Hinata came to a stop in the forest. She removed the Sacred Fist Gauntlet from her right hand, extended her bare palm, and drew a soft breath. Chakra coalesced in the pale-eyed girl's palm, and a spinning sphere of energy rapidly took shape—unmistakably the prototype of a Rasengan.
The underlying principle wasn't especially difficult. In simple terms, the technique worked by gathering multiple streams of chakra flowing in different directions within one's palm, then compressing and containing them inside a sphere. The more divergent streams packed into the sphere and the higher the rotational velocity, the greater the Rasengan's destructive output.
Consequently, so long as one possessed a certain baseline of chakra control, learning the Rasengan was no great feat. If it were, then in the original work, Hinata and Naruto's brat Boruto Uzumaki could never have nearly mastered the technique in a single day.
Studying the Rasengan spinning in her right hand, Hinata casually raised her arm and pressed the sphere against a nearby tree trunk. The dense, hardened wood offered almost no resistance whatsoever—the Rasengan bored a gaping hole clean through it.
"Four divergent chakra streams and it already packs this much punch? Fascinating."
Having assessed the Rasengan's destructive potential, Hinata found herself genuinely satisfied with the technique. However, a standard Rasengan carried no elemental nature transformation. The Fourth Hokage had died before he could incorporate nature transformation into the Rasengan's framework. The Rasenshuriken that Naruto later developed was simply a variant born from adding Wind Release nature transformation to the base technique.
"Well then. Let's see what happens."
Sliding the Sacred Fist Gauntlet back onto her right hand, Hinata steadied her breathing and once again began molding chakra in the Rasengan's compression pattern within her palm.
Because the Sacred Fist Gauntlets forcibly converted chakra into their corresponding elemental nature, the chakra pooling in Hinata's right palm this time smoothly transformed into swirling flames. Under the Rasengan's compression method, multiple streams of fire flowing in different directions gradually coalesced into a spinning sphere. Unlike the ordinary Rasengan from moments ago, this version—infused with Fire Release nature transformation—resembled a fireball rotating at tremendous speed, and with each increase in the chakra's rotational velocity, the flames blazing inside burned fiercer and fiercer!!
Not good!!
Sensing with razor-sharp instinct that the instability within the Fire Release Rasengan was intensifying by the second, Hinata whipped her right arm forward almost on reflex, hurling the flaming sphere from her palm. She threw both arms up in front of her face and rocketed backward.
The Fire Release Rasengan had barely traveled a few meters from her hand when a blinding flare of light erupted from within—and the densely compressed ball of flame detonated outright!! Unlike an ordinary explosive tag's blast, this explosion expanded like a spiral-shaped fireball inflating at breakneck speed, swelling until it reached a diameter of nearly seven meters before erupting skyward with a thunderous roar!! From a distance, it looked for all the world like a miniature volcano blasting its cap off!!
Her timely evasion and guard spared Hinata the embarrassment of being scorched by her own Rasengan, but the sight of a charred crater nearly seven meters across still made her brow furrow tight.
Just as she'd suspected—incorporating nature transformation into the Rasengan was extraordinarily dangerous. Even in the original work, when Naruto first used the Rasenshuriken to kill Kakuzu, the backlash from his own technique had ravaged his right arm.
The Rasenshuriken represented the Rasengan infused with Wind Release nature transformation. Hinata's Fire Release Rasengan was essentially an early-stage variant incorporating Fire Release instead. But judging from the sheer explosive force, if she'd been holding onto it and punching an enemy point-blank, it would certainly have killed the target—yet the blast radius would absolutely engulf the user at that range too.
In other words, once nature transformation was added, the Rasengan had to shift from a close-range technique to a ranged one. Otherwise, the user's own body would inevitably become collateral damage.
That said, nothing was absolute. If she could control the scale and intensity of a nature-transformed Rasengan—repurposing it from a standalone technique into the finishing blow of a combo sequence...
"Heh~ I see now. No resource is ever truly useless. It all comes down to how you integrate everything into a seamless whole."
Her idea crystallized, Hinata turned on her heel and headed straight back to her room in Tazuna's house. As a shinobi who had long since made training a daily routine, she carried a full complement of essential tools and scrolls at all times. Among them was a diagram of the human body's pressure points.
True, Hinata had abandoned the antiquated, overcomplicated Gentle Fist long ago. But knowledge of the tenketsu wasn't exclusive to the Gentle Fist style. This world might never have developed anything as sophisticated as acupuncture therapy, yet any experienced shinobi knew how to stimulate specific pressure points to heal injuries or bolster stamina. The most classic example was the so-called Eight Gates—its principle was, at its core, nothing more than forcing open eight critically important pressure points in the human body in rapid succession, unleashing an explosive surge of physical power.
What could be stated with certainty was that the Hyuga clan's Gentle Fist was indeed designed to target and damage pressure points, precisely because they were harder to defend and inherently more fragile. However, the style's obsessive pursuit of pinpoint tenketsu-blocking precision had driven its complexity and difficulty sky-high, rendering it effectively unlearnable for anyone lacking exceptional innate talent—people like Hinata's original body.
But the universal truth remained: if a pressure point suffered a powerful external blow, it would inflict damage the victim could scarcely defend against, because pressure points were fundamentally the intersections where blood vessels and nerve endings converged—the body's hidden critical points. That was why certain "death points" existed: those locations sat atop major arteries or primary nerve clusters, and a clean hit there made survival all but impossible.
Put plainly, a pressure point was like a junction where blood vessels and nerves intersected—the equivalent of a crossroads on a road network. If such an intersection were blocked or destroyed, every connected nerve and blood vessel downstream would be affected.
Even without the Gentle Fist's precise tenketsu-blocking art, simply striking the right major pressure points on an enemy's body could inflict devastating damage. Moreover, because pressure points were nerve-ending clusters by nature, some were deceptively easy to locate. Take the spot commonly called the "funny bone" on the arm—that was actually a key pressure point known as the bicipital point. Forget being struck hard; merely bumping it caused the entire arm to spasm and go temporarily numb. And finding it was simple: it sat right in the hollow of the elbow joint.
Tracing her finger slowly down the pressure-point diagram, Hinata's eyes narrowed to slits. Before long, her finger stopped at its first target—a point located dead center between the two nipples. The position was trivially easy to identify; one didn't need a Byakugan to find it.
This pressure point was the shanzhong point, classified among the lethal "death points" of the human body. The internal thoracic vein's anterior perforating branch ran directly through it. A solid strike would impact the heart directly—at minimum causing palpitations, disorientation, and mental confusion; at worst, it could rupture a cardiac chamber, inflicting irreversible internal damage.
If she could land a punch squarely on the enemy's shanzhong point, then so long as the target still qualified as "human" and lacked something like a Susanoo or Gaara's Armor of Sand providing full-body defense, sufficient force would leave them dazed and unable to act for several seconds at minimum.
Stripping away all edge cases and summarizing in game terms: a strike to the shanzhong point inflicted several seconds of stun, dealt true damage at a multiplier of the user's raw strength, and applied a lingering debuff reducing both movement speed and attack speed.
Now—treating the front of the human torso as a map, the shanzhong point sat right on the body's vertical midline. And running along the body's left and right contour lines were three symmetrical pairs of "gate points." From top to bottom: the yunmen points at the shoulder blades, the zhangmen points below the tips of the eleventh floating ribs, and finally the chongmen points on the outer edges of the inguinal folds.
These three pairs of points were bilateral—mirrored on both sides of the body—and each served a distinct function.
The yunmen point was essentially the pressure point beneath the scapula that governed arm mobility. The so-called "piercing the shoulder blades" torture technique was, in reality, the act of puncturing through this exact point—equivalent to directly sealing off the arms' primary blood supply. It governed the lungs; if damaged, it would not only impair both arms' movement but could also induce pneumothorax.
Summary: a strike to this point dealt true damage at a strength multiplier, plus applied debuffs of suffocation and bilateral arm paralysis.
The zhangmen point governed the liver. It sat along the mandatory route that chakra took when flowing upward from the dantian in the lower abdomen into the upper body's meridian network.
Summary: a strike to this point dealt true damage at a strength multiplier, plus applied debuffs of silence and chakra stagnation.
And the final pair—the chongmen points. These two sat at the midpoints of the outer inguinal folds. Running through them internally were the femoral artery, the femoral vein, and even the femoral nerve.
Naturally, damage to these points could be treated as simultaneous trauma to the legs' blood supply and nervous system.
Summary: a strike to these points dealt true damage at a strength multiplier, plus applied a crippled legs debuff.
If she could land hits on all these points in a single combo, the enemy would be left—by the time the beating was over—with both arms crippled, both legs crippled, ninjutsu silenced, and mental faculties scrambled. A lamb for the slaughter.
However, she couldn't rule out enemies with special regenerative abilities. So a powerful finisher was still essential. Examining the distribution of the four pressure-point groups—shanzhong, yunmen, zhangmen, and chongmen—they all shared one common chakra supply node: the point on the shinobi's lower abdomen that served as the origin of all chakra—the qihai point.
The qihai point was even easier to locate: just slightly below the navel. And if this area took a solid hit, it wouldn't produce a single isolated debuff. Every single one of the effects listed above could trigger simultaneously.
Hinata's eyes flickered with cold light. She could feel it now—she had grasped the rough outline of a terrifying technique.
First, strike the enemy's shanzhong point to inflict a brief full-body stun. Then attack the yunmen points on both arms to prevent any counterattack. Follow up with strikes to the zhangmen points on both sides of the ribcage to disrupt internal chakra circulation and cut off any last-ditch self-destruct moves. Next, hit the chongmen points to strip away leg mobility and pin the target in place.
And finally—a devastating finishing blow to the qihai point, detonating all the accumulated damage from the preceding seven strikes and unleashing catastrophic destruction.
No need to target sixty-four tenketsu the way the Eight Trigrams Sixty-Four Palms demanded. Instead, she would select the eight most critical pressure points for her assault. Even the dullest person alive could memorize eight simple locations—especially when three of the four pairs were conveniently mirrored on both sides of the body.
"But... the actual results..."
Rising to her feet, the pale-eyed girl turned her head slightly. Her eyes, half-veiled beneath her bangs, flickered in the shadow cast by the sunlight—cold and eerie as foxfire.
"...will require testing."