(June 26th, year 54 AK)
For the next three days Yuta trained to modify his Shadow Cloak genjutsu to make it multitargeted, and by the end of the three days he time-traveled back and repeated these three days over and over again.
The modification of the Shadow Cloak genjutsu happened to be not as difficult as mastering using the sound as a genjutsu medium was. It went smoothly, step by step Yuta was developing his jutsu without much problem, after all, he was quite proficient with genjutsu already. But although it went smoothly, it happened also to be quite time consuming.
The hard part was not to figure out what and how, but to design the jutsu to be efficient, fast, and then to master the newly developed form for him to be able to use it quickly, simply put – to make it combat-ready.
After working on it for about three months, Yuta had finalized the concept and the framework for the modified jutsu.
At first, he tried to form multiple instances of the Shadow Cloak genjutsu during the preparation phase of the jutsu by doing it in a succession, one after another, until he formed six of them, ready to be casted on the targets, but that way of forming the jutsu had turned out to be inefficient and required way too much time.
Next Yuta switched to forming the one big chunk of molded chakra for the jutsu and then he added an extra step to split it into six separate instances, that was harder on his chakra control and more taxing, but way more efficient and faster, so Yuta went with this way of doing it instead. Also, this way he was able to adjust the number of targets on the fly without affecting the casting time required to form the jutsu.
After that, Yuta has modified the targeting part, where he transfers the molded chakra of the jutsu onto his targets, that part was easy to modify to transfer his jutsu through sound, although that had increased the strain on his chakra control, since now he has to control each genjutsu that was prepared for each target, all at the same time.
It's also more taxing on his mind now, since now he has to calculate and preprogram multiple trajectories of the sound weave streams to target multiple targets at once. And ideally, all of that needs to be done just in a split-second.
By the end of this initial three months of work Yuta finally has a working Shadow Cloak genjutsu that targets multiple opponents at once, but the difficulty and complexity of the jutsu have increased proportionally, depending on how many targets Yuta wants to affect with it.
Yuta has been working for three whole months for just that, and the new jutsu is not even close to being combat-ready, since he still have to train to master it to be able to cast it quickly.
But he wasn't in a hurry, and his daily working routine was a very relaxed one.
At some point, Yuta thought jokingly, 'If any competent ninja would ever get to know my training regime, they surely would die from envy...', that thought just occurred to him as he was finishing unhurriedly his lunch at Yakiniku Q, and without any worry in the world he paid his bill and went home to have a nap. In the middle of the day.
At first, as he was only starting the time-loop training, Yuta went hard on it and spent about fourteen hours a day working, basically training non-stop, only pausing for sleep and food, but soon enough the thought occurred to him, that there is no reason to be in a such a hurry, and he had gradually decreased the working hours all the way to about seven or eight. At the morning, he goes to a random restaurant in the village, eats his fill, then unhurriedly goes to train for about four-five hours before lunch.
After a good lunch at Yakiniku Q, he goes back home and either sleeps for an hour or two or just rests while reading some random book he picks in a bookstore. Yuta found those books somewhat entertaining, although it was a far cry from his previous life, but it was enough to pass the time. He had a good laugh here and there while reading some ninja-related fictional stories though, from how idealized and romanticized some of them were.
After a good afternoon's rest Yuta goes back to training for about three more hours before dinner at some place in the village. He hasn't been cooking these days at all. And after dinner Yuta rests with a book for a few hours before bed, and the next day he repeats this routine.
As for the slowed down training progress with such a leisurely training routine - Yuta doesn't care at all. In his point of view, he has unlimited time here, and he could train for just half an hour a day and still fully complete his training plan by June 30th, all the same.
The days went by in such routine, and the more Yuta spent time in this time-loop, the more he just wanted to stay just like that forever, no danger, no missions, no hardship, unlimited money, unlimited three days of complete freedom...
The lazy part of him wanted to send everything to hell and just stay like that, in these endless three days for as long as he possibly could, maybe even forever...
But then he saw his reflection in the mirror, an eight-year-old boy, and he realized that his body will also forever stay like that if he stays in this time-loop. Besides, if his spiritual energy continues to grow, even if slowly, while his body and physical energy stay the same, there might be a point in the future when his body won't be able to handle all the spiritual energy at some point, or so Yuta thought.
Then he remembered how much cool stuff this world has to offer and how much stronger he could become, and maybe he would even be able to figure out how he ended up in this world in the first place and what was that black void place was, that he saw before he get here.
After those thoughts, the desire to stay forever in this time-loop had subsided significantly, but never went away completely thought.
Before this, Yuta thought that the most dangerous side-effects of his Time Control ability was that with time he would gradually lose the sense of reality and treat this world as a game and its people as just NPC's that he could kill or worse, without any consequence or guilt.
But now he realized, that the most dangerous thing about his ability is how easy it was to just become a shut-in in the endless time loop like that.
And this realization, unlike the idea of losing his sense of reality, had truly frightened Yuta.
In his understanding, it was one thing to become a bit delusional and evil, he believed that he could deal with that as long as he continues moving forward. But to stop moving forward and to be stuck in an endless time-loop? That was a whole another matter entirely.
Yuta still remembers some parts of his previous life, after college when he was still unemployed, spending days at home doing nothing, playing videogames and reading books, and that continued for couple months until he finally decided to get a job. That was a lazy spiral, and he only was able to exit that spiral because he was short on money and he had to do something about it...
But here and now? In a time-loop there won't be any external factors that could force him to stop the loop, he could go at it forever, or at least until he was able to continue. And that thought was exactly what frightened Yuta, even the idea of going crazy wasn't as scary to him, since he believed that as long as he is going forward, he could deal with his own craziness. But staying stuck in a time-loop, it was like standing still in one place, forever.
After thinking about that Yuta decided to create a new rule for himself - "To never stay in the time-loop for no reason. To always have a specified exit condition to follow." This was his second rule that he created for himself like that.
The first one was - "To never time-travel less than 8 hours.", that was created because he needs 8 hours after the time-travel before he could time-travel again, and that rule has already saved his life once. Just before the incident with Obito Yuta had almost broken that rule, but in the end, he decided to follow it, only because of that he was able to escape back then. That was when he reinforced that rule in his mind and became determined to always follow it, no matter what.
And right now, his reason to stay in the time-loop is to complete his training according to the plan that he has formed before, he has an end goal, and Yuta would reach that goal eventually, that would be his exit point of the time-loop. Yuta believed that keeping this in mind will help him to resist the lazy thought of just staying in the time-loop forever.
...
Either way, after the initial three months of work and the completion of his new jutsu, Yuta started practicing it.
He had to use all of the eight hand seals, as the new form of the jutsu requires, and he has to go slowly through the seals, concentrating on the chakra molding and control. It required him about five seconds to cast the jutsu, and that is only with two targets at once. But it was nothing new to Yuta. When he first developed the Shadow Cloak genjutsu, he also had to use multiple hand seals and a lot of time at first.
He has to practice a lot to get used to the new version of the jutsu and to make the casting process instinctual and natural to him, so he could do it without a thought, on just instinct. That's when the jutsu could be called 'mastered'.
As for both of his targets, he obviously used himself as a target, since there wasn't anyone else here to target. He was layering the two instances of the Shadow Cloak jutsu on himself, one on top of another, training not only the jutsu itself, but also the technique of layering the genjutsu together on the single target.
He had already used something like that during his combat evaluation fight, but back then he was improvising, and now he was researching properly the new area of application of his genjutsu skill.
--- AN ---
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