There was no room left to step inside the laboratory.
Crumpled balls of scrap paper and ruined engraved metal plates littered the floor. Shattered crystal plates lay piled in a corner, some still bearing black scorch marks along their edges where chakra had blown out. Rinto leaned against a stone stool, half a charcoal pencil pinched between his fingers. The crystal plate before him had just exploded for the third time. Cracks spread from its center to its corners, and the nested structure engraved inside had shattered into a complete mess.
Three days.
He had tried every way of combining them he could think of. He had dismantled the reconstruction anchor into components and embedded them in the Senjutsu cycle, only for the balance to collapse the moment he activated it; he had worked the Senjutsu balance unit into the steps of nature decomposition, only for the structure to fall apart as soon as he moved his chakra; he had even tried reducing the timing difference between the two sets of logic to one ten-thousandth of a second. But if nature decomposition began even a fraction earlier, the balance of the three energies immediately skewed wildly. Backlash shot through his chakra pathways, deepening the petrification patterns on his left arm that had yet to fade.
At first, he had still dared to conduct small-scale trials on his body. Later, as each backlash grew worse than the last and the stabbing pain in his chakra pathways lingered for days, he no longer dared gamble with his body. He could only conduct static tests outside his body on crystal and metal plates. Yet structures he could barely stabilize outside his body descended into utter chaos the moment he placed them in the flowing chakra inside him, unable to last even half a breath.
The charcoal pencil creaked in his grip, his knuckles turning white. He stared at the two sets of diagrams spread across the table: one showed the full structure of the Senjutsu cycle, and the other the core anchor of Dynamic Reconstruction. He had studied them for nearly half a month and could draw them with his eyes closed, yet he simply could not fit them together.
One needed to lock the proportions of the three energies in place, putting stability first; the other needed to break apart chakra structures, prioritizing change. Their underlying logic was fundamentally at odds, like water and oil. Even if he forced them into the same bottle and shook it, they would separate again after a few seconds at rest.
Irritated, he tossed the charcoal pencil onto the table. It rolled a few times and fell to the floor, but he did not pick it up. Just as he closed his eyes to settle himself, the warning anchor at the laboratory entrance suddenly let out a shrill alarm. Chakra fluctuations traveled through the stone door, grating on his ears.
Rinto's brows instantly knotted.
How many times had it been this month? When he had tested Senjutsu Dust Release earlier, the aftershocks had damaged the warning anchors around the laboratory and knocked their linkage structures out of alignment. They kept triggering false alarms, three or four times a night, always just when he had begun to find a thread of an idea.
He swore, grabbed the engraving knife beside the door, pulled the stone door open, and headed outside. He was not looking for inspiration. He was simply fed up-unless he fixed this damned thing, he could forget about thinking in peace.
The anchor was set in the rock wall outside the laboratory, wrapped in a weatherproof sealing layer. The earlier shock wave had cracked the seal and loosened the core patterns inside. Rinto crouched down and used the engraving knife to pry away the cracked stone covering, exposing the composite anchor within.
He had casually engraved it while setting up his defensive line. An anchor the size of a fingernail handled three things at once: sensing nearby chakra fluctuations, setting a trigger threshold, and linking to the paralysis trap beside it. It was not three separate little anchors pieced together. From the very first cut, he had worked the requirements of all three functions into the same set of patterns.
The problem now lay in the core linkage structure. The sensed signals could not reach the trigger mechanism, causing the erratic alarms. Rinto condensed an extremely fine thread of chakra at his fingertip and probed along the patterns. Once he located the misalignment, he gripped the engraving knife and prepared to adjust the patterns' parameters.
The moment the knife tip touched the stone, he abruptly froze.
The chakra at his fingertip still hung within the patterns. He stared at that structure smaller than a fingernail, and it felt as though something had struck his mind.
When he designed this anchor, he had not thought about "piecing together three structures for sensing, triggering, and linkage." Instead, starting with the most basic patterns, he had made every engraved line accommodate the logic of all three functions at once. The same circuit could transmit sensed chakra signals, evaluate the threshold, and simultaneously trigger the trap linkage. It had been a single whole from its foundations, not components forcibly glued together afterward.
Then what had he been doing for the past half month?
He had kept thinking about how to piece together two ready-made structures-the "lock" of Senjutsu balance and the "dismantling" of reconstruction decomposition-without letting them clash. But whether he nested, synchronized, or layered them, they remained two independent things housed in a single shell. There would always be gaps, and they would always interfere with each other.
Why couldn't he start from scratch, like with this composite anchor, and create a basic unit inherently capable of doing both jobs at once?
Not balancing the three energies first and then decomposing their natures, nor decomposing chakra first and then introducing natural energy. Starting with the most microscopic anchor unit, decomposition and balance had to become two sides of the same process. Every pattern had to both decompose nature-transformed chakra structures and simultaneously absorb natural energy, maintaining the proportions of the three energies. Every step of decomposition had to fit perfectly with the adjustments to the balance. No sequence, no timing difference, no two separate structures-just one structure accomplishing both tasks at once.
Rinto remained crouched on the ground, his engraving knife poised against the stone, unmoving for a long time. The sea breeze swept over with bits of grass, brushing his arm, but he did not notice. The failures of the past half month kept turning over in his mind. Every collapse, every backlash, had shared the same root cause-two things that could never fit together.
He had taken the wrong path from the very beginning.
The engraving knife in his hand dropped unconsciously, tracing lines on the smooth rock wall beside him. First he traced a microscopic Senjutsu balance pattern, then embedded a nature-decomposition structure into that very same circuit. The two patterns were not stacked together but intertwined, each within the other, every turn serving both functions at once.
As he drew, he suddenly stood and rushed back toward the laboratory, nearly flinging the engraving knife from his hand. He left the unfinished warning anchor where it was and even forgot to close the stone door.
Rushing back to the stone workbench, he swept aside the mountain of discarded drafts piled on it. No matter how long he had spent drawing those diagrams, he swept them all onto the floor, clearing a large space. He grabbed a stack of fresh scrap paper and pressed his charcoal pencil hard against it. This time, he drew neither a Senjutsu cycle nor a reconstruction anchor, only a single unit, the smallest and most basic.
The unit was so small it could accommodate only the decomposition of two streams of nature-transformed chakra. Yet every pattern within it carried two sets of logic at once: the path of nature deconstruction and the lock maintaining the balance of the three energies, perfectly interlocked and inseparable. From the moment chakra entered, decomposing its natures, absorbing natural energy, balancing the proportions of the three, and fusing them into kekkei genkai senjutsu chakra all happened simultaneously, completed in one step without any intermediate stages.
After drawing the basic unit, he did not dare test it directly on his body. Instead, he grabbed a fresh crystal plate, held his breath, and precisely engraved the miniature unit onto it.
He condensed chakra at his fingertips, feeding a thread of wind nature and a thread of water nature into the crystal plate's anchor at the same time, while simultaneously drawing in a thread of natural energy.
No blowout, no imbalance, no collapse.
The anchor on the crystal plate glowed steadily. Pale blue cold seeped from its patterns, forming a thin layer of ice across the plate's surface. What emerged was fully fused Senjutsu Ice Release chakra, stable and condensed, without the slightest excess fluctuation.
Rinto's breathing paused. He fed in twice as much chakra, and the anchor remained completely stable. The ice thickened, without the slightest sign of impending collapse. He repeated the test five times, and every attempt went smoothly. There was no timing difference, no loss of balance, and even the chakra consumption was nearly thirty percent lower than with his previous two-step method.
It worked.
The most critical deadlock had actually been resolved just like that. Not through some earth-shaking epiphany, but through a warning anchor he had casually engraved half a year ago, which had smashed a crack in the wall blocking him for half a month.
He set down the engraving knife and let out a long breath. Only then did he realize that the back of his clothes had long since become soaked with cold sweat. His knife hand had been tense the entire time. Now that he relaxed it, his fingertips trembled slightly.
But he did not rest for long. His excitement had barely surfaced before new problems pressed it down.
Success with a single unit outside his body did not mean it was ready for use. Ice Release, with its two natures, was the simplest case. What about the more complex Lava Release and Explosion Release? What about Dust Release, which required the fusion of three natures? And even with a single unit stabilized, embedding countless such units into his body's chakra circulation to achieve instant senjutsu kekkei genkai anywhere throughout his body, at any time, demanded the utmost precision in chakra control. The slightest carelessness could still cause a collapse.
He pulled over the stone stool and sat down, not even stopping to clean up the mess on the floor. Picking up the charcoal pencil, he began expanding the basic unit he had just drawn into an adaptive structure for the entire circuit. How could he seamlessly embed these miniature units in his existing Senjutsu cycle? How could he ensure countless units remained synchronized? How could he adapt them to the nature-fusion logic of different kekkei genkai? How could he increase fault tolerance so that one collapsing unit would not cause backlash throughout his body?
The oil lamp's flame flickered in the wind pouring through the doorway. He raised a hand to shield it, never taking his eyes off the paper. Outside the window, the sky slowly darkened, then slowly brightened again, and he noticed none of it. He went through three charcoal pencils, filling sheet after sheet of scrap paper, grinding forward bit by bit from the basic unit, to adaptation for a single kekkei genkai, to a linkage plan for his whole body's circulation.
At one point, the unfinished warning anchor sounded again, its alarm carrying from a distance. He did not even raise his head, as though he had heard nothing, his pencil racing across the paper.
All his earlier irritation, frustration, and stifling sense of being trapped in a dead end were gone. All that remained was the ease of an unobstructed train of thought and the work of refining the new structure. He knew very well that this was only the first step. Before he could truly achieve instant senjutsu kekkei genkai, there were still countless pitfalls to encounter and countless rounds of trial and error ahead.
But at least the path was open.