Chapter 90: The Principle of the Explosive Tag
Full and satisfied.
Li Yao lay back on the lounge chair, suddenly growing quiet, his gaze blankly following the drifting clouds in the sky.
At some point, he fell asleep.
This was the first time he had ever dozed off without leaving a shadow clone on guard.
Sleeping, Li Yao's face was peaceful—almost like he had no worries, no desires.
When he first arrived in this world, he had been lost.
Before he could even adapt to his new self, he was subjected to the kind of perverse torment he'd only seen in twisted films in his previous life.
His spirit had actually collapsed countless times—only the peculiarity of his consciousness allowed him to retain his sense of self.
This calm now… it was more like a symptom of post-traumatic stress.
Night fell.
The full moon rose.
Li Yao woke up, life returning to his face. His spirit felt good.
He sat at the dining table and laid out all his possessions.
Seven soldier pills left. Three sealing scrolls. Twenty explosive tags—taken from those two Konoha shinobi who'd once guarded a noble's residence.
That was all his worldly wealth. Not much.
But everything was useful.
One scroll contained the Third Hokage's daughter's head. Another held four roast chickens. The third stored twenty bowls of eel rice.
The soldier pills were essential for escape.
The explosive tags… Li Yao picked one up, studying it carefully. He had always been curious about how they worked. Now he finally had time to investigate.
"The paper is the same as that used in sealing scrolls—likely the same kind, capable of storing and stabilizing chakra."
The black inscriptions on it varied, but the overall structure was almost identical.
Each followed a simple sun-like design.
The core of the seal featured a black symbol like "爆" (explosion) or "封" (seal), surrounded by radiating lines like sunbeams.
The exact seal inscriptions varied, but the framework was the same.
In this light, explosive tags could be considered scrolls that sealed an "explosion"—not a physical bomb, but a form of explosive ninjutsu.
It reminded him of an episode in the anime where Shikamaru used a scroll bearing the symbol "水" (water) to release water—not actual water stored inside, but a Water Release jutsu that had been sealed and then activated.
"Let's see if that's really how it works…"
Li Yao focused, condensing the chakra encoded in the explosive tag's "爆" seal.
"It's Fire-nature chakra."
The moment he formed it, he realized: the chakra sealed in the "爆" symbol was simply basic Fire-nature chakra—it didn't inherently have explosive properties.
So what was sealed was not an explosive technique, but Fire-nature chakra.
Li Yao continued examining the black seal inscriptions on the tag.
"It must not be the jutsu itself that's sealed—but Fire-nature chakra which is then processed through these seals to form a ninjutsu that explodes."
He had a theory.
Injecting a bit of chakra into the explosive tag, he immediately felt a connection to it. He could now trigger its chakra flow at will.
"So that's how it detonates."
Li Yao smiled. He'd figured it out.
He tossed the explosive tag ten meters into the air. With a thought, he triggered the chakra within the seal. The "爆" symbol lit up, and the tag ignited like it had been lit by a fuse.
Boom!
A fireball erupted mid-air. A wave of heat swept over Li Yao, blowing back his long black hair.
"Not bad."
He nodded. In the Naruto world, most people didn't have strong physical defenses. An explosive tag detonated at close range could easily cripple or kill.
Didn't Obito lose an arm from Konan's explosive tags?
And Tsunade's brother Nawaki… was often joked about by fans as the only ninja in the series to die from a single tag.
Waving away the smoke, Li Yao picked up another tag from the table.
Now he could confirm that the black seal patterns on the explosive tag worked like the hand seals a ninja would form to perform a technique.
Normally, a ninja converts neutral chakra into a ninjutsu-specific chakra through hand seals, shaping it into a jutsu.
Explosive tags, on the other hand, used the black inscription lines to guide Fire-nature chakra through a transformation, turning it into a Fire Release jutsu—an explosion.
In essence, the seal patterns acted as pre-formed hand seals. Chakra flowed through them, transformed, and became a jutsu.
Storage scrolls worked the same way.
Li Yao put the tag down and picked up a sealing scroll. Injecting chakra, the scroll's seal lit up, and the chakra transformed into a ninjutsu state.
Poof—after a puff of smoke, four lotus-wrapped roast chickens appeared.
He then fed chakra into the scroll again. The seal's black inscription lines transformed the chakra and resealed the food.
Just like with the tag, chakra moved through the seal's path, transformed, and activated a jutsu that stored a physical object in a pocket dimension.
On a broader scale, this seemed to be the basis of most sealing jutsu.
But then again… Li Yao suddenly thought of the Adamantine Sealing Chains and his own Black Iron Chains.
His Black Iron Chains were… Hmm. Wait.
He paused, frowned in thought, then chuckled.
"The principle is the same after all."
With a thought, both Black Iron Chains and Adamantine Sealing Chains shot from his shoulders.
On closer inspection, both were the result of chakra being shaped into a jutsu state by passing through inscription-like internal structures.
Come to think of it, the sealing jutsu that the Third and Danzō had placed on him had always remained active—that is, in a constant ninjutsu state.
So when he copied their chakra during those moments, what he captured already had the functional properties of sealing jutsu.
But the chakra inside an untriggered explosive tag was still just Fire-nature chakra—it hadn't flowed through the seal pattern yet. So what Li Yao had previously copied was just normal Fire-nature chakra.
If he could copy the activated form—the chakra that had just passed through the seal pattern—he'd gain Fire Release chakra capable of explosive effects.
Thinking that, he stepped onto the viewing platform and was about to inject chakra into the tag… then stopped himself just in time.
"Whew—close one."
He wiped imaginary sweat from his brow. His body wasn't especially tough. If that tag exploded in his hand, he might end up as the second ninja after Nawaki to die to one.
With a thought, he activated his full Black Iron Feather Cloak.
Now he had nothing to fear from an accidental explosion.
Boom!
He triggered another tag. With his armor on, the blast didn't harm him at all.
Li Yao wasn't paying attention to the blast itself—he focused his senses entirely on the transformation of chakra in that brief moment.
At the instant of detonation, he clearly perceived the Fire-nature chakra flowing through the seal pattern and transforming into a Fire Release jutsu.
He stretched out his right palm, and with a thought, condensed a chakra sphere identical to what he had just sensed.
An orange-red chakra orb formed in his palm—it was Fire Release ninjutsu chakra, identical to that in an activated explosive tag.
But… the moment passed, and the orb didn't explode.
Li Yao frowned and looked again at the explosive tags on the table. A thought struck him.
Maybe, like Super Beast Imitating Drawing, explosive tag ninjutsu required a medium to manifest their effect.
Simply recreating the chakra wasn't enough. Without chakra paper as a medium, there was no explosion.
"Then… does that mean the storage scroll's chakra also needs a medium?"
Li Yao wondered aloud as he sat back down and picked up another sealing scroll.
(END CHAPTER)
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