CHAPTER 40

* Now we come to the most important and heart-wrenching part. If it turns out that it's impossible to combine black substance with water element jutsu, then I can immediately throw all my future plans into the toilet. - Yuske was in no small amount of anxiety over the possibility of combination.

The indescribable pressure of not knowing sometimes makes you want to stay in ignorance forever, not trying to take the next step lest you get a negative answer. But Yuske still had to pull himself together and continue his experiment with creating a jutsu that suited him.

Due to the fact that it was evening and the parents were at home, it was impossible to go outside and continue near the pond. On the other hand, Yuske had no intention of conducting his next experiment where it could hypothetically be seen by outsiders.

It would be quite simple if he was caught using elemental manipulation and mistakenly thought to be a genius, but it would be much worse if the top brass of the Leaf got wind of the black substance and its strange uniqueness. Accordingly, he can only conduct experiments with black substance where others will not notice it: in his room, or another secluded place, which would not be bad to find.

The good thing is that Yuske has kept a large basin of water in his room for years, and that would be enough to test the compatibility of the black substance with the water jutsu.

In turn, the experiment in his room required extreme vigilance. He could not cause a ruckus, attracting the attention of parents, and also have to be extremely careful, because the water jutsu out of control will easily soak everything nearby. To that end, he decided to use much less chakra, thus reducing the size of the technique. A boon, the current task was to figure out a specific detail, not to test the limits of water manipulation. The time and expense figures of the technique were also not among the top priorities that required immediate attention.

Filling the basin with water and carrying it back to his room, he set it in the center of the room and went to get some towels. Spreading them around the basin of water as a precautionary measure, he crouched down in front of it and performed the now familiar actions to create a pillar of water.

Having folded the Dog Seal, he once again felt the fine particles in the air, and of course the entire mass of water in the basin. Even before his parents returned, he had learned to control the jutsu quite well, and after more demonstrations and games with Ayane, he had no trouble creating a thinner and shorter version, a sort of water snake that moved obediently at his will.

Speaking of movement, Yuske found one oddity when applying this technique - it required him to act 'first-person' while visualizing the direction of movement. The first time he wished for the 'tentacle' to move slightly to the left, it instead moved in the opposite direction. It felt like you had shoved your hand into a big box and could control it by watching through a camera installed inside that very box.

It took Yuske a few tries, but fortunately he learned fairly quickly how to control the technique he had created. The strange thing was that if he wanted to change the shape of the 'tentacle', say, to split its top or transform it into a ball or other geometric figure - it was enough just to visualize it in his mind and there was no difficulty in managing it.

To produce the smaller tentacle, Yuske used a fifth of the chakra he had used earlier during the training outdoors, from which he not only obtained a smaller version of the technique, a 60 cm (1.9 ft) long sprout of water, but also gained the capability to use this bizarre creation for about six minutes.

The previous time when he first experimented on the water pillar, he tried reducing the amount of chakra, but had failed miserably. This was due to the fact that while reducing the amount of chakra infused into the technique, he did not imagine the shrinking process of pilar itself, causing it to behave unstably, promising to collapse if there was no additional influx of energy, assuming that Yuske still wished to maintain a thick and meter-long form.

Currently, he had envisioned and created a smaller 'tentacle' from the start, causing it to take on the desired size without any problems, based on the amount of chakra he had allocated beforehand. The moment he feels the technique begin to behave unstably; he knows that the amount of chakra is sufficient for the current proportions.

Perhaps in combat scenarios, the decision to create such a short version of the technique would be foolish, but here and now a compact size was required. Still, there was another reason not to create a technique of the original size, and it was rooted in the expenditure of black substance. If he makes a three-meter technique in his room, he will lose huge stocks of his unique matter, and the colossus will definitely break something in the room, and the experiment can easily get out of control, in fact, most likely it will.

Having finally made up his mind and accepting the fact that the experiment was something of utter importance, Yuske began to envision the black substance slowly emerging from a part of his arm and moving towards the 'tentacle'. After a few attempts, he realized that there was no way he could create black substance outside of his body, right within the technique or on the section of chakra that had been released outward. He was fairly disappointed by this information, as it limited the use of his strange ability, but he didn't dwell on it for long.

Gradually the substance began to envelop the creation made of water, and started to envelop it from the foundation. It looked as if the water inside the 'tentacle' was being replaced by the unique matter, but that was only a visual deception, for the water could still be felt inside, and the black substance only covered the jutsu in a thin layer, partially mixing with the liquid inside.