Shota stopped and stared at his open palm. He summoned a small flame ball using his fire fox jutsu. He fed it more chakra. The flame grew bigger, but the heat increased only by a little.
'This confirms that increasing the chakra would not increase the power and heat of the flames.' He closed his hand to snuff it out.
He needed to think like a scientist to make it work somehow.
Shota focused on separating oxygen from the surrounding air. He wanted to draw only the oxygen toward his flames while pushing the remaining gases, mainly nitrogen and other inert components away from the combustion zone of his flames.
His theory was that by compressing this concentrated oxygen around his fire, he could accelerate oxidation. That would make the flames burn at extreme temperatures far beyond ordinary fire jutsu.
'But the question is how I could do it?' Shota thought. 'How do I even identify what part of air is oxygen and what is any other gas?'
He closed his eyes for a moment. The flame in his hand flickered and died out. He took a slow breath and tried to think like a science student.
In science class, they had learned about fractional distillation of liquid air to separate gases. But that needed extreme cold. He could not freeze air with chakra. At least, not yet.
Then a light bulb moment happened for Shota.
'Oxygen is what I breathe and what plants release.'
He opened his eyes wide. 'I already take a deep breath when I use fire jutsus and everyone does too. No matter what fire jutsu it is. I see. We are doing this because flames can only be created from oxygen. When we take a breath, we are taking oxygen inside and then exhaling it as fuel for our flames.'
The realization felt something that he should have realised long ago. Shota had seen it thousands of times in the anime. Every shinobi who used fire release took a big inhale before breathing out fire jutsus.
He had always thought it was just for style. But now it made sense. The deep breath was not random. It pulled in oxygen to feed the fire.
'People in this world probably don't know about this,' Shota thought. 'But whoever created the first fire jutsu must have known this and thus added a deep breath to use any of the fire jutsu. So that's the principle behind this.'
'I could increase the oxygen that I put in the jutsu to make it hotter and for that I can increase the suction force that I take air in me,' Shota thought.
'Like how Luffy can take a lot of air and balloon himself but without ballooning myself, my body or my lungs. So I have to store more oxygen than possible in my body and release it when I use the jutsu.'
The idea excited him. In his past life, people talked about breath-holding techniques in freediving. Some divers trained to hold their breath for minutes by slowing their heart rate and using oxygen more efficiently.
He would do the same and shinobi also had better control over their bodies. With chakra, he could force his lungs to expand more without pain. He could even use chakra to bind extra oxygen molecules in his blood or tissues temporarily, like a natural oxygen tank.
'I think it could work,' he told himself. 'I can start by practicing deep, controlled inhales. Use chakra to stretch my lung capacity safely. Then hold the air longer while I shape the oxygen inside me. When I exhale for the jutsu, I release it all at once with the chakra flame. The extra oxygen will mix with the fire right at the start. That should make the fire hotter from the very beginning.'
He tried it right away. He inhaled slowly at first. Then he pushed harder with chakra. His chest expanded more than normal. He felt pressure, but no pain.
He held the breath for ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty. His vision blurred a little at the edges, but he stayed calm. When he exhaled, he formed a small fireball.
The flame came out brighter with a lot more heat. Shota stared at it in surprise. It had worked. Just a tiny bit, but it had worked.
'Alright so I have the principle down,' Shota thought. 'And I am sure that I believe it to be true since it is well science and simple science at that. Jeez, and Orochimaru calls himself a scientist. He should at least have found about this but who knows maybe he already has.'
'Anyways, I also have the understanding of this principle and I know how to make it work and add it to my jutsu so the only thing left is adding it to my jutsus and incorporating it to all my fire jutsus.'
He spent the next hour practicing the inhale-hold-exhale cycle. Each time he tried to make the flame hotter. He focused on compressing the stored oxygen as it left his mouth.
'Storing the oxygen and using it to increase the temperature of fire won't increase the chakra required for the jutsu either,' Shota thought. 'But I have to ensure that I inhale large amounts of oxygen quickly and not take too much time about it.'
He needed speed. In a real fight, he could not stand around breathing deeply for ten seconds.
'After I am successful with this,' Shota thought, 'I would not sit still until I incorporate another principle to my fire release. Covering larger area so that not everyone dodges my fire attacks. Seriously, fireball jutsu had not killed a single person in the anime and it had been used the most times alongside Rasengan and Chidori.'
--------Author Notes---------
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