…
The mindscape surfaced around him, the endless dark water stretching in every direction beneath his feet, still and perfectly level, reflecting the pale blue moon above with the clarity of a mirror undisturbed by any ripples.
Murakami stood at the water's edge and let the space settle around him before turning his attention to what he'd come here to do.
His Three fundamental techniques.
Not chosen arbitrarily. Chosen because each one represented an unresolved problem that would compound into a liability if left unaddressed.
The Mountain Embracing Technique first.
He had used it once.
Once, under extreme duress, against an opponent actively trying to kill him, with no conscious understanding of how he had actually produced it.
It had worked, worked well enough to bury a Jōnin-equivalent commander under several tons of compressed earth, and then immediately render him unconscious from the chakra expenditure.
A technique he couldn't reproduce reliably and couldn't use without collapsing wasn't a technique.
It was an accident he'd survived.
He sat with the memory of it.
What had he actually felt in the moment before the earth moved?
He'd been watching the enemy coordinator's movements, tracking the way chakra flowed into the ground, reading the intent behind the technique rather than its surface form.
He hadn't copied it.
Takeda had been right about that much.
He'd understood something, a fundamental relationship between chakra and earth.
How a an intention, carried by chakra, could move earth at scale.
Ideally, when a shinobi performs Earth Release, they don't just push chakra into the ground randomly, they have an intention, and a specific mental image of what they want the earth to do.
That intention, carried by the spiritual aspect of chakra, translates into physical movement of the earth at whatever scale the technique demands.
The same principle applied to other naturally occurring elements… In Murakami's case, Wind and Earth.
That was why upon comprehending the mechanics behind the chakra threads manipulation, he had then expressed that understanding through the only framework available to him in that moment.
It was raw, unrefined, and catastrophically expensive.
'The principle was sound,' he thought. 'The execution was not.'
A completed technique was efficient.
It didn't drain its user completely because it had been refined down to its essential components.
You could either perform it or you could not.
What he'd done was the jutsu equivalent of building a road by tearing up everything in a straight line instead of grading the terrain first.
It had worked, but it had also cost him everything he had.
The gap between those two facts was where the real work lived.
He turned his attention next to the Shockwave Jutsu.
More developed than the Mountain Embracing Technique, more reliable, but still carrying inefficiencies he'd identified during the mission and hadn't had the opportunity to address.
The release point remained slightly too broad with the force behind the shockwave dispersing laterally more than it needed to, effectively bleeding force in directions that served no purpose.
At point blank range, it served its purpose, but as an AOE attack it wasn't yet up to par.
And finally, the Phantom Step.
The movement technique was the most polished of the three, but polish wasn't the same as mastery.
Its ceiling, the Nine Spirit Illusion Steps, nine afterimages from a single motion, was still a considerable distance from where he currently stood.
The gap wasn't speed. It was precision of chakra distribution across the body during the step itself, each fraction of a second requiring a different allocation as momentum built and released.
He understood the destination.
He didn't yet have the road.
Three techniques. Three unresolved problems. Three directions to move in simultaneously, each one feeding into the broader architecture of what he was building.
'Begin with what you understand least,' he decided, his attention returning to the Mountain Embracing Technique.
Then stopped.
He had three techniques to work on and a finite window of time in the mindscape before the mental strain of sustained immersion started compounding.
Sequential practice meant three separate sessions minimum. That was inefficient, and inefficiency was something he had a personal policy against.
He needed a way to work on all three simultaneously.
His gaze drifted across the endless dark water stretching in every direction.
He was in his own consciousness. A space he'd built, maintained, and expanded through deliberate cultivation.
If this space could contain a moon, a star, and an infinite body of water that responded to his presence…
'A clone,' he thought.
Not a shadow clone, he hadn't learned the technique yet, but the principle was simple enough.
An energy construct modeled after oneself, operating independently while he focused elsewhere.
He reached into the space around him and willed it, and a figure materialized.
He studied it.
It looked like him but something was immediately, fundamentally wrong.
It was similar to the constructs he had created when he first opened his mindscape.
The figure stood where he'd formed it, neither breathing nor blinking, its eyes carrying the particular vacancy of something that existed without experiencing existing.
It was similar to a puppet. Aware of nothing. Capable of nothing autonomous without directives.
He dismissed it with a thought and stood quietly for a moment, turning the problem over.
The issue wasn't the construct itself. It was the absence of awareness.
A clone that couldn't think couldn't practice, and practice required error, correction, and the capacity to distinguish between the two.
His mind went to the shadow clone technique.
He'd seen it in the anime enough times to remember the mechanics as they'd been explained. Each clone a fully independent entity, capable of thought, capable of learning, and capable of returning its experiences to the original upon dispersal.
That level of independence implied something specific about how the technique worked.
A chakra construct alone didn't produce awareness. Chakra was the physical half of the equation, it built the shell, gave it form and maintained its existence.
But awareness, the actual capacity to think, that came from somewhere else.
Spiritual energy.
If his theory was correct, then each shadow clone wasn't merely a chakra construct. It was a portion of the user's spiritual energy given temporary physical form.
A Yin-yang technique for a lack of better descriptive term.
That was why the technique was so costly. It wasn't simply dividing chakra between bodies. Each clone carried a fragment of the user's spiritual essence, temporarily separating something that was meant to remain whole.
Then how could Naruto produce hundreds? Was his spiritual reserve truly that vast? Or was there another principle he had yet to understand?
Murakami didn't and couldn't know the answer to that, so he shrugged it off and turned his attention toward the moon.
That was the embodiment of his Spiritual energy. Instinctively, he knew this, and through that instinctive attention, something clarified that had always been present but never examined directly.
He noticed a connection, like a thread running between his awareness and the moon's light.
'That's what spiritual energy feels like from the inside.'
He had no comparison point since there was no other people's reserve to measure against or an established baseline for what was normal or exceptional.
He filed the observation away without conclusion and turned his attention to the more immediate problem.
He reached for the energy directly and shaped it the way he'd shaped the failed construct, pushing it outward into a form.
A figure materialized, vastly different from the last one.
He knew it immediately, before he'd even fully processed the visual. This wasn't an object placed in his mindscape.
This was something that was in his mindscape.
Just like the moon…or rather, an extension of the moon.
Then the figure's eyes opened, and Murakami saw it directly; a flicker of awareness, looking back at him with a particular quality he couldn't place a finger to.
He hummed once in quiet approval.
Then, he felt his reserves drain. He instinctively knew… half of his reserves was gone.
A single mental clone and he'd spent half his spiritual energy producing it.
'What would be the result if it were made in reality?' A look of alarm flashed through his face for an instant. 'How absurd is the shadow clone technique, and how absurd is it that Naruto could spam hundreds!?'
Unfortunately, there was no one to answer his questions, so they were left unanswered.
He looked at the clone. The clone looked at him.
"You're M-1," Murakami said. "Your objective is the Mountain Embracing Technique. Practice it. Repeatedly. From first principles of chakra thread flow."
M-1 nodded once. "Understood."
Then, without ceremony or apparent effort, it turned toward the endless dark water stretching in every direction… and the water gave way.
Not gradually or with any visible process of construction. One moment the water in the mindscape extended in every direction as it always had, and the next, a vast rocky terrain occupied the space where water had been.
Jagged formations of earth, stone shelves and fault lines spreading outward to the horizon with the particular density of land that had always been there and was only now being seen.
Murakami stared dumbstruck.
For exactly one instant, something crossed his face that wasn't his usual composure.
Then it disappeared again.
He was aware, vaguely, that he could have done the same thing at any point.
The moon hanging above him was proof enough that the mindscape responded to deliberate intention, he'd built that himself, willed it from nothing into the structure it now was.
Creating terrain was no different in principle.
He had simply never thought to do it since there wasn't a need for it.
He clicked his tongue, directed the thought at no one in particular, and deliberately turned his attention away from M-1, who he had immediately and privately categorized as a show-off.
He reached for his spiritual energy again.
What remained was already half of what he'd started with. He felt the thinness of it immediately, the reserve pulled tight in a way that made the next step feel considerably less advisable than it had thirty seconds ago.
He shaped the energy anyway and a second figure materialized.
The moment it fully formed, Murakami felt the familiar pull on his consciousness.
He had perhaps seconds before he would be forced out.
"M-2." He kept his voice level despite the pull intensifying with each word. "Shockwave Jutsu. Improve it. Whatever direction you think is best."
M-2's eyes flickered with that same awareness.
Then everything went dark.
…
Murakami opened his eyes on the balcony and raised two fingers to his temple.
The headache was mild and quite manageable. The kind that sat just behind the eyes.
He clicked his tongue.
Two clones. Half his reserves per clone.
He sat there for another minute, rubbing his temple as the dull ache behind his eyes gradually eased.
An unsustainable expenditure, but not a failed experiment.
He had confirmed that consciousness itself could be divided within the mindscape.
That alone was worth today's effort, the rest could wait.
Murakami rose from the balcony, slid the door open, and stepped back into the house and made his way to his room.
Upon arriving, he extinguished the light with a passing wave of chakra over the Hearth array sensor in the room before lowering himself onto the futon.
His eyes closed almost immediately. Within moments, the room fell silent.
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
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