Three new blueprints lay spread across the stone workbench. The top sheet was covered in modular microstructures, its corners blackened by his fingertips. Rinto held his charcoal pencil suspended in midair. The blisters on his fingers had burst, and beads of blood stained the pencil's tip. He casually wiped his hand on his trouser leg, never taking his eyes off the paper.
The idea he had drawn from the alert anchors broke fusion and balance down into miniature modules that could be combined. Testing Ice Release outside his body had worked, but once he moved it inside, something still went wrong.
He first tried fusing two attributes within a single section of his chakra pathways. It worked. At a thought, the wind and water decomposition modules and the balancing module snapped into place, forming senjutsu Ice Release chakra at the same instant. With a flick of his fingers, an ice spike buried itself in the rock wall before even the chakra fluctuations could spread. It was a full half-breath faster than activating senjutsu first and then casting ninjutsu.
He continued testing, spreading the modules throughout his chakra pathways and using the senjutsu cycle's main bus to synchronize them. He released Ice Release and Lightning Release simultaneously from his left and right hands. Both formed instantly, without stalling or turbulence. He could even switch Kekkei Genkai types while maintaining the senjutsu cycle, consuming thirty percent less chakra than the two-step method.
For two-attribute Kekkei Genkai-Lava Release, Explosion Release, and Scorch Release-he only needed to modify the modules' attribute decomposition paths to cast them smoothly. Power, precision, and speed all met his expectations.
But the moment he tried Dust Release, everything stalled.
Dust Release required wind, earth, and fire to fuse simultaneously. Compared with two attributes, it needed another layer of decomposition and matching logic, with an entirely different rhythm. When he assembled the three-attribute modules, either decomposition lagged half a beat, leaving the already-integrated natural energy nowhere to go and throwing the three-energy balance off completely, or he forced it to wait for attribute fusion, allowing natural energy to accumulate until it exploded at his fingertips.
On his first attempt, the structure collapsed the moment chakra entered the modules. Uncontrolled energy exploded in his palm. He instinctively pulled back, but his hand was still burned and blistered. The smell of scorched flesh mingled with charcoal dust and filled the laboratory.
Ignoring the injury, he sat down to revise the module structure, adding a timing lock to three-attribute fusion so attribute decomposition and natural energy integration would align perfectly. When he tried again, Dust Release barely formed, but its startup took even longer than the old two-step method. It fell far short of instant casting, and its margin for error was absurdly small. The slightest distraction collapsed the balance.
Worse, adapting the modules for three attributes had complicated their general-purpose structure. When he went back to two-attribute Kekkei Genkai, they stuttered instead, and chakra consumption increased. Fixing one end broke the other.
For the next two days, he remained trapped in that knot.
He revised version after version, from general-purpose adaptive modules to separate attribute arrays, then to nested structures dedicated to three attributes. Every test collapsed. His best attempt barely managed one instantaneous, small-scale senjutsu Dust Release, but when he immediately switched to Ice Release, module disassembly and reassembly lagged half a breath, nearly freezing his own hand to the rock wall.
Discarded drafts piled higher than the corner of the wall. Ruined engraved crystal plates littered the floor, some still blackened along their edges from explosions. He stayed awake for two nights. Blood vessels webbed the whites of his eyes, stubble covered his jaw, and charcoal dust and burn ointment smeared his face. Even the experimental log he had previously kept every day held only a few hastily scrawled failures. He had no strength left to record the detailed procedures.
Once, he tried six times in a row, and all six collapsed. On the last attempt, Dust Release exploded directly in his palm. The shock wave drove him two steps backward into the stone wall and knocked over the oil lamp on the table. Oil spilled across half the tabletop, nearly setting his core blueprints ablaze. He frantically smothered the fire. Looking at the half of a module diagram ruined by oil, he neither cursed nor threw anything. He simply slid down the stone wall and sat on the floor, motionless for a long time.
It was not pain. He was numb. Ever since he had begun working on senjutsu, every hurdle he cleared had brought him face-to-face with an even higher wall. With the earlier anchor collapses and cycle turbulence, he had at least known where the problem lay. This time, he could not even decide what to sacrifice-universal adaptability demanded sacrificing precision and speed; maximum performance for one Kekkei Genkai demanded abandoning the freedom to switch at will, defeating his original purpose in developing Dynamic Reconstruction.
He sat on the floor for nearly an hour. Only when the chill seeped through his clothes did he slowly move his fingers and hook the experimental log by his feet toward him. He was not searching for inspiration, merely leafing through it aimlessly. He reached the first few pages on barehanded Dust Release, records from just after his escape from Konoha, when he had spent nearly a month unraveling the logic of Kekkei Tōta.
His fingertip stopped at the corner of a page, beside a note he had casually written back then. The crooked handwriting suggested he had written it at the limit of exhaustion: "Dust Release rests on locked proportions, not dynamic decomposition. Fix the wind, earth, and fire ratios first, then consider fusion. The finer you break it down, the more easily it falls apart."
Rinto abruptly froze.
Right.
He had spent these two days chasing himself down a blind alley.
He had kept trying to force Dynamic Reconstruction's logic onto Dust Release, intending to break all three attributes down completely, then reconstruct them alongside natural energy. But Dust Release's core had never been flexibility in decomposition. It was absolute precision in the proportions of its three attributes-even a fraction off would produce Explosion Release or ordinary Fire Release or Wind Release, never the effect of detaching the primitive world.
Ōnoki had used Dust Release all his life, relying on fixed anchors with those proportions ingrained in his bones, not a dynamic structure assembled and dismantled at will. The modular combinations Rinto had designed for two-attribute Kekkei Genkai were flexible, but for a technique as demanding of precision as Dust Release, flexibility became a burden. Every additional assembly step introduced another risk of imbalance.
Then why insist on using the same logic?
Two-attribute Kekkei Genkai could use flexible modular combinations for instant casting and switching. For a fixed-ratio Kekkei Tōta like Dust Release, why not build a separate, solidified fusion-and-balance unit, locking the attribute ratios and three-energy balance at their foundations? Without dismantling and rebuilding it every time, wouldn't that solve both startup and precision?
He had kept wanting to create a universal system that accommodated every ninjutsu, but his specialty had always been designing structures to meet specific needs, not solving every problem with a single framework.
Rinto shot to his feet and rushed to the stone workbench. He swept all the old general-purpose module blueprints aside, grabbed fresh paper, and designed an independent fusion unit specifically for senjutsu Dust Release. Rather than breaking things apart and combining them, he began with the most basic anchors, embedding the fixed proportions of all three attributes and the natural energy balance lock into a single core structure. Everything would happen in one step, without intermediate assembly.
He drew until dusk, only finalizing the dedicated senjutsu Dust Release unit after refilling the oil lamp a second time. Setting down his pencil, he did not rush to test it. He first closed his eyes and reviewed the entire structure's logic, the chakra circulation paths, and the balance-locking mechanism three times in his mind. Only after confirming there were no logical flaws did he take a deep breath and walk to the open space in the middle of the laboratory.
He closed his eyes and extended the senjutsu cycle's main bus. The specially designed Dust Release fusion unit rapidly formed in his dantian. Wind, earth, and fire chakra flowed into it simultaneously, while natural energy integrated along the anchor structure at the same moment. Proportions locked, balance synchronized-no sequence, no timing discrepancy.
An intensely restrained white light appeared at his fingertips. It was not the brilliant light that previously needed to gather in advance, but a nearly invisible halo, condensed to the utmost. Senjutsu Dust Release formed instantly.
He raised his hand and sent it forward. The white light struck a discarded metal plate piled in the corner. The high-density sealing metal, half a finger thick, silently vanished into nothingness without raising a speck of smoke or dust. The surrounding stone walls and floor were entirely untouched. Precision, speed, and power all met his expectations.
It worked.
Rinto slowly withdrew his chakra, looked at his fingertips, then at the traces in the corner, and let out a long breath. From the initial deadlock between two sets of logic to this moment, the fusion of senjutsu and Dynamic Reconstruction had finally come together completely. Whether two-attribute Kekkei Genkai or three-attribute Kekkei Tōta, he could cast them instantly and switch at will. They had fully merged with his Barehanded Jutsu Casting system.
He returned to the stone workbench, picked up his experimental log, and meticulously recorded the modular system, the design logic behind the dedicated Dust Release unit, the lessons from his failed attempts, and every parameter. He wrote each stroke more carefully than ever before.
By the time he finished the final stroke and closed the log, the sky outside was completely dark. He picked up the dry flatbread beside the table. Taken out three days earlier, it had long since hardened like a stone. One bite hurt his teeth. With the thoroughly cold water from the dipper, he forced down the entire piece.
Only after his stomach had something in it did the exhaustion of two sleepless days surge over him. He leaned against the chair back and was just about to close his eyes for a couple of minutes when a sensory anchor at the island's outermost perimeter suddenly trembled.
It was no false alarm, but an unmistakable chakra fluctuation. There was only one, yet it was immensely powerful and steady as a mountain. It was approaching the island's center, having already crossed the outer sensory network, and was less than three li from the laboratory.
Rinto's brows instantly drew together.
The texture of this chakra belonged neither to Konoha nor Orochimaru. It carried a heavy earth-attribute presence, along with a trace of Dust Release chakra fluctuations he knew all too well.
Someone from Iwagakure? Ōnoki?
He understood immediately. News that he could cast Dust Release barehanded had long since spread throughout the Shinobi World through Konoha's earlier suppression team and Orochimaru's men. As a Dust Release wielder, the only person in the Shinobi World who had spent a lifetime using Kekkei Tōta, it was perfectly natural for Ōnoki to come looking for him.
He rose, locked his experimental log and core blueprints inside the blastproof stone cabinet, set the seals, casually picked up the engraving knife by the door, and left the laboratory.
He had no interest in fighting, still less in arguing with anyone from Iwagakure. He only wanted to send his visitor away quickly and return to refining his system. But as soon as he reached the square amid the palace ruins, he saw that short little old man hovering in midair with a cane, studying the marks his earlier tests had left on the ground with keen interest.
It was none other than the Third Tsuchikage, Ōnoki.
Seeing him emerge, Ōnoki landed and leaned on his cane, looking him up and down. His tone carried scrutiny and a touch of an old man's refusal to concede to age. "You're Rinto? The boy who can use Dust Release without a Kekkei Genkai?"
"That's me." Rinto's voice barely fluctuated and even carried a hint of impatience. "Lord Tsuchikage, surely you didn't come all the way to the Land of Whirlpools just to confirm that? I have no interest in getting involved with Iwagakure, and I haven't stolen your secret techniques. Dust Release is fundamentally attribute fusion. Anyone can research it. If there's nothing else, please leave. Don't hold up my research."
Rather than angering him, those words amused Ōnoki. He planted his cane against the ground and snorted. "You've certainly got a mouth on you, boy. The entire Shinobi World knows Dust Release is the Kekkei Tōta passed down through Iwagakure's generations. You secretly learned it without our permission, and you still sound so righteous?"
"I didn't secretly learn it." Rinto frowned. He hated this sort of pointless argument most of all. "I derived the logic of attribute fusion through my own understanding of chakra. It has nothing to do with Iwagakure's inheritance. If you came to compare whose Dust Release is stronger, I'm not interested in playing along. If you want to show off your power, you've already seen things just now. Hurry up and leave."
"Why, you little brat!" His refusal to budge stirred Ōnoki's temper. "Your father wasn't even born when I started using Dust Release! Today, I'll show you what real Dust Release looks like!"
Before he finished speaking, Ōnoki raised his hand, and the white light of Dust Release instantly shone at his fingertips. He aimed not at Rinto, but at a broken wall of the abandoned palace nearby. "Dust Release: Detachment of the Primitive World Technique!"
White light expanded. The broken wall, over ten meters long, instantly vanished into nothingness, leaving not a single piece of rubble behind.
But Rinto paid no attention to the wall's fate. His gaze was fixed firmly on every moment of Ōnoki's Dust Release casting.
He saw it clearly. The instant Ōnoki raised his hand, he locked the proportions of all three attributes. From anchor formation to release, the entire process flowed seamlessly, without any trace of dismantling or reconstruction. The anchor's core structure was fixed from the outset. Regardless of the technique's range, those core proportions never shifted.
More importantly, Ōnoki's Dust Release anchor fully embedded attribute fusion and chakra compression within the same structure, without a single unnecessary step. It was even simpler and more efficient than the dedicated unit Rinto had just designed.
He had thought he had mastered senjutsu Dust Release, but compared with Ōnoki's display, his structure was still far too redundant, with far too much room for optimization.
After releasing the technique, Ōnoki had expected shock or apprehension from Rinto. Instead, the boy stood there staring blankly, lost in some unknown thought, paying no attention whatsoever to his show of force. Ōnoki paused, then could not help coughing. "Boy, what are you staring at? Scared?"
Rinto came back to himself, and even the way he looked at Ōnoki changed. All his earlier impatience vanished, replaced by an almost obsessive seriousness. "When you used Dust Release just now, the core anchor fixed the proportions of all three attributes from the very beginning, with no adjustments throughout. Correct?"
This time, Ōnoki was the one who froze.
He had lived nearly a lifetime and fought countless people. Some feared his Dust Release; some hated his hardline ways. Yet never had anyone, when he cast a technique to demonstrate his power, ignored its might and focused solely on his anchor structure, seeing through its core logic at a glance.
After a long stunned pause, Ōnoki suddenly burst into laughter, even the hand gripping his cane shaking. "You really are a madman, boy! Other people can't get away fast enough when they see my Dust Release, but you dive straight into its inner workings?"
"That's all I care about," Rinto said evenly. "Fighting is meaningless. Win or lose, it wastes my time. Your Dust Release anchor structure was much simpler than mine. Do you have any records on it? I can trade you my Dynamic Reconstruction logic, or my senjutsu balancing logic. As long as you have insights into Dust Release's core, we can discuss it."
Ōnoki stopped laughing. His gaze grew more serious, with a touch of appreciation for a kindred spirit. Dust Release mattered more to him than anything else in his life. It was his life, Iwagakure's trump card. Yet this boy cared nothing for his identity, his strength, or the Shinobi World's power struggles. His eyes held only the essence of techniques. Ōnoki had never encountered such purity bordering on obsession in his entire life.
"Do you truly know nothing but research and care about nothing else?" Ōnoki asked.
"Yes." Rinto nodded. "Everything else has nothing to do with me. I only want to understand chakra's essence. Nothing else matters."
Ōnoki fell silent for several seconds, then pulled a crumpled little notebook from his clothes and tossed it to him. "These are the insights I recorded over a lifetime using Dust Release. There are tricks for fine-tuning attribute ratios, simplified anchor structures, and emergency adjustments for all sorts of extreme situations. I meant to pass it down to the next generation. Lucky you."
Rinto caught the notebook, his fingertips tightening slightly. He opened it and read two pages. They were filled with Ōnoki's handwritten insights and hand-drawn anchor structures, solid knowledge honed through actual combat. It was far more substantial and precise than what he had worked out alone.
"What do you want?" Rinto looked up at Ōnoki. He did not believe in free lunches. Having given him something so fundamental, the other man surely had conditions.
"No conditions." Ōnoki waved a hand. "I simply don't want you taking Dust Release down the wrong path. Your understanding of chakra is deeper than that of most shinobi I've met. Giving this to you is better than letting it rot in my hands or passing it to juniors who only know how to follow instructions."
He paused, but still could not resist adding, "Still, take my advice and come back to Iwagakure with me. I'll build you the finest laboratory in the entire Shinobi World and supply whatever materials you want. No one will dare interrupt your research. It'll be a hundred times better than hiding alone on this deserted island. Whether it's the Five Great Shinobi Villages or the Akatsuki, no one will dare trouble you in Iwagakure."
Rinto shook his head, tucked the notebook securely against his body, and refused without hesitation. "No. Iwagakure has its rules, its wars, its sides to take. All of that would waste my time. Here on this island, I can research whatever I want, and no one interferes. It's good."
Ōnoki had expected his refusal and was not angry. He merely sighed. "You're still too young, boy. Do you think hiding on this deserted island will keep you out of trouble? Konoha wants you, Orochimaru is watching you, and the Shinobi World is getting more chaotic by the day. The Akatsuki are capturing tailed beasts everywhere. These abilities of yours are a juicy piece of meat everyone wants a bite of. How many times can you fend them off alone?"
"If I can stop them, I will. If I can't, I'll move somewhere else and keep researching," Rinto said without much inflection. "As long as my brain is still here and my hands can still draw blueprints, anywhere is the same."
"You..." Ōnoki shook his head and stopped trying. He knew further persuasion was useless with someone so stubborn. He looked at Rinto again and added, "Fine. I won't force you. But remember, Iwagakure's doors are always open to you. Whenever you get tired of being out here and want somewhere peaceful to research, come find me in Iwagakure."
With that, he leaped into the air, hovered, then turned and flew west. Without another word, he soon disappeared into the night.
Rinto remained where he was, watching the direction in which he had vanished. He lowered his head and touched the notebook inside his clothes, then said something he rarely said. "Thanks."
On his way back to the laboratory, his mind was filled with the notebook's contents and the details of Ōnoki's Dust Release. His pace quickened considerably. He only wanted to return as soon as possible and optimize his Dust Release anchors and his entire senjutsu fusion system.
Back in the laboratory, he lit the oil lamp, spread Ōnoki's notes across the table, and worked through them word by word. His charcoal pencil never stopped, drawing optimized structures on scrap paper as he gradually blended Ōnoki's decades of combat experience with his own Dynamic Reconstruction and senjutsu balancing logic.
He worked through another entire night.
By the time he finished optimizing the senjutsu fusion structures for every Kekkei Genkai and confirmed through repeated tests that there were no problems, dawn had arrived. He organized all the blueprints and insights and locked them inside the stone cabinet. Only then did he exhale in relief, lean against the chair back, and let his mind go blank for once.
Barehanded Senjutsu was complete, as was the perfect fusion of senjutsu and Dynamic Reconstruction. With his current abilities, protecting himself was hardly an issue. Even if elite suppression teams from the Five Great Shinobi Villages came, he was confident he could escape unscathed, or even eliminate the trouble completely.
He had accomplished all his previous research goals.
Where should he go next?
Once that thought arose, he could not suppress it. His gaze fell on the most badly damaged silk manuscript in the corner of the stone workbench, the one he had found in the Land of Whirlpools' ruins.
He had found it earlier in a side chamber of the Martyrdom Sealing site. Besides those few phrases about "using the body as a vessel," it contained several lines burned down to half their original length, fragmentary records concerning Yin-Yang Release.
"Chakra's foundation lies in the two forces of yin and yang. Yin governs form; yang governs life. All things arise and transform from these."
Previously, he had been too busy developing senjutsu and fusion to delve into this. But now he had pushed chakra's nature transformation, shape transformation, and senjutsu fusion to their limits. Going further would touch upon chakra's essence-what exactly were physical energy and spiritual energy? How did Yin-Yang Release control form and life?
All his previous research had revolved around "the application of chakra," but Yin-Yang Release was chakra's source.
That thought instantly took root in his heart like a seed.
He rose, retrieved the damaged silk manuscript, and examined it over and over. Everything it contained about Yin-Yang Release amounted to fewer than ten sentences, all conceptual descriptions. There were no specific technique formulas, no anchor structures, not even the most basic logical framework.
He had searched every corner of the Land of Whirlpools' ruins. All the material he could find was already here. To study Yin-Yang Release further, he would have to leave the Land of Whirlpools and seek new clues, new texts, and new ruins in the Shinobi World.
But leaving meant stepping into the Shinobi World's conflicts. Konoha's wanted notice remained in force. Danzo's Root would never let him go. Orochimaru was still watching him, and every major shinobi village would covet his technology. Then there was the Akatsuki Ōnoki had mentioned. Once they targeted him, the trouble would never end.
All that trouble would delay his research.
But if he stayed, his research would be completely stuck here. He had never researched for self-preservation or to establish himself in the Shinobi World. He did it to unravel chakra's essence. Now that the road ahead lay before him, even if it was filled with trouble, he could not possibly stop here.
Holding the damaged silk manuscript, Rinto stood by the window and gazed out at the sea in silence for a long time.
In the end, he made his decision.
Leave. He had to go out there.
He turned and began preparing. First came the laboratory's security. The core experimental logs, all the source manuscripts and blueprints had to be sealed in the blastproof stone cabinet in the deepest section, protected by the strictest seals. He would even add self-destruct anchors. Any chakra other than his touching it would trigger an immediate explosion. His research must never fall into someone else's hands.
Next came the island's defenses. He needed to reinforce them again so that even if he left for six months or a year, no one could enter the core laboratory and take his things.
Last was his luggage. He would take only the most essential notebooks, his engraving knife, consumable materials, sealing scrolls, and those few crucial fragmentary texts. He would travel light. The less he carried, the less easily he would be exposed.
Once he decided, he did not hesitate. Setting down the silk manuscript, he picked up his engraving knife and sealing materials, then headed into the depths of the laboratory to begin laying seals.
He knew very well that stepping off this island meant stepping into the Shinobi World's muddy waters, where countless troubles and dangers awaited. But as long as he could reach chakra's essence, none of that was worth mentioning.