Chapter 1194 - 1189: Testing, Estimates, and the Unexpected

Guesses are just guesses in the end. If he wanted hard numbers, he'd have to put in the work himself.

With that thought, Seimei stopped wasting time. He gave one last glance at the "Chakra Refining Technique" on the bottom of his panel (still climbing steadily) and then closed it. Time for another round of training.

Even though the sky had gone dark, it was still a ways from midnight, and thanks to his recent transformation he was feeling fresh as hell. No way was he letting the rest of the day go to waste.

One hour… two hours… three hours…

Riding that perfect condition, he trained for over four straight hours, only calling it quits a little past 1 a.m.

The night passed peacefully.

The next morning, Seimei was up bright and early. He headed to the stream, washed up quick, opened his ninja pouch, and scarfed down a handful of enhanced soldier pills. Once his stomach stopped complaining, he jumped right back into training.

He kept at it all morning.

By noon, he finally had a solid read on his body's new limits.

Crunching the numbers, if he went all-out on body tempering right now, he'd need to pump a whopping 510 million points of chakra into it every single day.

Before today? That number had been 410 million.

In other words, he had to cough up an extra 100 million chakra per day.

It was a little lower than his worst-case guess, but still over 90 million more than he'd hoped.

Bottom line: he needed to divert even more chakra every day just to keep up.

That meant his backup reserves were gonna run dry faster.

He'd seen this coming, but when the actual figure hit him, he still couldn't help the quiet sigh in his heart.

"Man… what a shame."

Shaking it off, he moved on. Body capacity: check.

Next up: how long would the full transformation actually take this time?

He was honestly pretty excited to find out.

Seimei swallowed a few more enhanced soldier pills to top off his energy, formed the seals, and in two quick bursts released the Multiple Shadow Clone Jutsu.

Poof! Poof!

Four hundred twenty-five shadow clones popped into existence.

That's right: 425 total.

Out of those, 175 were assigned to gathering natural energy.

Originally 140 had been enough, but the new 100-million-daily chakra demand meant he needed 35 more just to break even.

That bumped the daily cost for natural-energy clones from 280,000 up to 350,000 (an extra 70,000 per day).

The remaining 250 clones? All on bloodline-mesh development duty.

His total chakra cap had grown again, letting him add 15 more development clones and tack on another 22.5 million daily chakra cost.

Grand total daily deficit: 115.782 million chakra points.

(Old deficit + 70k + 22.5M – some earlier offsets + a little wiggle room = 115,782,000)

"One hundred fifteen million, seven hundred eighty-two thousand…"

The number flashed through his mind. He shrugged it off pretty quick. Yeah, it was higher, but not crazy high. Still within acceptable range.

He waved the clones away, then whoosh—Flying Thunder God straight into the volcano beneath Moon Island. Training round two, let's go.

Days blurred by like that.

A week later.

He took one day off to swing back to the village and restock, but the other six days were more than enough to get a solid estimate on the new transformation timeline.

Late that night, Seimei finished his last session of the day and opened his eyes.

Feeling the changes over the past week, he ran the final calculations.

Just like he'd predicted a week ago: thanks to the aptitude boosts from Ice Release, Storm Release, and Lava Release evolving, the difficulty of body tempering had dropped hard.

Even though this transformation was tougher than the last one, the total time required only crept up a little.

Last time: four and a half months.

This time: five months flat (assuming unlimited chakra).

Problem was, his current reserves would only last him about three months at full burn.

After three months, he'd be short over 100 million chakra every single day.

No full-speed training = slower transformation = timeline gets stretched.

That said, it still might not go over five months total.

Because right around the three-month mark, Dust Release was scheduled to evolve.

And when that happened? Based on his earlier estimates, it was gonna shave off a massive chunk of time.

So, push and pull—would the final number stay under five months?

Unknown for now.

All those thoughts flickered through his head. He mulled it over for a bit, then let it go.

Honestly? How long it actually took didn't matter.

All he had to do was keep training, day in, day out.

The rest would sort itself out with time.

He stood up, teleported back to the little wooden cabin on the corner of the island, pushed the door open, and crashed for the night.

The next day, same routine: up early, quick tidy-up, straight into training.

He figured he'd just ride this plan all the way—burn through his backup chakra, adjust on the fly, finish the tempering, and boom, transformation complete.

That was the idea, anyway.

But life loves throwing curveballs.

Roughly two months later.

One random morning, Seimei was deep in training inside the volcano beneath Moon Island when—

A chunk of memory suddenly slammed into his head out of nowhere.

He froze for half a second, then instantly stopped training and started rifling through the memory.

His schedule was like clockwork. He always dismissed clones himself at set times.

The only times a clone ever force-synced memories early were when they screwed up practicing a jutsu and dispelled themselves, or… something really bad happened.

And right now? His training lineup was super stable. It had been forever since a clone accidentally popped and sent memories early.

So if one just force-fed him memories without warning, something seriously bad had gone down.

No hesitation.

Seimei's expression turned dead serious.