NOVEL NEXT Chapter 5: Red Dice
Author note: I wrote this on a tiny phone.
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Interestingly his chakra had seen an increase as well, although only 2 points were increased in the past 20 minutes, this was still a passive process that would keep on running for as long as his mental clone uses the sage modification skill. Having the nature energy act as a substitute for food did alleviate his hunger somewhat meaning he was back to being his normal amount of hungry.
He couldn't lavishly spend his nature energy for sustainability of his body as it would be better to strengthen his body towards not needing to eat as much. This expenditure of nature energy was a one time thing that he did because of his brain's adjustment to the expanded mental capacity brought by the mental clone.
One thing he would spend his nature energy on is to get rid of fatigue to his brain. This way his mind would still be active even with his body asleep. This would allow the mental clone to run sage modification 24/7 without any interruption, meaning his body would be upgrading at all times along with his nature energy reserves increasing as well.
He also considered saving up nature energy for emergencies like the brain upgrade so as not to get headaches for hours on end.
Next Shishui sorted through the various ways to use nature energy, which like chakra has ninjutsu, also had techniques in ancient times. Because he got the information of the guy's last ten years, there were an astonishing amount of techniques that he had at the time. Although most were focused on earth manipulation of a much higher magnitude then the ninjutsu of today. It still had techniques for flying, concealing presence or even controlling magma.
Of course although he had the ability to do so, he wouldn't want to be so conspicuous just yet, at least not untill he had some amounts of self protection capabilities. Another thing to note was that he'd have to modify his body to be more attuned to earth manipulation making him able to use the energy in the surroundings rather then his own. He obviously had a better plan in mind than to become completely attuned to earth manipulation.
First Shishui started to use a small amount of the stored nature energy to essentially make a concealment barrier around his reserves making it impossible for anyone to know or detect whether he had nature energy in him unless they touch his body surface and somehow know how to use nature energy for probing, which as far as he knew was no one in Konoha.
The three holy lands' sages might be able to if they went out of their way to come to the Uchiha compound and make contact with him, essentially impossible.
Although this did mean his reserves were concealed, it didn't conceal him. So it would still be stupid to fly around while hiding his reserves as people would still spot him, especially the Uchiha. Unfortunately there wasn't any type of shadow clone ability back then, so he can't really have one take his place here in the Uchiha compound.
They did have a nature energy powered barrier which blocked people from sensing anything in an area, which of course was related to earth manipulation as the old guy really liked dirt for some reason. The best part was that there wasn't a need for hand signs or some complicated preparation for these sage jutsu as all one needed was to turn nature energy into earth or to spread it into the earth so as to freely control it as long as there was a connection between the practitioner and his nature energy like a chakra thread.
Shishui tested this by having part of his nature energy penetrate the ground through his feet and spread his "comtrol" of that earth to a wider area by inputting more nature energy. This went on until he had a roughly 1 cubic meter area under his control beneath him. He could make it float upwards and leave a cubic hole on the ground, which he wouldn't do as that would just mean having a very conspicuous cube piece of earth floating around him.
He did however try other things like making the ground harder then rock or soft enough to sink into, even made it elastic for a few trampoline jumps after which he turned it back to normal. The jumps weren't that out of the ordinary and no one was observing him currently as he 'played' in the backyard. He had made sure to check if anyone was watching him by asking the system. These small questions didn't take up much 'space' as his mental capacity had increased.
Another thing he really wanted to try was make the earth shrink. Not compressing it but actually reducing the size of the earth to fit into his hand, he obviously didn't do that to the whole cubic meter but instead made a small 5 cm cube decrease in size till it was 3 cm then 2, 1, 0.8, 0.6 all the way to 0.5 cm at which point he picked it and rolled it in his hands. He made it lighter as it was easier to then to make it float around.
With a little adjustment, the small cube had small indentations on it which made it look like a dice, a very heavy one if not for it being lighter then a 5 cm cube of dirt. Changing the colour of it to look like a red dice with white indents only cost a negligent amount of nature energy.
After he controlled the dirt to fix the hole in the ground, he noticed the dice was continuing to expend small amounts of his nature energy to maintain its shape, the colour seemed to be a permanent change. To make the dice not eventually eat at his reserves, he built a barrier around it with his nature energy along with another barrier which could absorb the surrounding nature energy somewhat similar to Pain's Preta Path's chakra absorption shield.
The absorbed nature energy was deposited to the center of the dice where a small nature energy storage seal, similar to the yin seal was placed. Now even if he left the dice in any place away from him, it would still be light and remain the same size. Granted it would be storing untamed nature energy so it wasn't something he could use like a MP potion or a battery .....yet.
It did however make the nature energy be trapped in a 5 cm cubic space (dirt) where it would keep getting denser untill it had about 10 times the amount of nature energy after which it would stop absorbing more as it could make the barrier unstable or just break at which point the barrier for maintaining the size would also be impacted after which it would release all the nature energy to the surroundings and expand to become a 5 cm large red dirt dice.
The dirt was also changed to be harder then rock so the dice retains it's shape more easily and the only consumption would be on its size and keeping it light. This could be used as a weapon if it were more exaggerated, like imagine throwing a kunai at the enemy which expands to be the size of a house and it being harder the rock, it would be a devastating surprise. It seems he'll have to develop following this direction.