The seaside wind carried a salty, fishy tang that made his eyes sting. Rinto stood on a reef, the white light at his fingertips flickering twice before it finally formed a stable Dust Release barrier.
The waist-high basalt in front of him silently vanished into nothing, but his brow furrowed even deeper.
Too slow.
From the moment he formed the thought to the moment Senjutsu Dust Release took shape, there was a delay of a full half-breath.
Only yesterday, he had smoothed out the full-chain cycle for Barehanded Senjutsu, letting him fling out senjutsu wind blades and Senjutsu Ice Release at will. But the moment he touched a Kekkei Genkai that required Dynamic Reconstruction-especially a Kekkei Tōta like Dust Release, which required three natures to fuse simultaneously-its shortcomings immediately showed.
His current senjutsu first relied on a full-body cycle to stabilize the balance of the three energies and generate senjutsu chakra, then used that senjutsu chakra to build the anchors for nature reconstruction. It was a two-step process. No matter how fast his hands were or how precise his chakra control was, he could not get around that half-breath delay.
That was no great problem when testing things in the laboratory, but against opponents on Jiraiya or Orochimaru's level, half a breath was enough for them to kill him three times over. Worse, fusing senjutsu chakra before building reconstruction anchors nearly doubled the chakra expenditure and diminished the senjutsu enhancement. Many fine adjustments to chakra nature collapsed outright the moment they ran into the senjutsu chakra's balance lock.
Just now, he had tried simultaneously adjusting the proportion of wind-nature chakra within the senjutsu cycle. Before he had changed even a tenth of it, the balance of the three energies had skewed, and the senjutsu chakra at his fingertips had instantly exploded, scorching a patch of blisters across his finger pads. They still throbbed faintly.
Rinto shook his hand and turned toward the laboratory. He had blasted several craters into the reef, all left by that morning's trial and error: some dissolved by Dust Release, some slashed by wind blades, some blasted apart by Ice Release. Not one attempt had succeeded.
Back in the laboratory, he spread two stacks of diagrams across the stone table. One depicted the full-chain cycle structure for Barehanded Senjutsu, densely drawn and still bearing the marks of countless revisions; the other showed the core configurations for Dynamic Reconstruction. From dual-nature Kekkei Genkai to triple-nature Dust Release, he could draw every set of anchor logic with his eyes closed.
He had mastered each system individually, yet he simply could not fit them together.
He pulled over a stone stool and sat down. Rather than immediately picking up his pencil, he stared at the two stacks of diagrams. He looked for almost half an hour, and the longer he looked, the more at odds they seemed.
The core of senjutsu was "stability." The proportions of physical, spiritual, and natural energy had to be welded firmly to the balance line, without the slightest deviation. Any skew would cause imbalance and backlash, collapsing the entire cycle. What it demanded was constancy, stability, and a tightly sealed closed loop.
But the core of Dynamic Reconstruction was "change." It broke apart chakra's nature structure, shattered the original balance, then rearranged and recombined it, splitting a single nature into multiple natures before fusing them into a Kekkei Genkai. What it demanded was flow, disassembly, and a constantly changing open structure.
One needed to lock the balance in place; the other needed to break the structure apart. Their logic was fundamentally opposed. Force them together, and either the senjutsu balance collapsed or the nature reconstruction fell apart.
Rinto traced his fingertips unconsciously across the stone table, smearing charcoal dust all over his hand, his mind turning over the points of conflict between the two systems. When developing the senjutsu cycle, he had embedded adaptive logic into it, but that had involved making fine adjustments within a balanced framework. Now he needed to break the balance outright to perform reconstruction. It was like pulling bricks out of a dam-it would be strange if it did not collapse.
He took a deep breath and picked up his charcoal pencil, starting with the most direct approach: nesting. He embedded the Kekkei Genkai reconstruction anchors directly into the senjutsu cycle's flow channels, hoping to let the senjutsu chakra complete nature fusion as it circulated.
He drew quickly. He knew both structures inside out, and finished the nested framework in half an hour. Setting down his pencil, he stood and walked to the center of the open space. He closed his eyes, started the senjutsu cycle, and tried activating the Ice Release reconstruction anchors within the flow channels at the same time.
Problems arose the moment he began.
As soon as the reconstruction anchors activated, they began breaking down the water- and wind-nature chakra. Once the chakra structure shattered, the balance units embedded in the flow channels instantly fell into disorder, throwing the proportions of the three energies off. Before Ice Release could form, the senjutsu cycle collapsed. Uncontrolled chakra battered his chakra pathways. Gritting his teeth, he immediately triggered venting across every flow channel, forcibly expelling the imbalanced energy. Even so, the shock left his chest tight. He stumbled back two steps into the stone wall, and the diagrams on the table shook loose and scattered across the floor.
"Fuck."
He swore under his breath and rubbed his aching chest. He had expected failure, but when it actually collapsed, he still could not suppress his irritation.
Without picking up the papers, he returned to the stone table, discarded the nesting approach, and tried temporal synchronization instead. He reduced the interval between initiating senjutsu fusion and nature reconstruction to the absolute minimum, starting them almost simultaneously. The idea was for the reconstruction anchors to catch the senjutsu chakra the instant it formed and complete nature fusion, combining two steps into one.
This time, he was more cautious, beginning with the simplest option, Ice Release. Chakra circulated rapidly through his pathways as senjutsu energy intake and nature disassembly began together. Yet even when he reduced the timing difference to one ten-thousandth of a second, they still would not line up.
Either nature disassembly happened too quickly, breaking the chakra apart before the senjutsu chakra finished fusing and causing it to disperse outright, or senjutsu fusion happened too quickly, stabilizing the chakra only for reconstruction to dismantle it and instantly break the balance. He tried more than a dozen times. At best, he barely managed to release Senjutsu Ice Release, but its windup was even longer than the earlier two-step process. It came nowhere near the requirement for instant casting.
The more he tried, the more went wrong.
To synchronize the timing, he altered the senjutsu cycle's structure and took the reconstruction anchors apart until they were unrecognizable. Not only did he fail to solve the delay, even the previously stable senjutsu cycle began to stutter. Once, it jammed outright inside his chakra pathways, reversing the chakra flow and leaving half his body numb with pain.
The sky slowly darkened. He refilled the oil lamp twice, while discarded drafts piled higher on the table and crumpled paper rolled everywhere across the floor. He revised no fewer than ten versions. Nesting, synchronization, layered anchoring, temporal locking-he tried every method he could think of. They either collapsed, ran too slowly, or consumed absurd amounts of chakra. Not one was usable.
His final attempt at synchronized Dust Release fusion exploded right at his fingertips. He reacted quickly and immediately dispersed the chakra, but the shock wave still hurled him to the floor. His elbow struck the stone table leg, scraping away a large patch of skin. Blood mixed with the charcoal dust on the floor in a broad smear.
He braced himself against the floor and sat up. Ignoring his injured elbow, he simply sat there, staring blankly at the discarded drafts strewn around him.
When developing Barehanded Senjutsu, no matter how difficult it became, he had always had a clear direction. Even when trial and error brought backlash, he knew where the problem lay, and correcting it moved him one step forward. This time, he could not even find his bearings. Two systems with completely opposing underlying logic were like water and fire. How could he keep them from fighting while making them work together?
He sat for almost half an hour, until darkness had fully fallen. Outside the window, there was only the sound of waves striking the shore. Inside the laboratory, only the oil lamp's flame swayed, stretching his shadow long. Only then did he slowly rise. Without touching the diagrams on the table or continuing his tests, he turned and left the laboratory.
He was not going out to find inspiration. He was frustrated. His head felt stuffed with a tangled mass of thread. If he kept staring at the diagrams, his thinking would only grow more trapped.
He wandered aimlessly along the path around the island. The night wind was cool against his face, easing his agitation a little. Passing the middle trap belt he had laid earlier, he noticed several anchors damaged by the shock waves from his jutsu tests, their trigger mechanisms knocked out of alignment. He crouched down and casually repaired them.
As he worked, his fingertips brushed the nested barrier patterns carved into the rock, and his movements paused.
He had made these when setting up his defenses: three barriers with completely different functions-warning, paralysis, and killing-nested within the same anchor structure and sharing a single trigger signal. Once triggered at one point, all three activated simultaneously without interfering with one another, and could even cover for one another.
At the time, his thinking had been that he did not need three independent formations. By blending the core logic of all three functions into a single anchor unit, he could save materials and space while achieving good synchronization.
That thought flashed through his mind like a tiny spark, but when he tried to pursue it, he could not grasp it.
Barriers were static, carved into rock. However complex their functions, their structures were fixed. But what he wanted to make involved two active systems whose logic ran in completely opposite directions. How could he blend them into the same unit?
He stared at the patterns for a long time. The tangled threads in his mind shifted back and forth, but he still could not untangle them. Irritated, he shoved the carving knife back into his pocket, abandoned the repairs, and rose to keep walking.
He wandered along the shore for most of the night. Only when the horizon turned pale and the morning wind chilled him all over did he turn back toward the laboratory.
When he returned, the discarded drafts were still scattered across the floor. The night wind had turned the pages of the diagrams on the table, and the oil lamp had long since burned dry, its blackened wick curled inside the bowl. He did not light it. In the morning light filtering through the window, he sat on the stone stool without touching his charcoal pencil or looking at the diagrams. He simply sat there.
All his earlier thinking had revolved around "how to fit two existing systems together." Whether nesting or synchronization, he had only been making alterations to the two original systems, forcing them to accommodate each other. But they were fundamentally incompatible. However much they accommodated each other, they would still clash.
Then what if I stopped trying to fit them together?
What if I used neither the existing senjutsu cycle nor the existing reconstruction anchors, but started from scratch and created an entirely new structure-one that accounted for both balance and disassembly from its most basic units, blending the two sets of logic at their roots?
As that thought arose, his completely blocked thinking seemed to loosen a little. Immediately afterward, however, new problems surged up.
A basic unit had to maintain the balance of the three energies while also disassembling and fusing chakra natures. That was inherently contradictory. Balance required locking things down; disassembly required releasing them. How could the same unit do both at once?
Morning light slowly spread across the stone table. He picked up his charcoal pencil and drew the simplest possible anchor unit on a blank sheet of rough paper. The pencil tip paused against the paper, and for a long time, he added nothing.
He knew his earlier path was a dead end, but he still had not found an entrance to a new one.
His empty stomach cramped with pain, and only then did he remember that he had eaten nothing for almost a full day and night. The dry flatbread beside the table had been taken out yesterday morning and was as hard as stone. He picked it up, took a bite, and chewed for a long time. Unable to swallow it, he spat it back out.
It was dry enough to choke on, and he was too frustrated to swallow.
He tossed the flatbread aside and picked up his failed diagrams again, going through them one by one. He was not searching for a solution, but for the flaws in his earlier thinking. With each sheet he examined, he crossed out another wrong direction. The further he went, the more certain he became that every previous attempt at combining the systems had been fundamentally wrong.
But how to build the new structure remained a complete blank.
The sun rose overhead. Midday sunlight shone through the vent onto his hands, covered in charcoal dust, bloodstains, and dirt. He had been sitting at the stone table for almost a day now. He had barely drawn anything, and charcoal pencil stubs like cigarette butts littered the floor, yet he still had not found a way through.
Since escaping Konoha, this was the first time he had hit a bottleneck where he could not even find a direction. Before, no matter how vicious the backlash or how badly he fell, he had known where to go. Now, there were walls on every side, without even a crack to be found.
But he had no intention of stopping.
He had worked on chakra configurations for over a decade, and there had never been a hurdle he could not cross. Barehanded Jutsu Casting had been one. Senjutsu had been another. This one would be no different.
He threw away the failed draft in his hand, grabbed a fresh sheet of rough paper, and pressed his charcoal pencil down hard. Since the old path led nowhere, he would smash everything old and start from scratch, working at it bit by bit. Even if it took a thousand failed attempts, or ten thousand, he would chip this dead knot open.