"Are there any s-sinks in the Seal?"
"Sort of. The whole point of a sink—oh, thank you." Hazō gave a small nod to the orderly who had brought in a rolling table with a tray containing bland food and tepid tea. The orderly fussed over him for a bit, bowed, and disappeared.
"The point of a sink is that it isn't connected to anything," Hazō resumed. "We don't see anything like that. There's a whole bunch of elements in this thing that none of us recognize, but they're all connected. Kagome-sensei is theorizing that they aren't sinks, they're stabilizers. They actually absorb the leaked chakra, clean it, and put it back into the system."
Harumitsu eyed him dubiously. "R-r-really? If you'll f-f-f-forgive m-me, My L-Lord, th-that sounds c-c-crazy."
Hazō chuckled and took a sip of his tea. "I know, right? If the chakra didn't get properly synchronized before being reinjected you'd get a resonance and it would all blow up. Plus, if there was too much leakage for the intake to handle it would build up and you'd have the whole vortex problem." He shifted slightly, trying to find a position where his back didn't complain so much, and sighed when he couldn't. "If Kagome-sensei is right about what's happening, that would suggest that the Seal is failing, it's just doing it slowly. The best case is that its performance will degrade until the entire thing shuts down. More likely is that the vortices build up and up and up until the entire seal fails catastrophically. Given how much chakra this thing must be pulling in, that failure is going to be truly epic."
"P-pity th-there isn't s-some w-way to add more s-stabilizers, or u-use up the ch-chakra. That c-could p-prevent the f-failure, r-right?"
"In theory," Hazō said. "It would be great if we could, but it's not practical. Even if Kagome-sensei is right about what those things are, there's no way to add more of them. We don't understand how they work, we don't understand how they perform the synchronization or manage the harmonics, and it's not like you can just insert new elements into an active seal. We'd need to redraw the entire seal with the new elements in order to ensure the balance was right, and..." His mouth gaped open and his teacup plummeted from frozen fingers, bouncing off the tray and splashing tea across his blankets.
