Chapter 10 - Training part 2

Early morning hours.

Inside the dense forest, Shinjo stood under the same tree as yesternight and tried emulating what he had accomplished already, as a form of revision.

He put a leaf in his hand and pressed his palms together to run his chakra through it. A continuous stream of oscillating chakra waves passed through the leaf, from zero hertz to what he considered around 15 hertz. That was the limit, the threshold at which the leaf decomposed, fell apart into irregular pieces. He kept repeating the same process again and again, his chakra pulsar oscillating 15 times a second. He felt the process getting smoother, bit by bit. The leaves were now falling apart in uniform pieces. As he slowly got the hang, he thought about how to improve upon it.

Following a thought that just passed through his mind, he put two leaves inside his palms, layered them and passed the same frequency of chakra pulsar through them. The result was surprisingly the same. The leaves both disintegrated into mostly uniform pieces, save for a few pieces of irregular contours. He expected it would require double the frequency, but he now understood that the pulsar after passing through the first leaf, went through the second one undeterred, with but a slight deviation, probably because the amplitude got reduced during the first leaf penetration and after the second penetration, it was already noticably weaker.

So he reached two conclusions. One, although the frequency remains the same till the end, after passing through multiple obstacles, the intensity was spent and so the power, so to say, wasn't as much as before. Without a constant input of 15 hz chakra pulsar, it would probably be all spent up after decomposing 2 more leaves. Two, this begged the question, in what situation would he need to change the frequency? The answer to that came naturally after a few experiments, never. As long as the leaf composition didn't change, meaning if he used the leaves from the same tree, he wouldn't need to change the frequency.

Then he followed the two branches of experiments. One, he stacked a lot of leaves of the same tree meticulously upto 20 layers and pressed his palms on both sides of the bunched up leaves and passed a continuous 15hz chakra pulsar through them. After spending 5 times as much chakra, he managed to decompose all the leaves, the gap between each decomposition was negligible.

Secondly, he stacked two kinds of leaves from 2 different trees. When passing a single 15 hz chakra pulsar, the first leaf was decomposed instantly, as expected. But the second leaf, save for a slight distortion in the middle, appeared undamaged. That proved his theory so far.

Then he took the undamaged leaf and checked for the threshold frequency for it. Turned out to be slightly above 20 hz. So he took another leaf and stacked the undamaged one below it and thought about how to damage both at the same time.

First, he started from 0 hz and tried to ramp up the frequency to 20 hz within the span of 1 second. Here, he met a significant problem. It was alright, slowly changing the rate of oscillation of chakra pulsar. It needed his conscious thought to change from one frequency to another, even a singular rise in hz needed some effort, much less a whole 20 increments. The most he could do, was around 10 seconds. He thought of cutting down the time by sending only two frequencies, 15 and 20 hz, since he is already familiar with them, he could do it in 1 second too. Thus if he knew beforehand what object he was gonna use, then it would be very easy for him.

But in combat, where he would need to hit every frequency he could manage, from 0 hz to probably a 100 hz, to employ his earth nature attribute chakra, where he wouldn't have the luxury to know the composition of the objects before hand, he couldn't afford being selective and he couldn't afford being slow. For now, his limit was 2 frequency changes in 1 second.

He set that aside for now, to practise it later. Now came the time to experiment with different composition of materials. A balloon, a rubber and various types rock, he had everything prepared for today. He tried with the balloon first. Slowly ramping up the oscillation rates, he went from 0 hz to 120 hz before finally managing to decompose the balloon material. Took him almost a minute and by the end, he was left panting. Apparently his stamina couldn't withstand the demand for constant change in chakra frequencies. Changing chakra frequency took more of a toll on his stamina than the frequency itself, he noted.

Then he took up the rubber material. This time, he didn't start from 0 hz, but directly used the 120 hz, already resulting in a slight distortion on the rubber surface. He took 3 full minutes to go from 120 hz to 134 hz and finally decomposed the rubber. It was obvious that the threshold frequency for the rubber material was 134 hz and it used up a lot more stamina to go through higher frequencies than the lower ones. For now.

He had already checked the stacking effect, so he didn't try that anymore and moved on to the rocks. He had brought various samples of rocks as well. Soily rock, mountain rock, bricks used in construction, a jade stone bought from the market and an obsidian rock he had found in his younger years.

He imagined rocks being rocks, they would have a much higher threshold than rubbers and balloons. And as expected, the soily rock, basically compressed fertile soil made into a mould, reached the threshold at 200 hz.

He did the same with mountain rock, now taking him upto 650 hz. The mountain rock was thrice as hard. But he was already reaching his limits, bringing him to the conclusion that he couldn't just ramp up the chakra pulsar frequency infinitely. He would probably fail to decompose the jade stone and the obsidian stone and by extension, other harder objects, such as metals. Both being many times harder, consequence of many years of deposit and crystalization, heated at high temperatures for the obsidian rock, as it was generally found near volcanic mountains and nearby sediments.

His experiments confirmed his hypothesis, failing to even leave a mark on both the jade and obsidian stones. Brick stone used in construction however was much softer than mountain rocks, thus easier to decompose.

At last, he had an idea on how to train his earth element efficiently.

.....

After a few hours of much needed rest, when he didn't do anything except lay down under the tree and appreciated the calm all around, he got up to try a few earth element jutsus and see if that correlates to everything he had learned so far.

First he took out the most common Earth release jutsu, the Rock Thorn Bed jutsu. After going through the hand signs slowly and smashing his hands on the ground, he felt how it made his chakra move and oscillate. Immediately after, a chunk of his chakra got sucked out and into the ground in his immediate vicinity and half a dozen earthen spikes popped out silently surrounding him, with a slight tremor.

He recalled the feeling how his chakra behaved according to the hand signs. The chakra pulsar oscillation didn't reach 650hz as intended. It only vibrated upto around 300 hz and pushed a certain volume of rock in the form of spikes upward. He figured it must have been the hand signs, that configured his chakra to behave in a set way and achieveing a set effect.

He maintained a thoughtful posture, didn't practise the jutsu anymore, instead picked up another basic jutsu and started with the hand signs. He intently observed the chakra behaviour, finding the chakra pulsar maintaining a constant oscillation of around 300hz, flowing into the ground and shaking it in a radius of 3 meters.

"Earth release - Ground shaking technique"

He quickly went through the other collected basic earth release jutsus and each time, the chakra wave maintained a constant frequency, flowing into the ground and making the earth move according to the handsigns.

He wagered if he tried the other complex jutsus, they still wouldn't have any changes in frequency, never reaching the threshold frequency of the rocks at all. Soon, he reached a conclusion, the aim was never to decompose, otherwise what's the point? How would he employ the ground under his feet in offense and defense, if all turned to dust?

So all of the experiments of the day could and should only be used to enhance his affinity and chakra nature manipulation to the next levels. The chakra's natural affinity to oscillate, that was what the earth nature was all about. For much higher class of jutsus, for example the A class and S class, they would probably still need the chakra frequency of 300hz. The only challenge would be the precise chakra control of vast amounts of chakra. He wagered it would be hard to control the vast chakra required for the jutsus, to maintain the same frequency, hence increasing difficulty.

He might follow up on his experiments to create his own jutsus in future. But for now, all he had to do was to enhance his earth affinity, master the jutsus and increase his arsenals.

What he didn't know was, the things he casually performed and experimented with, would most likely astound any regular shinobis and kunoichis, because - just reaching 15hz to decompose the leaf is difficult enough, Genins would need to practise for a week to a month to reach there. Say nothing about getting the frequency to 300hz in one go and maintaining it uniformly thoughtout the amount of chakra used for performing the jutsus. No wonder it took a long time to practise ninjutsus. A ninja's elemental talent laid in his chakra's susceptibility to the respective elemental behaviour. How accomodating it is to heat (fire element), to the sheer force generated (wind element), to the oscillations (earth element), to the moisture (water element) and to polarization in terms electrical charges (lightning element).

.....