At that moment, a thought that had been firmly sealed within the "subjects" suddenly and intensely leaped into his mind.
The moment the thought arose, action followed! Fine blue-white electric arcs suddenly sprouted in the laboratory air, not confined to one spot, but spreading like living vines from his fingertips and arms to every corner of his body.
A sense of natural confidence flooded his heart, an understanding based on a precise grasp of his own limits.
He was proficient enough! Sufficiently capable of safely wielding this power of lightning!
"Crackle, boom, sizzle!!!"
In an instant, the laboratory was completely swallowed by deafening thunder! Dazzling lightning erupted, weaving and jumping to form a dense, liquid-like lightning dome that completely enveloped Takuno's figure.
The lightning leaped violently, illuminating the entire room with flickering light.
In this core area where destruction and power danced together, Takuno suddenly opened his eyes, his dark pupils resembling black crystal against the backdrop of the lightning.
He slowly raised his arm, his gaze piercing through the jumping electric arcs to land on his fist, which was tightly covered by a lightning armor.
His muscle fibers surged and bulged under the stimulation of the current, and an explosive force far beyond the mundane, almost bursting through his frame, coursed through his Kekkei Genkai!
The corners of Takuno's mouth curled upward uncontrollably, tracing an arc full of power and a sense of achievement.
Success! This is the Lightning Release Chakra Mode!
Although he knew that this nascent prototype's instantaneous power boost might not yet reach the heights of the secret techniques polished for generations in Kumogakure.
But most importantly, the principle had been understood; that crucial barrier from "zero to one" was personally shattered by him today!
The road ahead was to unswervingly continue forging this spark, letting this power run from "one" to "one hundred"!
Compared to the difficulty of creation, this process of accumulation and improvement would undoubtedly be much flatter and wider.
Thinking of this, a sense of emotion arose spontaneously. Who would have thought that the final hurdle, which seemed insurmountable within the subjects, would be so smooth and natural during the first complete experiment back in his original body?
This undoubtedly proved an unshakeable truth: if every experiment could use this perfect "vessel" that was in sync with his mind—his own body—the success rate would inevitably achieve an unimaginable leap.
However, the moment this tempting thought flashed, it was instantly frozen by the ice of reason.
Takuno's mind cooled down again, his gaze sharp as a knife.
Reality is cruel; experiments, after all, come with unpredictable risks. For some projects, no matter how much the initial success rate is improved, the fatal dangers they contain always follow like a shadow!
He was also perfectly sober; he had only one body, with no backup.
This was his greatest, irreplaceable trump card! Once "scrapped" in an experiment, it would be an irrecoverable catastrophe!
Therefore, even if using those "subjects" meant more fumbling and more adjustments, and meant precious loss of efficiency and long time costs, he would still treat them as the absolute priority!
Fate? Luck? Takuno sneered at such things.
He absolutely did not believe he was some "chosen one" who could reverse the slim "one percent" probability.
He believed only in steady progress and absolute certainty; this was the only way to survive and reach the peak of power!
Now, it was time to test the boost brought by the preliminary mastery of the Lightning Release Chakra Mode!
In the dead of night, the cold air seemed to solidify.
Takuno pushed open the heavy laboratory doors and stepped into this world of ice and snow.
The world before him was not the deep darkness he expected; the white snow covering the earth, soaked in pure moonlight, actually emitted a soft glow, cleverly lighting up the night.
This wilderness of snow, far from human habitation, was the perfect testing ground to examine the speed and power boosts brought by the "Lightning Release Chakra Mode."
Speed was undoubtedly the first testing item!
The moment the thought arose, the dormant Chakra within Takuno's body was instantly ignited. Dazzling, piercing blue electric arcs seemed to break free from invisible shackles, suddenly erupting, winding, and jumping from the acupoint nodes all over his body without warning!
Sizzling electric snakes instantly wrapped around his body, forming a violently leaping ball of energy light.
Then—
"Whoosh!"
There was no heavy sound of footsteps hitting the ground, and one couldn't even see a figure clearly; there was only a dazzling bolt of lightning tearing through the silence like an arrow from a bow, violently ripping through the pure, boundless snow blanket at a terrifying speed that completely exceeded the limits of the naked eye.
Wherever it passed, the deep snow beneath was struck as if by an invisible giant force, suddenly splashing up like a boiling, massive wave of snow.
While the snow dust was still dancing in mid-air, the figure had already left a stinging trail of lightning at the edge of vision.
In almost the blink of an eye, Takuno reached the preset target point and braked hard, plowing a deep trench into the ground and kicking up a cloud of snow dust.
However, he did not show any joy; instead, his brows furrowed deeply, and a trace of indescribable solemnity and a faint disappointment flashed in the depths of his sharp eyes.
"Not enough, this level is far from enough," he whispered in his heart.
Admittedly, the dash under the Lightning Release Chakra Mode was breathtakingly fast, but even without this so-called "Lightning Release Mode."
By relying solely on the explosive limit of his own physical strength, supplemented by the subtle use of Wind Release Chakra to reduce wind resistance, the peak speed he could reach was almost equal to this!
That stunning dash just now, in terms of absolute numbers, did not seem to trample the limit speed line he yearned to cross.
But this disappointment was like night dew, vanishing in an instant.
"Heh—!" A trace of determined and fiery curvature immediately pulled at the corner of his lips; it was absolute confidence in exploring his own limits.
The Lightning Release Chakra Mode was just starting, like a newborn dragon; how could he demand it soar through the nine heavens?
In the future, with deeper research and more masterful control over lightning, the increase in speed would surely undergo a qualitative leap again.
In contrast, the seemingly amazing pure physical explosion combined with Wind Release, though violent as a tide, was ultimately a "finite thing," whose end he had clearly touched in countless experiments.
Without the help of this new "Lightning Release Chakra Mode," the shackles of speed would have almost no possibility of being broken.
In an instant, a burning desire that almost ignited his soul exploded violently in Takuno's deep, cold-pool-like eyes!
That move just now was, after all, only a basic test of the "Lightning Release Chakra Mode" itself!
His true full speed, that already well-tempered "Wind Release assisted acceleration" method, had not yet shown even a shred of its brilliance!
"Then let me see now," he took a deep breath, "what terrifying realm this ultimate speed, after merging the two, can actually reach!!"
His will was like a knife! Even more massive, more violent lightning, almost condensing into a solid blue armor, exploded from every one of his acupoints, bursting with an angry light that was impossible to look at directly!
The space where his body stood hummed and vibrated slightly under the burden of this violent energy.
Time seemed to be gripped hard at this moment and then suddenly released!
On the snow, Takuno seemed to still be standing in place, without even the slightest change in posture!
However, in the next instant, an incredibly eerie scene occurred!
Along his path of travel, as if light and shadow were being pulled and split at high speed, countless blurry, swaying "Minamoto Takunos" of various forms remained in the air like overlapping souls!
They were not real, but afterimages that transcended physical rules, left in space because vision could not distinguish them in such a short time during high-speed movement! Dozens? Hundreds?
Densely packed blue light and shadows instantly filled that area, each "afterimage" maintaining a slightly different posture, overlapping with each other to form a bizarre and spectacular symphony of light and shadow!
This speed was no longer just surpassing the mundane!
It clearly and arrogantly crushed the limit speed that he could only briefly achieve after opening the "Eight Gates"!
When Takuno's true body finally nailed itself as steady as a rock at the further finish line, the countless ethereal blue afterimages lingering behind him were only then erased layer by layer by time, finally dissolving completely into the boundless snow.
At this moment, in those deep eyes, a hint of sincere satisfaction, ignited by this world-shaking power, finally flickered.
"This is the feeling," he whispered to himself, his voice carrying a hint of hoarseness and exhilaration after the release of power, "this is the boost that should be enough to tear the sky apart!"
This sense of control brought by speed, a sense of freedom as if breaking the shackles of heaven and earth, was truly worthy of the price he paid and the expectations he held!
However, following this, he also clearly felt the new challenge threshold faced by the Chakra control within his body.
Just as he expected!
When the base speed was suddenly boosted to such an unbelievable realm by the Lightning Release Mode, the invisible barrier formed by the air ahead, the strength of that resistance, also underwent an exponential surge!
He needed to use more massive and pure Wind Release Chakra to weave a more precise Wind Release Chakra auxiliary field on his body surface to effectively counteract and guide this violent wind resistance, which was enough to tear steel, and achieve the effect of auxiliary acceleration.
The higher the speed, the more wind resistance grew geometrically;
The stronger the wind resistance, the difficulty of precisely controlling Wind Release to eliminate it naturally rose accordingly!
At his current full-speed flight, he could still maintain the perfect "zero resistance" state with his deep foundation.
But once his mastery of the Lightning Release Chakra Mode became more profound in the future and his base speed reached a new level, wanting to perfectly erase the accompanying monstrous wind resistance, even for him, would likely no longer be an easy task that could be done at will.
However, this faint worry was soon drowned by a deeper flood of confidence!
"So what?" He raised his head slightly, his gaze piercing through the cold night, as if seeing the peaks of the mountains in Kumogakure.
Even if he could no longer perfectly eliminate the air resistance brought by speed, when the Lightning Release Chakra Mode reached the realm of great completion, by relying on the pure speed bestowed by lightning and the auxiliary boost of Wind Release, he firmly believed that there would be no one in this world who could even see his back in terms of pure speed.
Whether it was the famous Fourth Raikage Ay of the current era, or that legendary Third Raikage, the "strongest Raikage" who fought a ten-thousand-man army with his bare body!
The fundamental principles of the "Kumogakure Secret" Lightning Release Chakra Mode they relied on were also clear to his heart.
Even if the path he forged was slightly different from theirs, in terms of the source of power—using Chakra to activate cells in exchange for extreme speed and physical strength—the principles were the same!
Besides, how could they be like him? They had no Wind Release secret technique to assist in forcibly tearing through the cage of air!
Nor did they have his own increasingly massive Chakra as a backup!
Not to mention the insurmountable gap in basic physical potential that already existed between them!
"Even in this current state that hasn't yet reached the peak, perhaps I am already on par with them—"
A cold and firm judgment echoed in his heart.
He even thought of that figure who made the battlefield tremble with the name "Yellow Flash," Minato, who specialized in the Flying Thunder God Technique and flashed like a ghost.
In the depths of Takuno's eyes, a trace of arrogance and battle intent burned silently.
"If it's just about the explosive impact within a short distance, my speed might not necessarily be inferior to the reaction interval between his Flying Thunder God Technique jumps!"
However, this ambition for speed only existed in the moments of close combat.
When it came to long-distance travel across vast territories, the teleportation mystery of Space-Time Ninjutsu, which ignored physical distance, was ultimately unshakable, representing the absolute authority of the concept of "distance."
Takuno knew this well and admitted its insurmountable nature.
What he pursued was another journey belonging purely to power and speed, which also led to the "ultimate" realm.
The snowy night was quiet, with only the small remaining electric sparks on his body still crackling in the air, reflecting those pupils burning with eternal fighting spirit.
Takuno's heart was already basically clear on the direction for increasing speed.
Unless he could research the Kekkei Genkai of "Swift Release" in the future, conventional speed training was of little significance to him; the marginal utility of improvement was very low, one could say it was a waste of time.
From now on, in terms of speed, he only needed to step-by-step research the Lightning Release Chakra Mode to perfection; that would be the best improvement!
And next, it was time to test the power brought by the Lightning Release Chakra Mode.
His gaze focused on the sizzling Lightning Release electricity wrapped around his fist.
A powerful force accumulated in his muscles and bones. Without hesitation, he condensed all his strength and his fist smashed into the frozen ground like a falling star.
"Boom!"
A dull, massive sound shook the surroundings!
The solid earth burst apart, and the thick snow, carrying mud, was lifted by the violent force, turning into a turbid snow mist that sprayed in all directions.
When the flying dust and ice chips slowly settled, Takuno examined the masterpiece he had left behind, a terrifying fist crater several meters deep.