Gōketsu Sasha, the clan's second-youngest member, was a final year Academy student. Hazō had read the reports and seen her around the estate occasionally, but he'd never had any conversation with her. After they'd rushed her and Honoka's adoption due to the KEI's adoption tickets demands, Hazō had never arranged a proper celebration for the two of them.

The Gōketsu ninja definitely favored Honoka, and for all the little girl's act of innocence, she definitely knew that acting cute got her all the attention she wanted. Sasha, on the other hand, would graduate in August. Unlike her younger clan-sister, she was far too mature to act cute like that. That was why she was calmly waiting for Noburi to test her element.

Well, not quite calm. Sasha was clearly excited, and she occasionally bounced a little in place before she restrained herself and forced herself to stand still.

"So, when would the Academy test your element?" Noburi asked the girl.

"Two months, Lord Noburi," Sasha said, looking down in a not-quite-bow. "We're learning non-elemental ninjutsu first. Those who master the Basic Three will be tested first."

"The Basic Three?" Noburi asked, confused. "I thought it was the Academy Two."

Hazō shook his head, causing a minor spike in his headache. "In Leaf, they teach all three basic nonelemental ninjutsu in the Academy: Substitution, Clone, and the Dispelling technique."

"That's right, Lord Hazō," Sasha said with a more full bow to her clan lord. "But yeah, some of my friends and other classmates in clans have already had their elements tested. My one friend says she's already learning real combat ninjutsu from her family."

As always, the clans had ways to give their genin an edge over the clanless, who would only learn their element mere months from graduation. Only then could they start trying to find someone to teach them any ninjutsu.

Luckily, Sasha was in a clan now. For all that Honoka was the Gōketsu's favorite, Sasha still found her fair share of tutoring from the various clan ninja. Atomu in particular had taken a liking to the girl, and was waiting along with Hazō and Noburi to test Sasha's element.

"Are you ready?" Noburi asked.

"Yes, Lord Noburi," she said. "Did Lord Hazō make the seal?"

"The seal?" Noburi asked.

"Yes," she said. "The chakra paper seal. You activate it, then it changes in a way that tells you your element."

Noburi laughed. "Ah, that seems too easy. No, we'll do it the proper way. Here," he said, dipping his hand into his barrel then taking her hand in his. "Channel your chakra to your hands, like you're using chakra adhesion."

Sasha closed her eyes and focused. Despite her scrunched up face, she bounced once on the balls of her feet in excitement before settling down again.

Noburi flashed Hazō a sign. Fire.

Hazō darted forward and dropped a pair of seals while Sasha still had her eyes closed, then Noburi released her hands. As she opened her eyes, a pair of firework seals triggered, shrouding her for a moment in a fountain of sparks. She stepped back, shielding her eyes against the harmless sparks.

"Did I do that?" she asked in wonder.

Noburi laughed. "Not exactly. But one day, you'll be able to do that and more. You, Gōketsu Sasha, have the Fire Element."

Sasha nodded, accepting the information. Was there a hint of disappointment on her face? Maybe Hazō had misread it. "Thank you, Lord Noburi."

"So," Noburi said. "The Academy is pretty general until the last year, right? You've had time to think about your specialization, and now you have six months to plan and train. Do you know what kind of ninja you want to be?"

Sasha shook her head, looking at the ground. "I don't know. I always wanted to be a ninjutsu specialist, and I was pretty good at Substitution and Clone, but I know the clan doesn't have lots of Fire Element users. I was going to train everything evenly and decide what specialization I wanted when I graduated, after I could see the clan's ninjutsu and seals."

"We have a few Fire Element ninjutsu in the vaults," Hazō said, nodding along. "And Reo probably has a couple more that he could teach you. You could be a Gōketsu ninjutsu specialist."

"If you wish it, Lord Hazō," she said, bowing again to her clan lord. "But I will be of service to the clan. I can specialize in whatever way would be best."

"Hm…" Hazō said, considering. He didn't want to start making plans to direct her training yet, as she'd be spending most of her time in Academy-mandated courses, but maybe he could provide a little nudge. "In terms of specialization, how about…"


In the Academy, Hazō always appreciated it when a long class or training block was unexpectedly cut short, giving him unplanned free time. To his surprise, he still felt excited.

That morning, Asuma's shadow clone had taken him to the quarries behind the Hokage Monument, where the already sparse iron veins had finally run dry. Hazō had expected the process of extracting any reasonable quantity of iron ore to take ages, but for some reason, he'd been able to manipulate the ore far, far easier than he'd been able to during his last tests on the Seventh Path.

At Asuma's request, he only pulled the purified ores to the surface rather than fully extracting them. This way, Asuma said, was fully legal. No civilian could alter the ore location, but mining them would be a violation of the Merchant Council's rules that Asuma was reluctant to do even in secret. As an added bonus, the miners would keep their jobs instead of being obsoleted. Within a few hours, Hazō had pulled enough iron ore to the surface to keep Leaf supplied for a year, and then he was free to go.

The iron ore the miners dug out would be high-grade ore, but it would still be mixed with the stone around it. Compared to the plain rocks the miners produced, purified iron ore was beautiful. Black-grey, shiny and lustrous, with flat planes and sharp, crystalline edges. It hardly looked like metal at all. Hazō had given samples of the purified ore to Ōshirō, the master smith whose patronage he'd stolen from the Hagoromo, but all he'd heard back so far was that the ore could be smelted at a substantially lower temperature – nothing on the quality of the steel provided.

Which is what he planned to investigate today. With Earthshaping's many abilities, perhaps he could bypass the blacksmith entirely and directly produce masterwork steel weapons and tools. It was an experiment he'd wanted to run weeks ago, but he'd run out of time on the day he'd set aside for Earthshaping, and he'd never had another opportunity.

He made the handseal for Earthshaping and let his chakra seep into the ground. With his hands, he reached for Ōshirō's length of steel. It was originally meant to become a sword, but given Earthshaping's destructive nature, Hazō hadn't wanted to ruin Ōshirō's real masterworks.

The long bar of fine steel had the occasional hint of banding that indicated slight differences in its heating and cooling. The band of steel resisted his chakra like the billet of iron had, if not more. Layer by layer, he stripped it away, closing his eyes to parse the strange sensory feedback Earthshaping was giving him. The steel was mostly iron, but there was something more there… Not quartz, which he'd spent the most time handling. Nothing in granite at all, really. It felt… like something in dirt.

It felt like coal! Hazō had experimented with the exotic burning rock earlier, and found that he could transmute it into diamonds, if inefficiently. However, coal was rare in Fire, and charcoal was made from trees rather than from the ground, so Earthshaping wouldn't easily penetrate it. Not that his lack of coal had mattered. Following Hazō's instructions to bring back many types of different rocks, Gaku had found another exotic substance called graphite which was similar, but far easier to work than coal.

Hazō tapped the storage seal with his rock collection and grabbed his graphite, taking a couple minutes to work his chakra into it. Yes, there was a trace of this feeling in the steel. Graphite and iron together made steel? It would make sense in a way – graphite was similar to coal which was similar to charcoal, and charcoal was burned to make iron and steel.

He pushed the graphite and the iron billet into the ground, then stripped the outer layer of rust off the billet. He brought the graphite next to the iron and tried to dope the iron with the graphite, tearing away pieces and distributing them into the iron… only to find that although his Earthshaping could manipulate the graphite easily, the iron was still impenetrable, and he was only affecting the tiniest sheet at the edge of the iron billet.

That wouldn't work. He switched his approach. He peeled away a strip of iron and shaped it into a long, narrow sheet. He diffused the graphite into the sheet, then peeled away another strip of iron and layered it atop the previous sheet. Layer by layer, he built up a bar of steel to match master Ōshirō's.

Hazō wasn't sure exactly how long it took – perhaps hours? By the end of it, he was sweating and exhausted from pushing the Earthshaping technique to do something it clearly wasn't meant to do. Finally, he pulled the bar from the ground.

Visually, it seemed similar to Ōshirō's steel bar. Hazō's steel didn't have the same banding pattern along its length, but it showed stripes along its width where he'd built it up layer by layer. Running his hand along the side of it, Hazō could feel its imperfections – though whether it was mere roughness that could be polished away, he couldn't tell.

He started stripping both bars again, comparing their sensations, and his face soured. Ōshirō's steel was more even than his, and he could feel where the inexactness of his method had made areas too soft and pliable, or too hard and brittle. Could he maybe fix the problems with yet more time…?

Frustrating. Hazō squeezed the chunk of graphite in his palm for a minute, then tossed it aside. Small patches of diamond shimmered in the sunlight. No matter. Experiment performed, lesson learned.

He set the steel bars aside and turned to the granite cube he'd summoned before starting. He felt inside of it for the mineral he wanted, then pulled. The granite slowly fell apart, shedding dust and grains and whole chunks as he reached for the quartz in its core.

After a few minutes, he had a solid brick of milky-white quartz in front of him, less than half the original granite's mass. With more effort, he could align it into a single crystal and turn it clear, but that wasn't his aim here. He scooped out a handful of quartz and started fashioning it into a blade.

Sadly, for whatever reason, he'd been unable to extract more of the corundum from granite. Try as he might, he felt no hints of that particular mineral in the MEWs he summoned. Maybe it was a quirk of the particular location in the Seventh Path he'd tried it in. Still, he had massive bags filled with the gemstone, many times his own bodyweight. If this experiment worked out, he could always try it again with the harder, tougher gemstone instead of quartz.

Hazō squeezed, and the quartz slowly turned denser. It retained its color, but shrunk by an eighth on every axis. He pulled with both hands, steadily stretching the stone into the shape of a short sword. He closed his eyes and focused grain by grain within the stone, aligning its crystal structure along the blade's length and turning it clear. Most swords were curved, but after burning too much time trying and failing to curve the crystal flawlessly and smoothly, he left the blade straight. With his thumb and forefinger, he pinched the blade flat inch by inch, leaving room for one hand on the hilt. Finally, he focused mentally, smoothing out the imperfections his hands had made and honing the edge of the blade to as sharp as he could possibly make it.

It was done. He stood and swung the sword around, careful not to move too quickly and lose his connection with the Earthshaping technique. The Iron Nerve remembered a few basic kata from his time in the Academy, and he ran through them, adjusting as he went for his new proportions. He'd made the sword too heavy, so he paused for several minutes to shed some of the material, then tried again. It felt uncomfortable at first, but he gradually altered the density in places, adjusting the weapon's weight until its balance was perfected. The sword felt like an extension of his hand.

Finally, he tested it. It cut through a carcass of a pig without issue, and was sharp enough to scratch steel. However, though it handled weak strikes fine, it shattered into shards when struck hard against the remaining quartz block.

A mixed result. Efficient as a weapon and relatively easy to make, but brittle and easily destroyed. Making them wasn't horrendously slow – at least compared to the hours he'd spent on steel that failed to produce any weapon at all, so Hazō made another. He'd hand it off to other clanmates to experiment with to see if the densified quartz blades could actually make reliable weapons.

Those were the two experiments he'd left outstanding, and Hazō straightened up. Tomorrow, he had another course of experiments planned on the Seventh Path. The sun had moved dramatically through the sky, likely while he'd been trying his hand at blacksmithing.

Before he withdrew his chakra from the ground, Hazō had a thought. He usually drew quartz from the granite, but the MEW-stone held another mineral in an even greater quantity than the quartz, and he'd never experimented with that one.

He reconstituted the MEW brick, now substantially diminished by the removal of the quartz, and pulled it apart again, this time isolating the component he'd ignored before.

It was a reddish-brown stone, smooth all the way through. Experimentally, Hazō tried aligning it, causing it to slowly form triangular and rhomboidal chunks.

Interesting. Now that Hazō had isolated it, he realized that it had always been the dominant sensation of MEW-granite, even more than quartz. Yet… Hazō had noticed this specific sensation before. He was missing something.

He tried transmuting it into different forms, scooping out a small chunk of the overall brick to make the manipulation quicker. One type of twist turned the stone gray. Another twist turned it beige-white. That already was more colors than quartz showed, which was always white or clear, but nothing particularly interesting. There was still something more, a memory or connection Hazō was barely failing to make.

Purely on instinct, Hazō tried another transformation, and the stone gained a vibrant green-blue color.

The same color as the Great Seal.

No, not the same color. It was lighter, milder. Experimentally, Hazō tried to transform it again, retaining as much of its feel as he could while pushing it to be more compact.

The stone didn't take to the transformation easily, but it did eventually. Before Hazō lay a spherical chunk of stone with the exact color and texture of the Great Seal. It looked odd, rich and dark, not unlike jade. Exotic and alien, like something meant for another world. Like the turquoise ocean under a stormy sky.

He probed it with his chakra again. It wasn't an infusable substrate for three dimensional sealing. Like any quartz he'd made with Earthshaping, it would accept his chakra, but it didn't have the requisite internal pathways that it needed to conduct chakra. Not yet, at least.

Hazō dropped the stone, then sat down to think. Was the Great Seal made from granite? Something strange must have happened, some transformation beyond his ability to detect. Perhaps Earthshaping imbued the stone with a metaphysical power… Or perhaps Earth-Element ninjutsu themselves left traces of chakra.

That could make sense, Hazō thought. Earth-Element ninjutsu always made a similar type of granite, and the Great Seal, if indeed the Sage's creation, would have used ninjutsu in its creation. Ninjutsu to create the stone, then ninjutsu again to transform it could layer chakra atop of chakra to create the otherwise impossible… and then you could infuse it using chakra beyond measure and an ancient art lost to time itself.

Hazō grinned as an idea came to him. Everyone had mocked him for building the old estate out of MEW-cubes, and the shantytown he'd built out of red granite on the new one to house his people had received some of the same treatment from Kei and the other more sarcastic members of the family (and that treatment had only intensified as his plans to begin construction grew steadily less credible). But… he could have Reo cast MARI to produce hundreds of tons of granite, turn it into bricks of quartz and the exotic blue-green Great Seal stone, then build an estate truly beyond compare in the entire Path.

And, at its core, it would still be built from the humble Multiple Earth Wall.


"Hello, Cannai."

"Greetings, Summoner. You look like you've seen worse days."

Hazō paused. "Isn't the saying that you've seen better days?"

"Well, that seems insulting," Cannai said, rousing himself from the grassy hillside to pad over to where Hazō stood. "I mean to say that you have gone through many trials and tribulations, and that while you are clearly locked within one at the moment, it is not the greatest challenge you have faced, and so you are certain to overcome it."

Hazō paused to take that in, words entering his mind fractionally slower due to the intense headache that, these days, was his perpetual companion.

"I see," Hazō said. "Thank you, I guess?"

"You are very welcome, Summoner," Cannai said. "Now, I trust your session with Canain went well?"

Hazō slung his bag off his shoulder and sat down on the ground hard, causing another spike of pain through his head. "No," he said.

"What went wrong?" Cannai asked.

"Chakra," Hazō said.

"Mm. Yes, chakra does do that, doesn't it?"

"Yeah. Turns out all of Canain's ninjutsu make chakra construct crystal instead of real crystal, so he can't make anything with the properties I need. I showed him the two halves of the not-quite-seal blank, and he tried investigating them, but he didn't sense anything unusual. He joined the two halves, but chakra didn't flow smoothly from one side to the other due to the fracture between them. I tried to use Earthshaping to align the internal channels in the stone to restore it to infusability, but I wasn't able to do it. Maybe I could in theory, but I'm not skilled enough yet."

"That's a lot of buts," Cannai said, circling Hazō with his nose to the ground. Purely by coincidence, Cannai's rear ended up right in Hazō's face as the Dog Clan Alpha started smelling Hazō's bag.

"Yeah," Hazō said, pushing Cannai gently away. "I wasn't expecting things to be easy, but it's still frustrating when promising avenues don't pan out."

"And you have another avenue here?" Cannai asked, nosing at the bag.

"Yet another experiment," Hazō said, reaching for the bag and emptying out the bones he'd grabbed from a butcher that morning. He made the handseal and said, "Earth Element: Earthshaping."

Slowly, his chakra permeated the ground around him. After the requisite minutes of establishing and stabilizing his chakra, Hazō reached for the bones and pushed his chakra into it.

Nope, nothing. Well, not quite nothing. It was kind of like charcoal – he could sense it vaguely through Earthshaping, but it was like swimming through a pool of syrup. He couldn't manipulate it at all.

Bones and charcoal were from animals and plants respectively. They weren't Earth-natured, but they were somewhere in between. Bones would be ground into bone meal and charcoal burned to ash, then both would be returned to the soil. Maybe after that, he would be able to affect it with Earthshaping, but he couldn't touch them in their current forms. Frustrated, he threw the bone away and pulled his chakra back out of the ground.

Cannai cocked his head slightly. "You're not going to say something foolish, like 'fetch', are you?"

Hazō shook his head. "No. I was just expecting more."

"What is there to expect from a bone?" Cannai asked. "It does little but provide marrow."

Hazō leaned back on the grass, looking up at the sky. "Bone could be another material for three-dimensional sealing. Someone I'm working with… suggested it."

After making his discovery about the potential of the cave crystal, Hazō had reread Orochimaru's report on substrates. Apparently, ninja's bones had a weak capacity for chakra conduction, necessary for ninja to support the forces involved in a fight without breaking everything – and according to Orochimaru's preliminary investigation, this chakra conduction was aligned along the axis of the bone in a way identical to the alignment along the long axis of the cave crystal. In other words, three-dimensional seals could theoretically be made out of the right kind of bone.

"Well, that hardly makes sense. I've seen the shapes on your seals and no bone would look like that," Cannai said.

Hazō nodded. Patient F-898 had been a chakra-capable male in his early twenties, surrendered to Orochimaru by the Final Gift Program. Orochimaru had removed most of the skin and muscle of his legs, used some unknown biosealing procedure to grow his bones into the shapes of basic seal components, then used some unknown sensory tools to examine the readings. Apparently, chakra conduction through bone was different enough than through stone that Orochimaru had decided to scrap the experiment, saying that understanding the Great Seal in this way would be impossible. Patient F-898 had been reallocated to another experimental program rather than terminated, as his upper body was essentially intact.

"You're right," Hazō said. "But if I could control it and shape it, then maybe it could have become useful. It didn't."

"Ah," Cannai said, pacing to Hazō's side and setting down. "But you have more experiments?"

"Yes," Hazō said, gazing at the silver-blue sky above the Dog Clan. "There's one more experiment with Noburi tonight. But I'm almost out of ideas. If I can't make more substrate easily, I'll need to raid the cave I got the crystal from in the first place."

"Did you not say that your Alpha himself laid eyes upon the Dragons? Would he not act on your behalf here? For all your skills, Summoner, it is my understanding that you are not the strongest warrior of your people."

Hazō inclined his head. "That… is a good idea, Cannai. I'm not sure whether the people he sends will do it right, but they could be a resource."

"Mm."

Hazō and Cannai sat there for several long minutes. Around them, wind blew through the grasses, filling the air with the whisper of their stalks rubbing together. Somewhere in the distance, carried to them on the wind, Hazō heard the sound of dogs barking as they played a game.

"Cannai."

"Yes, summoner?"

"You mentioned you had a different way of perceiving the world. You called it landsense. What is it?"

Cannai huffed as he thought. "It is being one with Dog. One with its land, yes, and with its waters and skies. It is the knowledge of what is and what is not. Nothing more."

Hazō nodded, leaning up and pulling out the broken chunk of the false seal blank, and another crystal of quartz he'd shaped as similarly as he could make it. "Can you sense the difference between these two?" Hazō asked.

Cannai paused for a moment, then stood and pawed around as if moving let him sense more clearly.

"They are different," Cannai said eventually. "Similar, but different. They are of a different material, but there is another difference that the landsense cannot tell, but I can. The chakra in this one," he said, nosing at the quartz chunk, "is free. It is natural, raw, chaotic, and disordered. It has no unity, no purpose, no will guiding it to act. Whereas the chakra in this one," he said, nosing to the crystal from the cave, "is more unified. There is an evenness to it. And as you said, there is an area between its two sections where the unity of one and the unity of the other are disjointed."

Hazō looked up. "Can you make the chakra inside the quartz unified?" he asked.

Cannai nosed at the quartz once more, then stepped up and placed his paw atop the quartz. Whatever was happening, Hazō couldn't see it.

After a few minutes, Cannai barked in amusement and stepped off the quartz, which looked the same. "No, I cannot! Fascinating. I can order the chakra within the stone to be still and purposeful and unified, but it does not stay. As soon as I release my grasp, it returns to chaos. I do not know how you would make it retain internal alignment, but it must be possible for the other stone to exist."

Hazō nodded, trying not to show any disappointment. "Yes, I think it's possible with Earthshaping. But it'll take a long time to improve my skill even further than I already have, and I'll need a reliable source of the substrate if I want to recreate three-dimensional sealing."

Cannai stopped pacing and settled down again, tail wagging slowly. "Ah, yes. Indeed, your Earthshaping ninjutsu could perhaps do the same, if it's [bark]. I will anticipate the results."

"Can you explain that?" Hazō asked. "I know you said it couldn't be explained last time, but…"

Cannai huffed. "I do not know what to tell you. Like I said, it would be like describing colors to a blind man. What I would say would have no meaning to you."

"At least try?" Hazō asked.

Cannai huffed again. "Fine, but I will not be blamed if you do not understand it. You are aware of your chakra, yes?"

Hazō nodded slowly.

"Just like your chakra has a force to it when you manipulate a large amount at once, and just like your chakra has a finesse to it when you cast a delicate ninjutsu, it also has [bark], which [growl] your chakra when you [bark], though you obviously have no control over it."

Hazō shook his head. "I still don't get it."

"You won't."

"Could you draw an analogy?"

Cannai looked up to the sky.

"Analogies are lies that convince ourselves that we understand."

"I understand."

"Very well, Summoner. Chakra is naturally wild and chaotic. It is full of energy but does nothing as it has no single direction, and any effect is immediately canceled by its opposite. To get chakra to act, you must restrain it. That is what ninjutsu does – your handseals restrict its nature and establish rules, your internal manipulations guide its direction, and your words establish an intention for it to achieve. Only then does chakra act in a structured way.

"Your Earthshaping Technique? It has but a single handseal. It is unrestrained, and weak as a result. However, you use your will to restrain it instead, forcing it to act. You have other ninjutsu. One enables you to swim through the earth. Could you do the same with Earthshaping?"

"Sure," Hazō said. "I could make the dirt part in front of me and push me from behind. But it would be slow, and it would take intense focus. I wouldn't get far before needing to breathe."

"Yes. What other ninjutsu could you replicate with Earthshaping?"

Hazō considered that. Earthshaping could raise walls of stone and spikes, or excavate tunnels. He could even clad himself in stone armor, though it would be completely useless for combat.

"Most of them," Hazō said. "Not Earth Clone, and it can't make new stone like Multiple Earth Wall can. But it wouldn't be good at any of those things."

"Yes. It is unrestrained, and therefore flexible but weak. Restrain the ninjutsu and it becomes inflexible, but efficient and strong. However, because Earthshaping is so unrestrained, it does not mediate your [bark], but lets you directly connect with it, and that connection is just enough for you to [growl] the earth as you're trying to do.

"There is nothing that Earthshaping can do that a ninjutsu specifically designed and aimed at the same purpose could not. However, its freedom and flexibility lets you discover potential uses of Earth Element that you would otherwise be unaware of."

Hazō nodded. "I see. So the ninjutsu is a flexible, unrestrained use of chakra, and that's why it can do so many things."

Cannai stared flatly at Hazō. "No. The analogy to restraints was only an analogy. To a human, Earthshaping is a ninjutsu like any other, with handseals, manipulations, and a callout. The key difference is that it is [bark], not that it is unrestrained."

"And what is that word if not unrestrained?" Hazō asked.

Cannai sighed. "It simply cannot be communicated," he said, sadly. "Perhaps by coincidence, it has a property that would not ordinarily be present in human ninjutsu – a property that could potentially be useful for your goals. That is all you can understand, I suspect."

"Can I gain the ability to understand?" Hazō asked.

Cannai panted in amusement. "No. Not unless you transform yourself into an animal and become the leader of a Seventh Path clan. If you elect to do so while pursuing the deeper mysteries of the Paths, I request that you pick a clan whose leader is already unpleasant. Perhaps you could be Cat. Or Pangolin."

Hazō sighed. "Fine, I'll let it rest for now. I ought to be getting back to the Human Path, in any case."

"Before you go, Summoner," Cannai said, "I do want to commend you. The Dragons are the Seventh Path's problem first and foremost, but you dedicate yourself to fixing it, all while shouldering your clan's burdens simultaneously. It is not an easy task, but it is a task fit for a hero. That you need to undertake it so young is a tragedy, and that you are able to walk around as if you've had worse days is an achievement in its own right. Do not despair, Hazō. You will have the strength to overcome these burdens and rise beyond them, in time. Until that day comes, know that you continue to have my deepest gratitude for the work you've done to try to save my Path."

"...thank you, Cannai. That helps."

"Best of luck in your quest, Summoner."


Hazō and Noburi sat on either side of the barrel, and Hazō held a rock halfway above the waterline.

"What do you feel?" Hazō asked.

"Nothing," Noburi said. "I don't know what you expect from me. I can't drain ninjutsu, and Earthshaping is just another ninjutsu."

"Try harder."


"It's just a rock," Noburi said. "A rock with your chakra, but a rock."

"Ugh," Hazō said, pulling the rock out of the barrel and setting it aside. "Really? You don't feel anything at all?"

"Look, it was a better idea than asking me to 'grow you more crystal'. I actually do have a chakra sense, so it wasn't completely hopeless, but still – what was I supposed to do?"

"Didn't you feel anything while I was twisting the rock around?"

Noburi shook his head. "It doesn't work like that. I can only directly sense your chakra. The ninjutsu's chakra is there, but it wasn't… doing anything."

"I was manipulating the rock in every way that I could! It was definitely doing a lot of different things."

"Alright, well it's not something my bloodline can sense," Noburi said, crossing his arms. "The chakra sense just isn't like that, Hazō. I can't tell when someone's boosting either, or when they're molding chakra for a ninjutsu. I can only tell you where the chakra is and how much there is."

Hazō sighed. "Fine. Another dead end."

"Yep," Noburi said. "That's me. Another dead end."

"I didn't mean it like that," Hazō said, shaking his head. "Sorry, Noburi. You've been very helpful, and thank you for sticking around through the experiments. I've just been trying a lot of different avenues to try to make more of the crystal, and they've all come up blank."

"Yeah, yeah," Noburi said. "It's fine."

Noburi grabbed his barrel and slung it over his shoulder, but Hazō could still sense a faint sense of irritation around him.

"Noburi," Hazō said. "It's been a while since we really got a chance to talk one-on-one. What's up?"

"Nothing, really," Noburi said, adjusting the barrel so that it sat comfortably just above the Toad Scroll. "The usual."

Clear communication it was. "Noburi, I noticed that you are acting in a way that seems frustrated or otherwise emotionally ill-at-ease. I want to understand what is wrong because venting may help or because I can shoulder some of the burden. If you don't want to talk with me, that's fine, but I want to make sure you know that you have the option to be heard. With that said, do you want to talk about it?"

Noburi looked at him, then sighed. "Yeah. It's just tough lately. Lost the Tsunade apprenticeship, then Akane died. There's other stuff, but that's the big two."

"Yeah," Hazō said. "How do you feel about it?"

Noburi shook his head as if remembering something. "Wait, you don't get to try to unpack me. You're the one who I gotta support. Look, I'll be fine. I always am. Give me some time and the awesomeness of saving all those lives in the hospital will make me feel better. How are you feeling?"

"It doesn't need to be one-sided, Noburi," Hazō said. "You can just tell me how you're feeling. Like about Yuno, for example."

Noburi shuddered. "Ugh. Did you know she took her genin on a bandit suppression mission? I wanted to ask if she told them about Jashin or tried to get them to do some blood ritual with the bandits they killed, but I couldn't figure out a good way to ask that wouldn't set her off and make her stop talking to me again, and I need all the leverage I can get.

"But… that's fine, Hazō. I thought about it, and you're fixing all these problems that aren't really your fault. Like the Dragons, or Konan killing Jiraiya, or whatever. So sure, the Yuno problem is your fault. Still, it's fine for someone else to fix your problems while you're busy cleaning up for the rest of us. That's the point of family isn't it? We don't need to be isolated individuals, each dealing with our own thing. We can work together and we end up stronger for it."

"Sure," Hazō asked. "And I want to help, if possible."

"It's fine," Noburi said. "I'm a little angry that my bloodline isn't good enough, and a little frustrated at the Toads. You know how you said you wanted me to get good contracts? I haven't really done anything as a summoner yet, just cosied up to the Toad Sages and got the clan some nice trade deals – which are valuable, but it's not something that the average Toad respects. I asked around to see if they had any things that needed doing on the Seventh Path, but they're keeping it calm with all their allies right now because of the Conclave, and going off to kill some driver ants isn't going to impress anybody. I'll need to figure out something on the Human Path."

"Could you go chakra beast hunting with Yuno?" Hazō asked. "There's lots of formidable beasts out there, and you could talk while killing something that's acceptable to kill."

Noburi shrugged. "I'm planning on joining a hunt with her, but it won't impress the Toads at all. Sure, me and Yuno could try to take down some badass jōnin-level chakra beast, but it won't really protect anyone. Anywhere that jōnin-level chakra beasts live is somewhere that civilians can't, so it'd just be pointlessly clearing the wilderness. Like, there's a reason why Leaf never patrolled the Swamp of Death – it wouldn't help anyone. And I don't think the weaker beasts are going to impress the Toads, not especially with Yuno's fighting stealing my thunder. I need to find some suitably important mission that has a narrative around it, then use that to showboat to the Toads. And before you ask – I've been keeping an eye on the mission boards, but nothing good's come up yet."

"So you're telling me… no Gamabunta?"

Noburi laughed. "I mean, if I do the mission thing once or twice or thirty times, then maybe it'll work. Plus, like you said, we don't necessarily need him to be on-call the way he was for Jiraiya. It might be easier to get him to agree to a one-time thing at a prearranged time, especially if it's a fight against the people that killed Jiraiya. It won't be easy to convince him, but I can work my way up to it."

"Good," Hazō said, clapping him on the shoulder, as they started to walk back towards the main part of the Gōketsu estate. "Let me know if you need anything from me."

Noburi shook his head. "Just do your thing, Hazō. And try not to let us down, okay? I grieved for Akane but your talk about the rift has left this niggling voice of hope in my head, and it would kinda suck to have to shut it down. If you manage to get the rift open, we're gonna-," Noburi's voice caught, "we're gonna get them back. Akane, Jiraiya. Everyone that shouldn't have died."

"We will," Hazō said. "Trust me."

---

May Jashin have mercy on your souls, ye who navigate forth into the treacherous waters of the author's notes below.

Earthshaping Updates

Executive summary: We made a mistake in our mineralogy – the interaction of ES and MEW/MARI should have gone fairly differently. Neither technique is changing how it works. Additionally, some important tasks with Earthshaping (including extraction of ores) should be and now are substantially easier than they were portrayed as on-screen. Finally, Hazō can now produce the Great Seal material.

Science of Earthshaping

In order to clarify how Earthshaping works, we're going to describe how we understand it in physical terms. For any further use of Earthshaping, we place the onus on the players to explain how a given thing is possible in terms of the basic operations that Earthshaping allows.

• At its base level, Earthshaping physically moves parts of affected material around. This can be rough (like moving scoops of dirt), or fine (like making detailed carvings). Fine detail and quantity of material affected both take time.
  • This is not atomically or molecularly precise, nor will it ever be.
• At Effect:2+, after you have cast the technique, you may add additional material up to your volume limit, or stop affecting material that you've already affected. Connections between components are relatively weak.
• At Effect:4+, you may strongly bond two materials together. We're not going to pin down exactly what this means, but neither material is being chemically altered in any substantial way – instead, their surfaces are being joined as if by high heat and pressure (e.g. the bonds between layers of metamorphic rock, or between mineral grains in granite).
• At level 40+, you may transform a mineral into any of its polymorphs. This is a purely physical change – nothing magical or chakra-based is happening, and the results of this transformation can be freely put into storage seals/taken to other Paths without any difficulty.
  • As an example of polymorphism, consider quartz. Its typical density is ~2.65 g/cm^3. Its densest polymorph is seifertite, ~4.29 g/cm^3, which is ~62% denser.
  • In general, we are saying the limits of polymorphism is 50% in either direction, as we don't particularly want to research the esoteric mineralogy of every type of stone, especially not composites like granite which have many components that may have different maximum/minimum densities.
    • There are some limitations – for example, diamond has no denser polymorphs, as its crystal structure is already optimally packed (and if you disagree, you need to convince us of that).
  • Generally, we'll use the following rules:
    • Physically, densified materials are harder (less easily scratched), stronger (can support greater loads without failure), and more brittle (deform less when approaching their breaking point). The inverse applies to materials whose density has been reduced.
    • Mechanically, increasing the density of a material will increase its Durability by 1. Decreasing the density of a material will decrease its Durability by 1.
• At level 50+, you may isolate component minerals in a given volume. This only isolates component minerals, but does not change their crystal structures. Our rough stance here is "Earthshaping does not do chemistry".
  • Basic example: you cannot use Earthshaping to turn quartz (SiO2) into elemental silicon and pure oxygen.
  • Another example: you cannot use Earthshaping to turn anorthite (CaAl2Si2O8) into quartz (2x SiO2 = Si2O4, CaAl2O4 remaining), corundum (Al2O3) and quicklime (CaO).
  • Red granite produced by MEW or MARI contains:
    • Alkali feldspars
    • Quartz
    • Small amounts of other feldspars
    • And trace amounts of other minerals
  • This means, for the most part, to acquire gemstones, you will need to find a mine and raid it.
    • You may use the Effect:4+ ability to turn many smaller gemstones (or even gemstone cuttings/dust) into substantially larger and more valuable ones.
    • You may still use the level 50+ ability to turn low-grade gemstones into high-grade ones by removing impurities and imperfections.
  • How does doping work in this framing?
    • Roughly, Hazō is undoing the purifying process.
    • Precisely, we don't care. If this shouldn't work under the rules of Earthshaping we've stated so far, don't tell us and don't poke at it.

Remember, the players must convince us that any new application of Earthshaping is viable within the rules we've established here. We're giving you the OOC information on how ES works to enable you, the players, to do the research to determine if something is possible. If you want to check whether your proposed application is possible, please direct questions to @Paperclipped.

Yes, this means Hazō can very easily extract large amounts of iron ore. He had trouble manipulating iron ore that one time due to chakra acting up. Weird.

Yes, this also means that Hazō can no longer turn granite into corundum. We're chalking this up to a quirk of chakra that Hazō summoned some granite with corundum veins in it (we do not know, nor do we want to know, if granite is a host matrix for corundum). Hazō still has around 300 kg of corundum, about 200kg of which has been doped into gemstone quality blue sapphire (read: much more than the Elemental Nations' markets can handle).

Outstanding Questions

With all that said, here's answers to questions and comments in the thread:

acidshill said:

eaglejarl said:

He looked more closely and saw the problem; his chakra had not infused the iron. Not the larger segments of it, anyway. The tiny flecks, yes. Those were fully saturated in his spirit and they moved and reshaped themselves to his will as easily as anything else. The larger masses of iron were inviolate.

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I'm confused about what happened here—did the MEW granite contain pure or mostly pure iron, or did it contain iron oxides? If the latter, did the earthshaping chemically change the oxides? I'm pretty sure that real-life granite would have much more iron oxides than pure iron, and I'd be surprised if the earthshaping jutsu treated e.g. Fe2O3 any differently from Al2O3...
Question for @eaglejarl: was Hazō able to earthshape the iron ore? Was it easier to work with than pure iron?

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You're right that iron ores are minerals by all meaningful definitions. As a result, Hazō should be (and now is) able to manipulate iron ores as easily as any other earth-based material with Earthshaping.

cowsruleusall said:

I've been lurking since the start of MfD almost a decade ago, and when I saw not one, but TWO posts about gemstones in MfD I figured this was the time to make an account and post.

If you dope corundum with iron, just plain old pure iron, you get Fe3+, which gives it a vivid yellow colour. If you dope it with iron and titanium in a 1:1 ratio, the specific combination gives you Fe2+/Ti4+, which has a unique charge-transfer phenomenon that gives it a sapphire-blue colour. Granite typically has somewhere between 0.05-1% titanium oxides so that's viable.

But the reason I bring this up? If Hazo is able to produce blue sapphire from MEW granite, then that means he's manipulating titanium. And that means there's enough titanium in that granite to be able to extract out titanium oxides, most likely as either rutile or anatase. Yeah there's a lot more work involved in getting titanium metal from titanium oxides, but if Hazo has been producing metal foils from the granite? Well then...

Oh - and granite has about 5-50ppm of chromium, which is the primary chromophore in ruby. If Hazo is able to make rubies? Well then, that means there's probably enough chromium around to make stainless steel given enough MEWs. You want to get really fucked up? Well then, you could probably extract enough potassium-40 or thorium from the MEW granite to do...things.

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Excellent point. Hazō's stock of corundum are mostly blue sapphire at the moment, but for some reason that he can't quite figure out, when he tries to dope corundum with iron again, it always comes out in a yellow color rather than a blue one.

Hazō cannot produce elemental titanium from granite – though if he knew what to look for, he could likely extract the trace rutile present.

Vamair said:

2Na[AlSi3O8] - Al2O3 (corundum) - 6SiO2 (sand) = Na2O. It's not hydroxide and it does react with water. There's quite a lot of it, as well. Some calcium oxide and potassium oxide as well.

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Vamair said:

Granite does contain sodium metal (or, more likely, sodium oxide). It's a part of feldspar, which is Na[AlSi3O8].

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Sir Stompy said:

Is "ES does not do chemical reactions" not well established? I thought it was quite clear from the text.

"Containing sodium atoms" and "containing sodium metal" are very very very different things. Table salt contains sodium atoms (ions technically), it doesn't explode on contact with water. Same can't be said for sodium metal.

Granite sure does contain sodium atoms, it does not contain sodium metal. To filter for sodium metal, ES would have to chemically alter the target. Something which it has shown no ability to do so far.

Feldspar is a regular crystal, ripping it apart for the sodium oxide is beyond the capabilities that ES has shown so far.

Now if you want to chemically alter the filtered feldspar, we can talk. But Hazō doesn't know any chemistry and thinks kami run the universe. So I doubt we're getting very far.

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Vamair said:

Granite does not contain mineral corundum. To get it you need to split feldspar into its constituent oxides. As Hazo did get corundum instead of feldspar (a lot of other things he does require influencing crystal structure and therefore breaking bonds as well), ES can evidently do that even if it currently can't split apart an oxide.

I currently believe he threw these oxides away with the sand, as corundum felt more solid and all-around interesting.

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Sir Stompy said:

You're right about this. My mistake. ES clearly can split up feldspar into its component oxides. Which means producing sodium/potassium oxide should be pretty trivial. They're not explosive but they're interesting chemicals. They produce caustic lye (sodium/potassium hydroxide) when added to water. As far as weapons go, we can spray that out of a macerator.

Maybe ES can rearrange stuff without changing oxidation state? That's about all I got at this point.

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Hopefully, this has been clarified at this point. We made a science mistake in our initial interpretation of Earthshaping, but it should not be able to alter component minerals in affected stone. It definitely cannot change oxidation states.

Sir Stompy said:

Can we alter the density of diamonds and corundum produced by ES?

Why I think we should be able to: High grade coal is a mixture of primarily amorphous carbon with other chemical compounds hanging out. IRL when subjected to tremendous heat and pressure some of the carbon undergoes a phase change and becomes diamond. Crystalline pure carbon.

It is a demonstrated capability of ES filtering to take granite and produce corundum. This involves purifying the granite by isolating the aluminum oxide and packing it into a crystalline structure.

I assert then, that the way ES produces diamond from coal is by filtering out the free amorphous carbon and packing it into a crystalline structure. Same as corundum.

That means Hazō should be able to alter the density of the diamond or corundum product. As ES has not yet altered its density.

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Tentatively: no for diamond, yes for corundum.

Aburame Deal

Okay, finally, we get to how this will affect the narrative in the ES-based deals that Hazō has made.

Hazō can produce roughly 10 telescope lenses (so 5 telescopes) per day of Earthshaping effort. Hazō and Shino crunch the numbers on the relative costs of Hazō's time versus the Aburame craftsmen's time, and find that Hazō can produce the telescopes slightly cheaper than the craftsmen (though much faster – they currently produce around 10 per month). In the long run, the Aburame can scale up their production in a way that Hazō can't, so Hazō's involvement in the deal is temporary.

While having Hazō perform labor with ninja skills that would otherwise have been done by civilians is a violation of Merchant Council rules, since the civilians are clan, Shino will instruct them not to make any complaints to the council. Hazō's primary motivation in entering this deal was to equip all of Leaf's squads with telescopes as quickly as possible. Still, while it lasts, Hazō can earn more money than he would have otherwise by scribing skywalkers.

Hazō and Shino will come to a fair distribution of gains (for Aburame's work inventing the telescopes and Hazō's work mass-producing them) and Shino will negotiate or renegotiate an appropriately monopolistic price from the Tower. The only decision you need to make is: How many "days" per month do you want Hazō to spend making telescopes? Some examples:

[][Aburame] Spend 0 days per month making telescopes.
[][Aburame] Spend 1 day per month making telescopes. (+50% production)
[][Aburame] Spend 4 days per month making telescopes. (+200% production)
[][Aburame] Write-in.

Hyūga Deal

By default, the deal is for Hazō to provide rough gems to the Hyūga craftsmen so that they may work them into finished gemstones, then into full pieces of jewelry for sale. This is not a violation of Merchant Council rules, as Leaf has no mines that produce gemstones, and Fire has very few, so it is not labor that would be done by a civilian. This deal would require that the Hyūga break contracts with their suppliers so that they don't pay twice for gemstones (once from Hazō, once from their suppliers). As those suppliers are foreign, they are eager to rely on someone inside Leaf instead, but they would need Hazō's guarantee.

Making this deal would provide a large income stream. However, it would still be limited by the craftsmen's ability to work gems and the relatively limited size of the markets available. Hazō could instead make much more short-term money by traveling outside of Fire and crashing their gemstone markets. Asuma prefers that Hazō make the Hyūga deal as it has minimal economic implications, and it builds a Gōketsu-Hyūga relationship, but will give Hazō the trade data he needs to effectively ruin other country's gemstone markets if Hazō desires it.

Though Hazō has a massive stock of sapphires, Hazō cannot produce gemstones other than diamond (which he can make from graphite with ES40). He will need to take missions to well known foreign gemstone mines and sap them dry to cover other gemstones. Because missions are a pain, he may not want to do so. Those are the relevant factors. Here are the options:

[][Hyūga] Finalize the deal: Hazō will provide them with sapphire and diamond only, in exchange for a healthy income stream.
[][Hyūga] Finalize the deal: Hazō will provide them with all gemstones of their choice, in exchange for a massive income stream. Hazō will need to do some missions as a result.
[][Hyūga] Do not finalize the deal. Hazō (or his Gōketsu subordinates) will travel to other countries and crash their sapphire and diamond markets in exchange for a truly massive cash infusion, using the Tower's intel. Hazō may do some missions later to crash their other markets.
[][Hyūga] Write-in. (specify whether the deal is finalized or if it falls through).

Finally, Mari notes that the Minami will be offended if Hazō makes any deal with the Hyūga – but the Minami aren't close allies anyway, and getting the Hyūga's alliance builds an important bond with Leaf's conservative bloc.

Like with the Yamanaka deal, Hazō is free to request things other than money.

Iron Production

Hazō cannot produce substantial amounts of iron ore from granite. However, the Land of Fire has many iron veins, frequently left unmined because of the difficulty of clearing chakra beasts and creating a new settlement at a given site. The ability to set up a perimeter and extract iron in a day means that Hazō can produce literal tons of high-grade iron ore.

We're not going to run a vote here. Hazō has already been hired to produce iron ore for the Tower so Leaf can build up a stockpile, and will be earning a large income stream as a result.

Roughly, we estimate Leaf's iron ore needs at 20-25 tons per year – or around 4-5 m^3 of ore. If in an area rich in iron ore, Hazō can extract this quantity in a few hours.

Asuma encourages Hazō to sell additional iron ore outside of Leaf (where the Merchant Council has no influence) if he wants, but does not want him to sell outside of Fire as access to iron and steel are strategically important.

Addendum: The Issue with ES50

Many of our problems stemmed from this table:

(which we were directed to by this player post)

While it is true that there are both silica oxides and aluminium oxides in granite, granite is not 70% quartz and 14% corundum. The "chemical composition" table is fairly misleading in this regard – instead reporting basic crystal subunits and their oxidation states.

In order to set a boundary we were satisfied with (namely, the line of "Earthshaping does not do chemistry" to keep it from being a tool to do arbitrary chemical manipulation), we needed to restrain Earthshaping to the component minerals in a substance. This was always our intention; we just misinterpreted the science involved.

Sealing Research

Timeline

First, outstanding research voted in from 609. Then, new sealing research. Hazōpilot thinks MS7 without SSA is a little risky, so he'd like to use a couple days prep to cram it in during the RB prep period. Note: to better match the narrative of sealing research being an all-encompassing, all-day activity, I'm now going to use 4 clone blocks per sealing research day. Also, Hazō has started to read Orochimaru's notes again.

• Days 1-2:
  • Prime: Prep for Rocket Boots
  • SC: Prep for MS7
  • SC: Earth Pillar
  • Notes
  • (-12 clone blocks)
• Day 3:
  • Prime: Prep for RB
  • SC: MS7 roll
  • SC: Earth Pillar
  • Notes
  • (-12 clone blocks)
• Day 4:
  • Prime: RB roll w/ SSA
  • SC: MS8 roll w/ SSA
  • SC: Earth Pillar
  • Notes
  • (-8 clone blocks for research, -4 for notes, -5 for SSA + safety margin, so -17 clone blocks total)
• Days 5-6
  • All: SSA recovery
  • Notes
  • (-9 clone blocks)
• Day 7:
  • Prime: RB roll w/ SSA
  • SC: MS8 roll w/ SSA
  • SC: CATEARS
  • Notes
  • (-17 clone blocks)
• Day 8-9
  • All: SSA recovery
  • Notes
  • (-9 clone blocks)
• Day 10
  • Prime: MS8 roll w/ SSA + Kagome's help
  • SC: CAPS prep day diff check
  • SC: Dampener prep day diff check
  • Notes
  • (-8 clone blocks for research, -4 for notes, -2 for SSA, so -14 clone blocks total)
• (eff SC XP rate: 0.7x)

Rolls

Research rolls for Earth Pillar:
Hazō (Sealing): 50 - 3 = 47
Hazō (Calligraphy): 42 - 3 = 39

Hazō (Sealing): 50 - 6 = 44
Hazō (Calligraphy): 42 + 3 = 45

Hazō (Sealing): 50 + 3 = 53
Hazō (Calligraphy): 42 + 6 = 48

Hazō (Sealing): 50 + 3 = 53
Hazō (Calligraphy): 42 + 0 = 42

Hazō finishes Earth Pillar on day 4! No sweat. Tentative mechanics: creates a pillar of earth when the seal is activated while placed on the ground, potentially making an Aspect like "Instant Cover Anywhere".

Research rolls for MS7:
Hazō (Sealing): 50 + 4 (prep) + 3 = 57
Hazō (Calligraphy): 42 + 4 (prep) - 9 = 37
While it's a bad callig roll, with prep, Hazōpilot is confident. He'll skip the reroll.

Hazō finishes the seventh seal in the jinchūriki chain! On day 3. Tentative mechanics: Identical to MS5, but slightly improved sensory fidelity in exchange for reduced range.

Research rolls for MS8:
On Feb 14, Kagome tells Hazō that he's almost done with MS8, and that Hazō can wait on Kagome to finish if he wants to benefit from Kagome's notes. Hazō elects to go ahead and Kagome will help him whenever Kagome is finished.

Hazō (Sealing): 50 + 24 (SSA) - 3 = 71
Hazō (Calligraphy): 42 + 12 = 54

Unfortunately, Kagome's notes and support really were quite helpful in lowering the TNs. He's making progress, but not too quickly. He'll try a little harder to see if he can push through it.

Hazō (Sealing): 50 + 24 (SSA) + 0 = 74
Hazō (Calligraphy): 42 + 0 = 42

Hazō estimates that he's around a third of the way done.

At the end of day 9, Kagome tells Hazō that Kagome finished MS8, and is going to help Hazō for the rest of the Jinchūriki Chain seals so that they can get to the necromancy seals faster. The Infusion TN Hazō faces for this seal will now be substantially lower. Hazō convinces Kagome that he's definitely done all his prep work and that they can start working right away (so that he can get at least one infusion roll in on MS8 before Kagome's insistence on full-prep slows him down to a crawl).

Hazō (Sealing): 50 + 24 (SSA) + 8 (invoke "Promising Sealing Student" lol) + 8 (invoke "Team Uplift"; working with Kagome to save Akane) + ? (Kagome's help) - 9 = 81 + ?
Hazō spends a FP to reroll!
Hazō (Sealing): 50 + 24 (SSA) + 8 (invoke "Promising Sealing Student" lol) + 8 (invoke "Team Uplift"; working with Kagome to save Akane) + ? (Kagome's help) + 3 = 93 + ?
Hazō (Calligraphy): 42 + 3 (IN) - 3 = 39

Somehow, Hazō ekes it out and finishes the eighth seal in the jinchūriki chain. Tentative mechanics: marginally improved sensory fidelity in exchange for dramatically reduced range.

Research rolls for Rocket Boots:
Hazō (Sealing): 50 + 24 (SSA) + 6 (prep) + 6 = 86
Hazō (Calligraphy): 42 + 3 (IN) + 6 (prep) - 3 = 48

After trying it, Hazō is quite confident he doesn't need prep. Sure, the calligraphy's a bit tricky, but the Sealing is still quite easy.

Hazō (Sealing): 50 + 24 (SSA) + 0 = 74
Hazō (Calligraphy): 42 + 3 (IN) + 9 = 54

Hazō finishes Rocket Boots! Mechanics already exist in the rules doc.

Research rolls for CATEARS:
Hazō is quite confident in his ability (possibly overconfident), and will just yolo no-prep it.
Hazō (Sealing): 50 + 3 = 53
Hazō (Calligraphy): 42 + 12 = 54

Lucky duckling. Hazō thinks he actually may have skirted fairly close to sealing failure if an uncanny luck hadn't been on his side. The seal isn't super hard, especially with his veterancies, but the chakra-adhesion trigger interferes with the ARS-chakra pulse in a way that makes things tricky. There's enough challenging components that he'd rather use at least a little prep. Hazōpilot will put down the project for a cycle, or until he has time for some prep.

Hazō thinks he made barely any progress.

Other

Sarubetsu & Isan seals:
The junior sealmasters are very busy dealing with the Seal Bank. However, Kazushi is very excited to do anything remotely resembling sealing research after days of scribing, and gladly takes on the challenge.

• Kazushi thinks the two seal elements Hazō reproduces from Shintarō's shop are components of a larger array, and there may have been other elements in the array that Hazō didn't get to see. He thinks the seals are chūnin-level, but it'll be much harder to reverse engineer them without the full array if it is possible at all.
• Kazushi also observes that the seals Hazō reproduces from the Yoshida to be derived from an oddly homogenous sealing tradition. Hazō managed to copy seven seal designs total – one of which Kazushi identifies as an explosive seal, and the other two Kazushi identifies as variants on a storage seal. Of the remaining four, Kazushi thinks they're probably all genin-level.

CAPS and Dampener difficulty check:

• CAPS: Hazō has no clue how to outright stop chakra adhesion from penetrating a seal without raw distance or a particular material. Perhaps adapting some high-tier barrier technique that prevents chakra penetration could work, but the desired flexibility and precision here seems very challenging. The difficulty of this seal is "Jiraiya".
• Dampener: Without 5SB, Hazō has no reference of "spatial locking" to try to adapt here. However, he could try to make the brush simply resist motion, increasing its inertia. While sealmasters already use correctly weighted brushes (heavy enough to resist hand tremors, light enough to maximize precision), Hazō tries to design a seal that would cause the attached object to very lightly resist motion – reducing hand tremors while minimizing loss of precision for seal elements. This would allow him to use a lighter brush and be slightly more precise. The difficulty of this seal is "genin".

Miscellaneous

Kagome's Necromancy Plan

Kagome is relatively confident that the eighth seal in the jinchūriki seal chain will be sufficiently stable for phase one in his necromancy plan. As a recap, his plan is:

1. Modify MS8 to latch onto the rift, push chakra into it to open it up infinitesimally, then send a sensor through it to get readings on status of the rift and on the other side. (in theory, this seal would open the rift if used from both sides)
2. Depending on those readings and how chakra flows through the rift, design a "channel" that could take a massive chakra flow from the Fox's opened tenketsu and channel it into the rift to forcibly inflate it. (depending on Kagome's prediction on cavitation)

He plans to perform phase one as a short chain of three seals:

1. Modify the MS8 construct to latch onto a rift – potentially separating the construct from the seal that it would otherwise be anchored to.
2. Modify the resultant seal to push chakra through a rift, using MS8's environmental chakra gathering.
3. Modify the resultant seal to periodically send sensory constructs through (chakrascope or MS8-based), providing readouts on the seal kept outside of the rift.
   1. Tentatively, this will collect readings on chakra flow relevant to determine whether the Fox-tenketsu plan will work, and if so what will be necessary to achieve it.
   2. If you want it to collect other relevant readings (e.g. to asses whether the rift can be moved), you'll need to select those reading before starting this seal.

He expects that this will take two months of work at least, but he wants Hazō, as the now-senior sealmaster, to take the lead in deciding how to go about this. Hazō could try to break the seals down more, or combine multiple steps into one.

The Jinchūriki Seal Chain

With eight seals in the jinchūriki chain completed (and without a single sealing failure as a result!), Hazō and Kagome still do not think they have the ability to research the ninth or tenth seals. Specifically, the research notes for the ninth seal are exceptionally long and complex, and they are drenched in a strange jargon that Asuma told Hazō is specific to technique hackers and ninjutsu design.

At this point, Hazō and Kagome can tell that they're still describing an infusion procedure for some kind of seal, yet he cannot follow the instructions provided between the ninjutsu jargon, random metaphors for life, and occasional religious sidebars in lieu of clear scribing instructions. Hazō thinks the ninth seal is describing a new kind of infusion procedure, the full details of which are elided for the tenth. If there is a code here to make the research process legible, Hazō and Kagome can't find it.

Signaling System

Sealmasters already signal whether they should or shouldn't be disturbed during their sealing work outside the facility. Kagome dislikes the idea of introducing potential distractions, but agrees that it would be good to get sealmaster's attention in emergencies – as long as the sealmaster does not continue infusion on that same day. A system has been worked out, though the onus is on the sealmaster to check it if they think that checking (or think that thinking about checking) is unlikely to distract them.

Diamond Brushes

The brushes that Hazō makes with diamond bristles do not work – at the level of precision Hazō is capable of making, the diamond is rigid and brittle. OOC: Sadly, neither nanothread nor nanotubes will be possible to create with Earthshaping.

Asuma's Informal Clan Head Advice

As promised before everything exploded, for the next while, Asuma will informally train Hazō in Clan Head business – listening to Hazō's problems and offering advice, and providing the occasional anecdote about Hiruzen's and his own successes and failures as a leader. These sessions will happen a few times per week, taking an hour or two each time, but Asuma encourages Hazō to spend time on his own reflecting on the lessons and thinking about how to incorporate them into his life. If Hazō attends these sessions reliably for the next six months and commits time approximately equal to one SC block per day, he will be eligible for a stunt called "Clan Head Training", with the expected narrative impact. Tentative mechanics: Add a bonus of +(Presence AB) to social skill checks.

Yamanaka Deal

Ino agrees to take 2 days-worth of Goo Bombs per month (either Hazō or Kagome's). In exchange, Ino will arrange some minor social plots to rehabilitate Hazō's reputation. She notes that the Hagoromo were careful to only target Hazō, not Gōketsu in general, so as to avoid the risk of being accused of trying to start a clan war. She also notes that the best thing Hazō could do is to be visibly devout to the Will of Fire – to do purification rituals and attend the Hagoromo's sermons and festivals – and to absolutely refuse (as much as he can) to interact with Hidan or anything resembling Jashinism at all. Ino also will come on a Summoning Scroll hunt that lasts up to a month, and forfeit any claim to anything retrieved on the mission. She requests that Hazō be present.

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XP Award: 35 + 10 (brevity) XP

Vote time! What to do now?

In addition to your action plan, please vote in deal plans with the [Aburame] and [Hyūga] tags. These plans do not need to be very detailed or precise – all dealmaking will be run by Hazō's advisors, and the details will be figured out in the negotiation.

Voting ends on Aug 2, 2023 at 7:00 AM