Kazushi sat at his sealing desk, the predawn gloom beaten back by the light of a Daylight seal, looking at his sealing work. Every square inch of the low quality papers were filled with various charts, graphs, and equations –the fruitful results of his sealing research.
Force Walls.
Lord Hazō had asked for his help –
his help! –researching the bog-standard Force Wall seal. Really, all Kazushi did was churn through the research grunt work like marking the astronomical influences, diagnosing which chthonic resonance worked with the dimensional shunts, and filtering out junk data from the various weather spirits who were feeling impish enough to mess with their initial readings.
It was honestly a little below his level of Sealing expertise, but the results were so very much worth it. To have a chance at working alongside his clan lord –Gōketsu Hazō, who invented skywalkers
as a genin –Kazushi would gladly take up the mantle of junior researcher.
In truth, Lord Hazō hadn't needed Kazushi's help. The seal was too easy, and Lord Hazō was a far more accomplished sealmaster than Kazushi was. As far as bonding exercises go, it was pretty blatant; not that Kazushi minded, of course. Lord Hazō's moods might be…
mercurial, but his sealing genius was such that not even the Hagoromo, blind bastards though they were, could deny it.
After all, Lord Hazō was a singularly unique sealmaster.
Rather than using more general-purpose sealing elements that worked "well enough" for a function, extant sealing elements that had been optimized and refined over the course of generations for safety and utility, Lord Hazō
invented his own sealing elements, specialized to the situation at hand… and his clan lord did it
on the fly.
Kazushi stared at his papers, eyes tracing over one of Lord Hazō's sealing elements, with a frown. It was an alternative to the Sogabe Slide, safely venting excess chakra that might occur during the seal's activation… but it was fragile, and hyper-specialized. Its foundation relied upon other elements in the Force Wall seal to support it, but the result was a much higher threshold of safety than what the Sogabe Slide could've offered.
During their time researching Force Walls, Lord Hazō had done that no less than three separate times! His eyes would lose focus for a few moments, his attention going to a place that only he could perceive, before picking up a brush and casually redefining Kazushi's preconceptions of sealing research!
Worse yet, Lord Hazō didn't even bother to name the sealing elements he created! Sure, they were hyper-specialized to the Force Wall seal, specifically, but the elements themselves were still unique creations that held mind-boggling implications about the underpinnings of sealing-as-a-discipline!
On Lady Mari's advice, Kazushi had taken to cataloging each unique sealing element, assigning them a placeholder name –"just until Hazō gets around to it," Lady Mari said –and submitting them to the Gōketsu Clan Vault.
Lord Hazō was a genius sealmaster, and suffice to say that helping him with Force Walls was a revolutionary experience. It showed Kazushi something that he didn't know was possible: Sealing Research, to Lord Hazō, was an art form.
Lord Hazō's eyes would go distant, and he would return with a revelatory work of sealing that the genius, somehow, couldn't explain. It was like speaking to one of Shinji's poet friends: they were never able to satisfactorily explain the "hows" and "whys" of their work's structure, only that it "was," and that the resultant poem was better for it.
Kazushi continued to stare at the pile of research papers. Working with Lord Hazō, even merely doing the grunt work, had left Kazushi nearly complete with
his own research of the seal. Lord Hazō might have done most of the complex theory work, but Kazushi had aided in the research, discussed the more advanced sealing theory with him, and was armed with Lord Hazō's own specialized sealing elements.
Kazushi reached out, grabbing his calligraphy brush, and started more research prep. Kazushi was no artist, but with enough work, maybe he could reach those same heights.
A/N: Depression and chronic migraines work hard, but the MfD community works harder!
