In Konohagakure, at Training Ground Five.
Crash! Crash!
Streams like dragons pounded down across the water's surface in overlapping cascades, carrying thunderous roars and splashing up large and small whirlpools that spun without rest.
At the center of the pool, in deep water nearly thirty meters down, Shinichi stood silently with his eyes closed and his hands hanging at his sides.
Suddenly, his brows lifted slightly, and the calm aura around him changed at once.
He slowly leaned forward, both arms hanging naturally at his sides, his posture so relaxed it was almost languid, as if he were merely adjusting his stance at random. Yet the muscles of his shoulders and back had already quietly tightened, like a cheetah poised to spring, every inch of his frame hiding the deadly danger of a predator just before the kill.
Bang!
A muffled explosion burst out at the bottom of the pool. The instant his foot stamped down, the force drove through the mud and sand, shocking the surrounding water into an immediate boil. Countless whirlpools that had originally been chaotic were shaken into rapidly contracting, then suddenly spreading outward.
His body released like a spring compressed to the limit. With his waist as the central axis, a powerful force surged upward from the soles of his feet.
It passed from the taut rebound of his calf muscles into his thighs, then was abruptly amplified by the twisting force of his waist and abdomen, climbing along his spine to his shoulder blades before ultimately pouring in full into his right fist!
His whole body became a bolt of black lightning, shooting upward with a sharp force that tore through the water.
As he rose, he used his right fist as the lead and turned his body with the motion for a single rotation. The viscous resistance of the deep water was actually skillfully dissolved by that spin, and along the path of his fist, the current drew out a bright silver arc like a strip of silk.
Clean and decisive, without the slightest drag or excess, as if those thirty meters of deep water had never been an obstacle at all, but had instead become the medium through which his power flowed.
The current in front of his fist had already begun to tremble violently. The bright water surface above was only an instant away.
But when he was less than fifteen centimeters from the surface, with the spray he had stirred already splashing against the tip of his nose, Shinichi suddenly withdrew his force. The muscles that had been tightly drawn all over his body relaxed in an instant, and the sharp momentum that had been splitting the current vanished without a trace. He let the rushing water wrap around his body and slowly drifted back down like a falling leaf.
The mud and sand at the bottom of the pool, stirred up by the aftershock of his earlier step, had not yet settled. When he returned to his original position, he lightly ground the sole of his foot against the ground to steady himself. Then he slowly opened his eyes. Reflecting the shifting light from above, he silently began reviewing in his mind the unfinished fist strike from just now.
He was developing a new taijutsu.
Earlier, by reducing the rotation of the Great Flame Rasengan and compressing it to the limit, he had created the Flame Shuriken—Dark Brush.
Then, by fusing in the Monster Strength techniques Tsunade had taught him, he had formed his own Flame Fist—Wild Bite.
And now, what he was thinking about was how to make flames coil around his entire body. That made him think of the secret taijutsu Old Master Chen had taught him—Leaf Dragon God.
This technique required the user's body to spin at high speed, forming a tornado-like azure dragon shape. Its spiraling upward attack trajectory, combined with the wind blades surrounding the user's body, gave it astonishing power.
But its flaws were just as obvious. It required several hundred rotations to build momentum, making the setup time far too long, and the eye of the storm formed by that high-speed spinning was itself a massive opening.
Ever since learning this move, he had been thinking about one question.
"Can the body turn fewer times?"
"Or even just once?"
But the overwhelming power of the Leaf Dragon God came precisely from the inertial kinetic energy accumulated through several hundred rotations in a single instant.
After thinking it over from every angle, Shinichi finally focused on increasing chakra output, combining the unique Monster Strength technique of "compressed concentration and instantaneous burst" with the rotational form of the "Leaf Dragon God," along with the Rasengan's distinctive spiral chakra state.
Inertia... My line of thinking is correct! If I'm going to abandon having the body spin hundreds of times, then I'll make the chakra spin in place of the body—in the form of the Rasengan!
The moment that thought settled, the still somewhat vague concept in his mind suddenly became clear, resolving into three steps.
The first step—Initiation!
His body tensed once more, and chakra throughout his body surged toward the soles of his feet like a tidal wave. Using the Monster Strength technique Tsunade had taught him, he forcibly compressed and refined it into a tangible mass of blue light.
Bang!
Mud and sand billowed upward again as his body was violently launched by that sudden explosive force, and his speed was actually even fiercer than before, when he had not withdrawn his force!
This step used the compressed burst of chakra to perfectly replace the initial acceleration required for spinning.
The second step—Power Gathering!
When he rose to the middle section of the pool, his waist and abdomen suddenly exerted force, carrying out a precise half-turn twist. Under the activation of the Monster Strength technique, his muscles swelled slightly, and the chakra rushing through his pathways poured madly into his right fist along with that twisting force, like a hundred rivers returning to the sea. A gentle blue glow appeared over the surface of his fist.
That half-turn contained no unnecessary movement. It existed purely to let the force form twisting inertia, yet it gathered power into a single point more directly and more violently than a hundred turns ever could.
The third step—Shaping!
Almost at the exact moment his fist finished gathering power, the chakra he released had already wrapped itself around the surrounding water and begun to rotate. Without his body spinning at high speed, that chakra, relying solely on the momentum of compressed eruption, forcibly rolled out a beautiful spiral current along the direction of his fist.
It lacked the grandeur of the original tornado, but it was more condensed and sharper. The water was churned into dense blade-like fragments, tracing bright silver lines around his body. This was using the spiral of chakra to replace the spiral of the body, perfectly reproducing the Leaf Dragon God's distinctive cutting force of wind blades.
Splash!
The next moment, he burst out of the water like a bolt of black lightning, sending spray flying everywhere before landing steadily on a rock at the shore.
Water kept dripping from his clothes and the tips of his hair, gathering into a small puddle on the ground, but Shinichi did not notice it at all. His right fist still hung low, and his eyes were half-closed as he repeatedly traced back every inch of the trajectory of that punch in his mind.
No need to rely on the stacking of a hundred turns. A half-turn twist as the fuse, and the instantaneous burst of Monster Strength replacing the inertial kinetic energy of rotation...
"One turn in place of a hundred turns, one form in place of a hundred forms..." He slowly opened his eyes and murmured in a low voice, "Once it's fully developed, perhaps it could be called Hundred Forms..."
But the words stopped at his lips.
"For now, I'll call it Rising Dragon."
Compared with the authentic Leaf Dragon God, Rising Dragon's charging time had been shortened by more than tenfold. It could practically be used instantly in battle, and it had completely erased that fatal flaw of the storm eye.
Of course, its shortcomings were just as obvious: the chakra consumption was about the same as the original version, but its power was also more than a full tier weaker than the authentic Leaf Dragon God.
Still, those were all minor problems.
First, he did not particularly care about chakra consumption right now. His own foundation, combined with the enhancement of various Entries, as well as the powerful recovery of [Unceasing Vitality] and the efficient absorption of food energy from [Gourmet], were enough to support that level of expenditure.
Second, this move had not yet been fully developed. The current Rising Dragon was only an incomplete form that had laid the foundation, a move that purely relied on the fusion of the Dragon God taijutsu and the Monster Strength technique to create a humanoid Rasengan. There was still enormous room for refinement, and its ultimate power was by no means something that could be measured at this stage.
What was more, in his plan, improving the Leaf Dragon God was only the first step. The next step was to fuse in Fire chakra nature transformation.
By that time, "Rising Dragon" would undergo a complete transformation. What his fist edge would carry would no longer be only condensed wind blades, but also raging flames wrapping around the spiral current. Wind would feed the fire, and fire would draw on the wind's might, instantly rolling together into a blazing tornado capable of burning everything to ash.
This would no longer be mere taijutsu, but true nin-taijutsu—his third nin-taijutsu move. At that point, "Rising Dragon" would no longer be "Rising Dragon."
It would be "Demon Scorch"!
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