hesitating for a long time, he finally bent down and picked up the heavy bundle. He did not open it immediately. Only after returning to the laboratory and locking the door behind him did he empty it onto the table.
Inside were several bottles of top-grade chakra-conducting fluid, several high-density metal plates for engraving seals, and a thick stack of research records. He casually flipped through them. Most were data from Orochimaru's human experiments, concerning the Cursed Seal and the human body's reactions to senjutsu transformation. His brows tightened fiercely as he read. After two pages, he tossed them aside and directly cast Fire Release, burning all the records of human experiments. Flames licked the pages, quickly reducing them to ash.
Only a few thin pages remained: basic data on natural energy's fluctuation frequencies and its compatibility with human chakra. These were basic observational records from Orochimaru's experiments that did not involve human subjects.
Rinto held those pages and read them over and over. The natural energy fluctuation parameters recorded there were far more precise than anything he had worked out himself. When designing his anchors, he had used only a rough range for natural energy's fluctuation frequency. He had never expected so many subtle variations within it.
Something stirred in him. Taking the data, he went back to revise the anchors' balance thresholds, accounting for variations in natural energy fluctuations and readjusting their adaptive structures. His previous anchors had been designed around fixed energy ratios, but fluctuations in natural energy itself could also affect the balance. Perhaps this was one reason his anchors kept collapsing.
It was already well past midnight when he finished revising the plans. Most of the oil in the lamp had burned away again, and Rinto had stayed up so long that his mind was growing sluggish. Still, he could not resist testing whether the revised version would work.
He drew a deep breath, suppressed his mental exhaustion, and once again formed the optimized anchor groups inside his pathways, adjusting their balance thresholds to accommodate natural energy's fluctuations.
This attempt was steadier than any of the previous ones. As natural energy entered, the anchors adjusted their locking strength with its fluctuations. Fusion proceeded smoothly, chakra circulation remained unobstructed, and the load limit had risen as well. He even successfully released two senjutsu wind blades, slightly more powerful than his earlier carrier-based version.
Hope had only just stirred in Rinto when he tried seeing whether he could maintain the senjutsu state for an extended period. But before half a minute had passed, an energy disparity developed between the anchor groups in his chest and those in his arms, instantly throwing the chakra throughout his body into chaos. He hurriedly dispersed every anchor, but the backlash still struck him with a stifling pressure in his chest. Blood surged toward his throat, and he forcibly swallowed it back down.
Great. He had solved the problem within individual stretches of pathway, only to run into coordination problems between anchors in different parts of his body. Chakra flowed at different speeds through his arms, torso, and dantian, and their natural energy intake differed as well. No matter how well he designed a single anchor group, problems still arose when they were brought together.
The oil lamp's flame flickered and went out completely. Beyond the window, dawn was breaking. Morning light filtered through the vent, falling on the discarded drafts covering the floor and on his face, pale from staying up.
For an entire day and night, he had run no fewer than twenty tests, revising one version after another and solving one problem after another, yet new problems always appeared. The bottleneck was like a thick wall. He had hammered at it for ages and knocked off only a little plaster, unable to break through.
Rinto tossed the charcoal pencil onto the table, too drained even to swear. He leaned against the back of his chair with his eyes closed, his mind a tangled mess of anchor structures, parameters, and errors.
He had worked on chakra configurations for over a decade, from Konoha's Research and Development Department to his escape to the Land of Whirlpools. Never had he faced anything like this, unable to find even one consistently viable approach. The logic was clearly sound, yet putting it into practice inside his body revealed pitfalls everywhere.
He stayed slumped in the chair like that for nearly an hour. Daylight fully arrived, and the seabirds outside made an irritating racket, but he did not move.
Only when his stomach let out a loud, hungry growl did he snap back to himself and remember that he had not eaten properly in almost two days. He stood up to find something to eat, but just as he lifted his foot, his gaze fell back on the sketches on the stone table, and he stopped again.
No. I can't stay stuck like this.
He sat back down, picked up the charcoal pencil from the floor, and dug out the tracking structure diagrams he had copied from Martyrdom Sealing. He examined them sheet by sheet, scrutinizing every line. He refused to believe that others could wield tracking logic so deftly while he could not apply it to Senjutsu.
Even if it took another hundred attempts, another thousand, he would break through this dead end.