Although Chiba Shun had never truly learned any of the five elemental nature transformations before, he had tested his chakra attributes long ago.
He possessed four in total. Earth was his strongest affinity, followed by fire, then lightning, with only the faintest trace of wind. As for water, it was practically nonexistent. At the very least, chakra test paper couldn't detect it at all.
A moment later, he had already memorized the contents of the Earth Flow Wall scroll nearly word for word.
Ninjutsu scrolls usually recorded the most primitive version of a technique first. Earth Flow Wall, for example, originally required fifteen hand seals. After that, the scroll would explain how to simplify the sequence.
If the technique had been refined by a truly powerful shinobi, it might eventually be reduced to only a handful of seals. Unfortunately, there were too few earth-style users in Kumogakure.
Many of them, like Chiba Shun, ended up abandoning earth-style training altogether. Because of that, even the most streamlined version recorded in this scroll still required ten hand seals.
That was obviously not Earth Flow Wall's true limit. If he wanted to reduce the seal count further, he would have to figure it out himself.
After pushing aside the tangle of thoughts in his head, Chiba Shun finally began to practice.
This was his first real attempt at one of the five elemental ninjutsu, so he was inevitably a little nervous. Once he had made all the necessary preparations, he went straight to the Ninja Academy's training ground and started his training there.
Chakra was a miraculous thing. It could be used in all kinds of strange, almost unreasonable ways.
Its simplest application was to reinforce taijutsu and swordsmanship, something anyone could learn as long as they had refined chakra and received proper instruction. But using chakra well was another matter entirely.
That required chakra control, nature transformation, and shape transformation.
Thanks to his knowledge from the original story, Chiba Shun had completed the basics of chakra control training a long time ago. Tree climbing and water walking were already second nature to him.
But that was also where his limit had been.
His old income had only been enough to support that level of practice. If he had tried to push himself into harsher training, the nutritional support his body needed simply would not have kept up.
Now things were different.
He no longer had to trail behind his old squad leader on missions, and his income had improved by a significant margin. His body was slowly growing stronger, and his chakra reserves were steadily increasing with it.
That meant he was finally in a position to begin proper ninjutsu training.
Earth Release: Earth Flow Wall was a basic earth-style technique. It required only chakra nature transformation and the simplest form of shape transformation.
Only advanced ninjutsu demanded more complicated shape manipulation, things like molding chakra into the shape of a dragon for an attack. That was still far, far beyond Chiba Shun's current level.
He slowly formed the fifteen hand seals.
As he did, he tried to guide his chakra through the nature transformation described in the scroll. To his surprise, the process was simpler than he had imagined.
All those years of grim, stubborn effort were finally paying off.
For a brief instant, he clearly sensed the change in his chakra. The feeling was strange and difficult to describe, as though someone had stuffed an entire, systematic, profoundly complicated set of knowledge directly into his head.
He almost understood it. He also understood nothing at all.
No wonder Naruto, with that reckless kind of intelligence of his, had managed to brute-force his way into mastering techniques like the Shadow Clone Jutsu and the Rasengan in the original story.
With Naruto's monstrous chakra reserves, if he repeated the same technique over and over and over again, reliving that tiny moment of realization each time, how could he not eventually succeed?
Those thoughts only flashed through Chiba Shun's mind while his hands kept moving.
When the last seal was complete, he slammed both palms onto the ground and shouted in a voice so dramatic it was almost embarrassing, "Earth Release: Earth Flow Wall!"
He was confident.
After all, he was not some complete beginner. He was already a qualified Chunin, and as a transmigrator, he had never once slacked off when it came to hand-seal practice.
What he had always lacked was not effort. It was inheritance. Resources. Opportunity.
Some people might ask why he had never tried to create his own ninjutsu.
Take the Rasengan, for example. Didn't the original story describe its training method pretty clearly?
He had tried.
He failed.
He had never truly been exposed to any of the five elemental styles before, so his understanding of ninjutsu had been far too shallow. Only someone with a deep enough grasp of ninjutsu principles could genuinely develop a technique.
As for the Rasengan, his chakra reserves and control simply weren't enough.
That was an A-rank technique. A Chunin's chakra wasn't enough to support it properly.
Strictly speaking, the amount of chakra might have been manageable if he pushed hard enough. But the control required was far beyond him, especially considering the reality he had always lived under.
To put it bluntly, he had never had the logistical support necessary to practice something on the level of an A-rank ninjutsu.
All things considered, this first attempt was already a great success.
A wall of earth rose slowly from the ground in front of his hands. It was roughly two meters wide and around twenty centimeters thick, and it did not stop until it had pushed upward to nearly two meters high.
Earth Release: Earth Flow Wall was, at the end of the day, only a basic C-rank ninjutsu. It was not particularly difficult, and the training method was written clearly in the scroll.
Any normal genin could learn it.
In that sense, Chiba Shun was actually learning it embarrassingly late.
His Three-Sword Style was harder than this.
If the Three-Sword Style sword art could be counted as a ninjutsu at all, then it should at least qualify as C-rank. More likely, it was already approaching B-rank.
"Whew..."
Chiba Shun let out a long breath as he looked at the earthen wall in front of him.
In battle, something like this was already extremely useful. At the very least, it would block the vast majority of kunai a Chunin could throw at him.
As for whether it could stop an explosive tag...
That, unfortunately, remained unknown.
Chiba Shun had no spare money, and he definitely wasn't rich enough to waste explosive tags just to test the durability of his own ninjutsu.
After using the technique more than ten times and draining over half of his chakra, he had basically gotten the hang of Earth Flow Wall.
It still required all fifteen seals for now. The sequence could definitely be simplified later, but that was a problem for the future.
Mastering his first true elemental ninjutsu also gave him a clearer sense of his own abilities.
Measured by the chakra cost of Earth Flow Wall, his reserves should be enough to use the technique about thirty times in total.
Whether that counted as a lot or a little, he had no idea.
As for his hand-seal speed, it was currently about three seals per second.
Back when he practiced hand seals in isolation, without circulating chakra, he could reach seven seals per second purely through muscle memory and finger speed. But forming seals for actual ninjutsu was a different matter altogether.
That required mobilizing chakra inside the body as the seals were made, and that inevitably slowed everything down.
Three seals per second was his current limit.
It was neither especially fast nor embarrassingly slow. Among Chunin, it could be considered decent.
Compared to the true monsters, though, it wasn't even worth mentioning.
Still, if he became more familiar with actual ninjutsu casting, his seal speed would definitely improve over time.
That could wait.
There was something more important right in front of him.
He lifted a hand and waved toward the side of the training ground.
A group of children, who had been secretly peeking at him the entire time, immediately froze.
The children at the Ninja Academy varied wildly in age, and naturally, the academy grounds had several training fields of different sizes. The one Chiba Shun was using now was the biggest.
The children who frequented this place were also the oldest group in the school. They had been recruited by Aoki Yuuichi several years ago, and most of them had already succeeded in refining chakra.
When they saw Chiba Shun wave them over, they burst into cheers and ran toward him.
Once they drew close, one of them finally worked up the courage to ask, "Shun-sensei, can you teach us ninjutsu?"
Chiba Shun smiled, wearing a gentle expression that made him look far kinder than he really was.
"Of course," he said. "It's my duty to cultivate a new generation of heroes for the village, one that can resist Konoha's evil rule."
The moment they heard the word heroes, the children instinctively straightened their backs.
Brainwashing was not something you only did in a classroom. It had to seep into daily life, drip by drip, until it became part of the way they saw themselves. Only then would they understand why they were cultivating at all.
Chiba Shun walked over to the last earth wall he had raised, the one that stood more than three meters tall.
He pointed at it and said, "Learning ninjutsu isn't easy. Before you can do that, you need to master this first."
Then, under the worshipful gaze of the children, he placed one foot against the wall and began to walk up it step by step.
His body remained perfectly perpendicular to the ground.
Soon, he was standing sideways on the face of the earthen wall itself. He turned, looked down at the children below him, and said, "Focus chakra into the soles of your feet and try it."
The children exploded into motion.
They crowded around the wall at once and began trying to imitate him.
Their excitement was obvious.
These were the same children Aoki Yuuichi had recruited years ago, the same children he had long since given up on. They were not stupid. They had always known, at least vaguely, that Aoki Yuuichi was disappointed in them.
But Chiba Shun was different.
His attitude toward them was completely different from Aoki Yuu's.
He was patient. Encouraging. He spoke to them the same way he had spoken during his previous academy addresses, as though each one of them truly might become a successor to the Will of Lightning.
There were a lot of children, and one wall clearly wasn't enough.
So Chiba Shun used Earth Flow Wall again. And again. And again.
By the time he stopped, he had erected more than a dozen walls and nearly exhausted every drop of chakra he had left.
Even so, the results were exactly what he had expected.
These were children of utterly ordinary talent. Not one of them gave him any kind of pleasant surprise.
A simple wall-climbing exercise took an enormous amount of effort from the entire group, yet not a single one of them could climb to the top of a wall that was barely more than three meters high.
That was normal.
After all, these were the leftovers. The children neither Jonin nor Chunin had wanted.
Chiba Shun still smiled warmly as he gave them pointers one by one, correcting foot placement, chakra flow, and posture while offering encouragement at the same time.
Only after that did he turn his attention to the second ninjutsu scroll.
The next technique he intended to study was Lightning Release: Lightning Guide.
Lightning Guide was a C-rank lightning-style ninjutsu with a fairly straightforward purpose. It allowed the user to channel their lightning chakra through a medium and transmit it directly to an enemy.
Sakai Hajime knew this technique.
He had never taught it to Chiba Shun.
There was no point.
Chiba Shun's talent for lightning release was mediocre at best, and he had never had enough spare energy to divide his focus into another attribute. So he had never tried to pry it out of Hajime either.
Unlike Earth Flow Wall, which still needed ten seals even after simplification, the version of Lightning Guide recorded in this scroll required only four seals.
The person who wrote this scroll had probably been a genuinely powerful lightning-style shinobi from the village.
The technique itself wasn't lethal, but it came with a strong paralyzing effect.
In truth, lightning release paired best with water release.
Unfortunately, Chiba Shun knew no water-style ninjutsu and had no talent for water at all.
Still, he was skilled with the sword, and he had even developed the Three-Sword Style based on Killer B's moves from the original work. If he could master Lightning Guide, his combat power would definitely climb another level.
Sadly, that was not something he could focus on for now.
Nature transformation might not be difficult if you were only talking about the very first affinity. Developing a second attribute, however, was another story entirely.
That was much harder.
With Chiba Shun's current amount of energy, there was no way he could successfully complete training in a second elemental transformation. He would only attempt it after his body had grown stronger through proper nutrition, his chakra had increased to a higher level, and his mastery over earth-style had reached a more advanced stage.
Generally speaking, a ninja capable of using the nature transformations of two elements was already Jonin material.
Chiba Shun was still far, far away from that level.