Chapter 129: It's Easy to Understand if You Just Imagine It
"Hmph~ So boring..."
Thinking about how she would next have to draw the tens of thousands of formulas for the Yin Seal on her body without a single mistake, Sakura could guess that this would inevitably be a large-scale project that was both time-consuming and tedious.
She instantly lost all interest.
Everything in her imagination was very beautiful, but the reality was that those Phase Three ninjutsu were all still a distant prospect. They were all still at the Phase One or Phase Two stage, and the next phase of the Yin Seal didn't even have a shadow of a beginning.
She was still a hundred thousand miles away from that version of Sakura!
She changed her posture from the salted fish spread out on the table. Like her spine had been removed, she lay back on the chair, gave a kick backward with her feet, and the chair began to creak and sway.
Using a four-legged, high-backed chair as a hammock, swaying back and forth, supported only by its back two legs—this kind of action, which would result in a loss of balance with the slightest carelessness, required highly skilled taijutsu ability to complete, and now she could do it casually.
Pillowing her head with her hands, her feet propped up high, she swung her calves idly. Sakura stared at the ceiling and began to daze off.
A tedious ninjutsu always made it hard to find the motivation to work.
The girl's diligence in ninjutsu was born from interest. When she encountered this kind of ninjutsu, she couldn't help but procrastinate, just wanting to find an excuse to not have to face the boring reality.
"Damn it~ To think that besides this, there's nothing else that must be done now!"
She thought hard for a while before saying through gritted teeth.
After a few minutes, she finally conquered her own laziness and buried her head in her work.
She forced herself to work for a whole morning. At noon, she finally walked out to find food, shaking her heavy head.
On the streets of Konoha.
"Hmm~" Sakura looked at the sun. The time was a bit awkward, making her feel a little uncomfortable.
The ramen she had just eaten had already been digested. She walked on the street, touching her stomach. Her lower abdomen had already completely flattened. As the feeling of having eaten rose, a wave of sleepiness immediately descended.
"Should I go back and take a nap, or should I go find Master?" she murmured to herself.
The midday sun was very brilliant, warming the back of her neck. The weather was so lazy it made one feel unmotivated.
Haaah~~ she yawned, feeling a little lazy all over.
Hmm... this is September Sickness!
—Although it was already almost October.
But in the end, her feet still carried her to the Hokage's office.
Without knocking, Sakura walked right in and saw Tsunade's sleeping face:
Lord Hokage was lying on her desk, pillowed on her fair, jade-like right arm, sound asleep.
From Sakura's angle, a large expanse of scenery was in full view: looking down from the open collar, the plump softness swelled up like a small hill, the two pieces of jade-like white flesh squeezed into a deep ravine, the fair skin like condensed sou seeming to emit waves of a faint, dark fragrance. It was pressed against the desk, fluctuating with her breathing, changing its shape like a water ball.
She took a step closer. Hearing the sound, Tsunade woke up in a daze.
"Sakura, it's you..." the Fifth Hokage murmured in a low voice, her eyes still sleepy. "What can I do for you?"
She asked while rubbing her eyes, a trace of crystal-clear saliva remaining on her full, crimson lips.
Sakura blinked—Weren't you the one who called me over?
The girl's small, confused eyes reminded Tsunade. The latter tidied up her messy hair and clothes, and her head finally cleared up a bit.
"Oh, right, it's this matter," she said, slapping her forehead in realization.
She then took out a scroll from the drawer by her feet. It was the ninjutsu R&D progress report scroll that Sakura had submitted. On it were written two imposing large characters—
Sakura Rush.
"Your scroll," she handed the scroll back to the girl. The latter opened it and saw that it was already filled with annotations.
"I've written down the parts I think are inappropriate and need improvement on it. You can take it back and read it yourself. If you have any questions, come and find me again."
Tsunade patted the chair in front of her desk, signaling for Sakura to sit, and then continued, "I've taken a look. Phase One of your Sakura Rush is basically complete. Just go back and overcome those few small problems. But in the development of Phase Two, you've never been able to achieve the ideal result. In my opinion, your ninjutsu should be missing an important part."
She picked up a piece of paper and a pen and quickly drew a few strokes on the paper.
She drew a long pillar with a protruding crown at the top.
"Look, these are two neuron cells. This is the axon of the first cell," Tsunade explained to Sakura, pointing at the long pillar with her pen. "In fact, you've only considered the problem of nerve impulse conduction in the nerve fiber of one cell, but you haven't considered that the transmission of a nerve impulse from one cell to another also consumes a considerable amount of time."
Sakura saw a long pillar with a round head at the top, pressed against the side of another cell.
Hmm... she gets it. That long pillar was the axon of a nerve cell.
"This knowledge was originally supposed to be explained to you in detail in a much later stage, but since you've already developed this ninjutsu, then I'll teach you a little in advance."
"Look closer here," Sakura leaned her head over and saw Tsunade quickly complete the simple diagram, drawing a complex pattern in just a few strokes.
She had drawn another nerve cell, with the tip of the axon pressed against the side of the second nerve cell.
Tsunade then pointed to the round crown on top of the long pillar.
"This end of the neuron's axon is enlarged and cup-shaped, called a 'synaptic terminal,' and it is in contact with the cell body or projection of another neuron after the synapse. This is the structural diagram of the contact part of two nerve cells."
Very good. A long cylinder, a cup-shaped crown, a synaptic terminal. Sakura stared at the diagram Tsunade had drawn, silently repeating these words, and felt that she couldn't control her laughter.
"After the nerve impulse is transmitted to the synaptic terminal, the presynaptic membrane releases neurotransmitters—mainly acetylcholine—which cross the synaptic cleft and are sprayed onto the postsynaptic membrane of the next cell, stimulating it to produce a nerve excitation. This is the process of nerve signal transmission between two cells," Tsunade explained to Sakura, pointing to the various parts of the diagram with her pencil.
The synaptic terminal sprays the medium onto the other's membrane. Sakura listened to Tsunade's explanation and nodded repeatedly. This process! It's really not hard to understand!
"Because the process is complex and uses a chemical medium to transmit the signal, the efficiency of this process is very low. So if your Phase Two development only blindly accelerates the nerve signal's conduction in the fiber without considering this process, of course you will quickly hit a limit and be unable to further increase your reaction speed!"
"Hn..." Sakura took the paper and pen and pondered over the simple diagram for a while.
She carefully digested the content of what Tsunade had said. Apart from the various professional terms, what Tsunade said was actually very simple.
It just required a certain amount of imagination.
Her mind was reasonably clever, and she quickly sorted out her thoughts.
A nerve signal is transmitted from one end of a cell to the other, and then transmitted to another cell. These are two processes. The former uses electrical signals for conduction, while the latter relies on chemical signals for transmission.
In other words, it's not enough for the signal to just be transmitted quickly within the long pillar; the process of the medium being sprayed onto the postsynaptic membrane must also be accelerated.
Sakura's previous Phase Two had only considered accelerating the first process of electrical conduction, and had not considered the process that relied on chemical transmission. And the latter actually took up a considerable amount of the reaction time.
"So that's how it is... I understand," Sakura said, putting away the scratch paper.
She understood completely, without any ambiguity.
Her medical level was really that of a half-baked amateur—but it was a great improvement from her previous state of being an empty bucket without even water. And this half-baked knowledge was the result of her madly chewing through the medical books Tsunade had given her during this period.
Since it was cramming from books, it was naturally rote memorization without seeking a deep understanding. Therefore, the development of Sakura Rush - Phase One had relied more on her superb chakra control to be forcefully completed. But when it came to Phase Two, her partial knowledge had become a major obstacle to the development of the ninjutsu.
Sakura now deeply regretted why she hadn't studied medicine in her previous life. Chewing through these big tomes was really very painful, and the progress was slow. She clearly knew that she was very lacking in knowledge of the human body, but to want to learn all this knowledge in a short period of time was a pipe dream, so she could only develop it while asking Tsunade questions.
Tsunade then asked, "So have you thought of how to deal with this problem?"
Sakura shook her head. How could she have a good idea immediately?
"I still have to go back and think about it again," the girl said honestly to Tsunade.
"Then I suggest you continue to use the previous method. That method has great potential!"
The method Sakura had used before, to put it simply, was to use chakra to create a new ion channel in the nerve fibers to replace the original inefficient sodium-potassium channels. With the nerve signals conducting in the new chakra ion channels, their speed would be far higher than the signal conduction speed of normal cells.
She called it the electronification of the motor nerves.
What Tsunade meant was to extend this practice to the chemical transmission process of the presynaptic membrane—postsynaptic membrane, changing the slow chemical transmission into a highly efficient electrical transmission. This was indeed a bold and tempting idea.
But as for how to do it specifically, there were still a lot of problems that needed to be solved.
Sakura was sure that this was a good line of thought, and she couldn't help but start to ponder it in her mind.
"Ahem, don't be in a hurry. Sakura, you can go back and think about it again," Tsunade coughed lightly to interrupt Sakura's contemplation and continued, "I have one more thing here..."
She pulled out two sheets of paper from the pile of documents and handed them to Haruno Sakura.
"I want you to join the Anbu."
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