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Murakami's POV
You ever try learning something so complicated that it makes your teeth itch?
That has been the last four weeks.
Studying under Mito Uzumaki has been nothing like I expected.
It started with a brush; not some legendary Uzumaki artifact, just a brush, ink, paper, and a seal formula that looked simple enough until I tried to reproduce it.
"Again," Mito said.
I looked at the formula. "I already understand what it does."
"That isn't what I asked you to reproduce." she said sternly.
I sighed inwardly and picked up the brush again.
That was the difference between studying Fūinjutsu alone and studying it under someone like Mito.
I already knew how to construct seals. I understood chakra flow, conditions, activation triggers, storage, restrictions, and the basic relationship between a formula and the behavior it produced.
I'd learned most of that through my own experiments with D- and C-rank seals.
What I lacked wasn't understanding; it was breadth.
There were simply too many things I didn't know that Mito had spent decades accumulating.
Her knowledge wasn't limited to the formulas she currently used. She knew variations of techniques, older methods that had fallen out of common use, different ways of achieving the same result, and the weaknesses hidden inside formulas that looked perfectly functional on the surface.
Every lesson seemed to uncover another branch of knowledge I hadn't known existed.
And I wanted all of it.
With the mental clones to enhance learning speed, I learned at a rapid pace.
The problem was that Fūinjutsu didn't have one branch.
The deeper I went, the more I found.
A storage seal wasn't simply a storage seal.
There were different methods of compressing the contents, different ways of regulating the seal's internal space, different approaches to preventing chakra leakage, and several ways to handle the transition between sealed and unsealed states.
I already knew how to make one work.
Mito showed me why another method might be better.
Then she showed me a third method that solved a problem neither of us had been discussing.
That happened constantly.
Sometimes I would recognize the principle immediately, sometimes I would realize that I had been solving a problem inefficiently without knowing it and occasionally, Mito would show me something that forced me to rethink an assumption I'd been carrying for months.
Those were my favorite lessons. Every correction meant I had found another piece of knowledge worth keeping.
Over the past month, my understanding of Fūinjutsu has expanded considerably.
Mito was showing me just how much there was to learn about something I had thought I already understood.
I had spent years building my own foundation through experimentation based on what I knew.
And now, Mito was giving me access to knowledge accumulated over generations.
The two complemented each other surprisingly well.
My cheat was to take what I knew, leave it to my mental clones to break it apart, understand the underlying mechanism, and see where else it could be applied.
Mito had an enormous library of things I had never encountered.
Together, that combination was proving dangerous.
Especially for ChakraLink.
Every new piece of knowledge gave me another possibility to consider.
A better method for transmitting chakra.
A more efficient way of maintaining a formula.
A different approach to handling interference.
Alternative ways of constructing relays.
None of it gave me an immediate solution, but that wasn't how research worked.
I wasn't looking for one miraculous answer, I was collecting pieces, and eventually, those pieces would connect.
That was how I had always approached learning.
Today, Mito was explaining one of the more advanced feedback structures I'd encountered.
I studied the formula in front of me and couldn't help but ask. "Why use this arrangement instead of a simple regulating loop?"
Mito glanced at the design then at me with a smile. "Because your version assumes the chakra flow remains relatively stable."
"And this one doesn't."
"No."
I traced the structure with my eyes.
"It compensates for fluctuations."
I nodded. "Among other things." then looked at her. "There's another function."
Her smile widened slightly. "There is."
I looked back at the formula and spent several minutes studying the structure before speaking again. "It isn't just regulating the flow. It's monitoring the change in flow and adjusting the response."
Mito nodded. "Exactly."
Interesting, I already understood feedback and regulation, but I'd never considered combining the two in that particular way.
My mind immediately returned to ChakraLink, If I could adapt the principle-
I stopped myself.
One problem at a time.
Mito watched me for a moment before speaking. "You're already thinking about where else you can use it."
I looked at her. "Is that a problem?"
"No." She smiled. "It's the reason I'm teaching you."
I didn't respond right away, instead, I bowed.
I was grateful.
Not because Mito had handed me some miraculous solution, but because her knowledge gave me more pieces to work with and ChakraLink gave me somewhere to use them.
The network was still far from finished, but it was beginning to resemble what I had originally imagined.
The biggest problem was maintaining communication over distance.
A seal that could transmit a message wasn't particularly difficult.
Making several seals communicate with one another reliably was another matter.
The more nodes I added, the more complicated the connections became.
So I started working on a chain of relay seals, Instead of forcing a message to travel directly from one point to another, the signal could pass through intermediate seals.
That reduced the strain on individual formations and made it possible to expand the network without redesigning everything from the beginning.
Then came identification.
If anyone could activate a communication seal, the entire system would become useless the moment someone got their hands on one.
So I developed chakra-signature restrictions.
Each seal could recognize the chakra pattern it was meant to respond to and ignore everyone else.
Simple in principle, but annoying in practice.
People weren't perfectly consistent, chakra fluctuated with exhaustion, injury, emotional states, and even prolonged use.
I had to account for those variations without making the seal so tolerant that someone else could imitate the signature.
A Shinobi could do that effortlessly.
That led to another improvement. I began researching whether a seal could detect the unique spiritual energy within a person's chakra.
Chakra fluctuated with the body, but the spiritual energy within it was far more personal. If I could make the seal recognize that, identification would become much more reliable.
It wasn't perfect yet.
But it was much harder to fool.
Then there were delayed activations.
Some messages didn't need to be delivered immediately.
An emergency warning could be set to activate when a certain condition was met.
A message could remain dormant until a specific time.
A seal could even respond differently depending on what triggered it.
That opened up far more possibilities than simple communication.
I also started experimenting with hiding seals inside ordinary designs.
Brushwork, clothing patterns, decorative markings and anything that could carry a formula without immediately looking like one.
It was useful for concealment and it also had another advantage which was that people tended to ignore what they didn't recognize as a seal.
That made subtle communication possible without drawing unnecessary attention.
Then came protection.
A communication network was only useful if someone couldn't tamper with it.
So I began developing additional restrictions that could sense foreign chakra entering the formation.
If someone tried to interfere with a seal, the formation would recognize the intrusion and respond accordingly.
At least, that was the theory, but the first few attempts proved otherwise.
I quickly learned that sensing foreign chakra was one thing, stopping it from disrupting the formation was another.
Still, every failure taught me something and that was the most valuable part of the entire process, I was now learning how to design increasingly complicated Fūinjutsu systems.
Mito's lessons gave me knowledge, experimentation gave me understanding and combining the two opened a door of possibilities to me.
There were still plenty of problems left.
The network needed a reliable source of power, the seals needed to remain stable over long periods, the transmission range needed improvement and I hadn't solved the question of how to scale the network without making maintenance a nightmare.
But those were problems for later.
For now, I had something much more useful than a finished invention, I had a direction, and every new piece of knowledge Mito gave me added another possibility to explore.
I dipped my brush into the ink and returned to the formation in front of me.
Four weeks.
My understanding of Fūinjutsu had expanded considerably.
And ChakraLink was becoming something far more refined than the system I had started with.
I still had a long way to go, which was good, I had never been interested in easy things anyway.
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