It's been four hours of sitting with his eyes closed, trying to control his ki.
'Come on.'
He pushed inward again, searching, but he couldn't get it.
'Come on!'
Nothing. His eyes snapped open, and he slammed his palm against the cave floor, and the rock fractured beneath it.
"This is bullshit."
He closed his eyes again.
'Feel it, it's in the center.'
He felt nothing for a while, then a small warmth that he almost missed.
'There.'
He reached for it carefully, and the warmth responded barely.
'Move up toward my chest, anywhere, just fucking move.'
The warmth flickered, and he felt a trickle of heat creep upward from his gut, through his torso.
'Don't lose it, keep moving.'
The trickle reached his chest, and he split it, forcing it upward through his neck, and then towards his eyes. The ki flooded his Byakugan, and he felt the veins around his eyes bulge.
He opened his eyes and saw every direction at once. The cave walls turned transparent, he could see through the mountain, and his vision kept going. His vision reached outward across Vampa's surface in a sphere, with perfect clarity. He saw upwards of a thousand kilometers ahead.
He saw in all directions simultaneously except for one narrow wedge behind his upper spine, where his vision was blurry. His legs buckled, but he caught himself with his hand on the wall.
"What the fuck."
His brain wasn't built for this. Information poured in from every angle, and the cave spun. He pressed his forehead against the stone wall and squeezed his eyes shut, but closing his eyes did nothing - the Byakugan saw through his eyelids.
'Okay. Okay. Breathe.'
His chest heaved for twenty seconds, and he started slowly sorting it, pushing the distant feeds into the background while also pulling his face from the wall.
'I can see everything.'
In the thousand kilometers he could, he also sensed faint ki signatures scattered across the wasteland. There were fifteen massive ones, which were Vampa Beasts - enormous bright cores that were half-buried in craters or submerged in green pools.
'Jesus, this planet is a death trap.'
There were smaller signatures too, hundreds of them, the Vampa Beetles, swarming in packs of twenty or thirty. Then he looked down at himself and saw Ki pooled in his gut, and when he pushed Ki toward his right hand, he watched the current move. Golden light traveling through the channels, flowing from his core toward his palm - and whenever it pooled wrong, he could see exactly where the problem was.
He corrected it and pushed it forward, the ki reaching his palms, then a yellow ball of ki, no bigger than his fist, formed. Every other fighter in this universe learned ki by feel with years of meditation and decades of training, while he could see every mistake the instant he made it.
'Ahh, my lucky cheat code.' Indra thought, grinning.
He let the ki ball dissipate and formed another, but faster this time. He kept repeating the same sequence with each one faster than the last, the Byakugan catching every flaw before it became a problem.
Ki coating came next, and he spread his energy outward from his core, pushing it through every channel simultaneously until it reached his skin and layered across his body like a second set of armor. Through the Byakugan, he looked like he was wrapped in a thin golden light.
He flexed his hand, and the difference was immediate - his body felt more durable and stronger, and he felt lighter somehow, like he'd been wearing weighted clothes his whole life and just took them off.
The Rinnegans were next. He formed a ki blast in his right hand and lobbed it gently toward his left palm. The Rinnegan absorbed the ki blast, storing it inside his left Rinnegan.
He could feel it, a small pocket of captured ki, separate from his own reserves, waiting. He did it again and again. After a dozen cycles, his reserves were dipping, maybe a quarter of his total ki spent on creating ki blasts.
He paused and watched his reserves refill from the outside. Tiny currents of ambient ki - barely visible, coming in through his skin from every direction. The planet itself was feeding him
'So that's what that was.'
The healing he'd noticed in the cave was his body pulling ki from the environment. It seems the mystery is solved.
---
'So if I dump everything I've stored through the left hand...'
The math was simple: twelve blasts' worth of ki, fired at twice the original power, should produce a single beam stronger than anything he could produce from his own reserves alone.
He looked outside and saw a Vampa Beast, roughly four hundred kilometers southeast, half-submerged in a green pool while dozens of beetles swarmed the area around it, feeding off the beast while the beast fed on them.
'The right Rinnegan turns living things into pills; the pills should give me their ki, and their power level should combine with mine.'
He needed to get stronger; with broken cheat-like characters like Frieza walking among them, he couldn't just sit in a cave absorbing ki. He needed to hunt.
'I need to rebuild my fighting skills too.'
His previous life's spearmanship - years of training and muscle memory were all gone in this new body. He'd need to fix that. Furious Smelting could give him a weapon, but that was for later; right now, he needs to gain power.
He walked to the cave entrance, stepped off the ledge, and started flying. He quickly crossed four hundred kilometers in a matter of minutes. The green pool came into view, and in the center was the beast.
It was enormous, like a living mountain. Beetles crawled across its exposed hide in clusters, syringe-tongues buried in its skin.
'That thing would kill me in two seconds flat.'
Indra hovered three hundred meters above it and raised his left palm, and the Rinnegan flared a bright light, everything he'd stored ripped out at once, the air split, and a column of golden light tore from his palm and hit downward, hitting the green pool first.
ZZZZRKK!
The liquid ceased to exist; it was vaporized in an instant, the Vampa Beast's ki signature flared - a panicked surge and then weakened. The beam kept going, drilling into the crater floor, sending shockwaves rippling outward that flattened rock formations for half a kilometer.
Debris launched skyward, and the beetles closest to the blast didn't leave remains. Dust and superheated air mushroomed upward in a column that Indra felt against his face.
The beast lay in the center of the crater with its fur covered in blood. His ki signature was draining fast. Indra dropped and landed next to it and pressed his right palm against its hide. The beast's body warped, compressed toward a single point in his Rinnegan, and a small, red, round pill sat in his hand.
'Here goes nothing.'
He put it in his mouth, and the flavor hit his tongue; it was like every good meal he'd ever eaten compressed into a single point of taste so intense his eyes watered. A warmth bloomed in his chest and spread outward through every channel the Byakugan could see.
'God, this tastes good.'
His fingers trembled, and the taste lingered, but underneath it, he felt a faint pull, like a whisper in the back of his head that said again. The ki settled into his body, and the difference was immediate. His ki reserves felt more than five times it was before.
'This is nothing like before, and the crazy thing is the beast was almost dead, a fresh one with its full ki would give me way more, the hunt isn't over.'