The charcoal pencil's core snapped against the paper. Grains from the broken tip scraped a crooked streak across the rough sheet, right over the anchor structure diagram he had only half revised.
Rinto stared at the streak, his pencil hand frozen for a long while, then hurled the remaining stub away. It struck the rock wall, broke into several pieces, and rolled among the crumpled papers littering the floor.
Another failure.
He had spent the entire night in the previous chapter revising the clustered anchors, then tested them another seven times after dawn. They still collapsed. Anchors in a single stretch of meridian could remain stable, but once extended throughout his body, the Chakra flow rates and Natural Energy intake in different areas never matched. Either one area fell out of balance or another overloaded. Even his best attempt lasted less than a minute before the backlash left his chest tight.
He had been cooped up in the laboratory for almost ten days. The responsive logic he had painstakingly extracted from Martyrdom Sealing caused problems as soon as he incorporated it. He had revised the structure over a dozen times, but fixing one problem always brought up another. Solve synchronization, and his meridians clogged; increase the load, and balance failed. The logic fit together perfectly, yet putting it into practice inside his body exposed pitfalls everywhere.
Rinto leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and rubbed his aching temples. His eyes felt gritty from the long hours awake. The moment he shut them, all he saw were densely packed anchor patterns, tangled like a mass of hemp. His stomach felt distressingly empty, but he could not even summon the inclination to get up and find food. His mind was full of one question: "Where exactly did I go wrong?"
When he had worked on Dynamic Reconstruction and Barehanded Jutsu Casting, however difficult they became, he had always had a clear direction. This time, he did not even know whether he was on the right path. Could the idea of using anchors to control energy have been entirely wrong from the beginning?
Once that thought surfaced, it pricked like a thorn, making him even more irritated. He abruptly stood, dragging the stone stool across the floor with an ear-piercing scrape. Enough of being cooped up. Any longer, and his brain would turn to stone.
He grabbed the coat hanging beside the door, tucked an engraving knife into his pocket, locked the laboratory, and headed out. He had no particular destination; he just wanted to clear his head. Without realizing it, his feet carried him toward the Martyrdom Sealing ruins at the island's center.
While dismantling Martyrdom Sealing before, he had noticed a sealed side chamber west of the main formation. Its stone door bore a protective seal from the Land of Whirlpools, linked to the main formation's patterns. At the time, he had not dared touch it for fear of triggering a rampage in the main formation. Now that he had thoroughly revised the main formation's trigger logic, there was no longer any risk of a linked reaction. He could take a look while he was there. Even if nothing proved useful, at least he would get some exercise.
At the edge of the ruins, he circled around to the western rock wall and, sure enough, found the sealed stone door. The sealing patterns on it were not particularly complicated, just an ordinary protective seal linked to the original Martyrdom Sealing main formation. Now that the main formation's logic had changed, this seal was effectively a toothless tiger.
Rinto crouched, gathered a thread of Chakra at his fingertip, and probed the sealing patterns. After days of pushing himself, his hand was a little shaky. His Chakra strayed slightly and triggered the seal's alert mechanism. Pale blue-green patterns instantly lit up across the stone door, carrying a faint electric shock. "Fuck," he cursed, hastily withdrawing his Chakra and steadying himself before patiently dismantling the patterns' locking structure bit by bit.
In less than a quarter of an hour, the sealing patterns dimmed. He reached out and pushed the stone door. It had seized against its frame, and only after he applied some force did it open a crack with a dull rumble.
A damp, moldy smell mixed with dust rushed into his face, choking him enough that he frowned and stepped back twice. Only after the stale air inside had dispersed a little did he slip in sideways.
The side chamber was small, only about half the size of his laboratory. Its wooden shelves had long since rotted through and collapsed onto the floor, broken wood mingling with dust. Most of the scrolls once stored on them had rotted too, crumbling into pulpy scraps at a touch. Several rusted-shut iron boxes sat piled in a corner, likewise corroded beyond recognition. Damp had long since ruined their contents.
Rinto kicked at the broken wood on the floor, growing more irritated. So he had come all this way for nothing. Nothing useful at all. He casually swept the dust aside with Chakra, hoping to find something that had not completely rotted away, but all he uncovered were scraps of paper whose writing had long since blurred beyond recognition.
He made two circuits of the chamber, growing more disappointed the longer he looked. Most of it consisted of old ritual records from the Land of Whirlpools, ninja rosters, and a few routine seal-maintenance logs. None of it was worth a damn for his current Senjutsu bottleneck.
"What a waste of time."
Rinto clicked his tongue and turned to leave, only to kick something hard. Looking down, he found a stone box set into a groove in the floor. Its lid was tightly sealed, with a simple seal carved into it, probably to keep out moisture. That was why it had not rotted.
He crouched, casually undid the seal on the stone box, and lifted its lid. Inside was a lining of moisture-resistant oilcloth wrapped around half a silk scroll and several broken bamboo slips. The silk scroll's edges had burned away, and more than half its writing was missing. It looked as though someone had hastily stuffed it inside during a fire back then.
Rinto had little hope to begin with. He picked it up, shook off the dust, and glanced at it by the light filtering through the gap in the stone doorway.
The writing on the silk scroll was in the ancient seal script of the Land of Whirlpools. After poring over so many damaged scrolls, he had long since become familiar with it. But when his eyes reached the second line, they suddenly stopped.
The silk scroll was badly burned. Most sentences no longer connected, leaving only scattered words and half sentences. He examined it over and over, but only a few passages were fully legible:
"...take the body as the vessel, Chakra as the sea..."
"...the breath of nature, accept it when the tide comes, cease when the tide recedes..."
"...not the solidity of the dike, but the capacity of the sea..."
"...yin and yang complement one another, neither locking nor blocking..."
Those few disconnected lines struck like a thunderbolt, leaving his mind ringing.
His approach from beginning to end had been about "blocking" and "locking." Afraid of losing control of Natural Energy, he had created countless anchors like little sluice gates, trying to lock down every thread of Natural Energy and make it follow his rules. Yet the more he locked it down, the more problems arose. The more densely he packed the anchors, the more easily things descended into chaos.
But that half sentence on the silk scroll spoke not of "locking," but of "holding."
Rather than using anchors as dikes to hold back the tide of Natural Energy, he would turn his entire body, his entire Chakra system, into a sea. His own Chakra would first form a stable "body of water." When Natural Energy entered, it would be like a tide flowing into the ocean, merging naturally without any need for little sluice gates to control it.
Rinto crouched on the floor, holding the half scroll of silk, even his breathing growing quieter. Scenes of every failure over the past dozen or so days flashed through his head like a film: anchor synchronization failure, blocked meridians, localized overload, Chakra disorder throughout his body...
Every failure had the same root-he had been using countless independent anchors to fight flowing energy. The harder he tried to control it, the less control he had.
What if he changed his approach?
He would stop making distributed anchor gates. First, he would turn all the Chakra in his body into a stable, flowing "vessel," establishing a stable internal circulation with his own Chakra. Natural Energy would merge directly into that circulation upon entering, replacing the balance of individual anchors with the balance of his entire Chakra system.
Just as the sea never tried to lock down every drop of the tide, yet when the tide came in, it merely merged with the sea rather than raising world-destroying waves.
The thought rushed like water through an opened floodgate, instantly sweeping away the knot that had blocked him for a dozen or so days. He had been stuck in a narrow line of thinking, always trying to make his anchors finer and more densely packed. He had forgotten that the most stable balance never came from countless points forcibly propping it up, but from the internal consistency of the whole system.
Rinto sprang to his feet so abruptly that his legs, numb from crouching too long, nearly gave way beneath him. He paid them no attention. Carefully folding the half scroll of silk, he tucked it against his chest and rushed out the door, forgetting even to pick up the engraving knife he had dropped on the floor.
He ran all the way to the laboratory, his head full of the framework for this new approach. Every previous design had been based on "anchors controlling energy." Now he would have to overturn it all and start from scratch, designing a fully circulating balance system centered on his own Chakra.
Reaching the laboratory, he shoved open the stone door and rushed to the stone workbench. With one sweep, he shoved the discarded drafts piled across it onto the floor, clearing a large space. Grabbing a fresh charcoal pencil, he began drawing before he had even caught his breath.
All the old diagrams were worthless now. What he was drawing was something entirely different. Its core was not countless anchors, but the balance of Chakra circulation throughout his body, making the body itself an adaptive vessel for Senjutsu balance.
The draft he brought in made the oil lamp's flame flicker, casting his motionless shadow against the rock wall. The sky outside the window slowly darkened, but it never occurred to him to light a lamp. By the last bit of daylight filtering through the vent, his pencil flew, and the lines on the paper gradually took shape.
The exhaustion, irritation, and frustration from over a dozen days of grueling work had all vanished. Only the excitement of a breakthrough in his thinking remained. Ideas poured through his mind like a tide, and the charcoal pencil in his hand could barely keep pace.
He knew perfectly well that this new approach would bring new problems too, that he would still have to endure countless trials, errors, and backlashes. But at least he had escaped his previous dead end and found an entirely new path.
Only when night had fallen completely, leaving the laboratory so dark he could not see his hand before his face, was he forced to stop drawing. He fumbled for the flint and lit the oil lamp. As the light flared, he looked at the beginnings of the new system's framework on the paper, and the corner of his mouth could not help twitching upward.
This half-burned silk scroll, these few disconnected lines, were ten thousand times more useful than that pile of experimental data Orochimaru had sent.
He did not rush to try it immediately. The new system was too complex; a change in one part would affect the whole. He had to establish a stable framework first and work through the logic of every component. Otherwise, rushing into practice would only cause worse backlash than before.
Rinto pulled over the stone stool and sat down, refining the new structure stroke by stroke under the oil lamp's light. His stomach growled with hunger, but he paid it no mind. In his thoughts and before his eyes, nothing remained but the patterns on the paper and that entirely new balance system that took the body as its vessel.
Outside the window, the waves sounded one after another, mingling with the soft scratching of charcoal across paper.