The caravan's stay in Rinha village was starting out smooth while maintaining basic vigilance, all members of Team 6 split off to try and improve their abilities through practice, in preparation for the battles to come.
Inori practiced a Hidden Jutsu she had been developing based on her clan's secret techniques, Mei practiced her dojutsu and Shinka simulated the situation of revealing her hidden mission and abilities to work up courage for the actual reveal.
Shiki, on the other hand, was approaching his training in a more complex manner.
First, the boy created two shadow clones, with their ability to replenish their chakra quickly with the Three Bodies Breathing Method, especially ever since Shiki unlocked his Ryumon lineage, they could continuously operate by themselves for extended periods of time.
One clone remained in the village, using his Enlightened Mind's Eye to continuously analyze the Yamakaze's Weather Manipulation efforts and to try and figure out the secrets of the Rinha clan.
The other clone went off to practice the rasengan and further develop it using the shadow clone brute force practice method.
Meanwhile, the original Shiki took a fair bit of distance from the village so that his attempts to reproduce the Weather Manipulation hidden jutsu were not discovered.
If successful, the boy planned to fuse it into his Nirvana Art: Elemental as the next step of its evolution at which point, it would differ from the original enough that they couldn't really accuse him of anything.
At most, it could be said he was inspired by them and his jutsu ended up taking a similar path but there would be no way to tell that he copied their techniques.
After all, through his observations, Shiki already had a pretty good idea how the jutsu worked and was not wholly unfamiliar with the principle.
The ability to generate numerous weather phenomena with added effects just as draining chakra and vitality with rain while influencing emotions, using sunlight to boost plant growth and other such things.
Its specifics were not explained in the series but another "jutsu" of sorts, accomplished something of a similar nature, even if the scale was far, far greater.
Tenpenchii, or "Natural Disaster Befalling Heaven and Earth", the Ten Tails's ability to cause natural disasters like immense thunderstorms, massive tornados, great floods and powerful earthquakes all at the same time.
This ability, like the Yamakaze's Weather Manipulation, was classified not as a kind of elemental jutsu but a neutral one.
It supposedly worked by using the Ten Tails' colossal chakra pool to interfere with the Nature Energy in a large area in order to set off these phenomena.
The Yamakaze's hidden Jutsu accomplished this using more skillful means rather than a huge chakra pool which they lacked resulting in a predictably much weaker output but a whole lot more precision with the phenomena one could create.
Theoretically, if one who mastered this technique acquired chakra reserves matching the Ten Tails', they would be able to produce a Tenpenchii of much greater proportion due to adding fine skill to the mix but that was just a hypothetical.
As for learning it himself, Shiki had a good trick to expedite the process.
Even before the Otsutsuki and the advent of chakra, the Ryumon clan had developed the ability to manipulate and influence nature energy to an extent.
The effects produced from this ability alone were incredibly weak but it provided a basis for the boy to develop his own version of the Weather Manipulation Jutsu.
And since he was starting from his Ryumon abilities, Shiki decided to develop as Nirvana Art: Elemental's evolution from the get go rather than developing the jutsu first and integrating it later.
*
While the original Shiki made progress in his assigned task, the shadow clone in charge of improving the ransengan was hard at work himself.
The clone multiplied itself before dividing into two different groups, each exploring a particular path of evolution.
One group would focus on the compression path.
Shiki had already developed the Compression Rasengan but if he could use that compression as a way to solidify and stabilize the jutsu, he could recreate Borushiki's Rasendan, a compressed ranged version of the standard rasengan with no nature transformation added in.
That last part was critical because the boy and his elemental affinities were not quite at the point where developing high powered elemental jutsu was an efficient method to increase his strength.
As such, the second path of evolution being considered, also did not require any form of nature transformation.
It was an attempt to intensify the rotation for more power.
Ideally, it would result in something akin to the Taikyoku Rasengan from the Naruto movie that took place in Roran which Shiki himself would be visiting soon.
'Maybe that destiny association will give me extra points towards successful jutsu development.'
That was one of the boy's flippant thoughts when making the decision.
The concept of the Taikyoku Rasengan was to combine two regular Rasengan, each created by people with similar chakra.
This would result in some kind of resonance when the two Rasengan are put next to each other, creating a powerful but unstable looking Rasengan.
It should have a rapidly fluctuating form, the regular sphere being constantly deformed in a myriad ways while violent streams of chakra twist and wrap around the user with the Taikyoku Rasengan at the core.
These streams alone had enough power to deflect attacks in the movie and the penetrative power of the jutsu was incredible, tearing a hole through its target before obliterating it.
Shiki's idea was to create two normal rasengan and then use his supreme chakra control to slightly adjust the chakra frequency of one of them until he found the sweet spot for resonance and then combine them into one for the final jutsu.
After he mastered forming the Taikyoku Rasengan through this two step method, he would then work on doing it from the outset as that would make the jutsu faster and more efficient.
*
Moving back to town, another Shiki clone was hard at work stealing other peoples' hard work.
Using his Enlightened Mind's Eye to find and read through the Rinha clan's records, including their secret ones, was a piece of cake.
All of their medical knowledge was now the boy's property but, expectedly, their most important and interesting stuff relied on their kekkei genkai which they actually called Spirit Reflexion.
As it turned out, making puppets into perfect clones using someone's chakra was but one of the few applications and it was called the Spirit Reflexion Puppet Jutsu, a rather unimaginative but highly accurate name.
Shiki remembered no such specificity in the game where the Rinha clan appeared but he already knew that, as a real world, there were certain differences between the lore he knew from his previous life and the reality of his current one.
Unfortunately, still being far from reproducing kekkei genkai, the boy's only course of action was to memorize the knowledge, collect as many Rinha clan genetic samples as he could, and hope his future project turned out well.
Even more unfortunate was that on the third day of his activities, Shiki's peaceful training time was interrupted by something he caught on the edge of his Enlightened Mind's Eye's range.
The second major encounter of importance for the boy in the Land of Wind was fast approaching and, depending on how one viewed it, it was destined to be less pleasant . . .
+++++
Hey, Author here!
To promote the novel I will be releasing BONUS CHAPTERS on SUNDAYS based on the previous week's power stone count.
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I'm trying to become a full time Author now and I'm not going to be starting any new novels just so I can make sure this one is properly completed.
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