(July, year 54 AK)
As Shisui promised, he beat Yuta, Itachi and Hikari up each day for about a week, calling it an exercise.
Most of the time it went about the same way as the first time, when Shisui managed to split them up and beat them separately. But on the last days they managed a few times to keep the formation and fight as a team against Shisui, and those fights went much better, although they still weren't able to win even once.
Itachi had perfumed exceptionally good in those fights, and he was the closest to score a hit on Shisui. After he got his Sharingan, Yuta figured, he reached a solid Jonin level of strength and chakra. His moves become much faster and more precise. It was like he could predict what Shisui would do the next moment.
Needless to say, that Yuta was quite envious of Itachi's Sharingan. Having such a big leap in power just by awakening it and having such a huge advantage in combat, it was a game-changing cheat in Yuta's opinion. Although Yuta understood that he shouldn't feel envy about such a cheat when he has the cheat of his own, and much more powerful too, but sadly - not in a fight, though.
Yesterday, after yet another team training, Shisui said that today they will be going on a mission again, so Yuta was a bit enthusiastic about getting an opportunity to test his skills in the real world against some ninjas, as he went to the usual team gathering place at the training grounds number 68.
On his way, he thought more about the Sharingan and an insane powerup boost it had given to Itachi just like that. Yuta still remembers Itachi's strength from about three months ago, when they were going through similar team exercises with Shisui. Back then Itachi was about as strong as Hikari was, and he only had less than 2C of chakra back then.
But now? Yuta has a hard time to estimate his chakra, it was about 10C or even higher than that. Although he understood that chakra alone wasn't enough to estimate the total combat power of a ninja, Yuta was a good example of that himself, he was able to defeat five ninjas with Chunin's levels of chakra when he only had about 8G of chakra.
In Itachi's case though, after fighting with him side by side against Shisui Yuta had no doubt that Itachi is already firmly on a Jonin level of strength by now.
Then Yuta thought about his own cheat ability.
'Hm, now that I think about it, I had figured only two applications of my Time Control ability so far, there should be more to it than just time-travel and Calm State. Too bad, there is no instruction manual...' Yuta thought.
'I was able to get some understanding of the River of Time, and based on that I figured the way to time-travel and then to channel the Calm State. But that understanding doesn't give me any instructions on how I could use it, only the basic instinctual understanding of the concept of time itself...'
'I can't affect space, that is an obvious and absolute rule, I know that by now. This prevents me from using Time Control in the most direct and obvious ways, like time-stop or time-acceleration. I can use time-travel only when I submerge my soul into the River of Time inside my mindscape, so the time-travel doesn't affect anything in the world by itself but only my soul, that being sent back in time through the river.'
'This part is quite counterintuitive, it doesn't affect anything in the world, but at the same time, it potentially changes the whole history and timeline of the world by sending me back. That gives me ideas to search for other counterintuitive ways to use my ability. Anything should be theoretically possible, as long as it doesn't need to affect space.'
'But I still wasn't able to come up with anything so far...' Yuta thought regretfully.
...
'Then, there is the Calm State. It wasn't the direct application of the power of River of Time, but some sort of channeling its influence into me and my physical body instead. It isn't some sort of active, time-related ability, but just a passive channel of its... What, Influence? Aura? Something like that. And since it doesn't apply any time-related effects upon anything in the world - it bypasses the restriction of not affecting space and works just fine.'
'That means that there could be more to it? Could I find other applications of my ability like the Calm State? Somehow, I doubt that. The Calm State feels more like a side effect of my ability and not like a direct application of it. Maybe there is nothing more to it for me in this direction.'
'What else I could possibly channel into my physical body from the River of Time that doesn't applies time-related effects on anything in the world?'
'Sight... Time-related power being complicated, obscure and hard to comprehend, who would have thought, huh...' Yuta thought self-deprecatingly with a tired sigh.
'And then, there was a growing spiritual energy issue as well.' Yuta thought, 'Who thought that more spiritual energy could be a problem in any way, huh... From what I've learned and experienced so far, I almost certain that when my spiritual energy will become a lot stronger than my physical energy, like a hundred times more or higher, then my body will start to struggle to contain all that spiritual energy.'
'I wasn't concerned about this problem until now, but now, since my chakra had grown from 8G to 50G, or just 5C, and all of that just in the span of a few days in the real world, I started to feel something unusual that wasn't there before.'
'When I actively use up my chakra, I can feel how my body gets tired faster than before, even when I feel quite a lot of chakra being still available to be drawn for jutsus - my physical body has harder time keeping up. I need more time to recuperate and rest now, and I feel a bit tired for a longer time now whenever I use up a lot of my chakra.'
'I have only noticed these changes recently during these days of team training, and it is still not a problem at this point, just a slight inconvenience, nothing more. I had dismissed it completely at first, but in the past couple days I had thought about it more and realized it for what it was.'
'It's an early signs of a spiritual-physical energies disbalance. At the current stage it is just a minor inconvenience. I have to rest a bit more, after spending chakra I physically feel myself not at my 100% but at about 95% for a while, and I tire physically a bit faster when I use up a lot of chakra. All of that is minor and not affecting me much for now.'
'And as long as I do not use more than 1-2C amounts of chakra – there is no side effects at all.'
'But the fact that these side effects had even showed up, it tells me all I need to know about the spiritual-physical energies disbalance problem.'
'It is very real and not just my empty theories. It's fine for now, the side effects should go away gradually in a half a year or a year as my body grows and becomes stronger. But if I were to double my chakra from 5C to 10C without growing older, then the side effects would grow more severe and start posing a real problem then.'
'By now though, I still don't feel any problem of just having a lot of spiritual energy. After all, there are no side effects as long as I don't use too much of my chakra. But I feel like that is only because the disbalance hasn't grown too severe yet. But what if I were to time-travel all the way back to my four-year-old untrained body? I'm afraid there would be problems of just containing all my spiritual energy even without me actively using any chakra.'
'Physical energy counterbalances spiritual energy in the process of forming chakra, and every living being in this world has chakra, flowing through their bodies. To form chakra, physical and spiritual energies being drawn, they are mixing together to form chakra, but the mixture doesn't have to be one-to-one ratio. If that were to be the case, then the ninjas with strong physical energy but weak spiritual energy wouldn't have much chakra, same could be said the other way around.'
'But even if it doesn't have to be the one-to-one ratio, there were still limits to how much the ratio could shift. I believe this is the reason for my side effects as well.'
'I have too much spiritual energy and too little physical energy, hence my chakra ratio had shifter to its maximum into the spiritual energy's direction, to the point that now my physical energy wasn't able to properly keep up to contribute even the bare minimum into the mix, that's why I feel tired faster than before – my physical energy was being drawn in higher percentages than my spiritual energy whenever I use chakra. Hence, my physical energy gets used up sooner than my spiritual energy and it needs more time to replenish as well.'
'Well, I do have some ideas on how to mitigate and fix the issue. Still, it's not pressing at the moment, my body will grow, and the issue will be postponed for a long time. In the future I could look into body modifications and experiments, Hashirama's cells and other stuff, but with my spiritual energy's growth rate, I still will have centuries of time to figure things out before my spiritual energy pushes my time's bottom line too much.'
'From what I feel right now, I should be still able to time-travel all the way back to the start of the Academy, where my body is five and a half years old, at that point I already trained for a year and a half, my body at that point should have enough physical energy for me to return to, although I would be restricted on how much chakra I could use.'
'But I shouldn't risk time-traveling all the way back anymore. The time before the Academy likely had already become an "event horizon" for me, I can't risk going too close to it now...'
'Not that I was going to. With how my interactions with Shisui had happened in the past and how he started to trust me – I'm not sure I could replicate that and act the same way again, Shisui is sharp and he still could see through me just by observing miniscule movements and body language.'
--- AN ---
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