Question: I see the "Minatosealing" term being used a bunch and I'm not clear on what it means. Could someone define it for me?
My initial guess was that it was "creating a chakra effect that requires both Sealing and TH", but Kagome's rift-opening seals are regular seals that take inspiration from the bijū chain without actually requiring TH, so I think I'm defining it wrong.
Minato-Sealing: What the Heck Are You on About, Hivemind?
Simple definition: Creating an effect that requires both Sealing and Technique Hacking.
More complex Definition A: The process by which one creates a chakra construct, turns it into a seal, and staples it onto an object or individual (such as one Uzumaki Naruto) to perform some sort of function or effect.
More complex Definition B: The process by which one creates a seal, which produces some specific chakra construct that can be attached to something, to perform some sort of function or effect.
At length explanation: Given the implementation of some TH-related knowledge in Minato's bijuu sealing chain, the thread strongly suspects that he has managed to combine Sealing and Technique Hacking into a hybrid discipline, that in some way, shape, or form, allows one to do fuinjutsu with chakra constructs, produce complex and intricate chakra constructs with fuinjutsu, or something similar enough to either of those.
Misc. Points of Evidence:
- Flying Thunder God
- This was not something reproducible by Jiraiya, the greatest sealmaster alive for a decade and change. Something fishy there.
- This is a ninjutsu that utilizes seals.
- It produces a spacetime effect that allowed him to teleport (at will?) in a combat situation.
- Note: We have yet to find an instance of a seal producing a novel, combat-applicable space-time effect of this nature. Everything seems to be similar to substitution, or be some sort of storage-seal related dimensionalism, or lock things in place a la Five Seal Barrier.
- Naruto's Bijuu Seal
- This does not seem to be a bioseal.
- Its seemingly some sort of shifting chakra construct thing.
- Minatos notes on this seal seem to be all about manipulating chakra constructs in a very fine grained manner. The latter 2/3rds of the notes require Technique Hacking to even make sense of.
- Rasengan
- This is a zero hand sign, neutral element technique that is seemingly nothing but raw chakra manipulation of a very complex kind.
- At least in canon. Unsure of what Hazou's been able to notice or is aware of IC.
- Aggregate observations:
- Minato was Kage-tier strong, but the guy was in his mid to late 20s by the time he got the Hat, IIRC.
- Edit: Made Jounin at 21 and Kage at 24, apparently? That is way too short a timespan. Something is up lol.
- This is too young to just have Elite Jounin level combat stats in addition to two distinct Legendary-tier research stats. That is going to be tough to swing unless you're earning 20XP/day.
- His secret sauce (The SauceTM) is probably something more complex and nuanced than "Simply have large numbers".
- He invented two incredibly powerful techniques: Rasengan and Flying Thunder God.
- Seems reasonable that they aren't entirely unrelated. Work smarter, not harder, etc
MMKII's Personal Speculations: Personally, I think that he discovered/invented his own subdiscipline of Sealing, similar to Biosealing or Primordial Sealing, with Technique Hacking as the Calligraphy equivalent. Sealing, as far as we the playerbase understand it, seems to channel currents of chakra through a medium in very intricate and specific ways to punch a hole into the Out, extract a pile of extradimensional energy in an incredibly specific format, and store (i.e. "seal" ) that later to produce a repeatable effect.
Regular fuinjutsu uses "chakra ink" (ink prepared with a specific ritual involving a polished brass ingot and some high quality ink) and high quality paper as the physical substrate, with Calligraphy-made brushwork to create the actual channels with that.
Biosealing, as far as we understand it despite not having direct access to it, uses carving or tattoos to embed the chakra channels into bone and flesh. We aren't aware of the specifics here, but its plausible to me that both of these can do a good enough job channeling chakra with some slight modifications, though perhaps there is something a bit more icky going on like "graft chakra coils and manipulate them into a certain shape". It would certainly explain Orochimaru's chakra reserves if his bioseals were pulling double duty as extra (though probably inefficient) chakra coils.
Primordial Sealing uses a chakra-conductive earthen substrate, which is shaped into a 3D sculpture (i.e. Rune) via some jutsu-derived manipulations. Its 3D, unlike Biosealing and regular fuinjutsu, and Hazou knows that this allows it to perform significantly more powerful and complex feats as a result. It also uses the most rigid and permanent substrate medium we've seen, which may be a factor in its strength: physically speaking your jutsu-crafted rune can probably be molded to fit a lot of shapes and deal with significant physical strain from its own weight, whereas what you are functionally able to do with the mediums of ink and bone are going to be significantly more limited even accounting for combinatorial mismatch from the 3D vs 2D apsects: your brush will only ever be able to make contiguous brush-squiggles, afterall.
I suspect that Minato looked at Biosealing and regular Sealing and said "Okay, but why do we need the thing the chakra is in? We could just do this directly with chakra itself, right?", and proceeded to figure out how to do that.
That runs into some issues we've actually skimmed the surface of in-setting. Chakra is finnicky, and outside of the body or sealing substrate medium or a focused jutsu effect, it has a tendency to ADHD hard and dissipate outwards. I think the "Chakra Diffusion Effect" has been brought up very occassionally, as a reason why ultra long range ninjutsu are very rare, frequently the stuff of epic bloodlines, and generally prohibitively expensive. We run into this very problem outside of a ninjutsu context, actually, despite it not really ever being mentioned directly all that much anymore: Noburi can't store chakra in water outside of his barrel for very long. If it's in a large body of water, it's gone in moments when he relaxes control. If it's in a regular old closed container, it's gone in an hour or so. He needs the bloodline-magic psuedo-seal barrel to be able to store chakra indefinitely without it just getting up and leaving.
Chakra seems to do whatever it wants. Hazou has a hard time convincing it to make substrate for him, for instance. "But you could be
this rock, instead!" -> "But I don't want to do that!". Skill, at least in some techniques, really seems to boil down to a learned experience in getting the chakra to do the thing that you want. Hazou's Technique Hacking lessons, more or less, were the exact opposite of his fuinjutsu-driven intuition. Instead of forcing the chakra to move
exactly as you need it, it seems like its more figuring out how to cajole it enough to get the effect that you want. That's curious too, since it implies some things about how sealmasters essentially pressgang thimblefuls of energy into specific shapes. But that doesn't last: infused seals do wear out over time. The Great Seal is a hunk of PS substrate inside of a big rock, and by the time Hazou inspected it thoroughly he found that the damage was getting accelerated by the chakra in the environment eroding it further: in other words, if you don't even have the substrate to stick the chakra in to separate it from the rest of all of the chakra in the environment, well, how long is that going to last? Well..
So maybe if you got really good at some ultra-fine grained manipulations, really small and delicate stuff (perhaps the same kind of complex manipulations that you would use to weave together a chakra-buzzsaw like the Rasengan, instantaneously out of a thousand whirring, disjoint threads, with no hand signs to speak of) and made a chakra construct that worked fine as a seal ("But what if you moved like a Biju Seal?"), and then stuck it somewhere it wouldn't degrade. Like inside someone's chakra system, or in specially prepared kunai (made of chakra metal, perhaps?)...
But yknow, we'll see.
As an aside, while I'm effortposting, this is a good opportunity to pivot to some other Potentially-Massive-Powerup related topic I wanted to opine about at length.
I note that overall, "Use the jutsu/chakra to do the seals"
isn't an entirely unique concept in-setting. It has been gestured at and stated a few times that the Sage did not know sealing (mostly by Kagome) and when the subject of summoning scrolls came up, well, some characters throughout the story have speculated that they were made with ninjutsu. Seems reasonable.
I
think that thats also true of the Great Seal (the 'at least one instance of speculating that it's jutsu-crafted' bit, though of course it's ambiguous since Primordial Sealing uses an earthshaping technique), and in fact it actually makes a massive amount of sense for Primordial Sealing. Cannai gave Hazou a one-off lecture on ninjutsu dynamics, and how it is the case that a very specialized ninjutsu often takes far less direction, effort, and skill to get the same effect as a more generalized version of that ninjutsu would. We see this in comparing Earthshaping and Bones of Creation: while they both allow for fine-grained earthen substance manipulation in some sense, the generalized one is capable of producing substrate (we think lol) at level 60, whereas the ninjutsu crafted specifically to mold and manipulate and create chakra-conductive stone, can do that at level 30. We see this in various mechanical stuff and WOG: as per a statement from hundreds of chapters ago, MEW at a high enough level would allow us to build finely detailed sculptures. We just picked up Earthshaping instead because it seemed like the better option by far, i.e. easier to do without investing a billion XP into.
Now, the two crappy things about runes is that they take forever to shape, and they don't seem to want to move. This is the big thing that prevents us from dishing out runes mid-combat at the drop of a hat. While it takes a lot of chakra to do this process, that is all downstream of "You are using Earthshaping for a massive amount of time". The chakra cost for infusing the rune itself actually isn't out of line with what you would expect from a combat jutsu, funnily enough.
Now, all the Minatosealing chakra construct stuff. That seems kind of difficult, right? Like, you read that and go, "Okay, with what I know of all the chakra technobabble in this setting, and with how long it took us to figure out Primordial Sealing from
ground zero square one, that sounds like it would be hard to do from first principles. Good thing we have the dude's notes!". Now, who knows what's going to happen with that. I'm hopeful we'll figure that out and use it for great punching and insane buffs, but whether we do or do not...
A rune is just a rock. It is
literally just a rock.
It's a specific type of rock, and shaped in a very specific way. But ultimately, it's just a fancy-shaped rock. Hazou has like, a kajillion ninjutsu that manipulate earthen substances in some way, shape or form. What's stopping us from making
specific rocks? Not a jutsu that makes all manner of specific rocks, no. One jutsu
per specific rock, taking Cannai's musings about ninjutsu capability to the limit.
Now, when Hazou does have Technique Hacking at 30 or so, I would like to try to apply it to Bones of Creation (if tweaks exist) or otherwise use it wholesale (if they do not) to make an incredibly specific technique. I want to see if we can make a tweak or variant of the jutsu that just produces Hazou's Explosive Rune blank (which is going to be the same shape every time, and is unique to Hazou's Primordial Sealing style) and runs through the same chakra manipulations that he does forming and infusing the thing (which I note, are the same chakra manipulations Hazou already knows how to do), except have all of that happen on the scale of combat action economy (Perhaps we'd need a chunk of existing substrate to target, have a clone lug a bunch somewhere, or take a Supplemental to unseal it).
Given various bits and pieces and dribs and drabs about the magic systems we've discussed in-character... there's a good chance that
that might be entirely doable, and
easier than making a jutsu like BoC by far.
That would be pretty fucking sweet.
