Right in the middle of Moonlight Island's open field.
Seimei shut his eyes and started rifling through the memories flooding his brain.
About fifteen minutes later he snapped them open again. A dark, calculating glint flashed across his pupils.
Just like he'd guessed an hour ago: the fewer shadow clones he kept active, the more chakra each one got stuffed with. That meant every clone could push deeper into their experiments, which in turn cranked the EXP they fed back to him.
So even though he'd slashed the number of clones working on the Kekkei Mōra project from 300 down to 250, the total EXP he was pulling in barely dipped. Hell, it was still sitting pretty at around 30% higher than before.
Still not peak efficiency, though.
If it was truly optimal, he wouldn't have seen even that tiny drop.
Seimei smirked, cracked his knuckles, and dropped the count again—this time from 250 to 230—just to keep testing how fast the EXP was rolling in.
Another hour later, he popped every clone and checked the haul.
Yeah, the raw EXP was a little lower… but when you factored in how much less chakra he was burning? Total steal.
Still not the sweet spot.
So he kept tweaking the numbers like some chakra-obsessed mad scientist, hunting for that perfect ratio.
Hours bled away.
Finally, right around noon, he nailed it.
Inside the volcano he cut off his "Extreme Body Forging" training, hit the Flying Thunder God seal, and zipped straight back to the surface of Moonlight Island.
He waited just long enough for his chewed-up body to stitch itself back together, then—poof—canceled the Multi-Shadow Clone jutsu and sucked every last clone dry.
Took him a solid ten minutes to chew through and digest everything those clones had learned in the last hour.
When it was done, Seimei let out a long, satisfied breath—like a dragon finally done hoarding gold.
After a whole damn morning of trial and error, he'd found the golden ticket:
Exactly 200 shadow clones dedicated to cracking the Kekkei Mōra code.
That gave each clone roughly 150,000 chakra points to play with.
With that setup he was pulling in about 1.2× the original EXP.
Sure, it wasn't the insane 1.3× spike he got from running 300 clones… but the chakra cost? It plummeted.
Running 300 clones a day would've bled him dry for 45 million chakra points.
200 clones? Only 30 million a day.
That's a fat 15 million chakra saved—every single day—just for a measly 10% drop in EXP gains.
Any shinobi with half a brain would call that a no-brainer win.
So yeah, from now on: 200 clones. No wasted chakra, still stupid-fast progress.
Of course the number isn't set in stone. The second his total chakra cap climbs (and it will), he'll bump the clone count again.
Right now his passive "Chakra Refining Technique" runs 24/7, giving him a clean 24,000 chakra cap increase every day.
Stack 150,000 more cap? Takes him about six, maybe seven days.
Meaning every week he can permanently add another clone to the Kekkei Mōra squad.
His EXP curve was about to go parabolic, and he wasn't wasting a single drop of juice getting there.
"Hell yeah," Seimei muttered, smirking like a bastard who just stole the Nine-Tails. "Perfect."
Decision made. No more screwing around.
Hands flashed through seals—bam—another two hundred shadow clones popped into existence and scattered like wolves on the hunt.
And just like that, the grind kept rolling.
Days turned into weeks. Weeks bled into months.
Spring turned to summer, summer got roasted by autumn.
Before anyone could blink, it was already September.
That evening, Seimei wrapped up another brutal session of Extreme Body Forging inside the volcano, then Flying Thunder God'd his ass back topside to Moonlight Island.
While his body knit itself back together from the lava sauna, he checked his physical reinforcement progress.
His predictions were dead-on, scary accurate.
It had been four months and ten days since his last full-body evolution.
And right now? His flesh was teetering right on the edge of the next breakthrough.
Four, maybe five more days tops and he could force the transformation.
Total time: four and a half months on the dot.
Any longer and the insane gap between his god-tier spirit energy and his merely mortal-tier body would start causing permanent damage.
We're talking dropped Constitution stats—months, maybe years of progress down the drain—or straight-up gene collapse. Nightmare fuel.
Good thing the breakthrough was basically knocking.
Once his Constitution shot up again, even if it still couldn't match his spirit energy, it'd close the gap enough to buy him way more time.
Basically, he was in a constant dead sprint against his own biology.
But not today.
Today was the last day of this training cycle. Tonight he was heading back to the village to chill, eat some damn ramen, and pretend to be human for a minute. No way he was breaking his own schedule just to rush the breakthrough.
That shit could wait till the next grind session.
Seimei shook the thoughts loose, confirmed his skin had stopped looking like barbecue, then canceled every shadow clone on the island with a single thought.
Poof. Hundreds of clones detonated into smoke.
Side note: after four straight months of mining his chakra refining technique for all it was worth, his total cap had jumped another 3+ million points.
That let him bump the Kekkei Mōra clone squad by another twenty bodies.
Now every last one of them was gone, memories slamming back into his skull like a Chidori to the brain.
Seimei exhaled, sorted the returning chakra and natural energy into their proper corners, then started sifting through the flood of R&D data.
Ten minutes. That's all his monster spirit energy needed to digest the whole damn library.
He stood there for a minute, letting everything settle, then cracked a feral grin.
Gear packed, he flickered to the shoreline in a few body-flickers.
Took one last look at the blood-red sunset bleeding across the horizon, spread a pair of glowing wind wings, and shot into the sky—straight toward the Land of Fire.