The roar of the waterfall cascading from a thirty-meter height created a natural sound barrier around the training ground. Here, in this isolated pocket, one could shout, explode things, and smash rocks without fearing the attention of spies.
Jiraiya took the massive scroll from his back. He slammed it onto the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust, and unrolled the parchment with a sharp movement. The paper was old, yellowed with time, but saturated with such powerful chakra that the air around it seemed thicker.
"This is the Toad Summoning Contract," the Sannin's voice became solemn, losing its usual jovial notes. "One of the strongest summoning techniques in the world."
Naruto stepped closer. His gaze slid over the names written in blood. The kanji pulsed. Each name was the story of a great shinobi.
At the very end of the list, before an empty space, he saw him.
Minato Namikaze.
The handwriting was sharp, swift, like the Fourth himself.
The youth froze. He felt a strange resonance. Not just chakra—an echo of kinship. The man who had sealed the Fox inside him had left his mark here. Now it was time to join this rank.
"He was the only one who could completely subjugate Gamabunta—the Toad Boss," Jiraiya noted, watching his student's reaction. "He had talent. Now it's your turn."
The Jinchūriki didn't hesitate. He brought his thumb to his mouth, sharply bit the skin with his canine, and forcefully pressed the bloody print onto the parchment, writing his name right below the previous one.
"Done."
"Excellent." The Hermit rolled up the scroll, slinging it back over his shoulder. "Now—practice. Show me what you're capable of. Summoning requires a massive amount of chakra. Don't hold back, Naruto. Let it all out!"
The blonde stood in the center of the clearing. He formed the seals: Boar — Dog — Bird — Monkey — Ram.
A switch flipped inside him.
Chakra. Not Qi. I need an ocean, not a stream.
He reached for his "primary" reserve. A huge, blue, bubbling mass of energy mixed with the Nine-Tails' background radiation. Usually, he restrained it, filtered it through channels to avoid hurting himself. But now an explosion was required.
"Kuchiyose no Jutsu! (Summoning Technique)"
Palm slam to the ground.
A monstrous impulse surged through his channels.
POOF!
A huge cloud of white smoke shot upward, concealing the youth's figure. The earth beneath his palm cracked.
Naruto straightened up, expecting to see a giant.
But when the wind blew away the smoke, he saw... grass.
Looking down, he noticed a small, bright orange toadlet with purple circles under its eyes by his sandal. The size of a kitten.
"Yo!" Gamakichi croaked, blinking lazily. "Where am I? I wanna eat. Got flies?"
Uzumaki froze, looking at his hands. The veins on them were still bulging from the exertion.
"What the?.." he whispered. "I put in enough power to level a stone wall! I felt it go out!"
Jiraiya, standing aside, chuckled at first, then burst out laughing.
"There's plenty of power, kid! Loads of it! But you're choking it at the exit!"
"Choking it?" the student frowned.
The Sannin walked closer, poking a finger into the youth's chest.
"I noticed it back on the water. You try to control chakra too... rigidly. You're used to your 'special concentration technique' where every drop counts. You dose energy like a pharmacist doses poison."
The Sage spread his hands.
"But Summoning is an explosion! You send energy into space to hook a creature. You output an ocean, but at the last moment subconsciously squeeze the channel to the size of a needle's eye. As a result, instead of a dragon, a lizard squeezes through. Your improved control is working against you."
"Hey, are you guys even listening to me?" Gamakichi exclaimed, having not received a treat. "Fine, since there's no food, I'm out of here. You guys are boring."
Poof!
The toadlet vanished in a small puff of smoke, leaving the cultivator to train further.
Naruto clenched his fist. Jiraiya was right. Years of Qi practice had trained his body to economize. Muscle memory resisted wastefulness. He tried to open the floodgates, but his chakra channels reflexively contracted like meridians, condensing the flow instead of expanding it.
"Alright." The teacher waved his hand. "We'll deal with summoning later, when you learn to relax. Right now we need a weapon for the finals. Something that suits your style: powerful, fast, and doesn't require complex seals."
The Sannin extended his right hand.
"Watch closely."
A vortex of blue chakra began to spin in his palm. Streams rotated at breakneck speed, thickening, condensing, until they turned into a perfect, humming sphere the size of a ball. The air around the hand trembled from tension, emitting a sound like a beast's growl.
"Rasengan."
Jiraiya spun around sharply and slammed the sphere into the trunk of a tree behind him.
BANG!
The tree didn't break. It was twisted inside out. A spiral mark imprinted into the wood, tearing fibers from the inside and turning the core into splinters. A huge chunk was ripped out from the other side of the trunk, leaving a hole with smoking edges from friction.
Naruto's eyes lit up.
Qi Sensory saw the structure of the technique right through.
It's... pure rotation! No elements. No complex formulas. Only shape and density. It's like rotating Qi in the Dantian, only brought outside and accelerated to the limit!
The ideal technique for him. It didn't require delicate sculpting, difficult with his volumes. It required holding wild power in check. That was a language he understood.
"Teach me," the youth exhaled.
"It's the Fourth's technique," the Sage smirked, dispelling the remnants of chakra. "He spent three years creating it. The highest form of chakra shape manipulation."
Jiraiya pulled a balloon from his pouch—an ordinary child's toy filled with water.
"First stage: Rotation. You must make the water inside spin so fast and chaotically that the balloon bursts from the inside."
Naruto took the balloon. Cold and soft.
Closed his eyes. Imagined his Dantian. A vortex.
Chakra. Spin the chakra.
Directed the flow into his hand. The water churned. The rubber deformed, bulged, stretching in different directions.
But it didn't burst.
The chakra was too chaotic, hitting everywhere at once, not creating a unified vector of pressure.
"Damn..." the blonde hissed, feeling the tension in the veins of his arm. The balloon just wobbled like jelly.
"You have a month," Jiraiya reminded him, sitting under a tree and taking out his notebook "for research." "Usually this takes weeks."
"I don't have weeks."
Uzumaki looked at the balloon.
My control has improved. But the volume still interferes. I need more attempts. Many more. I need to feel this a thousand times so the body remembers.
He suddenly remembered that the residual experience of clones returns to the original after dispelling. Usually, this was used for reconnaissance. But what if...
He looked at the teacher.
"Old man... I mean, Jiraiya-sensei. Can I use clones?"
"Huh?" The Sannin looked up from writing another spicy scene. "Why? So they can applaud you?"
"To speed up the process." The Jinchūriki's eyes glinted with calculation. "If I create a hundred clones, and each trains for an hour... I get a hundred hours of training experience in one hour. Right?"
Jiraiya froze. Slowly lowered the notebook.
He knew this property of Shadow Clones. A secret Jonin technique. But using it for training? It required monstrous mental endurance. An ordinary person would go insane from memory overload or die from shock, receiving the fatigue of a hundred bodies simultaneously.
But standing before him was an Uzumaki. A Jinchūriki with an ocean of energy and a will of steel.
"Hah..." The Sage broke into a wide, predatory grin. "You're not so simple, kid. It's dangerous. Your head could pop like an overripe watermelon. But with your reserves... It might work. This is your personal advantage."
Naruto nodded, casting aside doubts.
The seal formed.
"Tajū Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!"
The clearing instantly filled with a hundred copies. The smoke hadn't even cleared, and the original was already barking orders.
Jiraiya, understanding the scale of the endeavor, dumped a whole crate of water balloons before them—clearly prepared in advance.
"Start!" the army barked in unison.
Training turned into an assembly line.
The clearing filled with sounds of splashing water and cursing. Balloons deformed, slipped out of hands, burst, but not in the right way.
Clones vanished in clouds of smoke, transmitting crumbs of experience to the original: "Harder to the left," "Too sharp," "Keep the rhythm," "More rotation."
The real Naruto sat in the center of the chaos, clutching his temples.
It was painful.
Every time a clone vanished, it felt like a nail being driven into his brain. Information came not as text—but as sensations. Muscle memory, finger fatigue, disappointment from failure—everything layered on top of each other.
By evening, his nose was bleeding. His head hummed. He felt nauseous.
But he didn't stop. He filtered the flow using the discipline of mind honed by years of meditation. His consciousness, tempered by communion with the Bijū, ground through the experience, extracting gold from the mud.
The sun touched the horizon. The clearing was soaked through, turned into a swamp.
One of the clones, standing at the very edge of the water, suddenly shouted:
"Got it!"
In his hand, the balloon spun wildly, deformed into a perfect vortex, and with a loud pop exploded from the inside, spraying water in a fine mist.
Jiraiya, who had been watching closely the whole time, whistled.
"First stage in half a day? Minato would be proud. That's... a frightening pace."
The clone dispelled.
The original twitched, receiving the final piece of the puzzle. The sensation of success.
He opened his eyes. The world swam. The youth staggered, almost falling face-first into the mud, but held on.
"I... get it," he rasped, wiping blood from his nose. "Give me the next stage. What's next?"
"Hey-hey, easy there." The teacher stood up and walked over to him, placing a heavy hand on his shoulder and transferring a little chakra for support. "You're squeezed dry like a lemon. Brain is overheated. If you continue, you'll burn out and forget even your own name."
Naruto looked at his trembling hand. He felt the phantom rotation in his palm. The memory of hundreds of hours had been written into his nervous system in one day.
This was it. A weapon capable of multiplying his striking power.
And maybe in the future, if he could add structure to it... it would become something more.
"Fine, Old Man." The Jinchūriki allowed himself to fall onto the grass, looking at the darkening sky. "But tomorrow... we speed up."
Jiraiya looked at his exhausted student with a warmth he rarely showed. In this stubbornness, he saw Kushina. In the talent—Minato. And in the eyes—something completely new.
"Sleep, monster. Tomorrow will hurt. We'll be learning to explode rubber."