Chapter 303: Development Progress Piled Up From Lives
What Haruno Sakura demonstrated for Koyuki was the first jutsu.
That is, the second phase of the Yin Seal: drawing energy from the outside world and sealing it on her forehead.
At the beginning, it was extracting energy from cloned hearts. Then, it was using a complete clone body as a battery. But these methods still didn't accumulate energy fast enough. Whether it was using Yang Release to accelerate the growth of new clones, or experimenting with Phase Three of Sakura Rush, both required a lot of chakra. And most of the clones she produced had to be used for experimenting with new jutsu, leaving only a small portion to be used as an energy source.
Before coming here, the chakra stored in Haruno Sakura's Yin Seal had just barely reached about a hundred times her own chakra amount—still not as much as when Naruto used the Nine-Tails' chakra.
During this period in the Land of Snow, she had spent more than she had taken in. Her reserves had been decreasing without increasing, and had already fallen to less than half.
This amount was definitely not enough to cope with future battles.
Using cloned hearts or clone bodies as an energy source was not only inefficient, but it also couldn't be used in Konoha. She couldn't just go back to the Land of Snow every time she finished a battle, right?
To convert the lightning in the natural world into energy that a ninja could use, the design had cost Sakura a lot of effort.
First was to convert the lightning into a form that a sealing jutsu could store. This required a sealing jutsu called the "Lightning Sealing Method." This seal, as its name implied, could seal lightning into a special jutsu formula.
This sealing jutsu was very obscure. Haruno Sakura had finally learned it from Jiraiya. He knew a whole set of sealing formulas for elemental jutsu. Lightning, raging fire, wind blades, etc., could all be sealed. Among them, the most commonly used and famous was the Fire Sealing Method—that famous jutsu formula that could even seal Amaterasu.
In this way, through the "Lightning Sealing Method," she could convert lightning into the form of Lightning Style and seal it.
By integrating this seal into the Yin Seal, the Yin Seal could directly extract the energy of the Lightning Style when it was activated—and then she would be electrocuted.
This was a problem Haruno Sakura had only realized after sacrificing a clone. Fortunately, when Haruno Sakura had learned this sealing formula at that time, she had not used it for experiments at the first moment, but had waited until she had arrived in the Land of Snow before she had begun to try.
This energy was too fierce, not as gentle as the chakra normally stored in the Yin Seal, and could not be directly used by the body.
So, outside the sealing formula that stored the lightning energy, another sealing formula had to be set up to convert the energy.
To convert a huge amount of energy into chakra that she could use, there was only one choice among the existing sealing jutsu...
And that was the Eight Trigrams Seal, which could suppress and extract the Nine-Tails' chakra!
The amount of the Nine-Tails' chakra was definitely at the level of a natural disaster. When Naruto and Sakura had joined forces to fight Sasori before, she had fully felt how vast the amount of chakra Naruto had unleashed was. That thick chakra, so dense that it could form a tangible Jinchuriki cloak, had simply refreshed Sakura's worldview.
And that vast amount of chakra, she estimated, was not even one-tenth of the Nine-Tails'!
With her current chakra amount, Haruno Sakura probably couldn't save up that much chakra even in a lifetime...
So, the Eight Trigrams Seal, which could suppress the Nine-Tails, was naturally more than enough to deal with this amount of lightning energy!
The only problem was that the Eight Trigrams Seal was, after all, designed by the Uzumaki clan to seal the Nine-Tails. When the object of the seal was changed to lightning energy, this sealing formula could not work very well, and would from time to time leak some lightning energy. The Yin Seal acted directly on the inside of the body. Even a trace of lightning energy that had not been cleanly converted would directly cause damage to the fragile meridians and the nearby brain, and even cause serious injury or death!
Therefore, to be able to safely extract the lightning energy from the Yin Seal, the Eight Trigrams Seal had to be modified.
Haruno Sakura was not proficient in sealing jutsu—ever since Uzumaki Kushina, there were not many people in the world who were proficient in it.
So she could only rely on herself to grope around, to rely on the sacrifice of her clones, to slowly push forward the modification work of the Eight Trigrams Seal.
The slow progress was almost unbearable: this kind of high-level sealing jutsu modification, even the five great ninja villages would have a headache over it! The unstable seal of the One-Tail was an example. The great Sand Village couldn't even handle the sealing jutsu of the weakest Tailed Beast! Who knows how many people they had lost to get Gaara...
The area where she was stronger than the Sand Village was that Konoha, at any rate, also had the inheritance of the Uzumaki clan's sealing jutsu. And, on her side, she could afford to lose people!
A ninja of Haruno Sakura's level, for even one to die in a few years, was an unbearable loss. But on her side, it was almost one death a day... Fortunately, it was just a clone body.
This time, the experiment, as expected, had ended in failure very quickly.
In front of Koyuki's face, the clone had been killed by the leaking lightning. The Eight Trigrams Seal on the clone's forehead had suddenly appeared, and then a lightning light had erupted. After a crackling sound, the clone had limply fallen to the ground, and a dark purple, tree-like pattern had instantly covered its entire head, extremely ferocious and terrifying!
Then, the slender blue rod had flashed, and Haruno Sakura's spirit had returned to her main body.
She suddenly sat up from the sofa, covered in sweat, and breathing heavily.
Kazahana Koyuki hurriedly supported Sakura. She touched her back, which was soaked with sweat. She suddenly realized what had happened. "You just... died once?"
The pink-haired girl nodded with difficulty.
Sakura's spirit had only returned to her main body after the clone had suffered a fatal injury, its body had completely died, and its body could no longer carry its soul. She had truly "died" once again.
The mental pressure was enormous.
For a moment, she couldn't even speak. She could only lie on her side, powerless, and let Koyuki support her.
"You're pushing yourself too hard," Koyuki didn't understand ninjutsu, but she was a professional actress and could read expressions. This was the first time she had seen undisguised pain on Sakura's face. That was the suffering she had felt before she had been electrocuted to death...
She held Sakura's hand with some heartache and wiped the sweat from the girl's forehead.
Haruno Sakura actually knew that what she was doing was extremely dangerous. When her body died, if her spirit had also judged that she had died, then she would have been really finished!
A similar case, she had also heard about from Sasuke—
The Uchiha had a genjutsu called "Tsukuyomi," which could directly attack a person's spirit by pulling the enemy into a genjutsu space and repeatedly killing them. If one died too many times in the genjutsu space, when the genjutsu ended, the person's body would still be alive, but their spirit would already be dead!
And this kind of 100% real feeling of death, the mental pressure on a person was in no way less than a small Tsukuyomi—after all, Tsukuyomi was just using genjutsu to create a false feeling of death!
So if Haruno Sakura had, in a moment of carelessness, really thought that she was already dead, and her spirit had thus dissipated, and her soul had gone to the underworld instead of returning to her main body, that was also a possibility.
Fortunately, when she had used her ice clones back then, she had died so many times that she was already used to it. And even a real death, she had experienced it once—the time she had transmigrated—and had still endured it. Her soul had not dissipated. With her spiritual strength, she could still withstand this kind of pressure for the time being.
People are all forced out. After dying and dying, Sakura didn't feel so bad after dying so many times.
After a long time, after she had caught her breath, Sakura finally managed to give Kazahana Koyuki a smile.
"I'm fine now." She squeezed Koyuki's hand forcefully and stood up, gritting her teeth.
Haruno Sakura's physical body was completely intact. The action of standing up should not have been so difficult. It was just that her spirit felt as if it were being torn apart, which was why she had acted like this, as if she couldn't even stand steadily.
Kazahana Koyuki touched the place where she had just been sitting. The sofa had been soaked with a patch of sweat. She let out a long sigh and asked, "Why are you working so hard, to this extent? You've already 'died' many times in this way, haven't you!"
"Because there's a sense of urgency..." Sakura said softly, her body now steady.
The enemies of the future would not wait for her to slowly grow up...
And, Phase Two of the Yin Seal was a necessary path to Phase Three, the Yang God Mode. She had to overcome the difficulties in this one by one, including how to convert heterogeneous energy into the energy of the chakra mode, and how to extract high-density energy into energy that she could use... Otherwise, the Yang God Mode would just be a flower in the mirror, the moon in the water!
"Don't worry, it's much better now! At the beginning, I had to lie down for half an hour before I could stand up!" The girl's voice was very weak, but her tone was very strong.
Kazahana Koyuki shook her head secretly. She watched as she formed hand seals and created a water rope to roll up the corpse lying on the ground and take it somewhere.
Then Haruno Sakura's spirit recovered a little. She sat at the table and began to write and draw. The tip of her pen outlined one complex pattern after another.
A strong spirit brought a strong recovery ability. Just a few minutes after Sakura had stood up, she had begun to work with a normal expression. She recorded the inspiration and experience gained from the experiment just now, and today's experiment was declared over.
—To die once a day was already her spiritual limit.
"Let's go back!" Sakura said after finishing this.
"Wait, don't you still have another ninjutsu in development?" Kazahana Koyuki was still reluctant to leave so soon. After she went back, she would be put under a genjutsu. She said quickly.
"That jutsu also involves dying..." Haruno Sakura said, a little tired. "I've already died once today. I won't demonstrate it for you."
Seeing Koyuki's expectant gaze, Sakura sighed. "I'll just chat about it. After I'm done, you should scram."
She said slowly.
"Sakura Rush is a secret technique that increases reaction speed. Its basic principle is to speed up the nerve conduction, thereby increasing the reaction speed."
"Let me give you an example. If a kunai flies towards me and I dodge it. The whole process is: first, the eyes see it, then the brain processes the image transmitted from the eyes, identifies the danger, and then makes the decision to dodge, and transmits the dodge command to the hands and feet. The time required for this whole process is the reaction time. The role of Sakura Rush is to shorten this time."
"Isn't it also divided into things like conditioned reflexes?" Koyuki asked, blinking her eyes.
"It's too complicated to go into that. In short, you just have to remember that even if you 'subconsciously' make the decision to 'dodge,' it still takes thinking time, probably a few hundred milliseconds. And then to transmit the decision made by the brain to the hands and feet also takes time."
The second phase of Sakura Rush had completed the so-called "motor nerve electronification," shortening the time it took for nerve signals to be transmitted from the brain to the hands and feet.
Then, as a matter of course, the task that the third phase should complete was to "overclock the brain," to use the same nerve electronification method as in Phase Two to speed up the transmission of nerve signals between brain cells, shortening the time consumed by thinking.
"Do you understand what I'm saying?" Sakura said.
"Alright, I have a general idea," Kazahana Koyuki said with a frown. "But why do you say that developing this jutsu will kill you?"
"The brain is very fragile..." Sakura said, rubbing her temples. "This jutsu of mine, after all, is an operation on the brain. It's even more dangerous than that Yin Seal from just now!"
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